Blue Goo Falls From Sky Into British Man’s Yard
The mysterious spheres of jelly are “not meteorological” in nature. The whole thing smacks of a 90s Nickelodeon game show gone horribly awry. Via BBC:
A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden. Steve Hornsby said [they] came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.
He found about a dozen of the balls in his garden. He said: “[They're] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar.” The Met Office said the jelly-like substance was “not meteorological”.
Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: “The sky went a really dark yellow colour…As I walked outside to go to the garage there was an instant hail storm for a few seconds and I thought, ‘what’s that in the grass’?”
Walking around his garden he found many more blue spheres were scattered across…
UFOs Sighted In Southeastern England
Is 2012 starting off as it should? Several people filmed video of strange objects in the sky in Essex earlier in January. Via Phenomenica:
Six suspected unidentified flying objects (UFOs) were reportedly captured on camera in two counties of Britain. The sightings were reported from Chatham in Kent and Loughton in Essex, around 50 km apart, The Sun reported.
Ernestas Griksas, 21, was clicking a cherry-picker outside his window at his home in Kent. When he looked at the photo, he spotted strange objects in the sky. “There are two white discs I can’t explain. I’m nowhere near a flightpath. One is slightly fainter as if it is further away or going at a different speed,” he said.
In the second incident, car salesman Josh Cummins spotted four bright objects hovering in pairs as he drove to work in Essex. “I nearly crashed. I stopped to take this picture with my mobile. It…
News Of The World Phone Hacking May Have Had 5,800 Victims
In America, you watch Fox News, in Britain, Fox News watches you…The tally of individuals whose phones may have been hacked on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid has been upgraded, first from “a handful” to “hundreds”, and the total stands at 5,795 and counting, the Telegraph reports:
Police have now found 5,795 names notes seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World private investigator who was jailed for phone hacking in 2007.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “It is not possible to give a precise figure about the number of people whose phones have actually been hacked but we can confirm that as of 3 November 2011, the current number of potentially identifiable persons who appear in the material, and who may therefore be victims, where names are noted, is 5,795. “This figure is very likely to be revised in the future as a result of further analysis.”
The…
British Man Kills Wife For Breaking His Star Wars Toys
I usually tune people out when they complain about how the population is becoming infantilized. However, case in point — a 30-year-old British man murdered his wife after finding she had smashed his Darth Vader action figures and then “ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby,” reports the Mirror:
A Star Wars fan was yesterday jailed for life after murdering his wife in an alleged revenge attack for smashing up his cherished toy collection.
Rickie La-Touche, 30, told a court that his Thai wife Pornpilai Srisroy, 28, had damaged his precious Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker memorabilia. He later suffocated her during a row and then ran sobbing to his mother who lived nearby.
La-Touche later told police his wife had smashed up his Star Wars collection as part of a campaign to “make his life hell”. He also claimed he “flipped” when she threatened to leave him to go back to…
Crop Circles In The Year 1678?
The phenomenon of “crop circles” became widely known in the 1980s, but the eerie Old Crop Circles site collects similar reports and references from earlier periods — in some cases, far earlier. The oldest is a woodcut news pamphlet titled “The Mowing Devil”, from Hertfordshire, England, 1678. It tells how a farmer refused to pay a laborer to tend his field, and swore that he would rather have the Devil himself mow it. The following morning, a strange, large-scale pattern had been cut into his field:
The artifact pictured left is a pamphlet dated August 22, 1678, entitled The Mowing-Devil: Or Strange NEWS out of Hertford-shire. It takes the form of a primitive news report, which started life as a woodcut — a type of early printing plate created by carving into a wooden block and then inking it.
The image depicts a demon, scythe in hand, felling crop stems in what seems…
How America Planned For An Attack On Britain In 1930
David Gerrie writes in the Daily Mail:
Details of an amazing American military plan for an attack to wipe out a major part of the British Army are today revealed for the first time. In 1930, a mere nine years before the outbreak of World War Two, America drew up proposals specifically aimed at eliminating all British land forces in Canada and the North Atlantic, thus destroying Britain’s trading ability and bringing the country to its knees.
Previously unparalleled troop movements were launched as an overture to an invasion of Canada, which was to include massive bombing raids on key industrial targets and the use of chemical weapons, the latter signed off at the highest level by none other than the legendary General Douglas MacArthur.
The plans, revealed in a Channel 5 documentary, were one of a number of military contingency plans drawn up against a number of potential enemies, including the Caribbean…
Objects Confiscated From People Entering British Parliament
Drawn from a freedom of information request, a breakdown list from London’s Metropolitan Police of the 667 items which they confiscated at Parliament over the first half of 2011 that were classified as “other”. Why were there so many attempts at sneaking harmonicas, giant tennis balls, and shaving cream into the halls of power? I wish that some of these revolutionary plots had gotten further along before being squelched by the law enforcement apparatus. Posted on Reddit:
UK Family Faces Jail Or Eviction From Farm For Living ‘Off The Grid’
The Mason family purchased an abandoned orchard and moved out of public housing. Their self-sustaining lifestyle has baffled local authorities however, who have ordered them to give up their property or face jail time. This Is Devon writes:
A family living an “off-grid” lifestyle say they face prison unless they move from their own land in Willand and return to a [regular] existence. Stig and Dinah Mason bought Muxbeare Orchard after a sudden windfall allowed them to quit their impoverished lives on a Hertfordshire council estate two years ago.
The Masons have transformed what they described as a derelict four-acre plot into a haven of self-sufficiency boasting a 400 sq m allotment, a polytunnel and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables, chickens for egg production and an orchard they have regenerated by planting around 14 new apple trees of various species. Dinah was bequeathed money from the sudden death of her aunt and…
UK May Block Facebook And Twitter To Quell Riots
Following another night of disorder in a country beset by deep inequality, corruption in the halls of power, and scant opportunity for young adults, the conservative regime in Bahrain has threatened to cut off access to social networking websites until the unrest subsides. Oh sorry — this is the news from England. Via Raw Story:
In a move that calls to mind the start of the most serious unrest in nations across the Middle East over the last year, David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, told Parliament Thursday that authorities may shut down social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, in hopes that it would return calm to their streets.
The remarks came one day after British authorities discussed turning off the messaging function on BlackBerry phones, which they suggested may remove a tool protesters and rioters were using.
“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social…
Stand Your Ground: Taking Photos In Public
The London Street Photography Festival had six photographers attempt to take pictures in various locations on public streets in Britain’s capital. Despite being perfectly within their rights, all six were stopped by private security forces who made vague allusions to “terrorism” and “security” and tried to intimidate them. The Festival filmed the encounters and what happened when the photographers politely refused to back down:
Britain’s Assault On Squatters
There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties in the UK – 650,000 in England alone. We should be seizing empty properties and giving them to people who need them, not locking up people for wanting a place to live.
People are broke and evicted. Meanwhile, countless homes sit unused and empty, or abandoned…some people take matters into their own hands and live as squatters. But now the outraged authorities are fighting back against the squatter scourge, the UK’s New Left Project writes:
The traditional view that the Tories are the party of the landed classes was built on solid bedrock. The last time they were in power they orchestrated the largest land-grab in living memory – the ‘right to buy’ – through which council housing passed to property magnates and buy-to-let landlords. This time around, spurred on by misleading articles in the right-wing media, they’ve announced plans to make squatting illegal and…
English Village Tormented By Inexplicable Hum
In a sense, we can all identify, as there is rarely a moment when we are not exposed to some sort of low-level aural drone. The Telegraph reports in ominous fashion:
Now a tiny English village is the latest community to claim to be being hit by the phenomenon known as “the hum.”
Residents of Woodland, in County Durham, claim that every night a noise permeates the air similar to the throb of a car engine. It is sometimes so strong that it even shakes the bed of one of the householders. But no matter how hard they look, the community cannot find the source of the problem and, at their wits end, have called in the council to investigate.
The 300-strong population is the latest around the world to be hit by the rumble which has in the past led to wild conspiracy theories blaming it on UFOs, government experiments and abandoned mine…
BO Turns on the Charm: U.S. President Leaves Ireland Early for An Audience with British Monarch
Guess Crown counts for more than kin with some people. From Anissa Hadaddi at the International Business Times:
A dense cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano was being blown toward Scotland yesterday. While airlines started to cancel their flights, U.S. President Barack Obama was forced to cut short his visit to Ireland as fears of disruptions similar to those engendered by the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010 mounted.
Britain’s Stylishly Mod Secret Underground City
How To Be A Retronaut has an arresting set of images of Burlington, the 35-acre “Cold War City” lying twelve stories beneath Wiltshire, England. Built during the 1950s, it was to be home to the prime minister and a few thousand others in the event of nuclear apocalypse. With record players, rotary phones, and Singer sewing machines folding out from enclosures in the walls, it makes the prospect of a post-disaster future seems quite charming:
It was equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation. 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modeled on the Red Lion in Whitehall. The bunker’s very existence was meant to be top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004.
The British And Their Bizarre Nazi Book Craze
Growing up in 1970s Britain, it was a given that classic World War II movies like Where Eagles Dare and The Battle of Britain would play over and over again on our handful of channels, and WWII comics were ubiquitous among kids, usually with German soldiers spouting ridiculous phrases like “Achtung! Englischer Schweinhunds!” in most every panel.
I thought those days had passed, though, as the long shadow of that war gradually faded. Apparently not: Clive Anderson details the strange and continuing British fascination with the Nazis for the BBC News Magazine:
The late Alan Coren famously published a collection of humorous pieces in book form, called Golfing for Cats. And he put a swastika on the front cover. He had noticed the most popular titles in Britain in those days were about cats, golf and Nazis.
That was in 1975. Thirty-six years on – and now more than 60 years since the end of World…
Rise Of The Precariat: The New Working Class
British economist Guy Standing has coined the term “precariat” to refer to the fast-growing working-class caste of the 21st century. With labor markets now globalized and “flexiblized,” the risks and uncertainties of capitalism have been transferred almost completely away from capitalists and onto workers. Below, citizens discuss living and working in post-industrial England, where large numbers scrounge to obtain low-wage, unstable jobs.
v
Coming To Britain: Unmanned Spy Drones And Facial Recognition Cameras
The Telegraph reports:
Unmanned spy drones, CCTV that recognises faces and cameras in the back of taxis could soon be the norm on the streets of Britain, the Home Office admitted yesterday.
Ministers signalled that advances in technology meant there was nothing to stop such controversial surveillance measures becoming commonplace.
Britain's Thales Watchkeeper WK450 spy drone
The warning came in proposals for a code of practice to better regulate the spread of CCTV amid fears there will be “unchecked proliferation” without it.
Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, said last year that Britain is heading towards becoming a surveillance state of unmanned spy drones, GPS tracking of employees and profiling through social networking sites.
He said the relentless march of surveillance had seen snooping techniques “intensify and expand” at such a pace that regulators were struggling to keep up.
The Coalition Government has pledged to row back the surveillance state and restore civil liberties.
Proposals contained in the Protection of…
Immigration Officer Put Wife On Terrorist List To Prevent Her Coming Home
Come on guys, the War on Terror is a serious matter! From Great Britain, hijinks ensue as immigration officials put their nagging wives on the terrorist watchlist to prevent their returning from overseas vacation. The Daily Mail reports:
An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.
He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’. As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after traveling to the county to visit family.
The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry. The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for…
China Vows To Help European Debt Crisis
2010 had Greece and Ireland receiving financial help from the Internatioanl Monetary Fund and Eurozone nations. 2011 has Spain, Germany and Britain finding help from Chinese investors as Vice Premier Li Keqiang began his European tour. Via The Jakarta Globe:
Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang backed Europe in its sovereign debt battle on Wednesday, starting a three-nation tour by promising to buy more Spanish government bonds.
Li, widely tipped to be the next premier, delivered a significant vote of confidence given China’s world record foreign reserves of 2.648 trillion dollars (2.0 trillion euros), much of it in euros.
On his visit to Spain, Germany and Britain he is supporting Europe’s recovery efforts and seeking to soothe global market fears of a debt quagmire spreading from Greece and Ireland to Portugal and even Spain.
[Continues at The Jakarta Globe]
