No Outrage Over Obscene Bonus Culture of Print Media

Obscene salaries and unjustifiable bonuses are rife in the world of print journalism, it was not revealed today by MPs, bankers, the Ministry of Defence or the BBC.

"Smug, overexposed celebrity columnists like Jeremy Clarkson and David Blunkett fill our pages, while Our Brave Boys And Girls are dying out there," said one of Rupert Murdoch's paid mouthpieces this morning. "I think our readers would very much like to know how much of the iniquitous cover fee goes straight into these fat cats' pockets. Well, tough tits. It's none of their business."

"Our Brave Boys And Girls don't get bonuses for putting their lives on the line every day in Afghanistan," screamed Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Express, Big Ones and Asian Babes. "But it's better that you don't ask how much 'danger' money our reporters get for the life-threatening assignment of sitting on their well-guarded asses in Camp Bastion and sending back uncritical rewrites of the day's press releases."

Meanwhile, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian Media, mounted a robust defence of the discredited financial geniuses who wrote nothing in their columns to predict the global meltdown.

"These are the most gifted economic forecasters in Britain," he said. "If we disclosed that their huge salaries and bonuses bear no relation to their actual abilities, they might very well decide to up sticks and emigrate to the Wall Street Journal or the International Herald Tribune - and then British reporting would be in a sorry state."

"As for their expenses, journo hacks are only acting within strict guidelines," he added, "Which allow reasonable remuneration for necessary costs, such as treating a spin doctor to dinner in a rather pricey West End restaurant in return for a leak he was going to divulge anyway."

Pressure is also mounting on Rupert Murdoch's son James - chairman and chief executive of News Corporation Europe and Asia - to disclose how much is being spent on redecorating his second home, Britain, in a vulgar shade of blue to match his personal taste.

Public Could Safely Swallow More Shit, Admit Nutritionalists

The guidelines recommending how much poorly-researched horseshit the public can safely be fed every day may have been underestimated by as much as a fifth, according to red-faced health fascists.

"For the last eighteen years we have been warning you that if you eat any of this and more than a spoonful of that, you will instantly become a disgusting gutbucket who deserves to lose all their friends, be rejected by their horrified families and mocked by total strangers, only to be held up to media ridicule when the crane comes to drag your flabby corpse from the lonely flat you hid in until you topped yourself in despair," admitted a hollow-cheeked living cadaver from the Pseudoscientific Nagging Committee on Nutrition.

"Now, as a result of some actual research we accidentally funded, it turns out our po-faced propaganda was slightly wide of the mark," he explained through gritted teeth. "You may actually be able to eat a cheeseburger a day and still achieve your tragic ambition of looking like some miserable celebrity clothes-horse off the telly."

"Fortunately, the vast majority of your airhead friends will miss or forget this soon-to-be-buried news item, so you will still be lambasted and shunned if you're caught shamelessly enjoying something tasty and filling," he pointed out, with a mirthless smile. "So our holy mission of making everyone feel thoroughly guilty just for sustaining their miserable lives is still on course."

"Meanwhile, be assured that we'll be compensating for any spontaneous outbreaks of public happiness by generating lots more scary stories about Omega-3 turning your child into a crack whore, or vitamins causing fatal multiple orifice evacuations during sex," he warned, adding: "Making those up is the bit I love most about this job."

Government Unveils Remarkably Cheap Cure For Unemployment

Joblessness in Britain will soon be a thing of the past, vowed Communities Secretary John Denham, as he announced that 61 local authorities in areas of total jobdrought would share in an unemployment-busting windfall of £41.27 in loose change to be allocated from central government funds.

Various regional projects could now get the green light, including the distribution of a free stamp to as many as three lucky unemployeds, or printing off a brightly-coloured leaflet and dropping it through somebody's letterbox.

"We're determined to make some negligible, token gesture towards the cheating, lazy chancers at the bottom of the heap, because some of them might still bother to vote," smiled Mr Denham, who also generously allocated £2,500 of taxpayers' money to John Lewis in return for some nice chairs and a rug for his second home in London. "Compared to the cost to the economy in benefits and support for three million dossers - and that's just the ones we admit to - this is a drop in the ocean. But it sounds like a lot of money to some unemployed family struggling to decide whether to indulge in heating or food this week - so if we get a vote or two out of it, then clearly that's money well spent."

Meanwhile, calligraphers at the Treasury were putting the finishing touches to a pair of handsomely-decorated cheques totalling £31.3bn, destined for Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Chancellor Alistair Darling explained that the splendid cheques would help Britain's suffering bankers to gird themselves for the heartbreaking task of splitting Lloyds and RBS into smaller units of greed, only a short while after they received billions from the government to expand beyond the bounds of reason in the first place.

"We're determined to make some huge, economy-crippling gesture towards the cheating, lazy chancers at the top of the heap," smiled Mr Darling, "Because some of them might still make donations to the Labour Party."

'Large Amounts' of Water Ice, Ben & Jerry's, Magnum Found On Moon

A jubilant NASA mission team indulged themselves in a truly embarrassing display of unco-ordinated dancing around their consoles today, after lengthy computer analysis of the data generated by bombing the moon with a double-decker bus last month revealed "large amounts" of water-ices in the resulting 1.6km-high plume of debris.

"We've got a complete blackcurrant Ribena Ice, Mini-Calippos at both the infra-orange and ultralemon-and-lime ends of the spectrum, plus traces of what we've tentatively identified as fragments of the astronomically rare strawberry Calippo," grinned mission leader Randy von Braun, spinning round and round in his executive chair as he delightedly wrapped himself in yards of printout. "And it looks like quite a few other tooth-rotting treats may also have been blown into orbit."

"We're picking up strong spectroscopic signatures of Mini Milk, Fruit Pastil-Lolly, Twister, Magnum, Solero and even dark choc-ice matter," he added. "You name it, if it's cold and delicious, the moon has it in stock."

Meanwhile, NASA's equally-nerdy counterparts in Europe are busily engaged in the search for the elusive Higgs Beer Cooler, which has long been predicted by quantum physicists to exist somewhere in the universe - possibly on one of the attractively-frosted outer planets.

"After our discovery of liquid cherryade on Mars last December, we are truly unlocking the mysteries of our solar system," enthused Dr von Braun. "It would appear that the cold vacuum of space provides a near-perfect refrigerator that may well satisfy the exploratory requirements of a future generation of geeky astronauts addicted to junk food and sugar rushes."

Console Gamers Mark Armistice Day By Fragging Everything That Moves

The nation marked the hour the guns fell silent in 1918, after four years of unimaginable, needless slaughter, by solemnly loading up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at precisely eleven o'clock this morning and blasting seven colours of shit out of everything.

"I see no inconsistency at all in saying war is wrong and we should like pull our troops out now, whilst unquestioningly blowing away shedloads of photorealistic foreigners on my TV screen," said Xbox owner Josh Geake. "Modern Warfare 2 is only a game, remember - and a game is like so unrealistic, apart from its groundbreaking realism."

"I have no moral compass," he added. "But maybe I'll find it on the next mission, yeah, if I separate enough bad guys from their internal organs?"

Keen fans of exploding guts are already frantically searching for the rumoured hidden 'Combat Medic' mission - in which the player has to stumble around a wrecked marketplace, pumping morphine into as many screaming, disembowelled women and children as he can before a second bomb adds him to the collateral damage.

An official apologist for Elspa - the Exploitation of Licenced Sadism Publishers' Association - defended the game's graphic content and moral bankruptcy, saying: "This game is specifically intended for the kind of emotionally-dead kidult who lols at online footage of real people getting their heads flattened by buses. If you have a problem with that, you must be old. Fuck off and die on YouTube."

Thieves Outraged At Being Punished For Theft

The online gaming fraternity is threatening to track down Bill Gates and blast his guts out, after thieving console owners who see themselves as exempt from paying for other people's hard work unexpectedly found themselves blocked out of Microsoft's Xbox Live service.

Gamers who thought they were being incredibly clever by installing illegal chips that bypass digital rights management, enabling pirated copies of software to run, found themselves howling with rage when they switched on their electronic substitutes for real life today - to be greeted by the shocking message: "Your console has been banned from Xbox, you thieving little bastard. Ha bloody ha."

"I was like, fuck, why me man?" sobbed copyright thief Liam Hacker. "At first I thought 'OK, is this just a joke?' - which is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make - so I like hit it with the TV remote and like there it was again. This is like so unfair. Why should I be singled out just because I enjoy ripping people off?"

"It's like telling someone their dog's died, just cos it like ate the face off some stupid kid what ortn't of got in its way right?" he wailed. "It's like games cost too much innit. I want every single game the day it's released, or all my mates will point at me and laugh innit - and there's just too many of them. Why can't I have everything I want for free? Cos money's like just a concept, yeah?"

"Well, fuck Microsoft," he added. "I'm going to nick a Playstation 3 tonight. I dunno how Microsoft done this - but I don't reckon Sony will cop on in a million years. Standard."

Britain to Get New Burberry Check Flag

Hard on the heels of news that the British now lead Europe in shoplifting, as well as financial irresponsibility, illiteracy, binge-drinking, aggressive behaviour and teenage pregnancy, comes a government announcement that the Union Flag - for many, the enduring emblem of British cultural leadership for over two centuries - is to be replaced with a design that more accurately reflects the nation as it is today.

The winning flag - unveiled by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw - comes from Burberry's top design team, and features a black and white check pattern on a fawn background, with additional red stripes.

"By George offered an interesting concept, with a brightly-coloured logo for a small American business you've never heard of on a thin cotton background; and we were also impressed by Primark's entry, which was all sequins and loose threads," said Mr Bradshaw at the unveiling ceremony. "But the Burberry entry has perfectly encapsulated the spirit of Britain in the 21st century - a once-great name, now reduced a risible travesty of its former self, which angrily flaunts its cherished delusion that it's somehow better than everybody else."

Mr Bradshaw then pulled a golden rope to run the new British standard up a flagpole, but was surprised to see nothing but a few torn threads where the flag should have been.

"Oh buggery," he sighed. "Some thieving little toerag's gone and nicked it."

A fuming Mr Bradshaw was chauffeured away at speed in an iridescent purple-green W-registered Astra 1.3 with a huge wing on the back and four cannon-sized exhaust pipes, while a colour sergeant reverently coiled up the ceremonial gold braid, popped it into an envelope and mailed it to Cash4Gold.com in the hope that it might pay off Britain's £768bn national debt.

Everything You Own Is Trying To Kill You

The public were today urged to throw every single object they own out of the nearest window before it inflicts fatal injuries on them and their loved ones.

The alarming advice came after mobile phone giant Nokia revealed that over a million chargers were likely to have a potentially lethal electrical fault, and Maclaren USA warned parents to stop using their baby buggies immediately if they wanted their children to grow up with hands.

"I've already encased my iPhone in concrete, after hearing that the battery might explode without warning," said harassed consumer Josh Geake. "I was thinking of using it as a headstone to mark the spot at the bottom of the garden where I buried my similarly explosive MacBook. Now I'm too scared to move. How many other household gadgets want me dead?"

A spokesman for the British Retail Consortium appeared on television to explain why everything you buy is shoddy. Unfortunately, however, due to ongoing problems with Freeview reception nobody could understand a single word he said.

Thieving Capitalist Bastards Deeply Hurt By Ingratitude of Exploited

Upset members of the Bilderberg Group spent this morning crying on each other's shoulders, after a global poll commissioned by BBC Worldwide revealed that their human resources' enjoyment of callous exploitation for the benefit of a handful of faceless corporatists has plummeted to 11%.

In 15 out of the 27 countries surveyed, a majority of resentful peasants even dared to suggest that control of major industries should be seized by the ineffectual governments which kindly capitalists have thoughtfully provided, in order to give people the heart-warming illusion of democratic power.

"We only ever wanted to spread the love by selling serfs the iPhones, XBoxes, HDTVs and delicious carbonated phosphoric acid that make their ant-like lives just about endurable," sobbed a red-eyed plutocrat. "And this is the thanks we get?"

"After selling my children into legalised servitude to stitch gaudy t-shirts for fashion-conscious young Westerners, I must admit I was rather disappointed when the sweat-shop suddenly sacked everyone," said starving Thai pauper Chanarong Na Pattalung, as he took a short break from scavenging a festering rubbish dump for discarded peelings. "It seems that a Mr Tesco decided to free up more floor space for the copious amounts of alcohol that Westerners require to endure the festival of their god's birth."

"As I lay awake at night listening to my children's empty stomachs rumbling, I must admit that I find it harder and harder to shake the gnawing suspicion that perhaps free-market capitalism is not quite the philanthropic jamboree that the free-market capitalists promised," he added.

Stung by the unexpected criticism, the disappointed exploiters soon rallied and hit back at their unappreciative customer-slaves.

"It is an undisputed fact that the only conceivable alternative to the instinctive free-market capitalism which separates mankind from the animals is the unnatural beast of Stalinism," they declared in a joint press release this afternoon. "But hey, if you really want to live in permanent fear of the gulag, that's okay by us. We've already got our top men working on tenders for the lucrative construction contracts."

Sun Readers Baffled By Concept of 'Writing'

Puzzled Sun readers were left slack-jawed today, after the leading literary journal of Britain lashed out at PM Gordon Brown over a strange new concept called 'writing'.

The row broke out after the deranged prime minister callously sent a wicked letter of condolence to the grieving mother of dead soldier Janie James, which he had - cynically - written with something called a 'pen'.

"Wot the focks this ere say innit?" demanded Jaqkueee Jimjams in a video clip posted on the paper's website, waving a piece of paper covered in funny squiggly marks.

Sun readers have spent the morning trying to decipher the strage marks on the piece of paper - so far without success.

"WHY OH WHY couldn't this evil BASTARD use a PRINTER?" screamed the paper's editor Dominic Mohan. "It's an INSULT to every single DEAD British HERO! The Sun Says: STRING this vile MONSTER up from a LAMP POST!"

"This issue is ABOVE politics," he added. "But it does PROVE, beyond a shadow of A doubt, that Labour are the NASTIEST FUCKERS to ever stalk God's good EARTH. Vote CONSERVATIVE."

A spokesman for Number Ten later told reporters - and a man from the Sun with a colourful set of crayons - that the prime minister had later done the right thing and sent Ms Jam a proper message of condolence via text message: "soz 4 ur lad :`-("