News you can use - The Chaser banned from Royal Wedding

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The Chaser have been prohibited from broadcasting their satirical commentary of the Royal Wedding, apparently by the Prince of Wales himself, due to a new ban on use of the wedding footage for any sort of comedic purpose. As of writing, this doesn't appear to be having any impact on Channel 10's 7PM Project coverage, or Channel 9's Dame Edna commentary, although in the latter case perhaps because of the absence of genuine comedy. The Chaser boys have issued a rather charming plea for clemency, which is itself rather funny.

Sony has admitted that its Playstation online accounts have been well and truly hacked and credit card details quite possibly stolen. There are 77 million accounts worldwide and 1 million in Australia alone. This is not a good look.

Things have gone a bit crazy in Melbourne's Sudanese community as a Sudanese beauty pageant has resulted in three nights worth of violence, including assaults on police officers. Which just strikes me as more violence than should really be attached to any beauty pageant. Except for that one I got second place in in Monopoly. Ooooh, such a travesty.

The heart-warming story of the Filipino men who were bought to Australia on Temporary Worker Visas and made to work on offshore rigs for 84 hours per week at $3 per hour. You will be pleased to know that the Ombudsman has been informed and is considering his decision. Ombudsman.

In a tremendously sensible move for the Palestinian people, the rival Hamas and Fatah parties (which control the Gaza Strip and West Bank respectively) have agreed to try and put aside their differences and form a unity government so as to better press Israel on such trifling matters as their right to exist. This could just have the effect of pissing off Israel even more though, as they have long denied the prospect of even talking to Hamas, a group who has an unfortunate history of making rather inflammatory comments about wiping Israel from the face of the Earth. Oh, also the bombings.

Syria continues to slaughter its subjects with impunity as the Western powers yell futilely from the sidelines, constrained by the fact that they have all generally already implemented pretty much every sanction they have available to them. There is talk of more sanctions, but with the trenchant support of Iran backing them up, there's a definite limit to how much this sort of chatter is really going to concern the Assad regime.

NATO is increasing its focus upon the command headquarters of the Gaddafi government in Tripoli, blowing up numerous tactically significant buildings over the last few days with the stated aim of destroying his capacity to control the country, but I'm sure if he just happened to be in one of the buildings we wouldn't be all that sad about it...

The White House has tried to grab the initiative in the Obama vs the nutbars "birther" issue - which has led to one quarter of the American population thinking he wasn't born in America - by publishing a copy of his typically inaccessible, long form birth certificate, showing with complete and utter certainty that he was in fact born in Hawaii and is therefore allowed to be President of the United States. The Fox News headline: "White House releases what it says is Obama's birth certificate". Sigh. I would like to point out that if Obama was a white man, this entire furore never, ever would have happened. However, with Donald Trump offering to show the world his tax records if Obama showed the world his birth certificate, I do look forward to a fairly thorough appraisal of ol' Donald's dealings with the IRS. And speaking of which, as the current popular forerunner for the Republican nomination, Trump's history of campaign spending has begun to come under scrutiny. More specifically, his habit of occasionally backing Democratic figures, such as Rahm Emanuel. What a strange old man. Or, as The Onion says, 'Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He's Not A Festering Pile Of Shit'. Here he is talking about how honoured he is to have forced the President to issue a birth certificate. God I want to punch his yellowed face so good.



Features

Colin  Vickery, a Herald Sun TV writer, in a shining example of "Where do they find these people?", as he declares the Royal Wedding to be "no laughing matter".

The New Yorker with a brilliant investigation into the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster, the gap between science and politics and the fact that the scale of the spill is nowhere near as great as is generally assumed.

Oddities/Curiosities

Gaby Rodriguez, a 17 year old high school student in Washington, managed to shock pretty much everybody by revealing that the pregnancy she'd been enduring over the last six months of her final year at school, was, in fact, a project designed to draw attention to the way in which people typecast and judge pregnant teens. This involved her keeping the falseness of the pregnancy secret from everybody except for her mother, the principal, her boyfriend and one of her 7 siblings. Now that takes some serious goddamn moxie.

The world's very last typewriter manufacturer has shut its doors, bringing to an end the first era of democratically available mass writing technology. Fortunately, with the amount still kicking around op shops, tortured hipsters should still be able to find a suitable writing machine for decades to come.

Video

I hope that someone somewhere is indexing all the videos of world leaders and people of note dancing awkwardly. Here it's Russian President Dmitry Medvedev cutting loose to a song called 'American Boy'. It's a side-to-side step-a-thon when Dmitry gets down!