Blatherskite

Seinfield stars for building society

Jerry Seinfield's forays into advertising haven't been wholly successful, his double act with Bill Gates for Microsoft completely failed to hole the pesky Apple below the waterline, the avowed intention. But now he's trying again for the Greater Building Society, which is located in Newcastle, New South Wales. Methinks you need a ...

Yates of the Yard on Murdoch’s tail

Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the policeman who investigated the 'cash for honours' affair which included interviewing then prime minister Tony Blair, has been charged with "establishing the facts" about News International's alleged bugging of hundreds of politicians and celebrities. Bafflingly this long list includes actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Yates will also, ...

UK’s threadbare Afghanistan policy revealed

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, a decent man although they said that about the politicians who mired the US deeper into Vietnam, got up on his hind legs today to try to explain why the UK is enmeshed in Afghanistan. He told a disbelieving John Humphrys on Today that we were there ...

Miliband may resign over torture revelations

Westminster sources say that foreign secretary David Miliband is preparing to resign over allegations that the British secret services and Manchester police (there's an unlikely duo) have colluded in the torture of British citizens in Pakistan and elsewhere. Whatever you think of Miliband he's the last person to want to torture ...

News of the World revealed as phone buggers

Phone tappers, that is. It seems that the good old News of the World has been acquiring its scoops by bugging phones left, right and centre. This is highly embarrassing for the paper now and also for former editor Andy Coulson, now David Cameron's spin doctor, who had to resign from the ...

‘Orrible Sir Alan is dumped by National Insurance

And not before time. I really hate those Alan Sugar NS ads, "Buy these bonds because my fee's going to Great Ormond Street hospital" (a non-sequitor surely). How could someone as literate as Dave Trott have written that? The reason he's being dropped is because he's been appointed as Gordon Brown's enterprise 'czar', ...

Google takes aim at Windows

Google has announced it's going to produce its own computer operating system to work with its Chrome browser, a big threat to Microsoft's Windows dominance, at least for home computers. Google's genius is in seeing the obvious and it appears to have twigged that most computers these days offer far more ...

Just what a recession needs, more red pandas

Anyway a zoo park in the south of Scotland is defying the downturn by packing in visitors to see a host of new-born animals including a brace of red pandas, surely the cutest animals on earth. This is particularly good for the park as it a couple of red pandas escaped ...

Hit public sector bosses, not the workers

The usually wise Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian today that public sector bosses, with their bonuses, should have their pay reduced, not the workers. Well he more or less says this, but that's what the Government should do. Most public sectors workers are still paid peanuts although general practitioners, hospital consultants, ...

US threatens curb on oil speculators

And let's hope they do it. Everyone is fearful of a 'double dip' recession, the tentative green shoots we're seeing in world-wide trade and porperty values being choked off by the shortage of bank lending and rising commodity prices, chieffy oil. Bank lending won't recover until the banks think they have enough ...