Key Posts Category
Plastic Brits: Why does the Daily Mail love big blond South African Mouritz Botha?
MOURITZ Botha (born in South Africa)was in the England team that beat France in Paris. So too was Manu Tuilagi – he was born in Somoa. Neither of them have been called Plastic Brits by the Daily Mail.
As the Mail says:
Manu Tuilagi set England on their way to a storming victory here yesterday that may confirm Stuart Lancaster in the head coach’s job. The 20-year-old centre scored a sensational long-range try in the 13th minute to ignite a performance that the interim coach claimed has ‘put the pride back’ in the nation’s rugby after the disastrous World Cup.
The Mail then turns to athletics:
Imports take GB to medal record
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London Olympics 1908 In Photos: When Britain Cheated America
THE London Olympics of 1908 ran from 27 April to 31 October and featured 22 countries. Rome was meant to host the Fourth Olympiad but Italy did not have the money to pay for it. So, the Games were moved. Great Britain did well, winning 56 gold medals at the White City stadium in west London. Henry Taylor was the hero, winning three swimming golds.
But glory was tempered by cheating.
GB won 146 medals in total. Seven players entered the rackets contest: all British.
All officials came from the host nation. This led to lots of complaints of bias from the Americans. There was, for instance, the time test cricketer Johnny Douglas won gold in the middleweight boxing division. The fight against an American had split the judges. The ref’s decision would be decisive. The ref was Douglas’s dad. Douglas wins!
British athlete Wyndham Halswelle won gold in the 400m when the American who crossed the line first was disqualified for blocking. The race was re-run. The Americans refused to take part. Halswelle was the only runner. Halswelle wins!
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Posted: 10th, March 2012 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (3)
Madeleine McCann: Helena Monteiro, Rogerio Alves and tabloid excitement
MADELEINE McCann: Anorak’s look at Our Maddie in the news…
Daily Mirror (front page): “At last! Maddy Police launch new probe”
“Lawyer: Cops investigate ‘fresh, specific information”
No. They don’t.
Daily Express (front page): “MADELEINE – Parents joys as Portuguese police start fresh hunt”
Daily Star (front page): “MADDIE – Shock as cops reopen case”
A shock because it is not true.
Only, the Portuguese police have not re-opened the case. As we reported yesterday,
It is understood that the team from Portugal’s investigative Policia Judiciaria (PJ), headed by senior officer Helena Monteiro, has been looking at the Madeleine case for some weeks now.
A team of detectives based in Oporto in northern Portugal has been appointed to re-examine the original investigation into the little girl’s disappearance from the Algarve in 2007, the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Noticias reported.
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Posted: 10th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann | Comments (18)
A history of the Great British Football mascot – from Ken Bailey to sex and violence
ONCE upon a time, football mascots were men like Ken Baily, who dressed as John Bull, helped restore Erica Roe’s modesty after her Twickenham streak, and followed the Queen and the England and Bournemouth football teams across the world. Subbuteo even honoured him with his own model.
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Posted: 9th, March 2012 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (2)
Daily Mail fails Tiffany Porter’s Plastic Brit test
TIFFANY Porter is the Daily Mail’s “Plastic Brit“. She’s the captain of Team GB at the World Indoor Championships in Turkey.
The Mail says she’s “plastic” because she was born and raised in Michigan. Tiffany Porter represented the United States as a junior. And now she represents Britain because her mother was born in London (her father is Nigerian).
This is a great country, where we welcome talent. But the Daily Mail does not share those values. Its reporter asks Porter to recite the opening liese to God Save The Queen, you know, like the Scots and Welsh don’t do at international sporting events. She can’t or won’t. She should, of course, have asked the reporter to sing the second verse. It’s that ability that marks you as an authentic Briton.
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Posted: 9th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Sports | Comments (7)
Kate Middleton is pregnant – Peter Andre, Katie Price and Kerry Katona will be delighted
KATE Middleton places a hand on her tum-tum and waves to the crowd. To her side OK! delivers the headline is bold yellow ink:
“A ROYAL BABY”
Can it be that Kate is pregnant? Kate is touching her stomach in the way pregnant women do in the tabloids. And that headline does crete the impression that Middleton is up the duff. Only the smaller print informs us:
“How having a baby will transform her life”.
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Posted: 9th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Royal Family | Comment (1)
Gemma McCluskie’s death is a tabloid soap opera
GEMMA McCluskie appeared in 34 episodes os EastEnders between 2000 and 2001. She’s dead. Well, so police believe. A body has been dragged form the Regent’s Canal in Hackney, London. It has no head. It has no limbs.
Miss McCluskie’s brother Tony has been arrested. He had been living in Bethnal Green, east London, with his sister.
That’s all we know. Police have released no more facts.
It’s a grim tale. A woman appears to have been murdered and dismembered. We know what the order of her ordeal. But the media see a dead star.
Daily Star (front page): “EastEnders murder girl in noisy row”
EastEnders… Noisy row… The Star seems to be blurring fact with fiction. What is EastEnders but a series of noisy rows?
Channel 5 Celebrity Big Brother star Natalie [Cassidy] said: “She’s a lovely girl.”
The Daily Star is owned by Richard Desmond, who also owns Big Brother on Channel 5. Best not to let the BBC and EastEnders get all the free plugs, eh?
The Sun: “Murdered Gemma McCluskie was ‘in fear of a man’ – EastEnders girl told pals of terror”
Another life-long friend said Gemma, 29, would have “fought for her life” against an attacker. The woman pal said: “She was feisty and bubbly, like her character on EastEnders. Gemma is not the sort of girl who would have wandered off.”
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Posted: 9th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (7)
Glen Johnson, Paul McGrath, Ron Atkinson, Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra star in a Racism Smack Down
GLEN Johnson, the Liverpool defender is talking to the Daily Mail where he is billed as “Liverpool’s only black first-team player“. That’s an odd thing to state, given that Liverpool is not a racist club, operating no colour bar to players nor fans.
It duly falls upon Johnson’s shoulders to be the spokesman for the entire black community (and where are those meetings held?).
Johnson was in the line up when unlovely Luis Suarez declined to shake the hand of Manchester United’s unlovely Patrice Evra.
Says Johnson:
“Evra was clever at Old Trafford,’ said Johnson, extending his hand directly towards me. ‘Because – I’m not being funny – but if I wanted to shake your hand I would stick it right out in front of me like that. But if my hand is down here, almost by my side, then it’s because I really don’t want to shake your hand.”
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Rochdale rape case shames all men
ON International Women’s Day, an update on the Rochdale rape case at Liverpool Crown Court.
Kabeer Hassan, 24; Abdul Aziz, 41; Abdul Rauf, 43; Mohammed Sajid, 35; Adil Khan, 42; Abdul Qayyum, 43; Mohammed Amin, 44; Qamar Shahzad, 29; Liaquat Shah, 41 and Hamid Safi, 22, are in court. They all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. Also a 59-year-old man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, denies the same charge and two, among other thing, two counts of rape.
The 11 accused are all men. That is the first thing we see.
In court, one of the men’s alleged victims tells strangers and a jury that when aged 15 she work form a drunken slumber to find a man raping her.
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Posted: 8th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (27)
The 10 funniest GIFS ever
WE love GIFS. You should see this video of how they came into being. But before that, enjoy the funniest 10 GIFS ever…
Amazing street art in photos
Amazing street art in photos – it’s not all grey with signs telling you what not to do…
Posted: 8th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Photojournalism | Comment (1)
David Cameron’s wolf whistle politics – making saucy whistling a crime
DAVID Cameron is out to ban the wolf whistle. Well, so says the Sun. The less sensational story is that Cameron is to sign the country up to Council of Europe’s convention on violence against women.
The Guardian writes:
Among the pledges in the convention, which has already been signed by 18 countries including Germany, France and Ukraine, is one to pass legislation or other measures to criminalise or impose other sanctions for “unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.
Unwanted? How do you qualify unwanted?
Better to rebrand the wold whistle to something less predatory, like the frog whistle or the teddy bear whistle. Wolves don’t whistle. But rabbits might.
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Posted: 8th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (4)
Do tabloid rewards do more harm than good?
DO newspaper rewards aide the hunt for missing persons and criminals? Or are they just splashy adverts that show how much the organ cares, or pretends to? The News of The World’s £1,5m reward for Madeleine McCann remains unclaimed (did it die with the paper?). So too does the Daily Express’ £1million reward for information on what happened to Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
As it did with Our Maddie and Jo Yeates, the tabloids likes to slap their logos on the faces of the missing. As the Sun said:
We also produced posters featuring this picture of the girls, in the Manchester United shirts they were wearing when last seen. The Sun pledged £100,000 of the reward and the News of the World £50,000.
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Posted: 7th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (4)
Blackburn man learned to grow marijuana on Facebook Pot Farm
MARK Anthony Barnes tells Blackburn Magistrates that he learned to grow and cultivate cannabis by playing Pot Farm on Facebook.
Facebook has rules against showing marijuana being used for trade and recreation.
But the Facebook founder have donated to the legalise marijuana drive
Facebook’s attitude to marijuana is every bit as confused as that of Western governments.
The Lancashire Telegraph says:
“Barnes was so successful at transferring virtual reality cultivation into the real thing that his first crop had a street value of nearly £7,000.”
Is this the Facebook business model?
Andrew Church-Taylor, defending, adds:
“There was so much he had actually destroyed some of the crop.”
Barnes pleaded guilty to producing cannabis. For his pains he was given a 26 weeks prison sentence suspended for 12 months, made subject to a 7pm to 7am curfew for 16 weeks and ordered to pay £85 costs.
A curfew? Why? Why keep the man who grows weed at home at home? The nonsense gets more nonsensical when we read:
Mr Church-Taylor said Barnes was a full-time carer for his wife and rarely went out of the house.
So. A curfew will teach him to obey the letter of the law on drugs – a letter than allowed puffing David Cameron to become Prime Minister.
The law on weed is so utterly pathetic, so weak and vindictive it could drive a man to drink (which is heavily taxed)…
Spotter: Karen
Ed Miliband says boycott the Sun – so David Miliband writes for it
SAYS Ed Miliband:
“News International have sullied the character of reputation of British journalism” – March 3, 2012
All good and true Labour supporters must boycott the Sun, says Ed.
“Sunk by a wave of freedom – David Miliband writes why Russian election could be end of Putin” – March 4, 2012
Posted: 7th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comment
The many orgasm faces of George Osborne
THE many orgasm faces of George Osborne – as not seen by anyone other than his wife ever (and no prostitutes nor members of the Bullingdon club)…
Spotters: @TomChivers, and TheMayCumFacesofGeorgeOsborne, @Uponnothing
Posted: 7th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Politicians | Comments (3)
Live-tweeting from the Park Slope Coop meeting – a gathering for tortured PC souls
WITH its leafy streets lined with charming brownstones, Park Slope is one of New York’s most desirable neighbourhoods. The name comes from the neighbourhood’s location on the western slope of Prospect Park – Brooklyn’s green oasis.
In the family-friendly Park Slope, also nicknamed “Stroller City”, yummy mummies brush shoulders with actors, directors and authors. Tom Hanks has a house here, as does Steve Buscemi and celebrity couple Maggie Gyllenhall and Peter Sarsgaard. Vintage shops, restaurants serving locally-sourced food and fair-trade coffee, community gardens and farmers’ markets cater to the well-to-do residents’ every need and PC preoccupation.
At the heart of the neighbourhood is the Park Slope Coop, a members’ only supermarket selling organic fruit and veg, artisan cheeses, supplements and vitamins, environmentally-friendly cleaning material and more. The coop has over 15,000 members, most of whom work at the shop once a month in exchange for discounts on groceries – and the buzz they get from feeling morally superior to their fast-food chomping peers.
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Janaka Basnayake loses buried alive world record
DID Janaka Basnayake, 24, break the world record for being buried alive? We may never know. Firstly, there is no official record. Secondly, Lord Lucan has yet to appear for his hiding place. And lastly, we do not know the precise moment when Mr Basnayake died under the ground in Kantale, Sri Lanka.
Also, it is only alleged that Mr Janaka Basnayake buried in 10foot-deep trench sealed with wood and soil. It is only alleged that his family and friends helped him, er, live his dream.
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Posted: 7th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Strange But True | Comment
Photos of the day – Wookie Goldberg’s missing piggy
Spotters: mudwerks, miguelandrade, kidgloves,
Posted: 6th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Photojournalism | Comment
Prince Harry does the Bahamas – Bahamas yields (photos)
PRINCE Harry has made it to the Bahamas. There he was presented with a portrait of himself. It wasn’t a caricature done by a precinct Picasso in black ink, with Harry smoking a massive refer, scarfing a rum punch and squiring a lovely bevy of lovelies. No, no. Wait for the photos. This is a neat portrait of Harry looking demure, as befits his role as one of the patriotic flag bearers for this year of Great British greatness. 2012 is the year of the Great British London Olympics and the Great British Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Lucky old Harry gets to escape the place for a while and build up his tolerances before the real pomp begins…
12960044
Posted: 5th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Royal Family | Comment
Baby P’s father gets £75,000 for being called a child rapist in print
THE father of Baby Peter Connolly – for now and for ever the tabloids’ Baby P – has been awarded £75,000 against the publishers of The People. The newspaper said he was a child rapist who had attacked a 14-year-old girl.
The paper was wrong.
Mr Justice Bean said it was “difficult to think of any charge more calculated to lead to the revulsion and condemnation of a person’s fellow citizens than the rape of a 14-year-old girl”.
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Posted: 5th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (2)
Lockerbie: Innocent Abdulaset Ali al-Megrahi was looking for sex not murder in Malta
ABDULBaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person to have been convicted of murdering 270 in the Lockerbie bombing, may get another appeal.
Scotland’s Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill says:
“The Scottish government had no interest whatsoever in Mr Al-Megrahi’s appeal being abandoned. I had no involvement in Mr Al-Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal against conviction — that was entirely a matter for him and his legal team… Scottish government officials were present throughout my meeting with Mr al-Obeidi [Libyan government minister]. At no time did I or any other member of the Scottish government suggest to Mr al-Obeidi, to anyone connected with the Libyan government, or indeed to Mr al-Megrahi himself, that abandoning his appeal against conviction would in any way aid or affect his application for compassionate release.”
Al-Megrahi has a new book out.
How latest defence is that he did go to Malta. But with a mind bent on sex not murder.
The BBC reports:
Prosecutors said the bomb which destroyed Pan-Am Flight 103 was in a suitcase loaded on the island. Previously secret documents, seen by BBC Scotland, detail the explanations of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, 59, for his presence on Malta….[The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s] 821-page report has never been published, but it has now been seen by BBC Scotland.
“As a Libyan Arab Airlines employee and as someone well known, both at Tripoli airport and at the airport in Malta,” he told the lawyers, “I could get away with not using a passport or an identification card at all, but simply by wearing my Libyan Arab Airlines uniform.
“This may sound ridiculous but it is true. If I wanted to do something clandestine in such a way that there would be absolutely no record at all of me going from Tripoli to Malta and back again, I could do it.”
A Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, identified Megrahi as the man to whom he sold clothes which were later found in a suitcase which had contained the bomb.
The SCCRC document says:
He told them he could not have sex with his wife.
“It was possible therefore that the reason for his visit to Malta on 20 December was to meet a woman for this purpose,” the SCCRC report said. “The woman in question was the same one that he had suggested he might have met during his visit to Malta on 7 December. He had had sexual relations with her on a number of occasions over several years, until 1989 or 1990.”
Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison in August, 2009. He had three months to live.
Maybe I am just getting too old to relish the challenge, but recent noises from the No 10 direction could hardly be more hostile, with David Cameron claiming that John Ashton’s book Megrahi: You Are My Jury is an insult to “the relatives” of the Lockerbie bomb victims – and that before he could possibly have read it: is he Prime Minister of the UK or the US?The inquiry route, as that proposed by the Justice For Megrahi campaign group, remains before the Holyrood justice committee. How else can we support JFM? My personal view is that there are sufficient material and powers within Scotland to unseat the Scottish verdict and that until that is done Whitehall, let alone the international arena, will remain obdurate…The relatives seek answers to the question of who did carry out the atrocity and why were they not prevented from doing so, rather than the simpler question of “was Megrahi guilty or not?” But the verdict is the obstruction that bars our progress, and the heavy lifting gear to get rid of that obstruction is within Scotland.The two entities needing to be in the cross-hairs are the Crown Office and the Dumfries and Galloway Police. Ashton’s book puts both of them on the back foot. Once the court proceedings at Zeist, in the Netherlands, are shown to have been corrupted – no matter by whom – it should be for Scotland to set aside her verdict. There is a scientifically verifiable divide between the fragment PT35b and the Mebo timers. Let us not waste time on wondering where the fragment came from and who made it. It appears the differences between the two types of circuit boards are scientifically irreconcilable. If that’s so and can be made to stand up in court, there is no other evidence of a timer used to enable the long journey from Malta to the skies over Lockerbie.With full analysis of the proven genuine fragment, the prosecution case collapses. Once that happens, Whitehall and the Americans ought to have to answer for their roles in all this, but that probably won’t happen in my lifetime.
Besides, it is wrong that an innocent man, Megrahi, and his family should remain under such overwhelming and unjustified blame a day longer. That also is evil and it has been done in the name of Scottish justice. Addressing the far greater evil of the murders themselves must follow the destruction of the verdict, surely?We shall all be guilty of failing to fight both those evils if we do not rise up in Scotland to overturn the verdict now…Sometimes it is hard also to resist the temptation to seek revenge against those who have misused the trust we placed in them to solve this case, but revenge was the fuel for Lockerbie, and to succumb to it would be to hand a further victory to those who murdered and those who have deceived. That cannot ever be right.
Book of The Day: Cooking With Poo
BOOK of the Day: Cooking with POO.
In Thailand, Saiyuud Diwong’s book “Cooking with Poo” is a hit. In Thai “poo” means “crab”, For reasons unspecified, Poo is also Diwong’s nickname.
It’s funny how one word can mean something so different in another language or time. For instance, in 14th Century Albanian, Jamie Oliver is a ‘gonad tongue’, a “term of endearment”.
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Posted: 4th, March 2012 | In: Books, Key Posts | Comments (4)
The Greatest keep-fit LPs ever – Spinning On Vinyl
BEFORE keep-fit videos and DVDs, the would-be fit listened to LPs. We’ve compiled a gallery of some of the greatest, as found in Old Mr Anorak’s Bangkok Gym ‘n’ Gin Studios. It was all leotards, Miss Piggy, aerobics, Jane Fonda know-how, June La Salvia’s “How The Waist Was Won’, dancing for Christians and other ‘firm’ believers, Crystal Carrington, Nutricize and the chance to be like “GLORIA and her Six Daughters”. As the keep-fit industry grew so did we. Fatter. And fatter. The conclusion is simple: exercise products make you fat…
Spotters: here,
Posted: 4th, March 2012 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment (1)
Whitney Houston had affair with married man at 15 – Michael Jackson blushes
IN “Whitney’s secret affair with Jackson”, the Sun leads with news that Whitney Houston had a “secret affair” with…Big Brother star Jermaine Jackson. Having been told earlier that Whitney wanted to marry Michael Jackson, we enter the realm of mistaken identity.
Pinning down what Michael Jackson looked like was akin to hitting a moving target. Thoughts are that had the King of Pop lived longer, he’d have been mistaken for Joe Jackson and be a freckle away from EastEnders harridan Bianca Jackson.
Says the Sun:
The romance explains why 56-year-old Jermaine — a married man at the time — was so devastated by pop diva Whitney’s death in a Los Angeles hotel last month.
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Posted: 4th, March 2012 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
