Category: News and politics

The Dutch Supreme Court has today dismissed all claims brought by the Church of Scientology against XS4ALL and Karin Spaink. This legal case has been going on for 10 years, but finally, justice has been done.

Following on from my "Justice is Done" entry, I now hand you over to the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam to learn the latest in this ongoing saga… If you want to see the video of the arrival then go here (in Dutch).

There’s an old newspaper joke about newspaper sub-editors trying to outdo themselves with a story headline that touched all of their readers’ hot buttons. The apocryphal winner was "Black Bishop in Mercy Sex Dash to Palace".

 

The Telegraph web site currently has a story classified under "Breaking News" that appears to be making a bid for the prize: "Vicar ‘Imprisoned Me Like a Sex Slave’ Says Cleaner". I think that’s a worthy effort. Although the sub-editor would have got extra points by inserting the word "Gay" between ‘a’ and ‘Sex’ – even better, because it’s apparently true. 

 

The story itself is pretty bizarre, and full of lovely touches like "[the cleaner], who lives with his diplomat uncle in Maida Vale, west London, said he also wanted to persuade his tormentor to return his passport so that he could renew his student visa". 

 

Human nature – it’s a wonderful thing.

 

 

Lord Falconer is either being disingenous or he’s a fool, with far too much power. Either way, he is a disgrace. That seems to go for far too many of his colleagues as well.

I mentioned the case of the sparrow blasted to smithereens last month because it knocked over a domino (or two). Well, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service has spoken and fined the killer 200 euros for the heinous act.

 

It turns out there’s even a somewhat bizarre back story to these events. The evidence of the crime (i.e. the remains of the sparrow) are currently in a freezer somewhere in the bowels of the Public Prosecution Service. There’s talk of sending them to the Nature Museum in Rotterdam. The chief conservationist, Kees Moeliker, is wondering how much actually is left for him to stuff and mount. He would like to display the little fellow in a forthcoming exhibition as "an icon of the love for sparrows". Er, Kees, it was shot… What I mean, protests Kees, is that the exhibition can become "a place of pilgrimage". Yes, thank you, Kees, and goodnight.

 

Meanwhile, the director of the Nature Museum in Friesland (the region where the crime was committed) has mixed feelings. He would have liked the sparrow for his museum… The papers don’t report what his intentions were for the corpse. Better not to ask, I think.

 

Update: I should have recognised the name of Kees Moeliker. He’s the author of that stirring piece of research: The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae). Silly of me. But today’s entry in the Improbable Research blog has put me right.

"Serious Organised Crime"? This is obviously a different definition of "serious" than the one I am used to. It might well have been "organised", but I for one would not view it as a "crime". Clearly, I’m not paranoid enough…

…three to go? The inimitable Steve Bell puts out his take on the latest Bush rumour. Meanwhile, al-Jazeera staff have started a blog to plead Bush not to bomb them.

Boris Johnson looks like a buffoon. Sometimes he behaves like one. But not always.

 

The news story – that Bush wanted to bomb the al-Jezeera news station in Qatar – is still rumbling on. It wasn’t helped by the appearance of Frank Gaffney on Newsnight the day the story broke. As CuriousHamster reports, Gaffney said two things: a) the allegations weren’t proven and b) al-Jazeera probably should be bombed by the US government. Way to go, Frank. Mind you, even though he’s the president of the Center for Security Policy, he does seem to have a habit of saying some pretty ridiculous things.

 

The art of the polemic is not dead – or, as yet, illegal. Warning, may be slow to load, but stick with it.

 

(hat tip to CuriousHamster)

 

It’s a pity he hasn’t been honing his morals at the same time. Those might have had a better effect on the rest of the world.

This is an extraordinary story, if true. And I hope that if it is true, then Bush was making a crass joke. The alternative – that he was being perfectly serious – is almost too horrifying to contemplate.

Apparently, Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty. These are from his statements now gathered together in a book, according to this story in The Telegraph. Well, the shenanigans of the current US administration are doing their best to deal the Constitution a mortal blow, so that’s one down I suppose. And I’m sure many on the Christian Right would just lurve to return to the days of jailing us pesky homosexuals, so number two is not beyond the realms of possibility. But I’m not sure about signing the Kyoto treaty though. I suspect that before that gas-guzzling culture would sign, Hell would first have to freeze over, except it wouldn’t have a chance, if you see what I mean.

 

Update: Ophelia nails the bastards.

… but rather than pushing up the daisies, it was blasted to smithereens. It was a sparrow – an endangered species here in The Netherlands. Its crime? It knocked over a domino, which in turn knocked over 22,999 others.

 

The Dutch animal protection agency is investigating the crime. The execution of the sparrow, that is, not the pushing over of a domino.

God, I love Steve Bell.

Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, dissects the hypocrisy of Blair and the media in a piece of barely contained fury. Can’t say I blame him. He also refers to the article written by John Tulloch in yesterday’s Guardian. That’s worth reading too.

 

Oh, and in particular, read this piece by Rachel – she was caught in the bombing, but she eloquently demonstrates why Blair and Clarke are posturing, not thinking.

The news that George W Bush has ordered all his senior staff in the White House to take a "refresher course in ethics" smacks seriously of attempting to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. There’s also the delicious irony of that word "refresher". It presumes that the current denizens of the White House had any ethics to start with.

Rosa Parks died yesterday at the age of 92. Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus was the spark that led to the civil rights movement taking off in the US 50 years ago. RIP, Rosa.

Orwellian Newspeak rears its ugly head again – this time by the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. She said:

"Detainee reporting" strikes me as a particularly slimy phrase. As Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt points out:

Read the rest of Justin’s piece. It’s worth it. And I know that if I was being tortured, I’d say whatever it was I thought the torturers wanted to hear in a vain attempt to get them to stop, just stop, please stop. So the phrase "can be accurate" has very little real meaning as far as I can see.

I do realise that that is not supposed to be the appropriate reaction, but I confess that it was my first reaction when I read this story. I never did like the Smurfs – irritating little creatures without any redeeming features whatsoever as far as I’m concerned.

I mentioned last week that the word "choice" tends to make my hackles rise. It’s because I often think it’s used in false circumstances. For example, New Labour apply it to services in the public sector. Well, I’m sorry, but to me, a public hospital should be the best that it can be, and funding should not be driven by a mythical sense of choice. When I’m ill, I don’t want to consult fucking league tables, I want to go to my local hospital and be rest assured that I am getting good treatment. Anything else is a travesty, and poking free market practices into places where I don’t want them to be. Eddie explains this very well over at The Sharpener.