News Roundup

Do You Want to be in My Gang? (No, don't touch me you old perv)
So the egregious Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter, has been detained by the authorities in Viet Nam for having sex with a 12 year old girl. This after he fled the UK and then got run out of Cambodia for the same reason. I understand that in Viet Nam child rape has a maximum sentence of death by firing squad. I have no sympathies; he should have been shot for that awful "Rock 'n Roll Part 2" years ago...

Travellers' Advisory
When flying, watch out for chemically compromised, nicotine craving foreigners who may not be aware of the realities of air travel. A cursory search reveals that this kind of thing is not uncommon and indeed something similar happened locally quite recently. Bugger! Now there's another thing to worry about when flying other than the lack of food and deep vein thrombosis.

Beware Bioterrorists
The head of Interpol, Ron Noble, announced recently that it's only a matter of time before mean spirited individuals unleash the horrors of a bioterrorist attack on us. Actually he's been banging this drum for some time (lazy hack/recycled story alert). He's even warning about "suicide bio-weapons". Look Ron, I hope you don't prove me wrong but the concept of a person, deliberately infected with a virulent pathogen such as Ebola, running around in a viremic state long enough to infect large numbers of the public is improbable. Biological weapons have never been very effective in human populations. Americans in particular should be much more scared of a lack of health insurance.

Microsoft Malignancy
Stories of the new Microsoft xBox360, released today, seem to dominate the offside front lead in just about every newspaper and on the planet. Public reaction has been to form serpentine queues of epic lengths with punters willing to put down as much as $600 to ensure ownership of one of these devices. Look everybody, let's get this in perspective. The richest corporation on the planet has run a marketing campaign of unparalleled brilliance to make us believe that without one of these machines our lives will have no meaning. And the press have bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker and are now running stories on how there may be a shortage. Oh dear, what a tragedy. The xBox is just a toy and there are shortages of real things like clean water. What's that you say? Oh yes, disaster fatigue...!