News of the News

ISLINGTON, Socialist Republic of North London, Tuesday (NNN) — President Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Bono are being invited to back a “vague middle-class interest portal” website, Hope Plus, to promote social politics.

“A global eBay-PeaceCorps-wiki-social-media-network-community-thingy is absolutely the most useful thing the modern world could have right now,” says founder Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline. “We already have lots of pictures of smiling African children.”

Mr Noble was inspired by his previous work for the BBC. “If we can tap into that Guardian demographic, we should be able to get people to really feel they’re doing their bit for the world, reducing their carbon footprint, cutting the poisons out of our air, water and food and feeding and educating the hungry by clicking on a website. People are good at clicking on stuff. We might even have some online petitions!“

The initiative is being bolstered by seed money from Microsoft. “I’ve long held that giving the poor the finest of our technology and the highest quality patented seeds is the way to advance everyone’s interests,” said Mr Gates, “particularly my own. I mean, my charity’s.” U2 has donated another copy of the bassline they have used on their last eight albums.

The Daily Mail will be starting Grumpy Plus, a portal for people to show their support for everything being so much worse than when they were young and everyone was polite and helpful and beat Hitler and you didn’t have to worry about coloured gay Polish asylum seekers ruining the price of your house. The Mail’s demographic is not as Internet-enabled, so the site will work by people mailing in coupons from the paper.

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THE BLACK HOLE OF LOCKERBIE, The Great Game, Saturday (NNN) — FBI Director Robert Mueller harshly criticized the release of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, as “a mockery of the rule of law” and “detrimental to the cause of justice engineering.”

Al Megrahi had been serving a life sentence for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. After many years of appeals over blatantly tampered evidence, in which the British government tried to keep relevant documents secret from the defendant and his lawyers on national security grounds until the judge threatened to throw the conviction out, Al Megrahi was finally released due to terminal prostate cancer and having three months to live.

Al Megrahi was told he could either go home to Libya or stay and die clearing his name. The government declined an option to free al Megrahi and allow him to live in Scotland after senior police officers cited the severe security implications of him opening his mouth where people might listen.

“Obviously, the sight of a mass murderer getting a hero’s welcome in Tripoli is deeply upsetting, deeply distressing,” David Miliband told BBC radio Friday morning. “Since of course he did it, as shown by none of his appeals getting through.”

The Libyan government had accepted that paying $2.7 billion and taking the rap for the bombing was a business requirement of selling oil to the West. But Thursday, after al Megrahi’s return, the Libyan official news agency JANA issued a statement from the government saying that al Megrahi had been “a political hostage,” showing that Gadaffi was obviously a terrorist nutter and a bad loser to boot.

Peter Mandelson pooh-poohed the notion that the release was in any way to sweeten upcoming oil deals. “The idea that the British government and the Libyans would sit down and somehow barter about the freedom of this Libyan prisoner to form some sort of business deal … it’s not only wrong, it’s completely implausible. Furthermore, any such deals in the very near future will be merest coincidence.”

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REDMOND, Indian Ocean, Tuesday — Microsoft has announced that today is “Global Anti-Piracy Day,” with the aim to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation caused by robbery and murder on the high seas.

“Robbery, rape and brutal murder at sea is just like people copying that floppy,” sobbed billionaire Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “You wouldn’t steal a patented software process, why would you steal a cargo ship?”

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has made these the most dangerous waters for software development in the world. The pirates use hacked zombie PCs, sometimes impounding codebases and programming staff at the point of their Heckler & Koch MP3s and demanding warez before they are released.

A famous attack late last year against one open source operating system was foiled when the crew scared the pirates off with the Righteous Mathematical Stentor, an ear-splitting acoustic device developed in Massachusetts as a “non-lethal” free software advocacy weapon.

Somali clan leaders have agreed to end over two decades of Unix wars in the country and have made attempts to address the piracy problem. But the tremendous lawlessness off the long eastern Somali coastline reflects the difficulty of controlling the flow of information on the Internet.

In one breakthrough, pirate chiefs have resolved that they will never pirate Windows Vista or Office 2007. “Not even with your dick.”

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