Survey Shows Regan and Goneril Unwilling To Support Lear and Cordelia

According to a realm-wide survey heralded today, two-thirds of the former King Lear’s daughters do not see why they should support either their retired father or their jobless sister Cordelia.

“This lack of support for a welfare state among the younger generation will come as a shock to many of the king’s faithful retainers, such as Kent,” proclaimed a herald. “Regan and Goneril object rather strongly to their father’s quaint notion that the state should continue to pay for his upkeep and his hundred knights. And they aren’t too hot on their unemployed sister, either, after they usurped her third of the kingdom. They don’t see why they should keep giving her handouts, just so she can raise a huge brood of feckless brats with her partner, the bone-idle King of France.”

“I’m not happy,” howled the elderly King on receiving the news. “I work bloody hard all my life to build up a decent kingdom and give my kids the best start in life, and this is the thanks I get? All I asked of them was a measly hundred knights to keep me in my declining years, and now I’ve had them taken away all I’m left with a blind old Earl of Gloucester to look after and some bloody Fool who’s no help at all. He just sits there making sarky comments.”

Stop your bloody whingeing and get a job, say under-25s

Regan and Goneril were unrepentant, however.

“This kingdom belongs to us now, yeah, and we got these big plans,” said Regan. “I don’t wanna sound like really harsh, right, but dad’s just a burden, frankly, and if he in’t got the decency to lie down quietly under a bush and die then that’s like totally not our problem.”

Goneril had equally harsh words for her weak sister Cordelia: “Mate, it’s a dog-eat-dog world right? If you’d like followed us into Canterbury Business School instead of doing some noddy Courtly Romance degree at Lindisfarne Uni, see, you might have learned to look out for yourself. You can’t just expect to live comfortably, right, on a handout from an irresponsible dad who didn’t give a shit about making financial provisions for his retirement.”

“As for that malingering bloody Earl of Gloucester,” added Regan, “I read somewhere that most so-called ‘blind’ people have like 20% vision actually, or something like that. There’s loads of jobs he could do, prob’ly, the sponging bugger, if he got up off his arse and looked.”

China Demands Arrest Of Nobel Prize Ringleaders

The Chinese government is still at something of a loss to understand why their Norwegian counterparts have still not rounded up the ringleaders of the Nobel Foundation, after they outrageously awarded the Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.

“This award is an obscenity,” shrieked foreign minister Yang Jiechi. “If - as the racist Norwegian authorities claim - the Nobel Foundation is truly an independent organisation over which they exert no control, why on earth have they not locked them all up and thrown away the key?”

Lucy Liu is not related to Liu Xiaobo, says China, so there's no need to bother yourselves about him

Fears are growing in the world’s democracies that, if the Chinese do not obtain satisfaction from the Norwegians, they may react against this overt act of bigotry by switching their vast industrial capacity to making things that actually work.

“The only thing keeping Western economies in business is consumer knowledge that the products they manufacture might very well continue to function satisfactorily after 366 days,” warned the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “If the Chinese should break into that market, frankly, my advice is to start planting rice fast.”

The US and UK governments are in urgent talks with the Norwegians, pointing out that all that give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death crap is really rather passé nowadays.

US Special Forces’ Tactical Manual Now Available As T-Shirt

US special forces carry their tactical manual with them at all times, in case they have trouble remembering the finer points

Following the unfortunate death of British hostage Linda Norgrove at the hands of the American forces who were supposed to be rescuing her, Pentagon sources have taken the unprecedented step of publishing in full their elite forces’ hitherto-classified tactical training document in the form of a 100% cotton t-shirt, to fit all sizes up to XXXL.

The sad demise of kidnapped aid worker Ms Norgrove, who appears to have been killed by a grenade thrown by one of her supposed rescuers, is covered by Part I of the machine-washable manual, which covers the assault doctrine of ‘KILL ‘EM ALL'. Part II, which contains detailed instructions for the mopping-up phase, advises troops to ‘Let God Sort ‘Em Out!’

Meanwhile, reports are emerging of a rift between the unit, who mounted the operation in a part of Afghanistan nominally under US control, and the British SAS advisors who accompanied them. MoD sources are privately saying that the SAS team would have been keen to implement their own expert tactics, claiming that the best chance for victory lay in openly daring Ms Norgrove’s captors to kill her if they were hard enough. They were, however, overruled by the US strike team, who instead placed their faith in small-unit tactics learned the hard way by their counterparts in Vietnam forty years ago.

“We had to destroy the hostage in order to save it,” confirmed a Pentagon source.

Alan Johnson Now Fully Conversant With ‘%’ Button

Newly-appointed shadow chancellor Alan Johnson announced today that he is now fully conversant with all of the functions on a basic calculator, including the difficult ‘%’ button, and expressed the hope that Treasury officials will allow him to start learning how to use a big scientific model on Monday.

Mr Milburn says a 10-digit calculator will be much better for getting to grips with the economy

“Mr Miliband says he’s very pleased with my progress,” beamed Mr Johnson, “Especially when this time last week I didn’t have the foggiest idea what an economic was, coming from a trade union background and that.”

The former postman amazed reporters with his grasp of numbers, explaining that you can add, subtract, divide and multiply them as many times as you want to make new ones. The pinnacle of his press conference was Mr Johnson’s slow but determined demonstration of compound interest.

“Apparently you can work it out backwards, too,” he assured hacks, “But my advisors assure me that’s just like really geeky and nobody’s ever found a use for it.”

“What I want now is a really, really good scientific calculator,” he added. “That posh Mr Balls and his wife, Mrs Balls, invited me round to dinner last night and - over a hoity-toity entrée of raw puffer fish and crisps they said they made especially for me - they showed me their really nice one. It’s a Sharp, with a line playback feature in case you get lost in particularly hard sums, and two stats modes – I suppose that’s for if you don’t like the answer you get from one mode, you might get a better one from the other. I like that. I’m going to ask Mr Miliband to get me one.”

“And it’s got a brilliant slidey cover, too, with a slot for a crib sheet,” he added. “So when I stand up in parliament with my shiny new calculator, I bet I can make that smarmy nerd George Osborne look really stupid with that. Or, if I’m like really bored, I can have fun trying to put it on back to front.”

“Excuse me, but I feel just a teeny-weeny bit sick,” he concluded. “When I come back from the bathroom, let me tell you about my really clever idea - which I worked out all by myself - that I can prove the damage the government’s cuts will cause, using something called a cosine.”

Serbs Celebrate Tolerance, Freedom Of Expression And Assembly With Anti-Gay Riot

Serbia demonstrated its readiness for EU membership today by holding the first Gay Pride march in the capital, Belgrade, for nine years. Its citizens then demonstrated why the saying ‘as unbigoted as a Serb’ has not yet gained common currency, by bombarding the marchers with petrol bombs before setting fire to the headquarters of the Democratic Party.

Serbian Orthodox Church patriarch Irinej Gavrilovica had earlier urged his deeply religious countrymen to exercise restraint.

“I beg all good Christian Serbs to show tolerance and respect for these perverted, unnatural abominations,” he told the faithful in an address on Friday. “Don’t kill them. Ask yourselves what Jesus would have done, and content yourselves with just kicking the evil gay crap out of them.”

Serbs hope their quaint national custom of murderous hate will flourish in the EU

Just before the march the head of the EU mission in Serbia, Vincent Degert, addressed 1,000 gay activists in downtown Belgrade.

“We are here to celebrate the Serbian values of tolerance, freedom of expression and assembly,” observed M. Degert, before sending them out beyond the safety cordon of riot police and armoured vehicles with his best wishes for their survival.

“I’ve been good. It’s been fifteen years since I last slaughtered anyone,” explained protester Petar Demonić moments later, as he hurled a blazing bottle at the marchers. “And even then it was only a couple of dozen Muslims. Can’t I kill some queers just this once, for old times’ sake?”

“I’m really looking forward to the EU,” he added cheerfully, as he headbutted a policeman. “Five hundred million people. So little time.”