Shed a tear, gentle reader, for the harsh judgement handed out by a county court to one of those popular car-clamping companies.
Poor clamper Jason White, who was, just doing his job for his Whites Car Park Solutions firm was horrified recently to find that an Indian restaurant, Chillies, next to a permit-only car park he was paid to police in Andover, Hants, had put up a sign warning its customers that they faced a £150 release fee if they parked there. Continue reading
BLESS
The banking industry is in urgent need of some clever marketing and PR, it seems….
BE VERY AFRAID
The success of a self employed photographer in winning an out of court settlement of £2000 from British Gas for wasting his time can only encourage others to seek….
TAKE ON THE BBC
Meanwhile the BBC’s blustering and bullying debt-collectors, TV Licensing should be taking note of the above….
NAFF MARKETING STILL ALIVE AND WELL
The naff and misleading marketing con of sending out a fake editorial with a fake personalised stick-on note is still finding favour….
TUNA BOYCOTT
Ethical Consumer magazine has called for a boycott on tuna sandwiches from Tesco, Boots, Greggs and Subway….
BIGGER THAN YOURS
Budget hotel chain Travelodge have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that rival budget hotel chain Premier Inn was misleadingly claiming to have….
JUST SILLY
Sad to see that actress Emma Thompson, appearing on an American chat show, chose to amuse her audience by claiming that homosexuals were stoned and flogged on….
I’LL SAVES YER, OLIVE
Endorsement for the power of cartoon characters in marketing to children comes from researchers at Mahidol University, Bangkok….
HOLIDAY COMPLAINTS
A study by Which? Legal Service has found that 10% of holiday travellers have made a complaint about a trip in the last three years. Half of the complainers were unhappy….
NOT FROM CHEDDAR
More than a third of the “cheddar” cheese sold in the UK is imported, claims the British Cheese….
Forty American billionaires, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Lucas and Michael Bloomberg, have pledged to give to charity at least half of their fortunes, thought to be worth around £100 billion. Most will go to world health.
Charitable giving totals 2.2% of Gross Domestic Product in the USA, compared with 1.3% in Britain.
Our Queen has been urged to use her 2012 diamond jubilee to persuade every member of the public to give one per cent of their income to charity, a move that would raise more than £4 billion.
Katie Piper, a former TV presenter and model who was badly disfigured in a horrific acid attack has started a new charity for burns victims.
Piper, 26, had acid thrown in her face in March 2008 by a thug, Stefan Sylvestre, hired by a jealous ex-boyfriend, Daniel Lynch. Both men are now serving life sentences.
The Katie Piper Foundation will lobby for more of the groundbreaking plastic surgery that surgeons used to save Piper’s face to be made more widely available, and for people to accept that disfigured people are still people.
More than half of the suicides of children aged 10-14 are connected to bullying.
A study by charity Beatbullying.org also found that the usual venue for the persecution was school, with more cases of bullying by email, and on social networking sites coming to light.
The raising of VAT in January to 20% will hit charities, which cannot claw the money back on purchases.
The measure will generate more than £13 billion a year for the Treasury and cost charities £150 million.
The former financial director at the Foundation for Integrated Health, a charity founded by the Prince of Wales, has been convicted of theft, fraud and money-laundering and jailed for three years.
George Gray, 50, who was paid £80,000 per annum admitted stealing £250,000 over two and a half years from the charity, which was set up by the Prince in 1993 to champion the use of complementary therapies, and which has now closed.
Also jailed for three years was Moses Bushiri, 48, an asylum seeker from Birundi in central Africa, who swindled charity grant bodies out of £42,000.
Bushiri claimed the money was for his “refugee charity” and backers included the BBC’s Children in Need.
The RSPCA persecutes innocent animal owners to generate the publicity that keeps donations of £115 million a year rolling in.
This is a view of some critics who have noted a number of questionable actions launched by the RSPCA, specifically the confiscation of a herd of ponies from a retired builder, who then hanged himself, and the three-year pursuit through the courts of a horse breeder, which recently resulted in his acquittal and being told that he could leave the court with an untarnished reputation.
According to columnist Christopher Booker, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the charity is not the organisation it was and its donors should be told of its failings. A self-help group, the-shg.org, has been set up to advise on RSPCA persecution.
Battersea Dogs and Cats Home put down a third of the dogs they took in last year, most of those because they were bull terriers too dangerous to re-house.
The number of such dogs has increased nine-fold in the last fifteen years. In a recent successful prosecution by the RSPCA a man who threw a live fox he had trapped to his Staffordshire bull terrier was convicted of causing unnecessary suffering.