Recently in Current Affairs Category

How many severed feet does it take to make the British news? Six, apparently.

• BBC News: Foot mystery baffles Mounties
• Telegraph: Sixth foot washes up on Canadian beach
• Guardian: Six feet under
• Times Online: Sixth foot washed ashore in Canadian mystery

Canada's not boring today.

A fourth severed foot has been found in British Columbia (see B.C. severed foot mystery continues). When will this bizarre mystery be solved?

Sometimes I despair for humanity. The following story is reproduced from the BBC in full. Apologies for violating their copyright, but it's succinct and simply too good to resist.

Teacake set to cost taxman £3.5m

The UK Treasury is facing a £3.5m bill, because of VAT wrongly imposed on a Marks and Spencer teacake, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.

Customers paid VAT for 20 years before the authorities accepted the product was a cake, which does not command VAT.

The UK argued that paying back the total sum would "unjustly enrich" M&S as customers had paid the money.

The ECJ ruled that, in principle, VAT had to be repaid in full, but left the final decision to the British courts. That decision will be taken by the House of Lords and HM Revenue and Customs said it was too early to make a comment.

"This is a very complex judgment on which it would be premature to make any comment until the House of Lords has handed down its judgment," Revenue and Customs said in a statement.

Marks and Spencer also gave a cautious response.

"It does look encouraging. However, it is a complex matter and we are reviewing the decision of the ECJ with our advisers," a spokeswoman said.

What hope is there for mankind if it takes us 20 years to determine the difference between a biscuit and a cake? Even now, the language used by the parties involved is stultifying:

"This is a very complex judgment (remember that fundamentally, this is about the difference between a biscuit and a cake) on which it would be premature (it's only been 20 years) to make any comment until the House of Lords (the highest court in the land) has handed down its judgment."

Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer feels it necessary to consult with its advisers. If ever proof were needed that we are the cause of all our problems, this example is it.

Since the decades of indecision must have caused the UK's bakers untold stress, I think the money should be donated to the Bakers' Benevolent Society or perhaps the National Association of Master Bakers Benevolent Fund. How's that for a speedy decision?

I'm currently dropping in and out of Letter from America by Alistair Cooke.

The following passage from The Immigrant Strain, the first essay in the book and dated 6 May 1946, jumped off the page for obvious reasons:

If you feel baffled and alarmed at the prospect of differentiating one American type from another, you can take heart. You have more hope of success than Americans, who shuffle through every stereotype of every foreign culture as confidently as they handle the family's pack of cards. Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power had done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.

Apart from the now-dated reference to families shuffling cards badly — families no longer shuffle cards much — Cooke's prophecy seems strikingly accurate today.

From Canada's pacific coast comes an incredible story straight out of a Coen brothers' movie:

Another mysterious right foot floats ashore in Gulf Islands

For the third time in six months, a right foot wearing a sneaker has washed up on the shores of the Gulf Islands, in the Strait of Georgia.

The latest foot was found on the east side of Valdez Island, near Nanaimo. Last August two other right feet, both male and both wearing size 12 sneakers, washed ashore on nearby Gabriola and Jedediah Islands.

Those cases are still under investigation, and so far no links between the three discoveries have been established, police said. The latest appendage has been turned over to the B.C. Coroner's Service, and the RCMP is reviewing missing-persons files that could shed light on its discovery. Police have yet to determine whether foul play had anything to do with the feet.

It's clear from the following interview with the RCMP (no Coen brothers' satire could be better — "We have received a complaint." — "It is unusual to find three right feet.") that … where there's a foot there must be other body parts, right? But surely logic suggests they should simply be looking for three one-legged men?

Launch in external player

Heathrow Airport has suffered a lot in the press this summer (see Heathrow hell: Britain's Awful Airports). It's been criticised for its inefficiency in processing travellers, resulting in long delays and missing luggage. Given that it was built to handle 45 million passengers annually but now processes 67 million each year, it's not surprising that it sometimes has problems.

However I've always been impressed with Heathrow, particularly the speed with which it processes arriving passengers. The last thing a tired traveller wants is a delay getting home from the airport, and Britain's immigration and customs procedures have always been excellent in my experience (unlike the equivalent authorities in some other countries e.g. USA).

This summer's criticism has focussed on departures, but I have bad news for the critics. We passed through Heathrow in record time this month at the start of our holiday to France. We left home by taxi at 6:35 am and were sitting at the departure gate at 7:07, having travelled to the airport, checked our bags and gone through security in only 32 minutes! It's a 20 minute drive from our house to Heathrow at the best of times, so that means it only required 12 minutes to get through the Heathrow check-in palaver.

Of course it helped that we had checked-in online the previous day and only had to drop off our bags, which we did by blagging our way through the business class fast bag drop (the check-in attendant was sitting there idle). Nevertheless, the security procedures were working well and so we had almost two hours to wait for our flight. To top it off, our bags were among the first off the plane upon arrival in Nice. Travelling from the UK really can't get much better than that!

The British weather doesn't often get me down, but I'm beginning to wonder if the sun still exists. It's been raining for days and days and days at this point. Wimbledon is way behind, and yesterday evening we even had ten minutes of continuous hail in west London.

The UK's Met Office has produced the usual monthly statistics (see chart), and the numbers confirm what everyone here has been thinking: it's wet.

Although yesterday's hail was extraordinary, we can't complain too much in the south. We only received twice as much rain as normal last month. By comparison, parts of northern England received 4 times their average monthly rainfall. Of course, we're all hoping August will be a scorcher.

Yet another double-decker bus has had its roof ripped off while trying to pass under a bridge (see Four hurt as bus roof ripped off and We're all getting a little stressed).

The moral of the story is obviously don't ride on the top floor of any bus while travelling on an improvised or irregular route.

The NPR web site has an interesting page of comments from the public about Hurricane Katrina. Here's one example from Marybeth Lima of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

As a survivor of the outskirts of Hurricane Katrina, right now, this is what I know:


-- that in Baton Rouge, La., the winds hit 110 miles per hour, and the hummingbirds navigated this wind, which picked up 200 ton blocks of concrete in Mississippi, like a breeze;

-- that a tree frog successfully rode out the storm on the leeward side of a Mexican fan palm that battered our dining room window;

-- that though the wind thrashed the web of a writing spider and her egg sac, all three sailed through the storm without damage.

I am in awe of these micro miracles in the face of such macro devastation: trees down, power lines live, flooding, storm surge and death, even in our fair city.

Read more at NPR : Affected by Katrina? Listeners Write In

The BBC is reporting that John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has topped the US dance chart at the age of 71 with a song supporting gay marriage (see Yoko's gay wedding song is US hit).

I can't understand how George W. Bush can argue that he's in favour of greater freedom for people when he "wants to change the US constitution to specify that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman".

Thirty-seven years ago while Justice Minister, a famous Canadian communist declared "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation". The left-wing Liberal Pierre Trudeau was in favour of freedoms that the current "leader of the western world" is unwilling to give his own nation.

Whenever I hear the Bush Administration arguing rhetorically about freeing foreign peoples, I can't help thinking of Cole Porter (an active homosexual, but at least he married a woman!). Porter hit the nail on the head when he wrote Anything Goes:

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that I'm bound to answer
When you propose,
Anything goes

It seems to me that the people who talk most about freedom, are really opportunistic control freaks who disguise themselves as liberals (i.e. freedom fighters) whenever it helps their selfish cause. Things are not what they seem, and anything goes!

PS - Is dancing allowed in Texas?

What does Tony Blair have in common with Britain's football hooligans? Well, a taste for the luxury clothing brand Burberry, apparently.

The Prime Minister has once again been spotted wearing Burberry; this time while on holiday in Italy. But as today's Guardian reports in I don't care if you are Tony Blair… he may have to rethink his wardrobe when he next visits the Midlands:

Drinkers wearing Burberry have been banned from two pubs in the city centre [of Leicester] because it is one of the favourite designers of a group of thugs.

Observers of popular culture noticed the hooligan penchant for Burberry some time ago, but if Britain's police and publicans are acting on this trend it must now really be official.

Seven years ago Tony Blair said "The new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture" (see 1997 Commonwealth Address), and it's good to see the Prime Minister making such an effective personal contribution to this social transformation.

With apologies to Ira Gershwin...

You say Al-KAY-da
And I say Al-KEYE-da
You say Osama
And I say Obama
Al-KAY-da, Al-KEYE-da
Osama, Obama
Let's call the whole thing off.

The "whole thing" could be defined in numerous ways I suppose, but I prefer to think of it as a reference to the conflict in Iraq.

"Obama" is, of course, Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Illinois who spoke so eloquently at the Democratic convention last week. Even the Financial Times published an article about him this weekend under the headline A Democrat star is born.

You can find out more about this new star in an article published in The New Yorker in May (see The Candidate by William Finnegan) and it seems I wasn't the only one to notice a certain similiarity in his last name:

[Democratic Congresswoman] Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”

Looks like Schakowsky was right.

Yet another example appears in this weekend's FT to suggest that "it 'aint what you do, but the way that you do it" that counts. Except this time the context is political (see Tales show a president need not be smart).

Writing about the similarities in three recent books on George W. Bush's administration, Peter Spiegel wondered:

How is it, then, that senior aides are ignored on their areas of expertise? Much of this dysfunction, it emerges, is due to the old Washington adage "process is policy" - in other words, how decisions are made profoundly effects [sic] which decisions are made. In this administration, the "how" is at the core of the dysfunction.

I wonder if they're any fans of Jimmie Lunceford at the White House?

Obesity has become a hot topic in recent months. The latest fat news came yesterday and again today when the UK media reported extensively on the recommendations of the House of Commons Health Select Committee, which has just published its concerns about the increasing number of obese children in Britain.

This change seems like yet another about-turn from the situation 20 years ago. When I graduated from university (the first time) the fashionable eating disorders of the day where those that made you thin: anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Remember all the fuss surrounding Princess Diana's and the Duchess of York's weight/eating problems? These days the disadvantages of fat are à la mode.

So Morgan Spurlock's award-winning movie Super Size Me is perfectly timed. Spurlock filmed the effects of eating all his meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner — for 30 consequtive days at McDonald's. He gained 25 pounds — that's not far off a pound a day — but luckily he lived to tell the tale.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film when it opens in the UK, but in the meantime I can't help thinking that with people like Michael Moore and Spurlock around, it's not a good time to be running anything big in the USA. No wonder Krispy Kreme has just reported its first loss.

The UK's best-known Martha is Miss Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of Lastminute.com, an internet travel agency that has prospered despite the IT crash. Earlier this week the 30 year-old doyenne of Britain's dot com boom made the news yet again for selling two million of her Lastminute.com shares, worth 4.6 million pounds. Apparently, she suggested it might be time to buy a new home (amongst other things).

The experts increasingly think otherwise. Almost a year ago the Economist was predicting a property crash, and since then more and more pundits have agreed that the time for a correction must be near. On Monday even Stephen Nickell, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee (which sets the country's prime interest rate) warned of the increasing risk of a dramatic fall in property prices.

I couldn't help wondering about this latest boom last night as I watched the usual Wednesday night litany of property-buying and house-decorating programmes on television. What will the TV producers do once the market turns? Switch from how-to-buy to how-to-sell I suppose, but that's not likely to be as much fun.

The Financial Times thinks the property programmes are similar to hemlines:

The anecdotal evidence for a bubble is also striking; TV channels are swamped with house-related programmes and there is a good business in seminars offering punters swift riches via the housing market.

But any sell-off needs a catalyst. Higher rates are an obvious trigger but, as Mr [Stephen] Nickell's remarks show, the Bank is well aware of the dangers and is treading cautiously. Higher unemployment is another potential pitfall, but looks unlikely to be a problem this year. But the catalyst will eventually appear and when it does, the sell-off could be swift; as those buy-to-let investors, desperate to plug a cashflow shortfall, unload their surplus properties on a falling market.

So Martha may have timed her dot com business perfectly, but if she buys a new home soon it may turn out to be rather "last minute".

Last week the US Congress scared the living daylights out of Americans by denouncing Canada as a welcoming haven for terrorists (see Terror groups flourish in Canada: U.S. report).

Now there's equally scary news for Canukistanis as it appears Texans have been caught taking all their bad habits into God's Country accidentally. According to the BBC (Grenade closes US-Canada border):

There are two Vancouvers - one is a small American town, the other is the large Canadian city. On Monday, a woman from Texas trying to find the small town ended up at the Canadian border.

When officials there searched her vehicle, they found a hand grenade in the glove compartment. Within minutes, the border was evacuated and the bomb squad was on the scene.

Once the woman explained her story though, things quickly calmed down. A Canadian police spokesman says they are satisfied that the woman was simply lost and had never meant to go to Canada. They soon released her and reopened the border.

As for the hand grenade, police say, the woman had no idea it was in her vehicle.

I think that makes both countries even. I mean, terrorists or crazy Texans … which would you prefer?

Almost two years ago I wrote:

The railways in Britain have suffered from a lack of investment for decades, and commuters are now paying the price. I don't think the general public appreciates how difficult it is to rejuvenate an industry like rail. It could very well take as long to renew as it took to decline, which puts the current Government in a difficult position. What can it possibly do to improve the railways before the next election?

Well, it looks like the answer is — nothing.

Now, given this morning's Guardian story headlined Blair: fixing key services will take 15 years, it seems the Government hopes to change public expectations instead.

Surprise, surprise.

The news today was full of pub lunches. Well, one in particular. Tony Blair took George W. Bush to lunch at the Dun Cow Inn in Sedgefield, Blair's home constituency.

As expected, a few protestors lined the route to the pub — but England's countryside has a better class of demonstrator. When the Presidential motorcade drove past one man stood silently while his placard politely proclaimed:

"George Bush is not very nice."

Enough said.

Update: Euan Semple describes another characteristically English response to George W. Bush's visit in Oh I do love living in Britain!.

Anyone descended from missionaries will be interested in this story from the BBC: Eaten missionary's family head for Fiji.

The residents of a Fiji village are preparing to apologise to the family of a Christian missionary who was eaten by tribes people 136 years ago…

The inhabitants of Navatusila on the island of Viti Levu believe their village has been suffering bad luck ever since the cannibalism incident, and hope saying sorry will help their fortunes.

I love the last sentence which suggests "Cannibalism died out". Did the last man alive eat himself or die of natural causes?

Several media commentators have suggested that the official denial of certain unreported rumours by the Prince of Wales this week has backfired. I agree. I am not very interested in the lives of the Royal family, but the fact that something was being purposefully withheld from me was more than sufficient to peak my curiosity and motivate me to investigate.

I knew that the rumour would be available on the Internet at some point, so that's where I started to look. I failed to find anything helpful at first, but reading between the lines of two stories published today has now convinced me that I know the gist of the scandal.

Read Royal rumour stories leak in Europe in The Guardian and Prince Charles Denies a Rumor, but Won't Say What It's About in The New York Times, and you too will figure it out.

Hindsight makes solving this mystery seem easy. Just ask yourself why someone named Michael Fawcett would successfully request an injunction preventing The Mail on Sunday from publishing details of a sex scandal involving the Prince of Wales. I'm pleased to report that I wasn't sufficiently intrigued, nor sufficiently cynical, to make the connection prior to this week's disingenuous challenge set by the heir to the throne.

Oh well, back to reality now.

Jessica Lynch, the US soldier who was captured and dramatically rescued in Iraq, is in the news again thanks to her recent engagement (this time it's a marital, not military, engagement): BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Former Iraq PoW Lynch 'to marry'.

The most amazing aspect of her story is that someone is willing to pay her a million dollars to tell a story that she doesn't remember:

Private Lynch, who is still recuperating from wounds sustained during her ordeal and who reportedly has no memory of the incident, recently signed a $1m book deal to publish an account of her capture.

At least it'll be a quick read.

As usual in August there's little real news, so the BBC is reporting on the weather, which is just barely newsworthy. In French heat deaths 'up to 3,000' it states:

The French health ministry has said the deaths of up to 3,000 people in recent weeks could be attributed to the European heatwave.

That number of deaths is plausible depending on the number of weeks concerned, but the report goes on to say:

Police trade union officials have called on the army to help remove the bodies of the deceased, saying that undertakers have been "overwhelmed" by the number of dead.

This misleading statement makes it sound like the plague is revisiting France. Here in the south I have yet to see a single dead body (not to mention any Police trade union officials), and we have experienced the same hot weather as the rest of Europe. As I write, it's 35° Celsius in the shade!

I must admit that even the locals are complaining about the weather now. It hasn't rained significantly since May, and everyone is feeling the effects of such a long dry spell.

Still, it didn't stop Sudsy Dame and I from hiking in La Vallee de la Siagne on Monday. The Siagne river runs at the bottom of a beautiful gorge overlooked by the village of St.-Cézaire-sur-Siagne. The hike begins in the village, but immediately descends to the river 200 meters below. It involves walking along a precipitous canal wall, and straight through a waterfall just before reaching an old Roman bridge across the Siagne, the Pont des Tuves. You then walk along the river for a few kilometers before re-crossing it at the Pont du Moulin. The best swimming is available at the two bridges, where there are incredibly refreshing (i.e. cold) pools of clean water that are easy to reach from the riverbank. You then return to the village by hiking up the east side of the valley back to St.-Cézaire.

It's important in hot weather to take lots of water to drink. Between us we consumed 4.5 litres while walking, but nothing matched the drinks in the main square in St.-Cézaire at the end. They were pure bliss.

The weapons expert accused by the Ministry of Defence as being the source of the "dodgy dossier" story has gone missing (see MoD expert goes missing). This development is worthy of a thriller. In fact, it reminds me of an excellent film directed by Ken Loach called Hidden Agenda. You could be forgiven for thinking that an apt title for current events.

Update: the BBC is now reporting that a body has been found.

Monaco is a very strange place, and now it looks like the Monegasque authorities can't do anything right. Ted Maher, the American nurse who admitted setting the fire that killed his employer, the Lebanese-American billionaire Edmond Safra, escaped from Monaco's prison yesterday.

A few years ago (before the Safra affair) the chief of police in Monaco was dismissed because there had been a huge increase in serious crime in the principality - it had suffered three bank robberies and one murder.

The prison warden had better revise his CV. For more, see : Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Nurse who set fire to billionaire saws his way out of Monaco jail

History seemed like it was repeating itself today with these two stories hitting headlines in the UK:

• BBC News | UK POLITICS | Byers defends rail rescue package
• BBC News | BUSINESS | Consignia cuts 15,000 jobs

The railways in Britain have suffered from a lack of investment for decades, and commuters are now paying the price. I don't think the general public appreciates how difficult it is to rejuvenate an industry like rail. It could very well take as long to renew as it took to decline, which puts the current Government in a difficult position. What can it possibly do to improve the railways before the next election?

The BBC's business correspondent has an interesting albeit brief analysis of the problems plaguing the British Post Office (Drastic surgery at Consignia). As luck would have it, I visited my local post office today for the first time since Christmas. When I arrived, the queue was so long that I could barely cross the threshold. With 18 people in front of me and four tellers at work, it took 14 minutes to be served and the queue was even longer when I left. There clearly is a demand for the service, so perhaps a few of the 15,000 imminently unemployed workers should be retrained as tellers?

Ironically the Royal Mail is the best post office with which I'm familiar, the others being Canada Post and the United States Postal Service. If the recent experience of My Life As An American Gladiator is anything to go by, things haven't improved much in the US.

Perhaps, as in other walks of life, modern technology is forcing postal services to come full circle by undermining the importance of the mail? In 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote:

"For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it."

That certainly corroborates my experience these days.

---

What did Henry David Thoreau have against the Post Office? In 1863 he also wrote:

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

Of course, he's not really criticising the Post Office in this instance, merely the people who use it as a distraction from their own reality. It's hard to imagine visiting the Post Office in order to escape, but if you replace it with television I think his statement would be equally applicable today.

I don't know anyone who likes back-seat drivers, so the news that Margaret Thatcher will no longer be giving speeches must greatly please the current leadership of Britain's Conservative Party. Her "retirement" is long overdue. She might have been an effective leader in her time, but she certainly didn't know when to quit.