But now a councillor in Whitby, North Yorkshire, has made one that really is - Labour's Simon Parkes says he fathered a child with an alien.

The married father-of-three, who represents Stakesby, said his wife had rowed with him after revealing he had a child called Zarka with an alien he refers to as the Cat Queen.

In the 2000 census and since, more than 20 million people said their origin was American.   Those who so answered are heavily concentrated in greater Appalachia, Florida and Texas, have a strong populist streak and share cultural ties that frighten outsiders: “To be perfectly blunt,” wrote Nate Silver, identifying your origin as American is “a pretty good proxy for folks that a lot of us elitists would usually describe as ‘rednecks.’ ”

Yet it would be a mistake to confuse the self-declared ethnically American (call them American-Americans?) with the Confederacy.  The areas where American ethnicity is claimed are also the ones that rebelled against the rebels, such as West Virginia, which was so pro-Union that it seceded from Virginia in 1863.

Over porterhouse steak and cherry pie at a desert estate in California earlier this month, President Obama delivered a stern lecture to President Xi Jinping about China’s disputes with its neighbors.  If it is going to be a rising power, he scolded, it needs to behave like one.

The next morning, Mr. Xi punched back, accusing the United States of the same computer hacking tactics it attributed to China.  It was, Mr. Obama acknowledged, "a very blunt conversation."

The first George Bush moved gracefully in foreign capitals, while Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush related to leaders as politicians, trying to understand their pressures and constituencies.

The magniloquent wrath of North Korea rained down on a group of 'scum' defectors today after they published a report claiming copies of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' were handed to its officials as a leadership guide.

The defectors claimed in the report that leader Kim Jong-un had handed out copies of the Nazi dictator's manifesto to top officials for inspiration.

Just some interesting dots.  We'll leave it to our friends at the Times to tell us if and how they're connected.

A woman trying to live on nothing but water for up to six months is calling it quits after 47 days.

Naveena Shine, 65, from Redmond, Seattle, stopped eating on May 3 in a bid to explore breatharianism - the concept that food is not necessary and sunlight provides all of the nourishment the body needs.

Fallon: Last week Obama asked China's president to stop spying on Americans.  And the Chinese leader responded, "You first."

Leno: The good news is Tim Tebow got a job playing for Boston.  The bad news is, it's the Patriots.  So now the IRS is investigating him.

Six teenagers and the father of one of them have been found guilty of kicking a volunteer linesman to death in the Netherlands.

The court in Lelystad sentenced the 50-year-old father to six years in prison.

Five teenagers were sentenced to two years in youth detention and another was sentenced to one year.  All seven are expected to appeal.

Judges in Lelystad sentenced the 50-year-old father, identified only as El-Hasan D, to six years in prison.  Five teenage players drew two-year sentences in youth detention for their roles in the December attack and another was sentenced to a year.  A seventh player, age 15, was sentenced to 30 days detention for assault.
. . .
The attack took place Dec. 2 in the Dutch city of Almere after the home team, Buitenboys, drew 2-2 with Nieuw Sloten, which is based in a mostly immigrant neighborhood of Amsterdam.

Roosevelt had not intended to appear at the Convention, but when he discovered that the long distance telephone from Chicago to Oyster Bay, by which his managers conferred with him, was being tapped, he changed his mind.  He perceived, also, that there was a lack of vigorous leadership among those managers which demanded his presence.  By going, he would call down much adverse criticism, even from some of those persons whose support he needed.  On the other hand, he would immensely strengthen his cause in Chicago, where the mere sight of him would stimulate enthusiasm.

A still more extraordinary piece of news came from Hooker to the effect that he had in some way intercepted a telegram "from Murray Crane to his nephew saying that Crane and Barnes would 'fight or ruin' and that it was now 'use any means and sacrifice the Republican Party.'  Had it not been for the way he told us, I couldn't have believed such a thing possible."

The Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, has appointed a member of the hardline Islamist group Gamaa Islamiya to the governorship of Luxor – a tourist city in which militants associated with the group killed 58 tourists in 1997.

The symbolism of the appointment has enraged Egypt's sidelined non-Islamist opposition, who see it as further evidence that Morsi is unconcerned about the country's increasing polarisation.

Tourism is the lifeblood of Luxor, home to some of Egypt's most dramatic ancient temples and pharaonic tombs, including that of Tutankhamun.  The city has been hit hard by the downtown in foreign visitors during the past two years of turmoil.

President Barack Obama's approval rating dropped eight percentage points over the past month, to 45%, the president's lowest rating in more than a year and a half, according to a new national poll.

The CNN/ORC International survey released Monday morning comes as the White House has been reacting to controversies over a massive U.S. government surveillance program; the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of tea party and other conservative groups who applied for tax-exempt status; the administration's handling of last September's attack in Benghazi that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead; and the Justice Department's secret collection of journalists' phone records as part of a government investigation into classified leaks.

Obama's job approval ratings have been drifting steadily downward since January, eliminating the gains that occurred during the fall reelection campaign and just before the inauguration.  The Pollster chart's estimate of Obama's approval rating, based on all public polls, stands at 46.7 percent as of this writing, just slightly higher than the 46.4 percent recorded in early July 2012.

. . . But other polls do not show as steep a decline as CNN - The issue is mostly that CNN's prior survey, showing Obama's approval at 53 percent, was something of an outlier. Of 36 other polls logged in May, none except CNN had Obama's approval higher than 51 percent.

When the G8 world leaders fly into Northern Ireland for their major summit there on June 17, they will see a vista of progress that has been created to deceive them.

According to Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, local councils have hired workers to paint fake shop fronts stocked with attractive but illusory produce.

They have also been contracted to cover derelict buildings with colorful billboards, the better to hide the real economic hardship being felt in towns and villages close to the five star golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month.
. . .
In the one-street town of Belcoo, the changes haven't just been cosmetic.  A grand deception has been crafted to fool the eye of any passing stranger.  At a former well known butcher's shop, colored stickers applied to the windows show a packed meat counter and suggest that business is booming.

Across the street another empty shop has been set up to look like a supply store.  From the window of a speeding limousine it's sure to make a favorable impression.

"I hate film festivals," Mr. McAleer said.  "There is not one film shown that anyone would disagree with at a Manhattan dinner party."

"Pandora's Promise" is not an exception, Mr. McAleer said, adding: "Nuclear power has become semi-respectable among environmentalists.  It's now a way of attacking coal and gas."

But the most controversial part of the bill might be the specific actual misdemeanors that won’t stop an undocumented immigrant from being more or less instantly legalized: They include, not just DUI offenses, but also domestic violence and child abuse.

The bill’s authors apparently think that staying on the right side of the law is an insuperable burden and that having a criminal record is an ordinary part of being an American.

1. We are aiding the rebels now that they are losing, instead of when they might have won.  Go figyah!

The worst of the leaks took place in London, where Tyler Kent, a bright, handsome, but twisted young man, worked in the code room of the American Embassy.  Convinced that a vast Jewish conspiracy was pushing the United States into an unwanted war, and that to help the enemy of the Jews was to help his own country, Kent took telegrams from the embassy and passed them to a pro-Nazi group.  By various channels, they reached Germany.  The German ambassador in Italy wired home a report of Roosevelt's reply to Churchill's request for 50 destroyers only seven days after it was received in London.  On May 20, however, Scotland Yard plugged the leak.  It arrested members of the pro-Nazi group for espionage and, with State Department approval, searched Kent's rooms. (p. 494)

Questions were raised Friday about security procedures at the ultra-secret National Security Agency, after it emerged that Edward Snowden, the contract employee who leaked details of the agency’s broad-scale data gathering on Americans, exceeded his authorized access to computer systems and smuggled out Top Secret documents on a USB drive — a thumb-sized data storage device banned from use on secret military networks.
. . . .
NSA officials “were laying down on their job if they didn’t disable the USB port,” the specialist said, referring to the small socket on the side of a computer where thumb drives are plugged in.
. . .
“There is easily available software to do that,” said the security specialist, noting that there were also low-tech, more permanent means available.

“I have seen places where they used a hot glue gun to block it,” he said of the USB port.

Once reporters started coming out of colleges and universities, however, they were shaped by the leftist perspective of those institutions.  These perspectives, once marginal in American public discourse, became increasingly prominent in the press and television news shows.  Now the old progressive view that the press should not just report facts, but mold public opinion to achieve certain political ends, served an ideology fundamentally adverse to the free-market, liberal-democratic foundations of the American Republic.

Edited to add: It’s possible, of course, that Krugman simply made a rash mistake and posted before he’d realized what the facts were.  That happens to everyone from time to time.  But this is the same Paul Krugman who has urged us repeatedly not to give anyone else the benefit of this kind of doubt, so a decent respect for Krugman’s worldview really demands that we dismiss out of hand any temptation to cut him some slack.

Krugman’s problem is that he long ago decided to monetize his Nobel Prize.  Every Nobel Prize winner in Economics has lots of opportunities to do so.  Most decline.   Krugman decided to convert his Nobel into the currency of political power, exercised through his platform at the Times.  That meant discarding all the attributes that got him the Nobel in the first place: careful research, a scrupulous regard for details, honesty in responding to opposing arguments, and so on.  That’s why there is so little respect for Krugman-the-pundit (versus the old academic Krugman) among economists these days.

When is a bribe not a bribe?  Apparently, it’s when taxpayers’ money is used to stop NHS staff blowing the whistle on clinical malpractice and criminal negligence in hospitals.

This week it was revealed that the health service has spent more than £2 million on 52 secret severance deals containing strict gagging clauses to prevent disgruntled ex-employees speaking out.
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NHS employees who think that the public have a right to know what is going on in our hospitals are first being intimidated into silence and then, if all else fails, given a fat cheque to go away and keep quiet.