Sunday, April 01, 2007

Butcher in Botox Arrest




A Swindon butcher has been arrested for giving his pet dog Rover Botox.


A neighbour noticed Rover looking odd and called the RSPCA.


The butcher was quoted as saying "anybody is legally allowed to do botox now, Rover looked tired so I thought I would pep him up a bit"
From Swindon Advertiser

BAE again

From the Sunday Times

A SECRET slush fund set up by BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence contractor, was used to pay tens of thousands of pounds to two British actresses while they befriended a senior Saudi prince and his entourage.
Confidential documents seen by The Sunday Times reveal that money from the £60m fund went on the mortgages and rent, credit card bills and council tax of Anouska Bolton-Lee and Karajan Mallinder. It even paid for language lessons.
BAE channelled the cash through a London travel company which financed “accommodation services and support” for Prince Turki bin Nasser and other Saudi figures responsible for the desert kingdom’s involvement in the £40 billion Al Yamamah arms deal.
The revelations are bound to reignite controversy over the deal, which sparked a bribery inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Documents giving details of the payments were handed to SFO staff.


The investigation was terminated in December when Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, told parliament that it was not in “the national interest”.
At the time of the payments Bolton-Lee, a former lingerie model-turned TV actress, and Mallinder regularly attended parties at the Carlton Tower hotel in London hosted by the prince who, as the then head of the Royal Saudi Air Force, was responsible for the purchase of 150 Hawk and Tornado jets from BAE.
A senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the inquiry had been trying to establish why the women were paid through the BAE fund.
It is likely that both would have been interviewed later this year had the inquiry not been aborted.
Goldsmith’s move followed a series of threats made directly to Tony Blair by the Saudi government. The Saudis warned that they would halt all payments on the contract and cut diplomatic and intelligence ties with Britain unless the criminal investigation was stopped.
The SFO had been investigating claims that BAE had set up the fund to support the extravagant lifestyles of senior Saudi royals as a way of ensuring that what was Britain’s biggest arms deal survived.
The SFO established that BAE used Travellers World, a travel firm, to run the slush fund and channel payments to Turki and others.
The prince, who is married to a niece of King Abdullah, the Saudi ruler, was the key player in the deal because of his role within the military.
The documents relating to the actresses refer to Turki as PB – a code for “principal beneficiary” – BAE’s description of him.
They show that during 2001 and 2002 Travellers World paid the £13,000-a-year rent on Bolton-Lee’s flat in west London. One document reveals that she received “expenses” of £1,275 in cash. Bolton-Lee, 29, who has appeared as a hostess in the BBC’s The Generation Game, declined to comment.
The documents also show repeated payments made to Mallinder during 2001-2. In July 2001, a sum of £1,002.67 appears as being paid to “Associates-Mallinder”.
Other documents refer to payments for “Mallinder mortgage (£448)”; “Mallinder expenses (£1,000); and “Mallinder language course (£326).” Karajan Mallinder, who changed her name from Karen after a 1988 conviction for possessing cocaine, said she knew nothing about any slush fund companies but admitted that she was a close friend of Tony Winship, a BAE manager and former RAF wing-commander who was arrested in 2005 over allegations that he ran the fund.
She ended a telephone conversation with The Sunday Times abruptly when asked if she had met Turki and his party in the 18th-floor penthouse at the Knightsbridge hotel.
There is a fine line between schmoozing a client and paying a bribe. It's not clear that this deal fell the wrong side of that line, but for as long as attempts to investigate are blocked it will remain controversial. More pointedly (but sadly less thrillingly for the papers), this deal involves the transfer of significant jet fighter intellectual capital to Saudi Arabia. While Saudi is not hostile to British interests it is very possible that this will end up in the hands of countries that are. £40Bn over 10 years is a tiny percentage of Britain's total exports. HMG should not be propping up any public company, especially not the defence industry which is horribly inefficient, and especially not BAe Systems which is in rude health and whose majority interests now lie outside the UK. Al Yamamah stinks and we should drop it like a hot potato. If the French want to step in and apply a lower moral standard then that is their decision; Britain should know better.
Anthony Charlton, Swindon,
I live near a big BAE factory, it employs lots of people in an area where jobs are increasingly hard to come by. So a Prince allegedly received some hospitality? Is it such a big deal?
The world turns on hospitality amd we in Britain seem to be pathetically puritanical about it all. If we dont watch it all our work will go elsewhere. It is all about moderation and harm caused to others.Does allegedly appealing to a Prince's more basic instincts harm anybody? No
Are the "actresses" allegedly involved bovered? No
How do you like your coffee black or white?

Nurses Struggle in New Prescribing Role



A study of 18 qualified nurse prescribers and 7 nurses undertaking a prescribing course were presented with 4 clinical scenarios such as "A 65 year old man asks if he can take some Aspirin for his severe pain due to gout.How would you proceed?"
The majority were "unable to identify the issues" involved in the 4 scenarios and "failed to provie an acceptable solution to the problem"
In interviews one nurse critisied her training on pharmacology as "really awful" .
About 50% of study participants scored zero in all scenarios.
The study was lead by Dr Maxine Offredy, reader in Primary Care at the University of Hertfordshire.
This raises further doubts about the scope and skills of nurse practitioners. One of the problems is the basic training of nurses in subjects such as biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology is superficial. This leaves them vulnerable when they start to practice independently. Of course many nurse prescribers only complete the course so that they can prescribe in a very narrow area of expertise.This is sensible. It is difficult to see how current nurse prescribing courses adequately equip them for work in more generalised diagnostic and therapeutic area such as primary care