The English are Pikeys

Your national football team is crap, so why not terrorise a bunch of innocent people to make up for it? Yes, that makes total sense – to the English. Your parents must be *so* proud!

Source: BBC News

Portugal fans had to be led to safety after more than 300 people began throwing missiles at a Norfolk pub following England’s Euro 2004 defeat.

Police arrested 11 people after the trouble outside the Portuguese-run Red Lion pub in Thetford. Bottles, stones and bricks were hurled at the pub, smashing windows. One female police officer was injured.

The landlord of the pub, Sergio Quieros, said the damage to trade and the premises made it almost impossible for him to stay in the UK. He said: “I don’t know if I will run the pub anymore. It’s a shame because we have 6,000 Portuguese in Thetford. Maybe I’ll go back to Portugal and stay there.”

I don’t blame you Sergio, mind if I join you?

Orange.net email sucks

orange.net email

Oh great, so 2,648 emails and the web interface will only display up to 30 messages per page, so that’s 90 pages of spam to trawl through just to delete it all.

It wouldn’t be so bad if even some of it was real email, but I haven’t ever used the damn address! Nice job Orange 😕

Europe court backs expelled Poles

Source: BBC News

Poland must pay compensation to a man whose family was forced from its home after World War II, a European court has ruled.

The European Court of Human Rights said 60-year-old Jerzy Broniowski should be paid 12,000 euros (£8,000).

Mr Broniowski’s grandmother lost her home after the war when Poland’s border shifted westwards. In its ruling, the Strasbourg-based court said Poland had violated the European Convention of Human Rights. It also said the problem underlying the violation of Mr Broniowski’s human rights was likely to generate a large number of similar cases. The Polish state has already compensated the majority of expellees since they lost their homes at the end of the war.

In January this year a new law wrote off the state’s obligations to the remaining claimants, but about 80,000 people say they are still entitled to compensation – estimated at more than 2bn euros (£1.3bn). Those people are the descendants of the 1.2 million people forced to leave their homes at the end of World War II when a large strip of eastern Poland suddenly found itself in the Soviet Union.

Mr Broniowski’s grandmother was one of those people. She lost her home in what was then the Lwow in Poland and what is now Lviv in western Ukraine. At Yalta, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to shift Poland’s eastern frontier hundreds of kilometres westwards to the Curzon Line. In return, Poland got a large swathe of Germany.

For that reason, private property restitution is a particularly sensitive and complex issue in Poland. Not only were Poles expelled, but so were millions of Germans. On top of that are the large number of claims by descendants of Jews, murdered in the Nazi extermination camps, many of which were located in Poland.

Currently Poland has no legislation which deals with property restitution claims. This latest ruling is likely to add to the pressure to adopt some.

Six Foot Fridge

Apparently, someone in London recently sent an urgent video tape via courier to BBC Bristol, which duly arrived in the post room at said outpost of The Corporation. One of the operatives therein – noticing that the label was peeling off – decided to replace it with a new one. He removed the original and stuck it on the fridge, intending to copy the address after lunch.

The next morning, the sender of the tape was surprised to find this voice message (mp3) on his mobile.

Arguments

“Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text-book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we’re warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.”

www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com