Broken Brain

As more details about his rampage emerge, it appear Cumbrian gunman Derrick Bird may have been motivated by an exceptionally tough form of tough love towards colleagues and bystanders. It is also suspected that some of the 52-year-old’s murders were tough decisions, while others may have been demonstrations of strong, stable leadership that simply became too strong, but not stable enough, over the course of that fateful morning. Speaking from the Other Side via a choir of psychics, the cabbie’s bloodied soul expressed regret to the families of the 12 he killed, but not remorse, saying that lashing out at non-millionaires was the only way to deal with a debt crisis.

Bad News for Voters in Latest YouPoll

Over 66% of party leaders think the British People are “more style than substance.” 33% believe voters should take more responsibility for heckles, or at least frame their ill-conceived non-sequiturs into a semblance of coherence. Well over half the leaders polled said voters were too easily swayed by rivals, while a clear majority wish voters would “just go away.”

Ratings for doddery xenophobes took a tumble this week with one third of party leaders saying they’d like less of their inmost feelings to be broadcast to such people.

Most leaders admitted they would take pleasure in making “tough decisions” if elected.

The working class are currently trailing the middle class in leaders’ estimation, with upper class a clear favourite. Leaders chose “tendency not to accept what our backers think is best for them” as the least likeable trait of voters.

Taliban Triple Agent may have been Quincentumetquadragintuple Agent: CIA

Amid fears that the Jordanian mole who killed seven CIA agents in a suicide blast last week may have been a “much higher order of agent than even we suspected”, CIA operatives are to receive an anti-infiltration mnemonic for identifying traitors in the field.

“It’s a very complex problem, knowing who to trust,” said Black Hat Spy, one of the world’s top spies. “Double and triple agents are dicey enough, but when you start getting into double figures it’s hard to keep track and, for a jaded spook, hard to even care.”

According to CIA spokesspy, Spy Z, “The breakthrough came when we realised that a quadruple agent was basically the same thing as a double agent, and a triple agent was essentially just an agent. After that it was simply a matter of encoding this insight in rhyme.

“Actually, most of spying boils down to rhymes.

“It goes something like: odd, thank God; even, best be leavin’,” said Spy Z. “Needless to say, those aren’t the actual words. They are Top Secret. But it’s something like that. Of course, this rhyme only works if you count loyalties starting from your own side. Therefore we have constructed a second rhyme for use when talking with respect to the enemy: even, I’m breathin’ (more easily); odd, oh sod... The trick is knowing which to use. I think spies should get the hang of it though.”

Not all spies are convinced. Yellow Dress Girl said the rhymes were “both silly” and that she will continue using her own secret method, “thank you very much.”

But The One Arm Spy is cautiously optimistic: “Latin is boring. That’s why many spies risk their lives by not learning to count to 540 in it. I think this new jingle is a boon, or a Godsend at the very least.”

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.”