Statue of the week award

One of London’s finer statues - Merchant Navy chap at Tower Hill looks out towards distant convoys and dreams of hot cocoa.

Back to the early 80s...

Holy crap.

Here we are, 25 years later and things look strangely familiar.

Talk of 3m unemployed within the year.

IRA murderers gunning people down for the sake of it.

Russia and China grumbling about the West and rattling their sabres.

England about to lose a Test series in the West Indies (and to follow it - probably - with Ashes defeat).

Taxpayers starve as Goodwin eats caviar

Well, it’s not that far off the truth.

So let me just get this straight.

After tax, Greed is Goodwin will take home about £33,000 every month.

However, if RBS had been allowed to collapse he would receive just (I say ‘just’ though it’s a lot more than I and most others will ever get) £20,000 per year from his pension.

So... RBS has so far received more than £45 billion in public funds, which means the bank is 70-per cent owned by the taxpayer. Without such a bail-out, the bank would have collapsed, and all pensions would have been transferred to the Pension Protection Fund (PPF).

The PPF guarantees 100 per cent of final-salary pensions in payment, and 90 per cent of those yet to be paid, up to a maximum of £28,000 per year. As this amount gets lower if a member retires before 65, a member retiring at 50 would be able to receive a maximum of £21,952 per year.

Dr Ros Altmann, an independent policy adviser, told The Times: ‘Sir Fred Goodwin should be treated like any other member of a pension scheme whose company has gone bust – he should be transferred to the PPF. There is absolutely no social justice or rationale behind taxpayers propping up banks to ensure that chief execs get paid such obscene pensions.’

Greed is Goodwin

There was a time when a chap knew what to do in the event of a catastrophic failure on his watch.

It involved the whisky bottle and the service revolver.

Today we have the largest corporate loss in history from RBS - a mind-numbing £40 billion - and the man in charge is not only not blowing his brains out he’s trousering £650,000 a year, for life.

This is after he has not only brought down his own company, but wrecked the prospects and savings of countless others.

And it has all been done with the collusion of the government.

Shocking, shocking stuff. There seems to be no bottom to what the banking industry is capable of.

Boy marries dog

A toddler has reportedly been married off to a dog in eastern India in a bid to prevent his predicted death by a tiger.

The ceremony, at a Hindu temple in Orissa state’s Jajpur district, was conducted with all the rituals observed at traditional weddings.

It included a dowry for the bride - the village bitch.

The dog sported two silver rings and a silver chain, the UNI news agency reported.

Parents of the groom, 18-month-old Sangula, were advised to arrange the marriage when they noticed a tooth growing from their infant son's upper gum.

The growth was considered to be a bad omen in the boy’s tribal community.

Village elders believed it would lead to him being killed in a tiger attack - a fate preventable, according to tribal tradition, by marrying a dog.

Ancient terror brings horror to Borneo, shock

Looks like there could be a humungous monster out there in the forests of Borneo, gobbling up pigs, goats, people - you name it.

(Though maybe not as scary as the giant rat of Sumatra - and less likely to fit in you rubbish bin).

Locals reckon it’s an incarnation of the Nabau, a legendary snake more than 100ft in length and with a dragon's head and seven nostrils.

Villagers living along the Baleh river in Borneo believe the mythical creature has returned after a photo of a gigantic snake swimming along the remote waterways has emerged.

The picture, taken by a member of a disaster team monitoring flood regions by helicopter, has sparked a huge debate about whether the photos are genuine or merely the work of photo-editing software.

Even the respected New Straits Times newspaper in Kuala Lumpur has asked readers to make up their own minds about the photos.

People who have studied the photograph of the shape taken from the air have dismissed suggestions that it's a log.

As one writer asked: 'A log can't be that winding, can it?' Others have suggested it's a speedboat, but this has been dismissed because of the twisting wake.

The most common accusation is that the photo has simply been manipulated on a computer, while others complain that the river is a different colour to the real Baleh river which is a murky brown.

But villagers who insist the snake exists say that photos of the creature being taken in different parts of the river prove it is swimming about.

Earlier this month scientists unearthed the fossil of a killer snake that was longer than a bus, as heavy as a small car and which could swallow an animal the size of a cow.

The 45ft long monster - named Titanoboa - was so big that it lived on a diet of crocodiles and giant turtles, squeezing them to death and devouring them whole.

Weighing an impressive 1.25 tons, it slithered around the tropical forests of South America 60million years ago, just five million years after the last dinosaurs were wiped out.

Partial skeletons of the boa constrictor-like prehistoric killer were found in a Colombian coal mine by an international team of fossil hunters.

Giant rat of sumatra caught and eaten (maybe)

A chinese ratcatcher has caught a giant rodent – weighing six pounds and with an impressive 12-inch tail – in a residential area of Fuzhou, a city of six million people on China's south coast.

Says the Daily Telegraph (and you have to love the DT for reports such as this in the troubled times).

‘The ratcatcher, who was only named as Mr Xian, said he swooped for the rodent after seeing a big crowd of people surrounding it on the street.

He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage [I should jolly well think so] before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.

"I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!" he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene [maybe, but having read the last paragraph I wouldn't be certain Mr Rat hadn't been served up in black bean sauce by now].

The local forestry unit in the city identified the nightmarish creature [hang on, what about journalistic impartiality] as a bamboo rat from initial photographs, but said that it would need to examine the rat more closely before making a final identification.

Chinese bamboo rats rarely grow beyond ten inches and are found throughout southern China, northern Burma and Vietnam.
However, the Sumatra bamboo rat, usually found in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan and in the Malay Peninsula can grow up to 30 inches long, including tail, and can weigh up to eight pounds.

A "Giant Rat of Sumatra" is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes tale: The Adventure of a Sussex Vampire.

All bamboo rats are slow-moving and usually spend their time in underground burrows, feeding on bamboo. Chinese bamboo rats are often sold for meat in Chinese markets. The largest rats in the world are thought to be African giant pouched rats, which can grow up to 36 inches in length.’