Whole Truth Coalition

The three men sat, in a row, looking like a trio of naughty, if rather aged, schoolboys. They may, in reality, be the most powerful men in the land when it comes to the economy but, for their appearance before the Treasury committee, they had donned the careful blank faces of pupils caught red-handed. John McFall, the Labour committee chairman, effortlessly adopted the persona of the stern and humourless headmaster as he faced the guilty three: Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, and Whatshisname, the new guy at the Financial Services Authority. They did, actually, look furtive.

Beside Mr McFall was a stack of 5,000 e-mails with questions for the Guilty Three from the Great British Public. The trio gulped. Mr McFall read out the first question, from Ted W. “Where,” he demanded, “has all the money gone?”
The Chancellor began to burble about global situations. I don’t think Ted W. will be too impressed. The answer seemed to boil down to: “Somewhere else.”
Michael Fallon, a Tory, demanded to know who was really responsible. “We have this impression of See No Blame, Hear No Blame and Take No Blame,” he said. As he said this, See No Blame, Hear No Blame and Take No Blame didn’t move a facial muscle. Had they been behind the bikesheds taking group Botox?

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We’ve had the bin police - now meet the tea bag tyrants.

In the latest initiative designed to make us more environmentally friendly, Government advisers are calling on businesses to appoint tea monitors to make sure staff don’t overfill the kettle at work.

The quango Envirowise is also telling workers to use teapots when making rounds of hot drinks and is calling for a return of old-fashioned tea urns. 

Envirowise - which gets £10million a year from taxpayers to advise businesses on being green - says the crackdown will cut greenhouse gas emissions and help beleaguered businesses save money.

Critics pointed out that in the current testing economic times, small firms had bigger problems to worry about than tea bags.

Susie Squire of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘This is yet another example of a taxpayer-funded quango doling out useless advice. People are sick of these quangocrats wasting our time and money.’

Envirowise - which is funded by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs - estimates that more than 30billion cups of water are unnecessarily boiled each year.

In a statement, the quango tells businesses: ‘Appoint a tea task force or tea monitor to make sure all your office hot drink-making facilities are as efficient as they could be.

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Coastguards have been banned from using flares in rescue missions after they were ruled to be a risk to health and safety.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency says the devices, which are used to illuminate large areas of land and sea during night-time searches, could cause ‘considerable injury’.

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(The fact that no-one has been injured in the last 40 years in the Coastguard service by flares has nothing to do with it I guess !)

Boots the chemist is offering vaccinations against a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer. The pilot scheme will be available to young women who are just outside the age group of a national immunisation campaign.
Ten stores in London will offer a vaccination service to help to protect women aged 18 to 26 against strains of human papilloma virus, which are considered to be responsible for up to 70 per cent of cervical cancer. The national NHS vaccination programme for girls aged 12 and 13 began in schools in September and a catch-up service for girls aged 14 to 18 is being introduced. Boots said that it had conducted a survey in which 65 per cent of women said that they would visit a pharmacy to request and buy three courses of a vaccine over six months. Patients wishing to have the jab must be registered with a GP.

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CNN carried a report that the US is funding the Iranian Nuclear program via two Russian Institutes.

The US Energy Secretary stated that the Busher reactor is for peaceful purposes of power generation which directly contradicts the State departments position that Busher is being used to ramp up Nuclear weapons development.

See how CNN put this oversight down to incompetance but in my opinion it is obvious that the duality of the Bush, and previous administrations in it’s well documented history of funding of both sides to create and sustain problems that it can then provide a solution to has come to light once again!

Another ominous sign comes to light as world shipping starts to grind to a halt.

The situation now is that for those shipping companies that can actually get letters of credit are now slowing down their ships to reduce fuel consumption, slashing crew numbers and leaving some of their tonnage in dock with the lights out.The problem with letters of credit, which are needed before a vessel leaves harbour, is that demands between banks are being denied as banks are not trusting each other. The Libor rate and the interbank lending figures are just another reinforcement of this catastrophic process.

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Two men arrested for running an Israeli spy ring in the Bekaa Valley are relatives of a suicide hijacker who piloted a plane in the September 11, 2001, attacks, a security source told The Daily Star on Sunday. The Lebanese Army announced on Saturday that it had arrested two people suspected of involvement with a spy network that gathered information for Israel’s intelligence services.

The army said that the men had been arrested on Friday, but the source said that they were actually captured two weeks ago and the discovery of the arrests by the media prompted the army to announce their capture.
The army said the men had admitted “gathering information on political party offices and monitoring the movements of party figures for the enemy.”
The statement added that the men had been found with “communications devices and other sophisticated equipment,” which they used to gather information and transmit it to Mossad agents.

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