Child Migrants Thank PM

(Last year, Prince Charles apologised to the great-grandchildren of Edwardian orphans who were dressed as bees and made to pollunate flowers in the grounds of Windsor Castle.)

Child migrants in British prisons and detention centres have welcomed PM Gordon Brown’s apology to the child migrants of a previous century.

Under the Child Migrants Programme, some 7 000 children were sent to Australia, but many were abused and ended up in institutions.

Today’s imprisoned migrants applauded the Prime Minister’s announcement that “the time is now right” for the UK government to apologise for the actions of previous governments, even though some of the victims of the 80-year-old scheme are no longer with us to appreciate it.

“It is a kind and thoughtful gesture,” said Fatima Latif, 10, Yarl’s Wood. “My sisters and I have been held prisoner for 18 months now and subjected to racist abuse by guards; we can really feel for those children of an earlier generation.”

“We are very pleased with Mr Brown’s brave words,” said Mohammed Salehi, 6 and a half, Dungavel.

Leaks reveal roads, schools, hospitals result of Libya deal: dismantling to start Thursday

Confidential documents, leaked out today, show that ministers only approved much of the infrastructure of Kent, England, as part of an agreement with Libya.

The documents show that ministers initially tried to exclude Kent from the deal, saying that it was, “Just a little county.” But in September 2007, Services Secretary Lord Caramadoc told barons that the pariah shire, “did not want to be treated differently.”

In December, Lord Caramadoc told outraged Kent councillors that the decision over whether to do good deeds there still rested with them, but that it might improve lives if they did, and was technically a legal requirement.

The provision of public services in Kent, on compassionate grounds, has been greeted by a storm of protest, especially in America, where healthcare for non-millionaires is seen as a form of terror.

Former CIA Director of Chokings, Porter J. Goss, called the magnanimity “a mockery of justice.” City bosses sang songs of revulsion, while opposition leader David Cameron said the government should come clean now about how many unworthy people might have been aided or educated.

Meanwhile, there are fresh allegations of double dealing after it emerged that Gordon Brown may have photocopied the agreement to read in the bath.

Policing of the county has been suspended, as of midnight, and destruction power-lines is to proceed on Thursday when the dynamite arrives.

Go Forth and Divide

News scientists at Fleet Street University have discovered a remarkable new function on calculators which looks set to revolutionise. The function is believed to map the Cartesian product of the reals and the reals excluding zero onto the reals. Its symbol is described as “something like a horizontal line with one dot above it and one below.”

“It’s an amazing operation,” one boffin raved. “It allows us to relate one random quantity with another to give a third, totally meaningless figure. With this function, if we don’t like an amount, we can make it bigger or smaller at will. It’s every journalist’s dream, and so easy to use. For example, did you know that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi served just eleven and a half days for each of the 270 people killed in the Lockerby blast? Of course, by this logic, to find the appropriate term for a single murder, we’d have to divide the maximum time a human could spend in prison by the maximum number one person can kill, say 70 years by 70 million, for a Hitler, which comes to one millionth of a year, or – um – 30 seconds...

“Or did you know that one British soldier was killed for every vote cast in Afghanistan’s lawless Helmond Province? Where is the fairness in that? After all those fatalities, by rights, our beautiful boys should have won. We shall certainly be lodging an appeal with the UN to look into the matter, and hopefully get the Talibans to concede us the victory. Of course, we’ll probably never know how many Talibans and civilians were detonated to achieve the opposite result, but that’s the great thing about ratios; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to find one.”

And it’s not just killings that can be divided.

“No indeed! Forget global warming! Dividing the mean annual temperature of the earth’s surface (17 degrees Celsius) by the number of human beings who have to live with it (6.67 billion) gives us a cool forty billionths of a kelvin, about as cold as a Bose-Einstein contensate, the bizarre state of matter in which quantum effects appear at a macroscopic scale. Compare this with Pluto’s minimum surface temperature: a balmy 33 kelvins. Carbon footprint, carbon schmootprint.”

However, other news scientists, experimenting with the saltire button, have pointed out that, with over 80 sunny days this year, having a combined temperature of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, we should all be sweltering at somewhere between the melting points of iron and titanium.

“True,” the boffin conceded. “Well, I guess the verdict’s still out on that one. Still, it is a more depressing result, so they’re probably right.”

Others have questioned why were there any victims of Lockerby at all when the passengers and crew of Pan Am 103 should have had a combined arm-strength divided by weight equivalent to the thrust/weight ratio of the Lockheed SR-71 advanced, long-range strategic reconnaissance aircraft, allowing them – in theory – to fly themselves home at three times the speed of sound.

“It’s puzzling, yes,” the boffin squirmed, “but it’s early days. It was only this week we really got to grips with division. Who knows what other functions these calculator things may have in store? It’s quite possible that one of the crosses, or the plain horizontal mark may hold the key to that one.”

Times to Drop “Torture” Quotes Before Next Millennium

In a move which many will see as treason, the Times Newspaper of London has promised to seriously consider dropping its scare quotes in all references to substantiated torture – by the year 3001.

“This is our current policy when mentioning torture generally,” said editor Elbereth Mitchell, “except where the ugly deeds have been carried out by agents of one recently ousted regime in an allied country. We just felt that in another few hundred years, the inconsistency could begin to look ridiculous.”

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British Uniform

(Thing of the past: it is hoped that the uniform will put a stop to class struggle.)

Trials for the new British Uniform are to go ahead today in Manchester despite wry looks from civil liberties groups.

The uniforms come in a wide variety of colours, including grey-1, grey-2 and navy blue, and cost £120 each, plus VAT.

The scheme is currently voluntary for British citizens, although foreign nationals are already required to wear the uniform at all times – waking and dreaming – and is expected to net the government up (or down) to ten million pounds. (Whether positive or negative ten million has yet to be announced.) If all goes well – and the press-releases have already been drafted suggesting that it will have done – the drab outfit will become law nationally in 2010.

“It’s crucial that you all do up your top button properly,” railed home secretary Jacqui Smith or Chris Grayling or whichever one its turn is to be Home Secretary today.

The other called it “neatness and tidiness gone mad,” although their own hands were “busy working overtime” under the desk, designing a special little hat to enforce when they get into office.

Lazy Man Completes Marathon by Accident

A Berkshire man, crippled by chronic laziness, was amazed to learn today that he’d completed a Marathon without realising he was running one. The gruelling race took just over 13 years to complete, and looks set to enter the Guinness Book of Records, although it is not yet known what for.

“I am immensely proud,” said the man. “But I could never have done it without my unwitting bravery and courage. It’s a tribute to the human spirit, I guess, and an inspiration to folk who haven’t achieved as much as I have. When I heard what I’d accomplished, it brought a tear to my eye. I think I might have the heart of a lion, or something. That’s the only way I can account for it. I’m not normally an amazing person, but this 13 years just seems to have brought out the best in me.”

Asked if the event had raised anything, the man said, “I certainly hope so. That would be nice.”

Police Request More Time to Question Consciences over G20 Death

(The disembodied head of a masked Terror Police contemplates its actions; note painted monster-design to intimidate news-crews.)

Police have been granted more time to question their own consciences over the death of a bystander in the G20 protests of this April 1st after initial enquiries drew a blank.

Judge Justice Barry Posilippo-Philippus granted the request as police submitted that, almost one month on, they still fail to grasp the seriousness of the attack which left a human man dead.

“In complicated cases like these,” said the judge, “there can be literally hundreds of hours of soul-searches to conduct. Credos and raisons-d’être need to be assessed, and sometimes even reassessed. We are still in the early years of the inquiry, and many of the officers involved are just too psyched up to care.”

But Police Complaints Czar, Sir [NAME UNAVAILABLE, NUMBER COVERED UP] called it “trial by media,” saying, “This would all have been a tragic accident if it hadn’t been seen.”

“We have yet to appreciate the wrong,” conceded a spokespolice for the Queen’s Royal Metropolitans and City, anonymous under his balaclava mask and ritual scarring. “The investigation is still at an early stage though, and we hope to make a moral breakthrough in the near future. Till then, who can blame us for circulating slanders about our enemies the British people?”

Giant Banker Loose in York

(Artist’s expression of what the fiend ought to look like.)

York town centre has been cordoned off and a ginnel put on high alert this evening after eagle-eyed shoppers spotted a gigantic banker alternately relaxing and letting off steam.

A thousand residences have been evacuated, and some hundred more burnt to the ground in an effort to contain the beast, while local farmers stampeded suicide-heifers at it.

Asked whether this desperate tactic had worked, they said they couldn’t tell.

“But probably not.”

According to eye-witnesses, the banker spent some time strolling around the old town, earning perks and emoluments as he took in York’s scenic ambience, before sipping a sort of brown coffee with white bubbles in it at Starbuck’s Coppergate. (Starbuck herself was unavailable for comment, as she was having a another flashback episode, due to insufficient Cylons.) Then he had a ride on a riverboat.

Later, young Vikings from Jorvik Viking Centre reported seeing the dreadful bloodsucker actually smiling.

“It was a chilling sight,” said Viking Hildr Ásgerðardóttir.

“He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself,” agreed her foster-brother, mischievous Viking Slengr Friðason, “after the way of his kind.”

When asked whether they’d seen any of the nation’s wealth being frittered away on the monster, the Nordic rapscallions said they couldn’t be sure.

“I did think I saw something being frittered away one time,” Hildr suspected, “but it might just have been a cup-cake. Oh, and he threw some herceptin to the ducks.”

Antiterror police said they’d had the banker in their sights several times already before it got dark, “but couldn’t shoot him, because the crosshairs kept getting in our way.”

However, it has been further revealed – in a mixture of shock scoops and exclusives – that the banker, who is believed to be a chairman of banks, earned somewhat more than newspaper bosses during the hours of his rampage, a fact that papers are describing as “obscene”.

They were joined in their condemnation of the creature by the Prime Minister, who said that all monsters’ salaries should be cut, “at least to those of a Prime Minister. More than that just doesn’t seem right,” as he draughted a range of cash incentives for the Thing, to win it over to the idea.

Meanwhile the behemoth shows no sign of going into meltdown. But police say it is vital that the usurious gargantua be apprehended before next week’s royal visit to York.

“We were all so looking forward to meeting Her Majesty,” York Mayor, Carnivalia Radon-Radion yearned. “It would be a shame if She were to be inconvenienced by a colossal parasite.”

US Scientists Solve All Mysteries

Scientists from the USA have solved a criminal mystery that had the scientific and legal communities in an uproar of puzzlement for over five hundred years, and then solved more, and more...

The team of military scientists, working at the US’s prestigious naval institute of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, made the discovery and the other discoveries late last night, “after a particularly gruelling session.”

“We were actually investigating a completely different crime, actually,” the scientists said, speaking as one, “the cowardly suicide-attacks that destroyed the Word Trade Center and the unprovoked madness that damaged one wall of the headquarters of the most powerful military force on earth. But in the course of that one, we developed special investigative techniques that didn’t amount to torture, and, to our surprise, horror and delight, the riddles kept getting solved. By daytime, we realised that the enemy individuals whom the Holy Lamb has blessed into our custody had confessed not only to those evil attacks, but that they were the abductors of Lord Lucan and had killed Cock Robin and the Princes in the Tower and the Lindbergh baby, personally, all 698 of them.”

The scientists denied that any dirt had got onto their multiplying lenses though, and were adamant that their “ideas... methods...” had not become unsound.

“Above all, I’d like to reassure the public that we did not give in to the temptation to be God,” the chief scientist said, mumbling eloquently from behind his black leather science-mask.