No Football.

With only 8 teams left in the World Cup there has been no football today and there will be no football until the quarter finals begin on Friday. Although traumatic this break does give me some time to concentrate on other things.

In 1966 the Jules Rimet trophy was actually stolen. After being sent on a tour of the UK to promote the tournament ahead of the World Cup it was stolen from Westminster Central Hall. Following a failed attempt to get a ransom for the trophy the thieves dumped it. It was found by a dog called Pickles in a garden in the Beulah Hill in South East London. This was exactly opposite to the restaurant where I celebrated my grandmother's birthday on Sunday. As losing the trophy is a definite no-no for countries hosting the World Cup I thought this story was well known in tournament circles. Therefore it provided a great way for me to reveal the location of the restaurant without putting a big neon sign over the place saying "Come and annoy me." So yes I do have do some counter intelligence to just to preform a simple task like going out to dinner. My life's weird, I thought we'd covered that.

The G20 Summit in Toronto was accompanied by some serious rioting. The windows of banks and shops were smashed, a police car was set on fire and over 600 people were arrested. That high number of arrests has apparently caused the Canadian legal system to collapse with people remaining in custody for prolonged period of time, getting lost in the system and being separated from their personal possessions. All this confusion means that it is difficult to tell exactly what happened. However back in 2007 the Canadian police were caught red-handed using undercover police officers to incite and carry out acts of violence during protests against the SPP. This has prompted wild accusations that seemingly everybody was an undercover police officer. It is clear though that undercover police officers were out in their hundreds if not thousands. They all appeared to be wearing the same "uniform" of jeans, sweatshirts, backpacks and what looked like Ipod headphones in one ear. That's remarkably similar to how I was dressed at the London G20 protests and would indicate a significant level of intelligence sharing between Britain's Metropolitan Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

I'm trying to read up on this US/Russian spy ring thing. I've not had a chance to look at all the details but it sounds fascinating like something that's come straight out of a spy movie.

After all the nonsense about immigration caps and torture inquires there has actually been some legitimate policy news in Britain today. The Conservative Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has announced plans to reduce the number of criminals being sent to prison. As the Conservatives are traditionally the party that likes to be tough of criminals this change in policy is being promoted as a move by the Conservative party a way from being the nasty party to a more caring and sharing, liberal party. The reality however is much more simple. Britain is running out of prison places and it doesn't have any money to build new prison places.