Good grief...

According to the BBC:

Sir Alan Sugar will continue to front BBC One's The Apprentice, despite concerns over his new role working for the government as an "enterprise tsar".

So it's probably too late to stop the freakish contestants from breeding - it's like Jurassic Park, only worse:

APPRENTICE stars Phil Taylor and Kate Walsh could be dangerously close to making numerous, smaller versions of themselves, experts warned last night...
Amid reports the pair were now dating, scientists said that if the couple's DNA is not kept at least 20 miles apart it could combine to produce an army of gibbering, soulless freaks obsessed with their own shallow, pointless ambitions...

Professor Brubaker and his team conducted a series of computer modelling experiments to predict what a Kate-Phil hybrid would look like. "We reckon it would be shaped like a Toblerone," he added.

"The entire raison d'etre of such a creature would be to pathetically ingratiate itself with millionaires by performing a series of demeaning voluntary tasks, like bleaching dogs' scrotums on Clapham Common. Other than that, it would just hop around pissing people off."

There's an excellent article in the Guardian, about the 0845 / 0870 telephone number scam:

It took just a few weeks for Sarah, who had her finances under control, to find herself on the verge of eviction. Due to an administrative error, the single mother in Manchester had her child benefit stopped.

As a result, her entitlement to income support, housing and council tax benefits also, incorrectly, dried up. What really made her situation impossible, however, was that she had to phone an 0845 number to reach the child benefit helpline to try and sort out the problem.

Like many other people on low incomes, she only has a mobile - and calls to 0845 numbers can easily cost 10p a minute. She and her son found themselves with no money left for essentials (including paying the rent), as all her cash was going on calls to the helpline.

Meanwhile in foreign news, those Iranian "elections" in full.

Having got all the "the world's going to hell in a handcart" stories out of the way in one fell swoop, maybe I'll find something more optimistic to link to next time.