Karl's Weird News

Margaret Thatcher knew the single currency would devastate Europe :

Next week it will be 20 years since Margaret Thatcher fell. Pressure had been building on a number of fronts, but the issue which finally destroyed her was the yet-to-be-born euro.

In the last weekend of October 1990, she travelled to a European summit in Rome, where Jacques Delors’ dream of European Monetary Union was high on the agenda.

But while Mrs Thatcher was fighting her lone battle against the prospective single currency abroad, she was being fatally undermined at home.

Geoffrey Howe, her bitterest cabinet critic, went on television to tell the interviewer Brian Walden that in principle Britain did not oppose the euro.

In her Commons statement after returning home, she was forced to slap Howe down: “this government believes in the pound sterling.”

Howe resigned, and days later delivered the famous speech from the back benches that set in motion a leadership contest.

Today, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, first published in 1993, reads like a prophecy.

It shows how deeply and with what extraordinary wisdom she had examined Delors’ proposals for the single currency.

Her overriding objection was not ill-considered or xenophobic, as subsequent critics have repeatedly claimed.

They were economic. Right back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher foresaw with painful clarity the devastation it was bound to cause.

Her autobiography records how she warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece.

Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies”.

It is as if, all those years ago, the British prime minister possessed a crystal ball that enabled her to foresee the catastrophic events of the past year or so in Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

Indeed, it is one of the tragedies of European history that the world chose not to believe her.

President Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Kohl of Germany dismissed her words of caution. And when Mrs Thatcher was driven from office in 1990, a crucial voice was lost, and a new consensus started to form in Britain in favour of the euro

Airport staff ‘exposed woman’s breasts, laughed’:

A WOMAN is suing over an incident where airport staff allegedly pulled down her top and joked about her breasts in public view.

The 23-year-old traveller, from Amarillo, US, is suing the US Government for the emotional distressed she says the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents caused.

The woman says she was singled out for “extended search procedures” while preparing to board a plane to Amarillo in May 2008.

“As the TSA agent was frisking plaintiff, the agent pulled the plaintiff’s blouse completely down, exposing plaintiffs’ breasts to everyone in the area,” the lawsuit said.

“As would be expected, plaintiff was extremely embarrassed and humiliated.” The lawsuit claims that other employees laughed and made jokes about the incident “for an extended period of time”.

New Yorkers outraged as bureaucrats order city to change lettering on every single street sign:

The city will change the lettering on every single street sign – at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million – because the feds don’t like the font.

Street names will change from all capital letters to a combination of upper and lower case on roads across the country thanks to the pricey federal regulation, officials said Wednesday.

By 2018, MADISON AVE. will become Madison Ave. and will be printed in a font called Clearview, the city Department of Transportation says.

The Federal Highway Administration says the switch will improve safety because drivers identify the words more quickly when they’re displayed that way – and can sooner return their eyes to the road.

Pastor Defends Easter Egg Drop

The pastor of a church that organized a massive Easter egg drop is defending the event after some parents reported that it turned into chaos.

On Saturday, 60,000 eggs were dropped from a helicopter at the Rochester Fairgrounds while thousands of people waited below.

Some of the eggs included tickets for valuable prizes, such as flat-screen TVs and Nintendo Wiis.

Some people said the scrum on the ground when the eggs started falling was dangerous.

“I think it was like chaos,” said Sarah Gallo, of Stratham, N.H.

“I saw some people kneeing people, and it was, like, really, really dangerous, I thought.”

Evesham school fake shooting of teacher traumatises children

Children were left crying and traumatised after a school role play in which one of their teachers was apparently shot dead in the playground.

The pupils, aged ten to 13, saw their religious education teacher run across a field and fall to the ground following a loud bang. Some were so upset that they were sick afterwards, parents said.

The stunt was part of a science lesson designed to teach children how evidence is collected in criminal investigations. They were not told it was fake until ten minutes after the event.

The ’shooting’ happened on Tuesday. More than 300 pupils were called to the hall and warned there was a gun somewhere in the school before being sent back to their classrooms.

Five minutes later, the fire alarm went and the children queued up in the playground. Only a handful knew it was fake.

Three teachers – one brandishing what looked like a gun – were seen running across the school field before shots were heard. Teacher Richard Kent fell to the ground and played dead.

The children were then ushered back to their classrooms as other teachers pretended to tend to Mr Kent. It was ten minutes before it was revealed the scene was fake.

Dwarfgate: 5ft 5in Sarkozy’s fury as 6ft Cameron and 5ft 11in Osborne ‘mock his size’

David Cameron is caught up in an extraordinary ‘dwarfgate’ row with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The dispute centres on a claim that Mr Cameron made a remark about ‘hidden dwarfs’ while discussing a photograph showing himself with Mr Sarkozy – who is seven inches shorter than the Tory leader.

The French government was reportedly furious about the comment.

And Shadow Chancellor George Osborne allegedly fuelled the Franco-Tory war by describing a box placed beneath a speaker’s lectern as a ‘Sarkozy box’, before bursting into a fit of giggles.

The jibes, made over a period of three days, led to French officials remonstrating with British counterparts, according to BBC2’s Newsnight.

Child Directed Traffic at JFK Airport; FAA Probes

An investigation is underway after a child was heard giving instructions to a pilot from the air-traffic control tower at one of America’s busiest airports.

In a recording that has been confirmed as genuine by the Federal Aviation Administration, the child makes five transmissions from John F Kennedy International Airport — with the pilots in each case all responding enthusiastically to him.

One conversation between the tower at JFK Airport in New York and a pilot goes as follows:

JFK TOWER: Jet Blue 171 contact departure.

PILOT: Over to departure jet blue 171, awesome job.

The child appears to be supervised, with a controller explaining the reason for the young voice to the pilot.

JFK TOWER: That’s what you get guys when the kids are out of school. (laugh)

92-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Evicted from Brooklyn Apartment:

She survived the Holocaust, but a tenacious life story wasn’t enough for 92-year old Eta Eckstein to keep her Brooklyn landlord at bay.

While out of her apartment in a rehab facility, the grandmother got evicted.

“It’s unspeakable,” says Eta’s grandson, Idan. “They just threw her belongings onto the street.” Eta’s family got no explanation from the landlord

“Family heirlooms, photographs, my dad’s birth certificate, diplomas. It’s all gone. Everything,” Eckstein told NBCNewYork.com.

SEC Workers Investigated for Porn-Surfing:

More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers.

The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: “It was kind of distraction per se,” he later told investigators. But he wasn’t alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents.

The activities of porn-surfing SEC workers, a small fraction of the overall work force, have been serious enough to warrant a mention in each of the past four semiannual reports sent to Congress by the SEC’s office of inspector general.

In response to the open records request by The Washington Times, the inspector general’s office provided more than 150 pages of records and transcripts on the investigations, but declined to identify the employees involved. The office noted that disclosure of the employees’ names “could conceivably subject them to harassment and annoyance in the conduct of their official duties and private lives.”

Allan Bachman, education manager for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, said such problems are hardly unique to the SEC. He also said the findings are troubling aside from “the egregious nature of what they’re doing.”

France backtracks on double-hyphenated names

France’s highest administrative body has ruled that double-hyphenated, double-barrelled surnames such as Bruni–Sarkozy must be abolished after imposing the unwieldy spelling on tens of thousands of children in the past four years.

In 2005, the French state – famous for laying down rigid language rules – declared that all new double-barrelled surnames must be spelt with two hyphens: the offspring of Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, would in theory take the surname Bruni–Sarkozy.

The idea was supposed to distinguish, for administrative reasons, between old double-barrelled names, like Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa – the French president’s full surname – and new, so-called “composed” names.

These cropped up from 2002, when it became possible in France to simply create a “family name” by sticking together the mother’s and father’s surnames.

But parents horrified at the ugly double hyphen launched a crusade to overturn the decision.

The Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative watchdog, has now sided with the single dash camp in a definitive ruling, saying the state had exceeded its legal powers and butchered the French language into the bargain with the double hyphen

Tourists enjoy White House breakfast:

It wasn’t a state dinner, and they didn’t crash it on purpose. Still, a Georgia couple who showed up at the White House a day early for a tour somehow wound up at an invitation-only breakfast with President Barack Obama and the first lady.

It left the White House once again explaining how people who were not on an event guest list wound up being ushered into the presidential mansion anyway.

The improbable adventure of Harvey and Paula Darden, Obama supporters from Hogansville, Ga., took place on Veterans Day, two weeks before Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi infamously crashed the Obamas’ state dinner for the prime minister of India.

The Dardens mistakenly showed up a day early for a tour scheduled through their congressman. The White House and Secret Service both said the Dardens went through the appropriate security screenings and were allowed into the breakfast as a courtesy because there were no public tours the day they arrived.

That explanation was news to Harvey Darden, 67, a retired pharmacist, who said he and his wife never were told about the breakfast. They thought they were simply starting their tour until they were ushered into the East Room, offered a buffet spread and told they’d be meeting the president.

“The further we got into the White House, the more surprised we were,” Darden told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

“My wife looked at me and I looked at her, and I said, ‘You know, I don’t know if we’re in the right place.’”

Prince Philip mocked blind hero Stephen Menary

PRINCE Philip mocked a hero Army cadet blinded by a terrorist explosion by poking fun at his dress sense.

The Queen asked brave Stephen Menary how much sight he had left, but before he could answer, the gaffe-prone Duke of Edinburgh joked: “Not a lot, judging by the tie he is wearing”.

Prince Philip’s tasteless joke was met with an embarrassed silence all-round and Her Majesty gave her husband a disapproving glare.

Hero Stephen was just 14 when he picked up a torch bomb that was hurled into a Territorial Army barracks in White City, west London, by the Real IRA in 2001.

He was almost blinded and his left hand was blown off. His mum Carol, 48, said: “Prince Philip is completely out of touch with reality, he is from another world.”

Boulder County DA launches investigation into sheriff at center of Heene family balloon hoax probe:

It’s deflating news for the sheriff at the center of the investigation into the Colorado balloon hoax.

The Boulder County district attorney announced Wednesday that he would personally investigate allegations that Larimer County Sheriff John Alderden improperly conducted his probe into the alleged balloon hoax committed by the Heene family.

A lawyer for Richard Heene wrote a letter to the Larimer County district attorney on Monday, accusing Alderden of breaking a Colorado law that prevents officials from publically disclosing information in a case involving charges of child neglect.

Alderden is seeking charges against Richard and Mayumi Heene of orchestrating a hoax on Oct. 15 that their 6-year-old son, Falcon, was trapped on board a wayward weather balloon. The Heenes allegedly launched the balloon from their home to drum up interest in a potential reality television show. Falcon Heene was later found safe in the family’s attic.

Alderden’s spokeswoman told The Associated Press Wednesday that the sheriff denies any wrongdoing in the Heene investigation.

Stockholm’s bunnies burned to keep Swedes warm

The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.

The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn’t sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.

“Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem,” Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn (‘Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits’) told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper.

Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees and shrubbery in the city’s extensive network of parks and green space.
…
But rather than simply disposing of the dead rabbits, the city instead froze them for eventual transport to a special heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden, where the bunny bodies are then burned as a form of bioenergy.

Paris mayoral feud blocks street:

There has been traffic chaos in two Paris suburbs after their feuding mayors declared the same busy road one-way, but in opposite directions.

Patrick Balkany, the conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret, initially made the D909 one-way to reduce the amount of commuter traffic through his district.

But Gilles Catoire, the Socialist mayor of neighbouring Clichy-la-Garenne, said this increased congestion in his area. He made his section of the road one-way in the opposite direction.

With the contradictory road-signs in place, the unsurprising result was gridlock, prompting the deployment of municipal and national police to direct traffic away from the area.

“What Clichy has done is not a long-term solution, but it is a response to a unilateral decision by the town of Levallois,” Clichy’s deputy mayor, Alain Fournier, was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

Bakersfield woman hounded over pet pooch

A Bakersfield woman says she has been hounded by county animal control officers to license her dog. Funny thing is, the pooch officials were so concerned about is a stuffed animal.

Dottie Elkin lives by herself in a quaint home in south Bakersfield. For the past few months the 83-year old says she’s hated getting the mail, due to letters she’s receiving from the Kern County Animal Control Department.

“I told them I do not have a dog, it’s a stuffed dog,” Elkin said. That’s right, Elkin has a stuff “guard dog” named Wolf, keeping watch at her front door.

For the last six months she’s been getting letters from animal control asking her to license the dog or face a $200 fine.

MADOFF WOWED KID PROBERS

YOUNG, inexperienced government regulators were so wowed by Bernard Madoff’s ritzy Midtown headquarters that they asked about job openings and dropped off resumes while missing clear evidence he was running a massive Ponzi scheme, a new book claims.

“No wonder they never found anything,” Madoff firm secretary Elaine Solomon told author Andrew Kirtzman for his book, “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” The Post’s Dan Mangan reports.

In the book out today, Solomon, speaking out for the first time since Madoff’s epic downfall last winter after years of operating his multibillion-dollar scam, said the arch-fraudster got anxious every time investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission came knocking at his Third Avenue office in the Lipstick Building.

“But he needn’t have worried,” Kirtzman writes. “He and his aides were amazed at the youth and experience of the regulators who showed up at their door.” Solomon said, “They would walk in and we’d look at them and we’d say to each other, ‘What do you think their combined age is, 12?’

Teacher makes teen smoke 42 cigarettes

A Malaysian teacher forced a student to smoke 42 cigarettes for four hours as punishment after a cigarette and lighter were found in his locker, a news report said Thursday.

A school official confirmed that the English teacher subjected the student to the unusual punishment, but said the teenager was made to smoke fewer than 42 cigarettes.

He declined to elaborate. He said the teacher was upset when she found a model student, 16-year-old Mohamad Alif Arifin, had a cigarette and lighter in his locker in the school in the northern island of Langkawi.

The boy was also smelling of cigarettes, said a school official, who declined to be named citing protocol. He said the school apologized to the boy’s uncle, who lodged a police report when he found out about the punishment.

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday.

“The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next.

‘Morally dangerous’ Bruno banned in Ukraine:

Ukraine has banned the hit comedy “Bruno” on the grounds that its “unjustified” showing of genitals and homosexual sex could have a damaging effect on Ukrainians’ moral health, officials said Wednesday.

The ban is not the first time “Bruno” star Sacha Baron-Cohen has run into trouble in the former Soviet Union after his previous creation, the Kazakh journalist Borat, caused controversy in the Central Asian state.

 The film, which stars Cohen as a gay Austrian fashionista with a habit of making outrageous remarks, has already hit the top spot at the North American box office. But Ukraine’s film censors were less impressed, with nine members out of the culture ministry’s 14-person commission voting for a total ban.

India plans hot chilli grenades:

Indian defence scientists are planning to put one of the world’s hottest chilli powders into hand grenades.

They say the devices will be used to control rioters and in counter-insurgency operations.

Researchers say the idea is to replace explosives in small hand grenades with a certain variety of red chilli to immobilise people without killing them.

The chilli, known as Bhut Jolokia, is said to be 1,000 times hotter than commonly used kitchen chilli.

Arkansas Inmate Nearly Dies After Left in Feces

An Arkansas prisoner nearly died after guards left him lying naked in his own feces for a weekend, and while investigating the incident corrections officials found that guards received lap dances while on the job, documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

The prison system fired Lt. John Glasscock, who supervised guards on duty at the maximum-security Tucker Unit prison. One sergeant was fired, another was demoted and three others received written warnings, according to a report stamped “Sustained (Allegation is True).” The report said Glasscock gave false information to investigators and did substandard work “resulting in injury and/or property damage.”

The disclosure of the inmate’s near death comes after two convicted murderers escaped a different state prison by wearing guard uniforms and officers at the Tucker Unit fatally shot a man who officials said fled from a contraband checkpoint.

Combined, the incidents raise new questions about a troubled state prison system described by a federal judge 40 years ago as a “dark and evil world.”

Under Restructuring, GM To Build More Cars Overseas

The U.S. government is pouring billions into General Motors in hopes of reviving the domestic economy, but when the automaker completes its restructuring plan, many of the company’s new jobs will be filled by workers overseas.

According to an outline the company has been sharing privately with Washington legislators, the number of cars that GM sells in the United States and builds in Mexico, China and South Korea will roughly double. The proportion of GM cars sold domestically and manufactured in those low-wage countries will rise from 15 percent to 23 percent over the next five years, according to the figures contained in a 12-page presentation offered to lawmakers in response to their questions about overseas production.

Congressman Plays “Name That Fetish” on House Floor

Fort Lauderdale Rep. Alcee Hastings nearly turned C-Span into XXX-Span when he ran through a laundry list of sex fetishes on the House floor in D.C. on Thursday.

The outraged Hastings was apparently mad that the odd array of sex acts and fetishes were listed in an amendment to a hate crimes bill that he had to read over.

The Florida pol gave a warning before he ran through the list of nearly 25 different sexual terms – part of a two-minute rant worthy of late-night talk show television.

 “I apologize to our transcriber, but I want to put into the record what we have to put up with in the Rules Committee,” Hastings said. OK, now run and get your dictionary because you are going to need it to keep up.

Hastings list included but was not limited to: asphyxiphilia, apotomnophilia and autogynophilia (a quick Web search gave the definition as “a form of sexual response in biological males characterized by sexual arousal over the idea of being or becoming female.” Translation: jones-ing to change one’s name from Bob to Betty).

Clown cannot wear giant shoes due to health and safety 

Valerik Kashkin, a clown in the Moscow State Circus, was performing in Liverpool’s Sefton Park last Saturday when he fell from a three metre high slack wire, injuring his foot.

Although he continued to perform for the rest of the show, when he went to hospital later that evening, he was told he had broken the metatarsal bone in his left foot.

When he returned to the circus he was told by management he could no longer wear the size-18 shoes because they compromised his health and safety.

Mr Kashkin features in the circus’ reworking of the Rasputin tale, The Monk’s Dream.

His routine includes dressing himself whilst walking on a wire, dress himself within a hoop of fire, and playing a drum-kit, trumpet and double-bass all at the same time.

But he is now worried performing in his regular sized footwear will lose impact on the audience.