Watch It!…We Donkeys Are Hard!!!

Braying donkey foils attempted burglary

Jaffa the donkey woke his owner up in the early hours of the morning with his 'very loud' braying, seeing off an intruder who ran off

A foster donkey foiled an attempted burglary with his loud braying which raised the alarm.

Jaffa who lives in Preston, Lancashire, woke his owner Mary Beetham in the early hours of the morning as he was “shouting his head off” after an intruder approached her home.

Ms Beetham, 73, said Jaffa seemed in such distress, she left her bed immediately to tend to him during the incident on Wednesday, June 18.

The retired P.E. teacher said: “I was woken up at 1.30am in the morning by the loud bray, he was obviously shouting his head off. He went on and on. It must have gone on for more than 10 minutes.”

She added that when she got up to tend to Jaffa, she “saw someone run down the drive”.

But she did not fear for her safety and said she was concerned for Jaffa, who she had fostered only three months earlier.

“The sound was an incredibly stressed sort of noise. They can die from this sort of incident and Jaffa needed calming down. I stayed with him for 30 minutes and calmed him down.”

“I didn’t consider it [her safety] until afterwards, I only thought ‘what was the matter with my donkey?’ It was later that I thought, ‘what am I doing here in my pyjamas?’”

Ms Beetham called the police in the early morning and said the officers told her they would record the incident and keep an eye on it.

She said the intruder had not taken anything.

The next day, Ms Beetham said, “Jaffa was very quiet and sleepy, he was shaken up. But he’s fine now. He just shouts at the postman now.”

The foster carer has been taking care of donkeys for 17 years and said Jaffa had been badly treated before being rescued in Ireland but “brought back to life” by The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of donkeys.

Ms Beetham also is carer to Jacko, who she has fostered for the last four years. She praised the charity's work and said she decided to foster donkeys because of her mother: “When my mum was alive, she wanted a donkey. I thought, if I don’t get one, I never will. It was the best thing I ever did.”

Watch Out …We’re After You.

UK Changed Attitude to Pirates

It seems that the advisors of UK Prime Minister are already unhappy with forcing Internet service providers to send their customers notifications when they pirate films, music and TV shows.

A few days ago, the Prime Minister’s IP advisor claimed that it’s time to realize that the currently employed scheme might fail and the government needs to turn to something more enforceable – for example, disconnections, fines, and even jail sentences.

The industry experts confirm that the UK Digital Economy Act has been running for 4 years on and is seen as pointless in overwhelming majority of cases. The idea was to educate the casual file-sharer about legitimate alternatives in the hope the user would change their behavior.

But this plan failed, as serious file-sharers could ignore the rules by using foreign proxy websites which were untraceable. Ordinary users were receiving 4 notifications and then nothing was happening. The advisor believes that four years is enough for the government to understand that they need to start thinking what to do if these warnings are ignored by infringers.

He says that notifications and fines are first steps, but blocking access to the web and custodial sentencing for damaging infringers should not be ruled out either. Of course, jail won’t be immediately on the cards for infringers. Education has to come first, with a special attention paid to informing consumers that illegal file-sharing is not in their best long-term interests and is not socially acceptable. In the meantime, the industry will be forced to get their product right and attractive to consumers.

But once the authorities had won the hearts and minds of content consumers and offered suitable product, keeps the option of enforcement of copyright legislation on the table when all else has been exhausted. David Cameron replied that he would closely consider his advisor’s report.

Let’s Block It All???

Online Filters Block 20% of Popular Sites

About 20% of the most popular websites on the Internet are being blocked by the porn filters employed on local broadband and mobile networks. For example, it was noticed that a Porsche car dealership, a couple of feminist websites, a blog on the Syrian War and a political website suffered from the filters recently installed in the United Kingdom.

The Open Rights Group has recently surveyed the 100,000 most popular websites to discover that 19,000 of them were blocked by a fixed line or mobile ISP – and sometimes even by more than one provider.

In the United Kingdom, for example, 4 mobile networks have used filters for a while now, following a push by David Cameron. Broadband companies have caught up, introducing porn blocks that allow parents to screen out potentially harmful content. Every subscriber will be asked whether he or she wishes to apply a broadband filter by 2015. Adult content filters screen out pornography, along with suicide and self-harm related content, weapons and violence, gambling, drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Moreover, people can also decide to block dating, music and movie piracy, games and social networking.

The Open Rights Group explained that such filters can stop customers accessing your website, block political commentary or harm your education. In other words, the government pushes people into filtering lots of content that they simply don't need to.

The examples are numerous. An American who moved to the UK wanted to read an article about recovering from childbirth on her mobile phone, but it was blocked by her mobile network, Three, who for some reason imposes a filter as default for all pay as you go customers.

A Porsche brokerage has recently found their website blocked by O2’s filter. Emails and calls brought no results in having the ban lifted, until the company began tweeting about the problem. All O2 responded with was “mistakes can happen”.

Syrian War commentator’s blog was screened out by EE, O2, Sky and Vodafone.

Sherights.com, writing about sexual health, violence against women and lesbian and gay rights, was blocked by TalkTalk a few months ago. The worst thing is that the ban boils down to advertising revenue.

Finally, The Guido Fawkes website is also blocked for subscribers who have selected to screen out all social media. This includes Facebook, Twitter, blogs and chat forums.

Flat For A Donkey??

We’re Watching You…So There!!

Social Media Mass Surveillance is Allowed in UK

The officials have officially confirmed the true extent of the government’s interception of social networks, including private messages between citizens. It was confirmed that searches on Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and exchange of emails abroad can be monitored by the local security services.

British government has finally admitted that communication of its citizens in private channels like Twitter direct messages are considered as legitimate targets that can be intercepted without a warrant.

The document representing defence of mass monitoring developed a legal interpretation,
provoking calls for the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to be overhauled urgently and the allegations that the authorities are exploiting loopholes in the law of which parliament was unaware.

The paper was released in response to a case brought by civil rights groups before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which deals with complaints against the intelligence services. The case was launched in the wake of revelations from Edward Snowden about the monitoring program dubbed Tempora operated by the British monitoring agency GCHQ. This program taps into the network of fiber-optic cables that carry the phone calls and online traffic worldwide, recording up to 600 million phone events daily.

According to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, traditional interception of internal communications within the country requires an individual warrant. The authorities argue that in a technologically-fast moving world, identifying individual targets before monitoring is too difficult. The external one, in the meantime, can be monitored without an individual warrant. The document explains that searches on social networks involve communicating with a web-based platform abroad, and are therefore external communications, not internal. Emails sent or received from abroad could also be intercepted in such a way.

The statement also points out that the issue was raised during the passage of the law a decade ago, implying that parliament knew about the difficulty of distinguishing between internal and external communications when it passed the bill.

Indeed, the Section 8 of the law reads that the internal communications between UK residents within the UK may only be monitored pursuant to a specific warrant, and if there’s a reason to suspect the individual in unlawful activity. But external communications may be monitored indiscriminately under a general warrant.

Buddy's Baby Crawling School

That's The way To Do It!!

Speeding? A Good Excuse!

Baby born during 100mph motorway chase

Man helps his daughter deliver baby girl on side of road after seven police cars chased his car at speeds of 100mph along the M275 in Portsmouth

A group of police officers who pulled over a speeding car were confronted by a newborn baby instead of a criminal after a grandfather helped to deliver his granddaughter at the side of the road.

Lola Mia Rose was born just as seven officers in four unmarked cars, who had chased her grandfather Colin Ellmore at speeds of 100pmh along the M275 in Portsmouth, surrounded the car.

Her mother Tiffany, who has three other children, described the experience as ''quite scary'' and said she was ''very proud'' of her dad for delivering baby Lola.

After suffering some ''niggling pains'' throughout the day the 26-year-old, from Fareham, said she realised at around 9.55pm that she needed to get to the hospital.

Accompanied by her partner Steven Read, their seven-year-old son Ralphy, and her parents Colin and Elaine, the family made their way towards the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham.

'My dad came to pick us up and before I got into the car I said to him 'I need to push','' said Tiffany, who was 38 weeks pregnant when the birth happened on Friday night.

''As the car was moving my waters went, then the police pulled us over and my dad came round and opened the door. I knew she (Lola) wasn't going to wait and then suddenly her head started to appear.

''The whole thing was quite scary.''

Lola, who weighed 6lb 4oz, and her mother were transferred to the hospital by ambulance soon after and discharged on Saturday.

Despite her dramatic entrance into the world, Ms Ellmore said her fourth child is doing well.

''She's doing great,'' she said. ''She's been very good.''

Sergeant Simon Goss, of the road policing unit pro-active team, said they thought the car might have been stolen because it was being driven so fast.

''We initially thought it was a stolen vehicle so put our lights on to flash it down. But it kept going at the high speeds,'' Mr Goss said.

''We boxed it in, forcing it to stop, and when it did the driver got out and we thought he was running off.

''But he ran around the car to the passenger side and shouted something about a baby. When we got to the car, we saw the baby in the man's hands. I have never experienced anything like it before.''

Police said no action would be taken over the incident.

A Long Pee??

Man trapped in plane toilet during 15 hour flight

Fire brigade frees American man's finger from lavatory rubbish bin after it became stuck during long flight

A 15-hour flight to Hong Kong proved a particular ordeal for one US passenger who accidentally trapped his middle finger in a lavatory rubbish bin early Wednesday, police said.

Police said in a statement the 32-year-old suffered the accident on a Cathay Pacific flight.

The passenger on the flight from Newark became trapped more than one hour before landing when he threw away some garbage, the South China Morning Post reported.

He had to stand alone in the washroom during the landing after flying for over 14 hours, it said.

Police said the man was able to free his hand with the help of firefighters after the plane landed and did not need hospital treatment.

Safety First

Read All About It!!

Digital News in UK Are Read on Mobiles

UK citizens seem to be abandoning PCs as their main method to access news, switching to updates on various mobile devices. According to the research carried out by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute, the proportion of readers who mostly rely on a desktop PC to get news on the Internet has fallen by 23 percentage points over the year and totaled to 57%.

Now smartphones are used to access digital news for 24% (which is up 11 percentage points over the same period), and tablets for 16%, which is also up 11 percentage points. The authors of the report admit that such shift in hardware is part of a broader change, which may have potentially profound effects for society.

The results of the research point out that there was a so-called “echo chamber” effect, because mobile consumers tend to rely on increasingly narrow sources to make sense of the explosion of choice on the Internet. According to Dr David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute, in some countries, including the United Kingdom, the established news brands have retained their loyalty in the more competitive web environment. However, the rapid growth of social media may be the way to discover and consume news content, which would have a range of possible ramifications.

The research points out that while choice proliferates, news consumption may narrow. The matter is that reliance on recommendations from like-minded friends could result in people being less exposed to a broad news agenda.

According to the report, some UK readers are increasingly committed to news providers amid the rapid change. Of those consumers who buy digital news, 63% do so via a recurring subscription – this figure was only 42% last year. In most cases, a selling point is the reputations of individual reporters and commentators.

Nice To See You Again

Hitchhikers are a pain!!

Sleepy Time??

Ouch!!

Vet Shot Zoo Worker Pretending To Be An Escaped Gorilla

IN preparation for the event of a gorilla escaping from Tenerife’s Loro Parque Zoo, a man pretended to be an escaped primate. He was spotted by a vet who shot the man in the furry suit with a tranquilliser dart containing enough medicine to down a 450lb gorilla.

The shot man, a 35-year-old zoo worker, was taken to the University Hospital of the Canary Islands.

Says Loro Parque Zoo:

“Last Monday, Loro Parque simulated the escape of an animal from its enclosure in the gorilla park. As part of the simulation, which took place in the security zone of the area and was attended only by authorised personnel, they set off the emergency alarm. Once they had carried out the various procedures, one keeper in the wild mammals team was accidentally struck by the medical tranquilliser that vets use in these instances. As a result, emergency services were called and he was taken to Hospital Universitari de Canarias, where he was treated. He recovered and is now in good health… Loro Parque, like all zoos and animal parks, regularly carries out this kind of emergency drill. The measure is designed to improve security, emergency procedures, and to train staff who work in these enclosures.”

That’s the trained staff who think a man in a monkey suit is a real gorilla..? The staff you give guns to..?

Unless all the zoo’s animals are just people dressed up..?

Well….It Works??

Man Who Bought Penis Enlargement Machine Received A Magnifying Glass

TO Malaysia, where Ong from Seri Kembangan is opening his new penis enlarger. The device has set him back RM450 (£83, $140).

Malaysian Chinese Association Public Service and Complaint Bureau chairman Datuk Seri Michael Chong explains what happened next:

“When he received the package, he was shocked to find a magnifying glass inside. The instructions that came with the package merely read ‘Do not use in sunlight’.”

Lawyer Alex Kok says it’s hard to get satisfaction:

“It is especially hard if there is no proof of purchase, such as receipts. We wouldn’t know who to sue or where and how to sue them.”

File under: well and tuly shafted.

50 Cent's Wild First Pitch Gets the Major League Treatment

My puppy's first sex toy.

For The Wine Buffs??

‘Great with roadkill’: Prankster replaces wine labels with hilarious alternatives

A prankster has decided to make wine a bit more interesting in his local shop.

Because the drink is pretty boring these days, isn’t it? We’re no longer swishing glugs about our tongue like mouthwash, pondering the aromas of a playful little Chenin, or spending anything more than a fiver on a bottle.

Regions of choice like the Loire valley, Provence, and Burgundy, have been replaced by Costcutter, the 2-4-1 section, and Strongbow. And if your bottle is determined by more than colour or price then you certainly aren’t buying it in Tesco.

The self-made labels were inserted under various bottles at a Tesco in Brixton, south London, and they do a good job of poking fun at those strange people who don’t just buy wine because it’s the cheapest.

Ice Cream Problem??

Woman dials 999 in row over ice cream sprinkles

The woman called West Midlands Police saying it was a 'bit of an emergency' as she only had sprinkles on one side of her ice cream

Police have released a recording of a woman who dialled 999 to request help in a row over the number of sprinkles on an ice cream.

The caller, who was not named by West Midlands Police, contacted emergency operators yesterday while arguing with the owner of an ice cream van.

During a minute-long call, the indignant woman told the operator: ''It doesn't seem like much of an emergency but it is a little bit because I've ordered an ice cream and he's put bits on one side and none of the other.

''He's refusing to give me my money back and saying that I've got to take it like that.''

Urging the public not to misuse the 999 system, Chief Superintendent Jim Andronov said: ''If someone is trying to get through to report a genuine life or death emergency, then a minute is a very long time to wait.

''I cannot stress enough that the 999 number is for emergencies only.''

Police forces often shame callers who clog up the emergency number with ridiculous calls.

In April, Police Scotland revealed a list of strange 999 calls, including a man who wanted two seagulls charged with a breach of the peace, a woman who was scared of foxes and a Christmas cook who wanted to know how long his turkey would take.

Last year, West Midlands Police ran a 24-hour tweetathon to highlight abuse of the emergency line which revealed that they had been called by a man who was having trouble being served at McDonald's, while another called for advice about retrieving a laptop password.