More misery ahead for UK consumers of electricity and gas (above), who have been consistently over-charged and ripped off for years. Britain’s “big 6” energy companies have rebuffed calls to cut prices, despite a halving of the wholesale cost of energy over the past year. OFGEM, the industry regulator, has been pressing the companies to reduce prices after it was revealed that the companies will be earning £170 profit each dual fuel customer over the next year. Over the past 3 years they have earned an average of £110 per customer per year. Alistair Buchanan (pictured below), OFGEM’s chief executive, wrote to the companies last month telling them that “they owe it to their customers to better explain their pricing position to them”.

But replies to Mr Buchanan’s letter published yesterday showed that the big 6 — British Gas, EON, Scottish Power, Scottish and Southern Energy, EDF Energy and RWE — have no plans to trim prices for 26 million households this year. One company even warned that price increases could be pending. This is despite the fact that the amount they are paying for energy on the wholesale market has halved in the past 12 months to the lowest level in almost 3 years. So yet more larceny by this cartel of arrogant energy companies as bloody usual. These greedy companies should be brought to heel – if not by the toothless regulator, then by the government. And as for the chief executive of OFGEM – if the best he can do in trying to uphold the interests of consumers is to write pathetic letters asking these thieves to “better explain their pricing position”, he should be fired into the bargain. He’d probably end up working for one of the big 6.

Speaking in the Iranian capital, Tehran, “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pictured above) said the Holocaust was “a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim”. He ranted on at worshippers at Tehran University : “The so-called Holocaust was used as a pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime and is false. It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim.” Interesting though that this cretin is the first to describe Israeli attacks on Gaza as a “holocaust”. He can’t have it both ways. But at the end of the day, all this lunatic is doing is to ensure that the moment it looks like he’s getting close to having a nuclear weapon at his disposal, the Americans will take that weapon AND him out. That’s if the Israelis don’t do it first.

The Lockerbie bomber’s online publication of documents he claims clear his name, has been condemned by Scotland’s law chief and victims’ families. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi (pictured above in the bosom of his family, a pleasure he denied his victims when he blew them out of the sky), who was released early from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya, has set up a website detailing an abandoned attempt to appeal his conviction for murder. Scotland’s Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini has deplored the move accusing Megrahi of seeking a “retrial by media”. It’s a pity that Scotland’s Lord Advocate hadn’t been more proactive a few weeks ago and tried to prevent the release of a convicted mass murderer. The naivety of some of these public officials beggars belief.

Pictured above is a reather grainy photograph of the late Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher. The reason it’s grainy is that it was taken 25 years agoo. The reason she’s dead is that she was murdered while on duty, outside the Libyan embassy in London, by a Libyan official who fired from within that embassy, then subsequently weaseled out of the country under diplomatic immunity. And now the government has decided to send UK police to Libya to train their officers, in a move which will provoke “disgust and anger” among the ranks, according to the Chairman of the British Police Federation. Paul McKeever said the scheme to use UK officers to train their Libyan counterparts was “naïve and insensitive”. But the Government has reportedly agreed with Libya tha PC Fletcher’s killer would not be tried in Britain, in a deal which has angered many police officers. It also raises another question : in the wake of the Megrahi release and now this, is there no limit to how low our politicians will stoop when it comes to licking Gaddafi’s arse for oil ?

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