Karl's Weird News

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.

Environmental agency offices pollute Wash. creek:

Washington state environmental regulators say they’ve finally found the source of pollution that has been fouling a creek near Vancouver Lake: the agency’s own sewer pipes.

City workers have discovered that an office building’s sewer line was mistakenly connected to a storm drain, rather than the municipal sewer main.

The 1970s-vintage building houses Washington state Department of Ecology regional offices, as well as those of the Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Footballer given yellow card ‘for breaking wind’ during penalty shot

The drive to bring good manners back to football has reached new heights after a referee issued a yellow card to a player for “breaking wind” as a penalty was being taken.

The official deemed the act “ungentlemanly conduct” and booked the player responsible. However Chorlton Villa, who conceded a goal on the second take, went on to win the match 6-4 against local rivals International Manchester FC at Turn Moss in Stretford, Manchester, last Sunday.

Ian Treadwell, manager of Chorlton Villa for the past eight years, said his team had learnt lessons from the game in which three players were dismissed and two were booked.

White House press corps grounded in Turkey

While President Obama took off for home around Tuesday 2 pm ET from Baghdad aboard Air Force One, the bulk of the journalists who followed him on his European journey found themselves stuck in Turkey.

Several hours before the president took flight, the United crew providing transportation for the White House Press Corps’ return discovered a problem with the United 777 scheduled to leave a few hours later.

It turns out the motor that moves the captain’s left chair forward to reach the controls was broken.

Italy muzzled scientist who foresaw quake:

An Italian scientist predicted a major earthquake around L’Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city on Monday, killing dozens of people, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic among the population.

The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, creating mounting alarm in the medieval city, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Rome. Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor’s anger.

Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for “spreading alarm” and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

Harvard Derivatives Whiz Fired For Emailing Larry Summers About “Frightening” Trades?:

A former quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Company, the university’s once-vaunted endowment manager, tells the Harvard Crimson she was fired for voicing concern to then-university president Larry Summers’ chief of staff about the money manager’s risky use of derivatives the traders didn’t understand.

The episode dates back to 2002, when analyst Iris Mack, whose website identifies her as the second African American woman to earn a Harvard PhD. in applied math (and someone who likes primary colors) joined the much-venerated Harvard Management Company, which invests the university’s then $18 billion endowment, to find what she termed a “frightening” state of affairs.

“The group I was working for had no background whatsoever to be working on [derivatives],” Mack says, adding that, to her knowledge, several of her colleagues were not licensed securities traders.

“Sometimes the ways they handled even basic Black-Scholes models [widely used to price stock options] were puzzling.”

So Mack took inventory of the abuses — high employee turnover, lax risk management practices and a “low level of productivity in the workplace” were among others, and detailed them in an email to Marne Levine, Summers’ chief of staff and a Treasury staffer on the Obama Transition Team. (Summers was the only person to whom Meyers reported, and according to a recent Forbes story he personally ordered the university’s biggest derivatives trade, a purchase of interest rate swaps that cost the university billions this year.)

 A month after sending her email, Mack was fired after a meeting in which the endowment fund’s then-chief furnished her the emails and castigated her for making “baseless accusations.” She later sued for wrongful termination and settled out-of-court with the university. But she claims the practices “shocked” her, and — the punchline is — she had joined the company from Enron.

Fire kills child, 3, and parents as police prevent neighbours from trying to rescue them

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them.

The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.

By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.

Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.

“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.

“Slightly smaller than Oregon”: a White House briefing on Britain:

So here’s what the White House is telling American reporters – and by extension the American people – about Britain. It’s laid out in an inch-thick “press kit”, with the Seal of the President of the United States emblazoned on the cover, handed out to each of us on board the White House press charter en route from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to Stansted.

The United Kingdom, we are told, is “slightly smaller than Oregon”. As for the the British climate, it is “generally mild and temperate” and “subject to frequent changes but few extremes of temperature”. A “group of islands close to continental Europe”, Britain has been “subject to many invasions and migrations”.

We’re taken through the Roman invasion (”brought more active contacts with the rest of Europe”), the Norman invasion (led to “active involvement in European affairs…for several hundred years”) and various travails with the Welsh, Scots and Irish before the British empire reached its zenith in Victorian times. Then it all started to go wrong.

“The losses and destruction of World War I, the depression of the 1930s, and decades of relatively slow growth eroded the United Kingdom’s preeminent international position of the previous century”.

Those fretting about the demise of the term “special relationship” might not be reassured by this briefing book. There’s talk of a “strong bilateral relationship”, of the UK being “one of the United States’ closest allies” and of “close coordination” and “bilateral cooperation” between two countries who “continually consult on foreign policy”. Everything except “special”.

Navy Secretary Nominee Drew Notice Over Divorce

President Obama’s nominee for secretary of the Navy was involved in a divorce that drew national attention for his secret taping of a conversation between his wife and his family priest that he used against her in court proceedings.

The nominee, Ray Mabus, is a former governor of Mississippi and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Mr. Mabus, a Democrat, was a strong supporter of Mr. Obama in the campaign last year.

 In 1998, as Mr. Mabus and his wife, Julie (now Julie Hines), sought to work out their marital problems, he surreptitiously recorded a meeting the couple had with the Rev. Jerry McBride, a mutual friend.

Hillary Clinton leaves flowers for Our Lady of Guadalupe, asks ‘Who painted it?’:

During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers “on behalf of the American people,” after asking who painted the famous image.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously imprinted by Mary on the tilma, or cloak, of St. Juan Diego in 1531. The image has numerous unexplainable phenomena, such as the appearance on Mary’s eyes of those present in the room when the tilma was opened and the image’s lack of decay.

Mrs. Clinton was received on Thursday at 8:15 a.m. by the rector of the Basilica, Msgr. Diego Monroy. Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

Storm in a goldfish bowl as MSPs debate obese pet fish

SINCE devolution a decade ago, MSPs have broken new ground in tackling major health issues such as smoking, alcohol and obesity.

But now they have turned their focus to the wellbeing of pet tropical fish, which are becoming obese and suffering a lack of social interaction. Holyrood’s petitions committee yesterday called on the Scottish Government to investigate the conditions in which Siamese fighting fish, otherwise known as Betta splendens, are kept in pet shops.

MSPs agreed that rules preventing the spectacular fish from being kept in goldfish bowls rather than proper tanks were too lax and poorly enforced.

Obama tacitly honours Chirac’s stance against Iraq war:

US President Barack Obama has indirectly praised former French president Jacques Chirac’s fierce opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the online edition of the daily Le Figaro reported on Thursday. In a letter described by Chirac as ‘very nice,’ Obama wrote, ‘I am certain that we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world.’

AIG Bonus Fury Took Awhile to Boil Over

Maybe you don’t spend your weekends perusing SEC filings, so perhaps you missed the one in November in which AIG, the world’s most unloved big company, reported that it planned to distribute $469 million in bonuses to some employees. This was after the government began pouring billions into AIG to save it from the fate of Lehman Brothers but long before populist outrage over the bonuses exploded this week.

And maybe you aren’t a regular reader of Rep. Elijah Cummings’s blog on the Huffington Post. His Nov. 27 entry, “A Bonus by Any Other Name Still Stinks,” complains that “just one day after being told that top AIG executives would be forgoing bonuses this year,” he had been “shocked” to learn that they would be getting “cash awards” as “retention payments.”

But surely you didn’t miss the Oct. 8 article in this very newspaper headlined “AIG Spa Trip Fuels Fury on Hill; Pressing Executives to Concede Mistake, Lawmakers Blast Them About Bonuses.” Or how about the New York Times on Oct. 17: “A.I.G. Agrees to Let New York Review the Propriety of Its Pay Packages”?

In short, you knew about this, if you cared. So why didn’t your self-righteous populist fury boil over before now? One of my favorite things about the news is the randomness of what becomes a big story. This is far from the first time some scandal that was reported with a yawn on Page D13 popped up months later on Page 1.

Gordon Brown is frustrated by ‘Psycho’ in No 10

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington.

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem. The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen.

Although he mournfully had to put the popcorn away, he is unlikely to jeopardise the special relationship – or “special partnership”, as we are now supposed to call it – by registering a complaint.

Obama White House bars press from press award ceremony 

We are not making this up:

Barack Obama was elected commander-in-chief promising to run the most transparent presidential administration in American history. This achievement and the overall promise of his historic administration caused the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. to name him “Newsmaker of the Year.”

The president is to receive the award from the federation of black community newspapers in a White House ceremony this afternoon. The Obama White House has closed the press award ceremony to the press.

Clinton gift gaffe: ‘Overcharge’ 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened her first extended talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by giving him a present meant to symbolize the Obama administration’s vow to “press the reset button” on U.S.-Russia relations.

She handed a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift: a red button on a black base with a Russian word peregruzka printed on top.

 “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.

Instead of “reset,” Lavrov said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”