Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

A bit of 'Copy and Paste' from a very excellent journalist:

From: Peter Oborne - Daily Telegraph (26 June 2014)

Prime Minister and his gang haven't learnt their lesson
Phone hacking showed our rulers at their worst, but they carry on regardless

Andy Coulson, who was employed by David Cameron, has been found guilty of conspiracy to hack phones Photo: Warren Allott/The Telegraph
The phone hacking affair has displayed the Prime Minister at his worst – a shallow, amoral, conniving careerist, determined to secure high office at any cost. Nevertheless, in Westminster yesterday, the general opinion seemed to be that David Cameron had got away with it, in the wake of Tuesday’s court verdicts. Political experts judged that he had answered most of the important questions, and that Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, had scarcely landed a blow.

Many hold the view that this has been an excellent week for the British press. Yesterday, The Sun newspaper, where Rebekah Brooks was the first female editor, went into full-scale celebration mode. “Great day for red tops” read its front-page headline.

I disagree strongly with both these judgments. In truth, the past week has been terrible for the press, for politicians and, above all, for the Prime Minister.

Let’s recapitulate the sordid facts. In the summer of 2007, David Cameron was running scared. He was starting to slip in the polls and was fretting that Gordon Brown might call – and win – a snap general election. So Mr Cameron hired as his senior aide a well-known Fleet Street figure, the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.

Mr Coulson was famous for his journalistic brilliance and cool, clear judgment. However, his reputation was under a cloud. A few months earlier, he had suddenly resigned after his royal correspondent was imprisoned for phone hacking. Mr Cameron accepted Mr Coulson’s assurances that he had done nothing wrong. But this week, a jury at the Old Bailey found Mr Coulson guilty of conspiracy to hack phones – and his former boss is paying the inevitable price for taking him to Downing Street as his director of communications.

The future Prime Minister was repeatedly warned about the consequences of doing so. I know of one friendly columnist who took him aside and gave him a private warning. Ian Katz, the deputy editor of The Guardian, gave a private briefing about Mr Coulson to Mr Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. In a column in The Observer in April 2010, just before the election, I warned David Cameron that he would be “making an extremely worrying statement about the type of government he plans to lead if he allows Coulson anywhere near Downing Street”.

Essential evidence came from the outstanding Guardian journalist Nick Davies, who has done so much to bring the phone-hacking scandal to light. Using traditional journalistic techniques, he carried out an investigation that resulted in very troubling revelations. It portrayed Andy Coulson’s News of the World as essentially a large, private intelligence service, using some of the same highly intrusive techniques as MI5, not all of them legal. There really was no excuse at all for David Cameron to be unaware of what had been going on.

In yesterday’s Guardian, Mr Davies levelled the very serious additional charge that the Prime Minister misled the Leveson Inquiry about his decision to hire Mr Coulson. He quotes Mr Cameron telling Robert Jay QC under oath: “I was reliant on [Coulson’s] word, but I was also reliant on the fact that the Press Complaints Commission had accepted his word, the select committee had accepted his word, the police had accepted his word, the Crown Prosecution Service had accepted his word.” But as Davies points out, at the stage when Mr Cameron hired Mr Coulson, he had not even been interviewed by the Press Complaints Commission, or by a select committee, let alone by the police.

The Prime Minister then compounded his original mistakes by failing to ensure that his director of communications received the “developed vetting” that is routine in a job as powerful as his. Many now wonder whether he was afraid that a proper investigation would expose the fact that Mr Coulson had broken the law.

Ed Miliband told MPs yesterday that Mr Cameron “will be the first ever incumbent of his office to bring a criminal into the heart of Downing Street”. It is impossible to contest this judgment.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister was skilful enough to escape the political consequences of his delinquency. In the long term, he will be deeply damaged. Mr Cameron has many virtues, but it is no longer possible to regard him as a man of sound character and reliably decent morality.

It is relevant here to note that his error of judgment over Mr Coulson is not an isolated case. It is only a few months since he crassly decided to stand by his culture secretary, Maria Miller, even in the face of proof that she had fiddled her expenses.

Three years have now passed since the revelation that the News of the World had hacked into the phone of the murdered Milly Dowler. It is essential to ask whether British politics has got any cleaner in the meantime.

Tragically, the answer must be no. The phone hacking scandal exposed a louche, selfish, privileged metropolitan elite at the heart of British public life. That elite still exists. Incredibly, the Chipping Norton set, of which the British Prime Minister was such a leading ornament, still flourishes.

Late last year, the Telegraph’s diarist, Tim Walker, revealed (after initial denials) that Mr Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, had attended the 50th birthday celebrations of Matthew Freud, an unappetising public relations mogul who is married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth. Another PR crony of Mr Cameron’s, Alan Parker, was given a knighthood in the Birthday Honours.

It is not just the Prime Minister, and the coterie of chancers who surround him, who carry on as if nothing has changed. The same is true of Ed Miliband, who last week caused such offence to his supporters by posing with The Sun. His failure to score points in Parliament yesterday looks like the result of a cowardly reluctance to offend Rupert Murdoch for a second time.

Or consider David Blunkett. Labour’s former home secretary was one of the most notorious victims of phone hacking, and has spoken movingly of how the intrusion drove him close to a breakdown. Yet until last year he was happy to accept an annual payment (equal to £3,300 a day) as an adviser to News International on “corporate social responsibility”. Tessa Jowell’s phone was hacked no fewer than 29 times when she was a Cabinet minister. She was told this at the time by the police, and it is alleged that she failed to complain (something she disputes). Ms Jowell is now reportedly planning to seek election as Mayor of London after the retirement of Boris Johnson, and appears content to earn a considerable amount from BSkyB.

We now come to the press. Rebekah Brooks being cleared of all charges is doubtless a matter of muted celebration, though not as splendid as the news that her husband Charlie, who has conducted himself with such admirable loyalty and good humour, has walked out of court a free man. I very much hope that he will soon resume his racing column in The Daily Telegraph. However, three News of the World journalists have already pleaded guilty to phone hacking, while another 23 journalists from an assortment of newspapers are yet to stand trial.

The scandal has been a shameful episode that has revealed the presence of an arrogant political/media class who have been habitually contemptuous of ordinary people. They are still being called to account.

Let’s leave the final word to Gemma Dowler, sister of Milly. She spoke yesterday of her disgust at the “incestuous relationship between our top politicians and the press”. She was right to be disgusted. Very few of us, and certainly not the Prime Minister, have learnt our lesson.

What about the other 15%?


The bank said 85% of mortgage approvals would need to be below the LTI cap of 4.5 times the applicants' income.

4.5 times the applicants income!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Totaly crazy, in my days it was 2.5 times and if you got lucky 3 times.

Add on the wifes income and what is it 5 to 6 times????.

Totaly barmey.

Im not convinced with this Carney chap and Im certain the BoE is NOT INDEPENDANT of the government.

They were saying the same thing on the Daily Politics Show yesterday.

More on my neighbours, 'extradited to the USA' Paul and Sandra Dunham, who with the help of some American friends now managed to get themselves released from prison and out on bail pending a trial.

Haystack feels the bits I've highlighted in blue are all fine and dandy and doesn't have any problem with the UK goverment's utterly disgusting extradition treaty with the USA and its utterly disgusting realities for 'innocent until proven guilty British citizens'.

Haystack takes the obtuse insular view and tells me there's 'no smoke without fire and so they must be guilty - otherwise they wouldn't have been extradited!'

I don't give a shit whether they are guilty or innocent. My beef is that this extradition treaty, which allows people to be treated this way before they have been allowed to properly defend themselves from, what are most probably malicious charges in this case anyway, needs massive revision and re-negotiation.



I do hope none of this shit happens to you on your foreign travels! Anyhow, here's the latest news on the Dunhams:

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/

Paul and Sandra Dunham speak of 'degrading and humiliating' treatment in US jail
The British grandparents extradited to the US to face fraud charges have been released from prison on bail pending a trial. Here Paul and Sandra Dunham speak exclusively to The Telegraph of the conditions they endured inside an American jail

By Raf Sanchez, in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Patrick Sawer in London. June 26, 2014

Through a narrow vent in the wall of his windowless prison cell, Paul Dunham was able to catch a few glimpses of his wife every day.

Standing below in an outdoor cage used for daily recreation, Sandra Dunham could not see her husband but could hear his voice as he called out.

Their fellow prisoners - convicted killers, drug dealers and armed robbers - would go silent to allow the British grandparents a few moments for what became known as their "Romeo and Juliet routine".

"It was almost impossible to talk but it was just the relief of hearing one another and knowing that the other was doing okay," said Mr Dunham.

The retired couple from Northamptonshire spoke to The Telegraph after being released on bail following more than a month in a maximum security US prison in Maryland.

The Dunhams, both 58, are accused by American prosecutors of a "multi-layered embezzlement scheme" to defraud their former company of $1.4 million (£820,000).

They were arrested in May and flown to the US under the terms of a controversial treaty which, campaigners argue, allows American authorities to demand the extradition of British citizens without presenting significant evidence.

Both Mr and Mrs Dunham were housed at the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Maryland, where the warden allowed them to communicate with each other by writing daily letters.

Unlike many of their fellow inmates at the "supermax" prison, the Dunhams have not been convicted of any crime and have no history of violence. Yet they were kept under the same regime as some of Baltimore's most hardened criminals.

The Telegraph revealed earlier this month how the couple had to rely on parcels sent from friends on the outside for basics such as toothbrushes, toothpaste and shampoo and their only outdoor exercise is 30 minutes a day in a windowless courtyard.

Within hours of arriving at the detention centre Mr Dunham was given a closely cropped hair cut. With no air conditioning inmates have to endure hot summer temperatures which, in Mr Dunham’s words, turn the building into a “foul-smelling human oven”.

On his release on Wednesday, his wrists still marked red from prison shackles, Mr Dunham said they would be strip searched up to four times on days when they left prison to appear at the nearby federal court.


Paul and Sandra Dunham outside court in Greenbelt (David Rochkind/The Telegraph)

"It was very degrading and humiliating for a couple that has never been in trouble in our lives before," he said.

The former engineer shared his 12ft by 17ft cell with a convicted gun runner who spent nearly 20 years in prison only to be released and then quickly re-arrested for making explosives intended for use in a robbery.

A hallway television blared rap music throughout the night and Mr Dunham said he regularly saw fellow inmates smoke cannabis and drink "hooch", improvised alcohol made by fermenting fruit with sugar.

Soon after he arrived, a gang seized control of the phones and demanded payment from any inmate trying to use them. Prison authorities already charged $9 to connect a call to the outside world and $4 for every minute, meaning even conversations about the logistics of bail could run up $100 charges.

Conditions were gentler for Mrs Dunham, one of 20 women being held in the prison. Her cellmate, a young Russian woman convicted of arson, took the grandmother under her wing and helped her steer clear of trouble.

The other female prisoners were amused by her accent and preference for tea over coffee. "They thought I was very posh," said Mrs Dunham. "They called me The Queen."

For her, the most difficult part of prison was separation from her husband and their 15-year-old grandson, Ben. He wrote regularly but several of his postcards were sent back by prison authorities who worried the cardboard could be folded and used as a weapon.

"That broke my heart," Mrs Dunham said.

The pair were released on bail on Wednesday after two American friends posted a $500,000 bond and agreed to take them into their North Carolina home under effective house arrest.

The British couple will wear electronic monitors and be unable to leave the first floor of the house without triggering alarms at a nearby US Marshals station.

Despite the conditions in prison and the terms of their bail, the Dunhams said they had no ill will towards American authorities and were confident they would get a fair hearing when their trial finally begins, probably in November.

Their anger is reserved for the British government, which they say is prioritising the demands of the US Justice Department above the rights of British citizens.

"Sandra and I feel very let down by the British government," said Mr Dunham outside the federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We feel that they are hiding from the reality and they're not offering protection to innocent citizens."

Under the terms of the 2003 treaty, US prosecutors need only provide limited evidence to trigger an extradition while British prosecutors demanding an American suspect be sent to the UK face a higher threshold.

Critics of the law argue that it often leads to British defendants facing years of detention in brutal American prisons before they have ever been convicted of a crime.

The Dunhams fought their extradition through the courts but were turned down. The night before they were due to surrender to police in May, the couple took an overdose of sleeping pills in an attempted suicide bid.

Both were hospitalised and survived and Mr Dunham said Thursday he "deeply regretted" trying to kill himself, saying it was an act of desperation at the prospect of time in American prison.

"It was less frightening that we imagined before we went there. The fear is worth than the reality," he said.

The Dunhams maintain their innocence against a detailed indictment, in which prosecutors allege they used corporate credit cards to fund a lavish lifestyle of art, furniture and even $3,279 on a "pet residence" for their dog.

Authorities claim the couple then double-billed many of the expenses to both the US and European arms of Pace, an engineering firm of which Mr Dunham was president.

The majority of these white collar crime prosecutions end in plea bargains, in which prosecutors threaten to ask for decade-long sentences but offer terms of a few years in exchange for a guilty plea.

Mr Dunham did not rule out the possibility of a plea bargain but said for now the couple intent to contest the case.

His wife said she needed a few days of decompression away from the green-painted doors of her prison cells before turning her attention back to their legal battle.

"I just need to get my brain in order and ready for the fight. And boy, are we going to fight," she said.

Please do listen very carefully to what Paul Dunham has to say at 2mins 30 secs into the video clip above.

I don't think they are guilty. I have no opinion regarding that. My view is that the crime that they are accused of is a serious one involving a substantial sum of money fraud. The police investigated it, the FBI were asked to investigate it and a Grand Jury look at at the evidence. They all agreed that there was sufficient evidence for a case. On that basis an extradition was applied for and in the fullness of time they were sent hack to the US. It looks like a case of due process and the right thing has happened. The guilt or not will come out at trial. Our courts looked at it and ruled against them. They were even refused leave to appeal to the EU courts. I see nothing to complain about.

You might have if it had been you on the receiving end.

David Dimbleby presents topical debate from Wolverhampton, with Conservative defence minister Anna Soubry MP, Labour's former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, deputy leader of UKIP, Paul Nuttall MEP, anti-extremism campaigner and Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Maajid Nawaz and the former executive editor of the News of the World, Neil Wallis.

Perhaps, you can understand why Snowden and Assange don't volunteer to face USA styled court system or trust the British or American legal systems.

GF,

I thought the BoE was independent, but I must admit some of Carney's statements and associations to Osborne's statements leaves me doubting that it is so.

Perhaps, he would like an early knighthood!

======

But who stoked the housing problem in spite of numerous warnings.

Still think if more money had been put into social housing and general infrastructure the economy would have been in better state without the misery produced by Cameron and Osborne's outdated policies.

--------

Both will be seen as failures and this government the worst since the 1930s.

Should be lively

Haystack

You say, "I see nothing to complain about."

Let's just try you with a little teeny weeny one.....

The Telegraph revealed earlier this month how the couple had to rely on parcels sent from friends on the outside for basics such as toothbrushes, toothpaste and shampoo

Notice I didn't mention a change of clothes, money or anything like that.

And did you cop how at '2 mins 30 secs' into the video above Paul tells us, how after spending 5 weeks in jail, separated from his wife, etc, etc, he still hasn't actually heard or read exactly what he has been charged with and neither has she.

And you find nothing wrong with any of this?

If so, and you feel you cannot change your mind and retract from that viewpoint, then I am utterly well and truly amazed!

Yep agreed Fred.

It was Osbourne who appointed Carney anyway.

Im also beginning to think the OBR are no longer independant and have been gotten at by Giddeon and co. SAME building.

Odd nought slip now and again, nudge nudge wink George.

OBR are very much independent and there is no mechanism for them not to be. Carney seems to be doing a good job. In the bad old days the BoE used to change interest rates too late. Carney is using the method of hinting to have the effect of an interest rate rise without the actual need. As of a a couple of weeks ago, the BoE has new powers to control money supply and levels of personal debt. At the current rate of things, we may not see interest rate changes till well after the GE.

They just go down to the Lodge and roll their trouser's leg up!

The economy is gong well, employment is rising, business confidence very high and low interest rates. Osborne is doing a great job.

Haze.

For your own sake, do try and get some treatment!

======

Rebecca has just stated she was innocent of the charges!

I am sure glad about that.

Do I believe it.

The jury thought so!

But nice to know they are sad about Coulson!

u,,mmm..h

Are there any of your immediate neighbours who you think it might be an idea to go and talk to at least once every year?

Probably not. Most of my neighbours are wierdos (and they probably think the same about me. I know I've disturbed a few comfort zones here and there).

Coming home one in the snow one night I could see one of them couldn't turn his car round on the road directly outside my house. I pulled in my drive, opened my garage door and took out four carpet sample slip mats and went to his car. "Is it a rear wheel drive?" He just shrugged his shoulders indicating he didn't really know. I popped two mats up against the back of each of his rear tyres. "Try it now." He was now able to reverse and complete the turn. Not a word of thanks! I was left to just pick up the carpet mat pieces and go back into my house. Tosser or wot? He is not the only one of my neighbours who doesn't seem to have as little as three penn'orth of common sense.

A woman has been found dead in her flat in Dorset six years after she died.

She lived in Tolpuddle Gardens. Maybe she was a martyr?