Fast news

Dirty money

BP, THE energy giant responsible for the US's worst environmental disaster, finally got around to jettisoning its gaffe prone chief, Tony Hayward.

BP's board of directors is hoping that Hayward's departure and the expected completion of an oil relief well will draw a line under the Gulf of Mexico disaster, which has resulted in the company losing 40% of its market value.

But while laid-off fishermen and tourist workers in the affected US coastal states are struggling to get by, Hayward will have no such difficulties.

Hayward's pay-off amounts to a staggering £1 million in salary plus a pension pot of over £10 million, the equivalent of more than £500,000 a year after retiring at just 55 years old.

A BP spokesperson blithely commented that Hayward's golden handshake was what any BP employee with an equivalent length of service could expect!

War cancer

A NEW study has revealed higher cancer rates in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, flattened by US artillery in 2004, than in survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

US marines surrounded Fallujah and pounded it with artillery shells tipped with depleted uranium after four security guards in the Blackwater firm were killed by insurgents.

The medical survey showed that infant mortality was 80 per 1,000 births in Fallujah compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait.

The researchers also found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and higher rates of other cancers in adults.

Tory sleaze

TORY BUSINESS minister Mark Prisk MP has become embroiled in sleaze allegations after it emerged that a millionaire Tory party donor, Andrew Cook, had successfully lobbied the minister to get the government to withdraw a £80 million loan made by the previous Labour administration to the engineering company, Sheffield Forgemasters.

Cook, who owns a rival company, sent an email to Prisk reminding the minister that he is "the largest donor to the Conservative party in Yorkshire".

The minister subsequently denied that the decision to cancel the Forgemasters' loan had anything to do with Cook's £500,000 donation to the party coffers, plus £54,000-worth of plane fights to David Cameron.

Free schools

'THE BATTLE of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton'. Presumably, this is why the public is having to stump-up £15 million a year in school fees to send the sons and daughters of top military brass and senior diplomats to private schools.

While the MoD was keeping schtum over the numbers of children it subsidises to send to Fettes, Winchester, Roedean and Marlborough, the Foreign Office revealed that 521 children of diplomats were being subsidised to the tune of £22,000 each, a year.

Perhaps this is what the Tories mean by 'free schools'!

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