Friday Newsletter: August 3, 2012

When Evading Airport Security Was “Easier Than Doing Homework” for an 11-year-old boy.

All 11-year-old Liam Corcoran wanted to do was to find a toilet…but instead he somehow found himself on a plane heading from the UK to Rome.

How he evaded five separate security checks to get on board the Jet2 plane at Manchester Airport without a passport or boarding pass, poses serious questions for UK airport security

This is how the bizarre series of events unfolded:

1. Liam was shopping with his mother near their Manchester home.
2. For reasons best known to Liam, he slipped away from his mother and caught a bus to Manchester Airport – three miles away.
3. He somehow managed to get airside without having to show any paperwork and says nobody questioned him or stopped him at any of the security checkpoints.
4. He found himself at the boarding gate for a Jet2 flight heading to Rome and says he was allowed to board the flight for Rome…where he immediately found the toilet he had wanted to use in the first place.
5. Cabin crew were alerted when, as the plane flew over France, he boasted to other passengers how he had run away from home.
6. He was kept on board when the plane landed and was sent home on the return flight two hours later.

As a result the airline has suspended three employees and the UK Transport Secretary Justine Greening has called for an urgent review of security procedures at Manchester Airport.

I should think so too.

This is not the only recent security breach at Manchester Airport.

Last month police criticized security at the airport after an armed robbery suspect being flown back to the UK for questioning escaped through a luggage chute.

We are told that UK airports are on heightened security alert due to the Olympic Games in London…but that message does not seem to have got as far as England’s “northern capital” of Manchester.

The Snowball, The Schoolboy, The Angry Mother, the CPS and the “assault victim”

In England and Wales it is the police who investigate crime and a separate body called the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which decides whether someone accused of an offense is actually brought to court.

They have a two-step process to help them reach a decision:

1. Is there a sufficient evidence to result in a realistic prospect of conviction and
2. Is it in the public interest to prosecute.

Both of those boxes must be ticked in order for the CPS to decide to prosecute.

So, how then, did these clever legal experts in the CPS ever decide that it was a sensible course of action to prosecute a 15-year-old schoolboy for throwing a snowball at a teenage girl?

When the girl complained that she had been hit in the face by the snowball back in February and named the boy she said had thrown it, police called at his house and took him away for questioning.

The boy was kept in police cells overnight, was hauled before local magistrates the next morning and had to make five separate harrowing appearances as a defendant in a criminal court before a magistrate, quite sensibly in my opinion, ruled there was no case to answer and threw the case out.

Now the boy’s mother is demanding an apology from the Crown Prosecution Service but she will be lucky if she gets anything of the sort.

Why do I say that?

Well, the boy’s mother had this to say: ‘The whole thing has been totally stupid. The Crown Prosecution Service should have never sanctioned this prosecution.”

And the Crown Prosecution Service had this to say: ‘The evidence, including two witness statements, pointed to the fact the defendant had made and thrown the snowball and made comments of a hostile nature afterwards.

Well This Is Certainly One Way To Deter Intruders

Some people have a nice water feature in the back garden.

Others might have carefully tended shrubbery and lawns.

In hot climates pools are common place and many families will opt for a children’s play area.

But none of these things are really any good for deterring intruders.

For that you could have powerful security lights, CCTV cameras and a large angry dog.

Or you could try a 15ft Tesla Coil which blasts mega high voltage bolts of pure electrical energy at anything within 26ft.

Like this perhaps which can be found in Newcastle, Oklahoma.

Video: megaelectronvolt/YouTube

I dread to think what the electricity bill is like at this particular household.

The Demands of Having Six Wives Proved Just Too Much

Having six wives proved to be the death of wealthy Nigerian businessman Uroko Onoja.

It has been reported that the five of his six wives had become jealous that he was giving far too much attention to his sixth and youngest wife.

So they hatched a plan.

They would persuade him to give him the attention they deserved and insisted that he should have sex with each of them in turn.

It seems that they used knives and sticks to force him from the bed of his favored wife and insisted that he slept with them instead.

He had slept with four of his wives and the fifth was making her way to his bed when the man stopped breathing and could not be revived.

Later the youngest spouse was reported as saying that the five other wives all fled into the forest once they realized that their husband was dead and the incident has been reported to local police.

Fearless Felix Jumps from 90,000ft…Next Month He Plans To Do It Again From 120,oooft

Last month extreme skydiver Felix Baumgartner landed safely back on earth near Roswell, New Mexico, after jumping from 18 miles in the air.

Or put it another way…when he leapt from 90,000ft up in the air he was three times higher than the cruising altitude of most passenger airliners.

It is a personal best for the skydiver people like to call Fearless Felix but he does not want to end there.

Later this month he plans something even more spectacular still…he intends to complete a record-breaking parachute jump from 23 miles high, (120,000ft) where on the way back to earth he will break the speed of sound as he freefalls earthward.

Fearless Felix, 43, ascended alone in an enclosed capsule lifted by a giant helium balloon and his pressurized jump suit needed its own oxygen supply because there was no air for him to breathe at the altitude he had reached.

Here is a video featuring computer generated imagery to show just what he plans to do next month.

Adventure hardly gets any more spectacular than this:

Video: redbull/Youtube

The London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony Was Well Worth The Seven Year Wait

I am not the greatest sports fan in the world.

And despite the fact that we here in the UK have been bombarded with updates about Olympics 2012 in the seven years since it was announced that London was to host the event, I had not really built up much enthusiasm for it.

My gut feeling was that we would somehow manage to mess up the opening ceremony so that it would be either just reasonable or distinctly average.

I think many others shared my lack of interest in the whole thing too…as a nation we tend to like being slightly disappointed about things; especially sporting things. How else do we explain the national soccer team?

So like 22 million others in the UK I sat down in front of my TV and was prepared to be underwhelmed.

Except…

I was glued to the TV set for four hours.

Health Service Tribute

The ceremony was utterly spectacular in almost every way (I wasn’t overly impressed with the unabashed leftist/Marxist agenda). And while parts of it may have been a little odd for non-British viewers (the huge tribute to the state-run National Health Service for example) I will mark it down as one of the most impressive events I have ever seen.

As I was watching I felt a little tinge of jealousy that I was not one of the lucky ones to actually have bought tickets for the ceremony but then comforted myself that I had a much better view of events by watching via the lenses of the BBC camera crews.

Even The Queen Took Part

The Queen even took part in the opening ceremony, where she allowed the TV cameras into Buckingham Palace  and was filmed for a comedy segment alongside James Bond star Daniel Craig, before then apparently parachuting into the Olympic Stadium with him.

Even die-hard anti-monarchists who want to see the UK turned into a republic must have at least drawn a smile at that stunning performance. Who knows? She might even have won a handful of them over to supporting the monarchy.

The New York Times described the ceremony as “weirdly and unabashedly British.” Well done that headline writer. You have got it in one.

China Daily said it highlighted Britain’s ‘grandeur and eccentricities’ – yes indeed it did.

The LA Times was left “baffled” by the NHS segment – well yes I did wonder about that segment myself but it is best just to accept these things and move on. Whether you understood it or not I think most would agree that the segment was visually stunning.

Mr Bean

We even had Harry Potter author JK Rowling reading from Peter Pan and a brilliant, utterly brilliant, segment where Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean messed things up as part of the London Symphony Orchestra.

It is funny because only a couple of days earlier I was telling an American friend how I didn’t particularly care for Mr Bean…but this performance had me laughing from start to finish.

The ceremony also showcased the UK’s The ceremony’s rich musical and cinematic history and these were among my highlights.

As I watched I imagined how agonizingly difficult it must have been to decide which songs to feature and which to leave out…but I was very impressed with the finished result.

The lighting of the Olympic Flame at the end by a group of upcoming British athletes at the end was seen by some as a bit of a disappointment or something of a cop-out but for me it was a touch of genius.

And what a moment for those seven potential stars of tomorrow…well done to all the Olympics organizers that was another highlight of the ceremony for me.

A bit laa-la

I will leave the final word on the ceremony to Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir – I could not sum up the night’s events any better than she did when she said it was ‘the barmiest Opening Ceremony in Olympic history, an explosion of nonsense and tremendous good fun” despite it being ‘a bit tinky winky and laa-la at times.”

Yes!

That is exactly how it was.

And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

A Typical British Protest…The Lodnon 2012 Oimplycs

This blog has featured on many occasions the love of British officialdom to zealously enforce every petty rule and regulation to the letter…even (especially) when doing so appears to be pathetic in the extreme.

“You are in breach of this law, or that regulation, or some obscure by law or local legal code,” is their justification and no amount of arguing or attempts to make them see some sort of reason or logic will have any effect at all.

In recent weeks there have been many such stories about stores being forced to take down all references to the “London 2012 Olympics” because such words (and the interlocked Olympic rings symbol) can only be used by official sponsors of the event.

So step forward Focus Formal Wear from Surbiton, Surrey, which has come up with a range of clothing featuring this unique – if slightly cheeky – design:

 

It remains to be seen how the Games organizers will react or, indeed, whether this quirky clothing range will be successful but it is great to see a business like this standing up for the high-handed approach of the killjoys.

There is even an official ‘Lodnon 2012 Oimplycs’ website…click on the rings, er I mean squares, below to check it out.

And finally…

I hate those Captcha codes you see on websites from time to time which exist to prove you are not some nasty computer spam bot.

Some are just impossible to figure out…such as these ones.

Enjoy!

Image: FunnyJunk.com

 

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