Goodies and Baddies

The number one story on most British news sites today has been this: There Are New Baby Photos Of Kate Middleton On The Royal Website. A few days ago, The Daily Mail’s lead story was that Catherine Zeta Jones NEARLY fell out of her dress. But not quite. Phew. I am not going to talk about stories like this from now on, even if they do tend to nab the front pages*.

David Cameron seems to be standing by Prince Andrew, who is in trouble over his friendship with American billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein. And his links with Gaddafi’s son. And his links with Tarek Kaitun- a convicted arms dealer. Time for him to have a bit of a facebook cull perhaps.

Bob Diamond – the rather aptly named Chief of Barclay’s bank – has recently been awarded a £6m bonus. Lots of people are very cross about it, which is understandable. In fairness to him, Barclay’s wasn’t one of the banks that were bailed out by the Government in 2008. Furthermore, people do forget that bankers this rich pay a fortune in taxes - which get pumped straight back into the economy. I digress.

Unrest in the Middle East continues, as Evil Dictator Number 3 refuses to do the decent thing and relinquish power. Gaddafi has been doing a great job of setting himself up as the undisputed bad guy by dropping bombs on his protesters (the good guys) and referring to them as ‘greasy rats.’ UK and American politicians have been clucking loudly in disapproval whilst secretly shitting themselves about the havoc this will create for our mates-rates oil deals. America has been nagging Saudi Arabia to help out the Libyan rebels but is otherwise whistling and looking the other way. Our foreign secretary William Hague sent a team of SAS officials to go and make contact with the good guys, but somewhere along the line they were mistaken for spies and captured instead. Everyone in England seems to think this is really embarrassing. I’m sure it happens all the time and I'm pretty sure we've done a lot worse. The SAS team has since been released so that’s all ok now.

There have been rumours cooking that China will be next to see its people rise up against their strict regime. “Absolutely not,” says foreign minister Yang Jiechi, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” This comes not long after it was revealed that China’s ‘internal public security’ expenditure has, for the first time, exceeded cash spent on defence.

Check in tomorrow for another hit of news abridged.

* I am totally guilty of reading this shit. I just draw the line at writing about it. Sometimes.