Reviews Category
We don’t just report off-beat news, breaking news and digest the best and worst of the news media analysis and commentary. We give an original take on what happened and why. We add lols, satire, news photos and original content.
Jobseeker dumped 20lbs of dog poo on Hanley job centre’s carpets
SIMON Bonnell, 21, staged a dirty protestin the foyer of Hanley’s Job Centre Plus: he dumped 20lbs of dog poo on the carpets. Mr Bonnell, who owns a Rottweiler and a Dalmatian, had arrived 10 minutes late for an appointment to sign on. Staff told him he’d have to speak with an advisor on the phone. Says he:
“The staff spoke to me like I was dirt and said they would stop my money. I was angry when I was on the telephone but there was a baby next to me and so I didn’t swear. Looking back I was glad I did what I did at the time. I just felt so mad. I just want to get a job as I don’t want to be on the dole.”
Posted: 9th, February 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
French ecology minister opens school for wolves
Domenico Ferrara accused of rigging TV talent show to let his teenage daughter Giovanna win
DID Domenico Ferrara, 56, get all his friends and relatives, and their friends and relatives in Villaricca, Italy, to vote for his 13-year-old daughter Giovanna to win I’ll Leave You with a Song, a televised contest for children run by Italy’s most prestigious music schools?
Giovanna finished second. If daddy fixed it, he needs to get more influence.
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Posted: 8th, February 2013 | In: Reviews, TV & Radio | Comment
It’s raining pseuds at Elliot Abrams’ AccuWeather.com
STORMS are buffeting the USA. Elliot Abrams writes at AccuWeather.com:
“At the height of the storm, anyone outside will face a fearsome blizzard. Innocent snowflakes turn to painfully stinging missiles, darts and tacks, propelled by gusting gales that scream over the seas and roar through the woods. In other words, high winds produce a crystalline ticker-tape parade of snowflakes: furiously falling and flowing flakes filling the fields, whisking past the windows, gliding to the ground and beautifying the bushes. The wild wind whips the snow into roadside rows and churns roof top snow into a creamy concoction with meandering smoky membranes of snow granules that dance to the edges and cascade down the sides. The storm’s gusty gales whip the snow into car-capturing, truck-trapping, bus-blocking, SUV-stalling drifts. It is among the great storms, one of the atmosphere’s awesome displays of change and violence among the momentous events that over time have shaped and changed the course of human events in ways wondrous and ominous.”
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Mental whale probably tries to kill humans in canoe (video)
THE latest in our series of ‘The Animals Are Trying To Take Over The World By Killing Us All’ (after badgers collapsing roads, ponies riding on trains and zoo animals chewing our drunks) sees a whale giving some hind-leggers the fright of their lives!
While riding in a canoe, a gigantic humpback whale leapt out of the water and almost landed on top of their vessel!
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Preacher abuses talking congregant at First Baptist Church of Hammond (video)
DO you talk in Church? Larry Smith is a sermoniser at the First Baptist Church of Hammond. Indiana. As the Church says on its website:
We believe that Christians should talk, behave, live, and dress like a citizen of Heaven.
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Findus dishes up horses for courses
FINDUS beef lasagne contains up to 100% horse meat. No artificial meats. Just trusty horse meat. No consumer complained about it not tasting like cow. No-one died. No-one fell ill. The horse lasagna sold as well as before. But then that consumer apathy may be rooted in the animal painkillers injected injected into those Nag Burgers.
Findus says it is “Good lads food made Findusly Simple”:
For over 50 years, Findus has stood as one of Britain’s best loved names in food. Using only the best ingredients and a generous pinch of imagination in our recipes, we’ll help you prepare great tasting and effortlessly good food straight from your freezer
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Posted: 8th, February 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comments (4)
Daniel Hernandez Jr is the reluctant hero talking to piers Morgan
DANIEL Hernandez Jr., was a congressional intern who stepped up:
On January 8, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson, Arizona, featuring U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Since he had some medical training, Hernandez ran toward the gunfire to tend to victims, realized Giffords was shot on the left side of her head and used his bare hands to keep her from losing more blood. . . . He’s been credited with saving Giffords’ life and recognized as a hero, although he rejects the title.
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Idiots vote for cat’s inclusion in Monopoly
YOU can make a good judgement on a human by viewing which piece they decide to play with in Monopoly. Basically, the rule is this: If they choose the dog, they’re an idiot.
This may seem harsh, but think about it. The car has a lovely art-deco quality and implies speed and fun, while the boot is reminiscent of a cartoon hobo’s boot, implying a wistful, rambling freedom. The top hat is a satisfying piece to hold and has a Lord Snooty quality, and anyone who doesn’t like the Beano should be slapped senseless. The ship is also filled with romance and a promise of adventure and maybe decadent dinner parties on deck, before the vessel perishes at the whim of an iceberg.
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Posted: 7th, February 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
David Beckham, Jimmy Savile, Ronnie Irani, Maggie Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer: the five biggest charity boasters
THEY do a lot of work for charity, and they DO like to mention it!
When it comes to self-promotion you have to hand it to him. Transfer deadline day arrives and instead of talking about a 22-year-old Brazilian or Portuguese hotshot on his way to Chelsea or Manchester to City, the media is frothing with excitement over a 37-year-old former international whose main purpose these days is to sell merchandise with his name on.
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Posted: 7th, February 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts, Politicians, Sports | Comment
Daily Mail launches Knackers Mothers’ Wine Club day after warning or women ‘killed by alcohol’
THE Daily Mail wants to talk to you about wine. On January 25, the warning was that you women are going to die from drink:
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Nine-year-old Dafne gives birth in Mexico
IN Mexico, Dafne, a 9-year-old Mexican, has given birth by C-section. The father is missing. He’s 17. Dafne is one of family of eleven children. She lives in Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos.
Lino Ginzalez Corona, spokesperson at Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office, tells media:
“Due to her young age, we don’t know if she is being entirely truthful… She did not realize that she was pregnant until the seventh month.”
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When We Went Mad: the documentary of Mad Magazine (with added Jimi Hendrix fold in)
MAD Magazine is a film. WhenWe Went Mad is a documentarythat MAD Magazine over the past 60 years.” You get to put faces to Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones, Arnie Kogen, Jack Davis, and Al Feldstein.
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Posted: 6th, February 2013 | In: Film, Flashback, The Consumer | Comments (3)
1976: the Star Trek cast meet the Space Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise
IT was no coincidence that the first Space Shuttle Orbiter was called Enterprise. Originally named Constitution (in honor of the U.S. Constitution’s Bicentennial), Star Trek fans wrote to President Gerald Ford suggesting an alternative name: Enterprise. The vehicle debuted at Palmdale California on Sept. 17, 1976. Many from the cast of Star Trek were there to see it.
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Posted: 6th, February 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology, TV & Radio | Comment
CCTV footage of disabled spot being painted around car while parked
GETTING a parking ticket or your car getting towed away is infuriating enough, but imagine if you’d parked legally and someone painted a disabled parking spot AROUND your car and then towed it away?
You’d be apoplectic with rage wouldn’t you?
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Posted: 6th, February 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Madeleine McCann: A jailed troll and police swab kids in New Zealand
MADELEINE McCann is back in the news. Why? Well, the Daily Star has news:
MADELEINE MCCANN PARENTS WANT JAIL FOR EX-SOLICITOR’S ‘SLUR’
It’s Tony Bennettt. Regular Anorak readers will know why comments on this story are not enabled.
Doctors Kate and Gerry McCann, both 44, claim Tony Bennett, 65, is in contempt of court for breaching promises that he would not repeat the allegations.
Bennett has accused Gerry and Kate McCann of covering up their daughter’s death.
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Posted: 6th, February 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews | Comment
Have you been taken up The Shard?
THE Shard is open to the public. You can see our photos of London’s epic building rising up here. Anyone considering using The Shard as a venue for dates, should heed the words of OK! magazine’s Natalie Posner who writes beneath the headline “OUR GIRL ABOUT TOWN”:
“On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to be taken up the Shard…”
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Posted: 6th, February 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Adios: Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat v Penelope Soto
PENELOPE Soto is 18. Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat is older than time. They met at a courthouse in Miami-Dade County. He was at work. She had been arrested for crashing her bike whilst off her face on Xanax, bars of which she had about her person.
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Posted: 5th, February 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (6)
Count the grammatical errors in Arizona teacher’s letter!
TEACHERS eh? We all know better than those idiots don’t we? We’ve met children and they’re idiots. So teachers have it easy, because they can tell them anything OR they’re to blame for children being a stupid as they are. And they get loads of holidays.
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Theme park to be built on Bin Laden’s corpse
WHEN Osama Bin Laden died, the whole of America cheered! The bogeyman had been captured, adding a head for the poles that contained Gadaffi and Saddam! Oh, how America love to hunt people in the Middle East down! And so, ill-feeling in the Middle East grows toward America.
What. A. Surprise.
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Why we like to squeeze cute creatures like Justin Bieber: to let the air out
EVER see a cuddly things and want to hug it and squeeze it and hug it and really, really, squeeze it? Ever look at Justin Bieber and think he needs a good, hard hugging? So. Why do we want to squeeze cute things? Shaunacy Ferro writes:
The study’s researchers, led by Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, dubs the phenomenon “cute aggression.”
“We think it’s about high positive-affect, an approach orientation and almost a sense of lost control,” she said. It’s so adorable, it drives you crazy.
But for the sake of thoroughness, researchers did a second experiment to test whether the aggression was simply verbal, or whether people really did want to act out in response to wide-eyed kittens and cherubic babies. Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted.
When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively.
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Panic Room: Muslim Terrorism in the USA was almost nil in 2012
IT’S not always Muslims. Charles Kurzman looks at Muslim-American terrorism. Spencer Ackerman notes:
Try as al-Qaida might to encourage them, American Muslims still aren’t committing acts of terrorism. Only 14 people out of a population of millions were indicted for their involvement in violent terrorist plots in 2012, a decline from 2011′s 21. The plots themselves hit the single digits last year…
Since 9/11, Kurzman and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.
What else?
All of the year’s other alleged plots by Muslim Americans were discovered and disrupted at an early stage. This is a shift from the previous three years, in which several plots came to the attention of law enforcement authorities at a later stage, after weapons or explosives had already been gathered. The most dramatic plot involved Amine ElKhalifi, an illegal resident from Morocco who pled guilty to plotting to bomb the U.S.Capitol in Washington, D.C. According to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI, El-Khalifi met with an informant in January 2011 and indicated that he was “ready for war.” In December 2011, El-Khalifi confirmed as part of his guilty plea, that he met with an informant and an undercover agent posing as members of alQaeda. Over the following two months, he shifted his proposed targets from a military office to a restaurant to the U.S. Capitol. The FBI employees encouraged the plot and provided El-Khalifi with a jacket containing mock explosives. In February 2012, he was arrested at a parking garage in Washington, D.C., after he had put on the jacket and started walking toward the Capitol.
Informants and undercover agents were involved in almost all of the Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered in 2012…
How it goes down:
In one unusual case, a suspect asked an undercover employee of the FBI furnish spiritual guidance for a terrorist plot. The FBI’s criminal complaint against Adel Daoud described the episode: “Daoud had been debating the topic of jihad with someone at his mosque. Someone overheard the conversation and reported it to his sheikh [religious leader], who called Daoud and [another individual, who soon backed out of the plot] to a meeting and ‘yelled’ at them. Daoud’s father was informed of the incident too and told Daoud to stop talking about these topics. Finally, another sheikh became involved and tried to convince Daoud that engaging in violent jihad was wrong. Because of the arguments offered by this second sheikh, Daoud asked the UCE [undercover employee] if the UCE’s sheikh had a similar background and could issue ‘the real fatwah’ justifying attacks on Americans.” The following week, the FBI’s undercover employee reported to Daoud that the FBI’s fictional sheikh “wants to make sure that he, the sheikh is not pressuring you, that I’m not pressuring you. ‘Cuz you know in Islam you can’t force anybody. … This has to be in your heart, especially jihad. You know it’s in your heart. It’s something you believe in. It’s something you either believe in or you don’t.” Daoud responded, “I’m convinced … I mean rest assured I was raising jihad before I knew you or your sheikh.”
What about support?
And in Europe?
The number of Muslim terrorism suspects and perpetrators has been declining in Europe as well as in the United States. According to Europol, the European law enforcement agency, the number of terrorism-related arrests of Muslims in Europe fell from more than 400 in 2006 to under 300 per year in 2009-2011, though the decline was partially reversed in 2010 and 2011.
The number of terrorism-related convictions dropped even more dramatically, from 137 in 2007 to 45 in 2011. There were no terrorist attacks by Muslims in Europe in 2011, compared with 1.2 attacks per year since 2006. These terrorism suspects “largely continue to exhibit poor skills and professional tradecraft,” Europol reported.
Poor skills is a s result of poor training. Looks like an enemy is being defeated.
Posted: 4th, February 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Kyron Horman: police, justice and media collude to create a secret criminal case from thin air
WE still have no evidence of what happened to Kyron Horman, the seven-year-old who went missing from Skyline School in northwest Portland on June 4, 2010. We don’t know what crime befell him. We don’t know know it he was the victim of a crime.
The latest news is that lawyers working for Kyron father, Kaine Horman, have filed a motion to delay the divorce proceedings against his estranged wife, Kyron’s step-mother Terri Horman. Says Kaine Horman:
“There’s two civil cases pending right now, one from his mother and then the divorce case that we have that’s still pending and on hold. And that’s exactly how we’re going to progress. We need to bring him home.”
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Posted: 4th, February 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Chris Kyle: marine shoots dead legendary Navy Seal sniper on Texas gun range
CHRIS Kyle was shot dead on a shooting range south west of Fort Worth, Texas. He was shot by Eddie Routh, a former marine who, reportedly, was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Also shot dead was Kyle’s friend, Chad Littlefield, 35.
This is especially noteworthy because Kyle was a Navy Seal sniper with 150 kills by his name. His Iraqi enemy nicknamed him the ‘The Devil of Ramadi’ and placed an $80,000 bounty on his head. Kyle said of one kill – a bullet he fired at an insurgent with a rocket launcher – “God blew that bullet and hit him.” He said of the reward:
“That made me feel like I was actually doing my job and having an effect on the war.”
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