Mrs Cornelius Clearly Has Too Much Time On Her Hands…

…and we all know what happens to idle hands:

Mum of three Mrs Cornelius says she was “sickened” by the group, which included mocked-up images of men eating babies and recipes for cooking children.

The 66 members of the group included people from Dartford, and some went by the names of notorious paedophiles, such as Gary Glitter.

Mrs Cornelius, of Ladywood Road, said: “As a mother, I was disgusted with the group. I found it so sick I wanted to bring it to the attention of other people.”

Yup, that makes sense.

You see something that horrifies and disgusts you, so you send it round to everyone else, saying ‘Look at this! Isn’t it horrific? Aren’t you offended?’.

Mrs Cornelius says her success in getting I Love Eating Children shut down has made her want to campaign against other offensive Facebook groups.

She said: “I'm pleased Facebook has shut down the group, but there are still many more groups like this, and such groups shouldn't be allowed in the first place.”

Ahhh, the perpetual cry of the Righteous: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’

Nothing that upsets Mrs Cornelius should be allowed. Free speech? What’s that, when compared with the freedom to roam the internet and never, ever see anything that might upset her?

Facebook removed the group yesterday, and a spokesman said: “We take all complaints by users seriously and we have a dedicated team investigating these complaints and comments.”

Well, you’ve just made yourself a hostage to fortune, haven’t you? Your group's going to be busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger...

"...you may find that there is nobody on earth more judgmental than bohemian, left-leaning woodcraft folk..."

...is a wonderful quote from this article on the perils and pitfalls of dealing with a child with 'difficulties'.

Unusually for the 'Guardian', it's frank and funny and well worth reading.

Misleading Headlines R Us...

Except if you read the story...

The vessel's crew had left their microphone on, blocking channel 16 off the Kent coast, which is used for distress calls.

All Dover coastguard staff could hear was Radio 2 on in the background so they called the BBC, who made the appeal on Ross's show during a news bulletin.

A Dover coastguard spokesman said the vessel blocked the channel for around three hours but has now moved out of range as it travels north, but it could cause further problems in the Thames coastguard area.

In other words, the appeal had zero effect. Nowhere does it say that as a result of the appeal, they stopped broadcasting...

No wonder no-one wanted to put their name to the story!

Ahhh, YouTube: For All Life's Little Dramas

Dizzy Thinks has video footage of some guy making a complete tit of himself, hectoring people trying to do a job, oblivious to the scorn and contempt of most normal people watching it.

Whoops! Sorry, that was the wrong link. Here's the right one.

You can see how easy it is to confuse the two, though... ;)

Johann Hari’s Ox Is Gored, And Gored Thoroughly….

…and the screams of anguish are earsplitting:

Who have they decided can afford to take the pain first? Not rich people like them: they will continue to enjoy big state subsidies to build up their savings and maintain their estates. No. Step forward instead the unemployed, poor kids who are falling behind in their reading, children in care, the elderly, the disabled, and any feeble little steps we were making towards building a low-carbon economy.

Hurrah! When do we start sending the kiddiewinks up chimneys again?

When you hear that the Communities Department has taken a 27 per cent cut, it sounds anodyne: what is it anyway? It's the money that goes to local authorities to pay for home help for the elderly and disabled, for monitoring children at risk, and children in care. Osborne has said he doesn't want councils to make up the difference by increasing council tax. So, very soon, there will be a big increase in the number of confused old people left unwashed and untended, and abused kids we never find in time.

And we’ll notice that, will we? We’ll be able to compare it to the halcyon days of the Labour Period, when there were no abused children, no elderly left to die in squalor, and we all ran frolicking in the meadow among the sunbeams?

Many of these cuts will end up costing us money in the long term. Over the past few years, children – mainly in poor areas – who have not been able to learn to read have been given special one-on-one tuition to get them up to a decent standard, rather than tumbling through their school years getting more confused and angry.

I note that he doesn’t ask the question of just how it is that the normal comprehensive education isn’t sufficient to enable children to learn to read…

Literate people are far less likely to commit crime and much more likely to pay taxes later in life.

Really? All those thieving bankers and fat cat industrialist tax-dodgers and expenses-fiddling MPs that he’s always whining about had good educations, didn’t they?

Cameron just closed the programme. The same child who loses her reading tutor now also won't get a small Child Trust Fund of £2,000 when she turns 18 – thanks to a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives on an £4.2m trust fund of his own.

Yes, Johann, but I don’t begrudge him his trust fund because he isn’t sticking his hand in my pocket to pay for it. Which is most certainly not the case with the government scheme, is it?

David Cameron's claims to care about global warming also just drowned. The subsidy to build wind turbines, the encouragement to buy electric cars – all gone.

Hurrah! In fact, double hurrah! Bring on the nuclear power!

Of course, the Cameroons say they have no choice but to do all this, because we are "bust". There is currently a £178bn-a-year gap between what the Government takes in, and what it spends. But there are two crucial questions here: when the Government should close this gap, and how it should close it.

The answers being ‘soon’ and ‘by any means necessary’…

It seems logical to pay off a debt as soon as possible.

Why, yes, it does. But that world-renowned economist, Mr J Hari, disagrees.

Better a deficit than a depression. Better to pay interest tomorrow than the dole to millions more today. And when the time for closing the gap does come, there is a much better way to do it – by closing the income gap. The first people to pay should be those who can afford it: the wealthy.

OK, we’ll target all those quango heads on more per annum than the Prime Minister. OK with you?

For example, the 1,000 richest people in Britain have added £77bn to their wealth in the past year alone. Can't they afford to make sacrifices a little more easily than a 17-year-old on the dole?

Yes, they probably could. They could also afford to up sticks and decamp for friendlier climes, and then we wouldn’t have them here, employing people, using goods and services… Would you like to see that, Johann?

Sunday Funnies

Don't say you weren't warned...

Lions! Tigers! Bears, Oh My...

Oh, I thought we'd seen the last of these two little publicity seekers, but I reckoned without the 'Daily Mail's' indefatigable desire to scare the living daylights out of their credulous readership.

And since cancer and rising house prices don't do it any more...

My worst fears nearly became a chilling reality last week when two girls, Kim Howells, 15, and her cousin Sophie Gwynne, eight, were stalked in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire - by what appears to have been a huge black cat.

Kim described the ‘panther’ as about the size of a Great Dane. ‘We cut through the brambles and just started running,’ she reported afterwards.

When they arrived home, their feet were cut and bleeding. Sophie was in tears. But what really brought this strange case home to me was the fact that if they had come to any real harm, I would have felt responsible.

Well, if that didn't catch the attention of the police, I don't know what would! Do you have a confession to make, Mark..?

For six months earlier, I had visited the same spot near Cinderford while making a TV film about leopards around the world, including a short section about the (I thought unlikely) possibility of them living in the UK.

In the end, fearful of causing public alarm, I chose not to use any of the extraordinary evidence I gathered.

Say one thing for him, he knows how to lead into a story. 'I could tell you, but then I'd have to...'

For the truth is I may well know the ‘mythical’ beast that chased them. Danny Nineham, the region’s local big cat enthusiast, showed me evidence of its existence when I was there last autumn. And it’s a black leopard — nicknamed Boris.

‘He’s huge, even for a male leopard,’ Nineham told me. ‘I’ve recorded many sightings of him. He’s dangerous, in my view. More so than any of the other leopards living and breeding wild in the Forest of Dean, or around the country.’

Damn! Does every region require a 'local big cat enthusiast'? Is there a grant for it? Sounds like a cushy job.

Nineham works with the authorities, logging the details. He collects possible hair and droppings samples, makes plaster casts of suspected paw prints, and sets up camera traps, all in the hope he can prove once and for all that Britain is stalked by big cats.

Ah, ok, maybe not.

And I suspect 'works with the authorities' is code for raised eyebrows at the local police station and a 'Oh, it's this nutter again...'

...we planned to interview Nineham as one of these eccentric believers and had lined up the wildlife liaison officer at Gloucestershire police, Mark Robson, to balance his claims.

Amazingly, however, he did no such thing. In fact, as I listened gobsmacked, Robson told me that most big cat sightings really are of leopards, and that there are enough eyewitness reports to follow individual animals’ movements on a map.

/facepalm

Let's hope his boss is reading this over his cornflakes. I can foresee a dressing-down on the horizon for Mark 'I Like To Have Fun With Journalists' Robson...

Many suspected sightings, after all, tend to be domestic cats, mangy foxes, even stuffed toys.

As eminent mammal expert Professor Stephen Harris told me: ‘Black always looks bigger in the dark.’

...

OK, I'm not touching that one!

I have to agree with him, the last thing we want is conclusive proof, telling us where and when these creatures appear in precise detail. Our record of living with large animals, however rare and beautiful, is not good.

But I do think that we should be aware that these extraordinary animals are probably out there, somewhere. And it is right that people such as those two little girls should know what they might meet on a Sunday walk.

Because it's not enough that we worry our kids about paedophiles, traffic, gangs, etc. We should tell them to be on the lookout for non-native predatory wildlife, too.

It’s So Annoying When You Leave Your Mobile On The Bus, Isn’t It?

Even more so when it’s full of stuff you really, really don’t want the police to know about:

And wheelchair-bound Fraser, who now lives in Seaham, County Durham, has become the last of five perverts to be sentenced for their part in the ring.

Whoops!

Brian Hegarty, defending, said: 'The defendant accepts that he has an unhealthy interest in children, which is of many years standing.'

And how many sitting down..?

Dangerous Dogs And Ignorant Bitches…

So, a dog already under a control order imposed by a court after a strong of attacks on other pets (and castrated, which clearly didn’t help) attacks again:

On December 10 last year Osya escaped from Sitaeva's home in Broad Street, Brighton, and attacked a smaller dog being walked by owner Gary Murphy.

Witnesses said Osya pinned the dog, called Benny, and “shook him like a rag doll”.

Drinkers at the nearby Marine Tavern ran outside and kicked and punched Osya to try and get him off. Mr Murphy and another man, Laurence Newell, were both bitten on the hand trying to free Benny from Osya's jaws.

Sitaeva tried to protect her own pet, shouting: “My poor dog, my poor dog” and told them “my dog didn't do anything”.

Yeah, right…

Benny needed £800 worth of veterinary work for injuries including a broken jaw. When Brighton and Hove City Council animal welfare officers and police went to Sitaeva's home to seize Osya, she claimed she had given him away to a couple of complete strangers on the seafront.

But at Brighton Magistrates' Court yesterday she admitted she knew where the dog was being looked after.

Bang to rights then!

Let’s have a bit of ‘contempt of court’ for the owner thrown in as well, before we give the beast the Big Sleep, shall we?

Her barrister Giles Morrison asked the court not to have Osya destroyed under the Dangerous Dogs Act but to impose tougher conditions on its care.

Hah! Well, ten out of ten for effort, chum, but clearly that one isn’t...going to…

Oh, FFS..!

Magistrates imposed a “contingent destruction order” meaning Osya will be put down if Sitaeva does not obey a new order. She was barred from walking the dog in public and told only an adult aged between 18 and 55 can walk the dog.

Osya must be muzzled and on a lead at all times in public and must be kept on a long lead if in a private garden.

/golfclap

Well done! That’s why we have magistrates, isn’t it? So they can impose orders and then, when those orders are broken – actually, not just broken but screwed up in front of the panel, thrown to the ground and spat on with contempt – they can issue more orders.

Shouldn’t there be an IQ test for magistrates?

Presiding magistrate Dr Sue Berry said: “We believe the new and stringent control order will ensure Osya will not be a danger to the public.”

Oh, you believe that, do you? And on what do you base that belief?

It can’t be the owner’s compliance with the last lot of orders, can it?

Outside the court Sue Watson, animal welfare officer, said: “What if Osya sees another dog and decides to go for it?

“I don't think anybody would be able to control him. We will be keeping a watchful eye on Osya's behaviour in the future.”

Mr Murphy, 56, said: “I'm speechless. It is only a matter of time until something else happens. This is a very dangerous dog.”

Let’s hope the next victim is a magistrate…

Young Love In 2010…

A former football star was tortured and murdered after his pregnant girlfriend set him up to be attacked by two thugs so she could watch the savage beating for pleasure.

Lovely…

Chelsea Platt, 18, despised Martin Hyde, 22…

This is some new definition of the word ‘despised’ which is synonymous with ‘spread her legs willingly for’, I suppose?

When Mr Hyde got caught up in a petty row over £15, sadistic Platt lured her lover into the clutches of two thugs who ambushed him as he followed her down the street.
Platt later watched unfazed as Mr Hyde was viciously assaulted at her own flat during a two hour beating during which his killers shouted: 'I want a spade so we can watch him dig his own grave and put him in it.'

I await the inevitable ‘what sort of videos were they watching/drugs were they taking/upbringing did they have’ articles…

At Manchester Crown Court a judge condemned Platt's 'haunting and casual approach to violence' as he jailed her for four years after she admitted conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm.

Four years..?!?

Even more odd than the condemnation uttered by the judge compared to the pitiful sentence was this paragraph:

Two witnesses who turned up at the flat in Brecon Towers, Stockport saw Mr Hyde battered and bleeding on the floor of the lounge with a blood soaked sponge in his mouth.

What sort of life must you be leading where the sight of something like that isn’t apparently unusual..?

And it's not the only bizarre story this week weither...