Republican Presidential hopeful Herman Cain just burst into rendition of “He Looked Beyond My Faults” at a press conference:

Nothing to do with the allegations swirling around his campaign today then…

No. 10 pours cold water the prospect of a Fox return:

“Well, he resigned only a few days ago.”

As the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill makes it way through Parliament, honorable Members are having fun tacking bits and bobs to the legislation. Tory MP Matthew Offord has inserted a new clause calling for mandatory sobriety for those involved in alcohol related criminality.

Presumably this will be applicable to those involved in scotch fuelled scuffles at Tory conference?

In their campaign against global greed the occupiers of St Paul’s have claimed another scalp – the Dean of the Cathedral Graham Knowles. Another victory against tyranny!

In other news the City remains unaffected by the eyesore…

Graphic via @MShapland

Prezza is trying to fight the allegations that he spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave with government credit cards. He has complained to the Cabinet Office that his spending under £500 has been released and denies that the spending was him. Could this upset be around the £400 spent at Hull’s Mr Chus Chinese in April 2004? Prezza denies it was him yet told the BBC in 2008 that it was his “favourite Chinese restaurant in the whole world.” So who was it then Prezza?

UPDATE: Some speculation that the Deputy Prime Minister was entertaining the Chinese Ambassador at Mr Chus. Classic Prescott. 

He was asked about it in Parliamentary Question in 2008, but refused to say how much was spent. There are also a large amount of restaurant bills that just scraped under the £500 limit such as the  £468.70 at posh champagne bar Kettners and the £493.08 of scoff at Le Volle Gas. Funny that…

On the day the German Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble declared war on the City of London by announcing the EU will take “a global lead in introducing a financial transaction tax to curb speculative trading”, maybe the left will finally have something to get angry about in regard to the EU’s stranglehold over the UK’s sovereignty…

Emily Nomates, formerly of this parish, has got hold of Treasury documents over at CityAM that show “UK authorities are currently locked in fractious negotiations with Brussels” over the whether the plans set out in the Vickers Review are legal under new EU capital rules. The whole story is here but essentially the Treasury suggest their plans to reform the banking sector are being blocked from above.

Maybe the occupiers should target Brussels for letting the bankers off…

John Hemming said after his wife’s trial last week that the cat that she had stolen from the home of his mistress was “probably dead”, but good news: it’s alive! Mrs Hemming got a nine month suspended sentence and the fact that the cat was never found left a bitter after taste in this bizarre and surreal story.

Turns out we get a happy ending after all…

The now famous global warming graph (top), popularised by Al Gore, shows rising global temperatures. Now a well funded team called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project (BEST) led by Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, has been accused of falsifying data by a respected member. A repeat of the Climate Research Unit debacle at the University of East Anglia.

Professor Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Muller’s claims were a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis – she has 30 years research experience and is the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers. She has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has actually stopped – as seen in the more accurate chart (bottom).

One international controversy over research fakery at the Climate Research Unit of the UEA by politically motivated scientitsts is bad enough, now a second case of fakery has been uncovered suggests the global warming racket is unravelling. The age of the progressive consensus on climate change, which was bought into by Cameron’s Conservative Party, was based on deliberate falsifications.

“Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The claims by the likes of George Monbiot and others that the respectable scientific world was at one and those of us sceptical of the alarmist’s claims were in denial ring increasingly hollow. Public opinion is turning sceptical, suspecting rightly that this is just another racket to raise taxes. Temperatures have not been rising for a decade contrary to the global warming theories under-pinning the outlandish claims of the alarmists. Our supposed invisible carbon threat reminds Guido of the emperor’s new clothes – seen only by fools deceived by charlatans.

See also: CRU Boss Stands Aside, Queens University Blocking Data FOI, Time to Defund CRU’s Global Cooling Deniers, Climate Change Alarmism is Snow Joke

The press smell money-grubbing by Blair in Kazakhstan, Tony Blair Associates is opening up shop in the capital city Astana. Cherie has been “meeting Kazakh women” on a couple of visits the latest of which, hosted by an investment bank, was “to talk about women and economic development and their role in business”. Charitable humanitarian that she is…

Lakshmi Mittal the billionaire Tony crony who, after Prime Minister Blair lobbied on his behalf with the Romanian government, gave the Labour Party £4 million, has extensive interests in the region. Mittal employs 100,000 Kazakhs in local mines where an average of 30 miners a year die working for him. The Mail reports that a whole gang of Tony’s cronies are circling around the resource rich state; Mandelson’s friend Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch, London-based Israeli Alexander Mashkevich an associate of Lord Levy, Lord Renwick of investment bankers JP Morgan – £2 million-a-year paymasters to Blair – coincidentally all attended an investors meeting addressed by Blair. Even Alastair Campbell is proffering advice on spin to the Kazakhs.

Blair says he isn’t making any moolah from the Kazakhs, yet he is opening an office. Presumably the £2 million a year from JP Morgan is for Blair to open high level doors to opportunities. So Blair is technically not lying, just being disingenuous…