I NEED YOUR TRUST IN THIS MONEY PLS:

From: wunt102@gmail.com

Subject: I NEED YOUR TRUST IN THIS MONEY PLS:

Date: 19 July 2011 17:44:50 BST

To: undisclosed recipients: ;

Reply-To: wunt102@gmail.com

Attension Dear Clive,

I am Mr Youssouf Kobanne, i am one of the aides to Mr Laurent Gbagbo, the president of Cote D'ivoire,

I am in charge of Finance & protocols in the government of Mr Laurent Gbagbo,the president of Cote D'ivoire,

Sir,you may be surprised of how i came across your name & contact, It is not far fetched, to be precise,I got your contact through plaxo.com,

My reason for contacting you is very simple, sincere, secret & profit oriented if you can maintain absolute confidentiality & secret into the whole arrangement,

You are aware of the recent and present crises going on in my country Cote D'ivoire right now because of the post election crisis between Mr Laurent Gbagbo and Mr Alassane Ouattarra,

THE UNITED NATIONS(UN), UNITED STATES OF AMERICA(USA), AFRICA UNION(AU)EUROPEAN UNION(EU) FRANCE OUR COLONIAL MASTERS AND ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST ARICAN STATES(ECOWAS) HAVE ALL PLACED SANCTIONS ON US(THE GOVERNMENT OF LAURENT GBAGBO, HIS FAMILY AND HIS LOYALISTS,),

Right now, we cannot travell outside Cote D'ivoire and our funds in various banks had been frozend,

To this end, i am contacting you so that i will direct you to where you will Get the considerable amount of USD$ been saved by me on bahalf of the government of Mr Laurent Gbagbo, i will not mention the accurate figure and the name of the banks where the funds are been kept until i get a positive response from you and your willingness to go this message for us,

The money runs into millions of Dollars, you will act as our eyes while going for this mission for us,

It is risk free business, the only impedement here is our inability to travel outside our country to collect the funds from(The banks) where it is been deposited/kept,

I used a different name to save the funds there, this is to ensure that people'e eyes are not on the funds, i did it that way in order not to raise eye brows, i did not use my name or any of the names of the serving personells in the government of Mr Laurent Gbagbo to save the money because of security reasons and coupled with our positions in government,

Declare your interest to this business to me by a return mail & let us follow this business because it is truth that i am telling you and you will see everything to be truth very soon, don't underate/commonise this business please, this is good business for us, so put good interest on it please,

Please sir, maintain adequate secrecy & confidentiality this business deserves, & ask question(s) where you deems necessary.

Don't let anybody know about this deal (This is top secret please) & you should maintain its secrecy & confidentiality it deserves.& ask me question where you are not clear,

I will mention where the funds is been kept in the bank and direct you to where and how you will collect it after hearing from you,

Contact me through my email address at (wunt102@gmail.com)

Mr Youssouf Kobanne

So this sounds like a good deal, but my grandfather always said you can't trust a man who confuses their semi-colons with their full stops (well he did not, he was a tool maker in the ship builders in Belfast and I only meet him once when I was 4, but you get the picture).

Typically Oracle's (previously Sun's) SPAM filters have been very effective in getting rid of these types of email. Even the browsers things its spam. I tried sending it to E-Crime Wales but their spam filters thought it was SPAM and bounced it, very good indeed.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its

recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

e.crime@wales.gsi.gov.uk

(generated from info@ecrimewales.com)

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:

host cluster.gsi.messagelabs.com [85.158.143.19]:

553-Message filtered. Please see the FAQs section on spam

553-at http://www.messagelabs.com/support/ for more

553 information. (#5.7.1)

and this is a harder problem. How do you detect an email that is reporting SPAM[or similar], rather than actually being SPAM.

Why did I pick E-Crime Wales? In the metrics driver world that they exist as I understand it this can be counted as a crime and a contact with the wider world and used to justify their existence which is very worthwhile in my view. I have not doubt every SPAM filter in the world already knows about this lot (well not every).

Hywel Dda Health Board waste my money

As noted in my other blog on running, I have been having some mild stomach cramps. Tests so far indicate it is nothing serious and they are mild (2 on a scale of 1-10), but my doctor thought it worthwhile to get a look into my stomach (from the throat I am glad to hear) and set about arranging an appointment with a Gastroenterology Consultant. All good, these things don't happen overnight.

Today I get a Dear Patient letter from the outpatients appointments co-ordinator that they are going to write to me again with details of an appointment. I would guess the cost of a letter that told me nothing I did not know and did not impart any useful information was probably between 3 and 5 pounds to the NHS and then do the sums.

It does beg the question of how this is allowed to happen and is there no oversight of useless work at all. Since there is no useful information on the letter, I shall put it in the bin.

What is this a picture of ?

So what is this a photo of and where was it taken ?

Arriva rant

This year, I have traveled on Arriva Wales trains maybe 8 times (if it was

more reliable I would use it a lot more). I can only think of 2 occasion when

the train between Birmingham and Machynleth has not been non-trivially late. The

early service seems to be OK, but deteriates through the day. If you

want to get to London for 6pm, leaving on the 5.45am service seems to

be wise. How does Green George cope?

It seems to now be common practise to stop a late train at Shewsbury,

making rail passenger up to an additional hour later. "You are late,

so lets do the 1 thing we can guarrantee will make you later". I must

admit to an internal Victor Meldew moment. Safety related issues which

delay a train and when the reasons are explained are fine by me, such

things happen. Little communcation and stopping a late service before

its destination I struggle with. Restrictions on ticket routing mean

you can't get the next train to Crewe or Stafford and travel ( without

buying a new ticket ) from there as the ticket issued by Arriva

explicitily requires travel via Brimingham.

The newly refusrbished rolling stock are still sheds on rails. Arriva need to focus on basics, i.e. trains

which complete their journey. I would rather travel in a open coal

truck that completed its journey according to the expected schedule

than what is curently on offer from Arriva.

I thought 3 hours contingency would be enough to get from Machynleth

to London to catch a Eurostar, but it seems not. The service is in my

recent experience now so unrealiable that it is useless for any

business use or same day connecting travel such as Eurostar or

flights. A lad infront of me in the "what the hell do we do now" queue

at Shrewsbury station missed a flight from Birmingham International airport.

I did find out that there are international conditions of travel where

on a delayed by one rail provider, if you produce evidence of such,

follow on rail proiders have to accomadate you on the next train at no

cost and Eurostar is included in this. Lesson is if one train operator

has a delayed train, a connecting operator can't charge you for a new

ticket.

For the very helpful Arriva staff at Shrewsbury this was news, but

they did write me a short letter and stamp it which proved helpful with

Eurostar who were very accomadating.

I wish Arriva management had experienced the dearly departed Wrexham

and Shropshire service which I can only remember being more than a few

minutes late once. I don't see evidence of Arriva shaping up under

their new ownership, instead of granting a long franschise, its time

for WAG to point its very generous subsidy elsewhere.

Arriva virdict -> on the ground staff are great, but that is about it.

Have what seem to be routine serious delays been root caused? Are

there clusters of reasons? Have these questions been asked, but Arriva Wales management are either

ignoring the answers or not in a position to do anything about root

causes. I would be interested to know which as a lot of money has been

spent on this service.

Now Arriva Trains Wales is far too unreliable for even well planned business travel, this means more miles on the car to drive to Stafford Station.

Pratchett on Assisted Death

It would have been a hard man who could watch Terry Pratchett's documentary on Assisted Death without feeling any emotion.

I though it was balanced in that it did explore the other option which was to stay alive with a Taxi driver who choose to end his days in a hospice. The big issue here is that an individual of sound mind has a choice.

A friend of mine who died 3 years ago from a lung complaint made an issue that was not discussed clearer to me. I was sitting with him in his home about 3 or 4 days before he died of natural causes in hospital. He explained he was happy with the life he had had, but that he did not care if he did not wake up the next day. His value of life had changed given the pain he was in. I suspect as an individual he would not have chosen to end his life, but he was ready to go. Maybe this is something that is lost on the pro-life campaigners, that for some people their perception of life and its value changes as they experience the pain associated with their ending or disease and the avoidance of pain, suffering and being humiliated by their disease weighs more heavily than the value of their remaining life.

As my father in law, in good health and now in his 80's, so I guess he ponders such things, stated its none of their bloody business, its should be up to me.

Once again, The Daily Mash gets it spot on

Carmarthenshire Council movie : shape of things to come

Calling the police because a pain in the arse is filming your council meetings struck me as over the top. It has got a lot of attention, here and here for example. I have to agree that both Carmarthen Council, its leaders and agents and the police have overreacted to a laughable extent.

In defense of a Council, it is where the rubber meets. Westminister can hide from many of the specifics, but closing a day centre for example which was the specific issue being considered is one which the angry mob of local people can identify with and get upset about. Hard decisions need to be made and Councils have to make and implement more than their fair share of them.

The BIG problem here is that the issue of the Day Centre closure was not debated and that is the important issue that has been missed by some of the reports and the blogger who got arrested was trying to bring attention to. This is the biggest undemocratic action of the Council and the most worrying. Would it surprise you if a planning application went in from a developer who has mates "on the Council" for a day centre redevelopment? Probably not, but if a Council can't be clear about its reasons for such a closure and accept reasoned debate, they are not functional.

However, Councilers in Wales in my experience are quite poor at dealing with rational arguments which are not aligned with their own. The do become defensive very quickly and work hard and fast to shut you out. I was a member of a Community Council for a short while and one of the reasons I left was that when members of the public tried to attend, they were shut out. Trefeurig Community Council is just the same today, as I am sure many others are.

Why the Police did not tell the Council to "get a life" is beyond me. I expect they will both look back and regret this, even if just from a publicity point of view. They were wrong to arrest and I am sure they had much better things to be doing. Will be interesting to see the response David Allan Green gets back from Dyfed Powys Police, appears they had a meeting about it!

This will also be the trigger for Council meetings in Wales being opened up. A year from now it will be common place to have video feed of the majority of Council meetings. no, sorry this is Welsh Councils were are talking about, 5 years. Unless WAG with to put the boot in as Mr Pickles has done on the other side of the Dyke.

Cognitive bias : who wants to swap with the seal

Think mature and well known footballer mentioned a number of times by name on both Have I got News for You and The News Quiz last night for something his wife would not have approved of and then being advised to go to court (I can't imagine he came up with the idea himself) to get a injunction to prevent him being named. He is now better known for being a victim of the Streisand effect. Like most people I don't care where said footballer dips his wick or with who, but the effect of technology and the way society uses it has fascinating consequences for enforcing an aspect of the law which is fundamentally broken.

True Black Swan or should his PR people have seen the use of twitter and parlimentary privilege coming?

I suspect our Rye would at this point in time prefer to swap places with Henry the seal pictured above.

Missed the point of the House of Lords

Even since I held a view on the subject, I have though that the Lords should be a bunch of old duffers drawn from a wide diversity of life paths. I thought the whole purpose of the House of Lords was to scrutinize legislation, suggest improvements and when elected representatives have got it very wrong to stop them from self harming. Having seen a lot of stuff go wrong during your life is probably the best training for scrutinizing legislation there can be. As a public, we are very bad at judging this skill and there is a big risk we will end up applying the same principles to electing Lords as electing MP's, councilers, AM's, etc. The role is different and so I assert the selection process needs to be different. Being accountable is not really the point here.

An elected 2nd house is the last thing you want and really young Clegg should see it.
There may be be reason to change the selection process, for example I see no good reason why being a Bishop in itself is qualification for the 2nd chamber, but that said in some ethical debates they may add value.

What must be avoided is career politicians who have had a career to date as a MP's researcher or case worker being part of the machine that is responsible for picking holes in laws as they are made.

Clegg, suggest you are better off leaving it alone.

An unconscious reply from Arriva Trains Wales

Hard to tell if he got the point about the Arriva Staff being unwilling to move a casualty which they fully understood to be at risk of chocking because of his position between the seats pushing his head forward and potentially leading to a blocked airway. This is not really about advanced 1st aid training or equipment on the train, its about allowing staff to do what their common sense tells them is the right thing to do.

Staff on the train 10 out of 10. Arriva management guidance 4 out of 10.

If the poor unfortunate had died from chocking, then how would a coroner view Arriva management guidelines to its staff not to move a casualty with a restricted airway?

Dr Clive King

03 May 2011

Your Case Reference: ATW-110330-BDV

Dear Dr King

Thank you for contacting us regarding the incident that took place on the last service from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth on 29th March. I was sorry to hear that a customer had become unconscious on our train and needed attention.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the assistance you provided our staff on this occasion as it was well received. It was also good of you to let us know how well you thought the conductor had dealt with the situation and a copy of your correspondence has been forwarded to her direct manager to record and to pass on.

Our train crew only receive basic first aid training and the equipment provided on board the train is very much the same. They are not required to perform more extensive aspects of first aid within their role and are advised to contact our main control in these incidents so an ambulance can be arranged to meet the train.

I do however take on board your detailed account of what could have potentially gone wrong and I have now passed your comments on to our more senior managers for consideration.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to us with your kind words regarding the conductor and thankfully this situation did not escalate to something more serious. If I can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Yours sincerely

Mark Davies

Customer Relations Advisor

Arriva Trains Wales

Virgin Trains better for unconscious passengers

I was on the late Virgin Trains server between Preston and London on Monday night, it was quiet and the train manager had some time, so I asked him about what Virgin trains policy is for their staff to do in relation to an unconscious passenger for whatever reason.

• Check breathing
• Ring though a 1st class ticket from Cornwall to Inverness return on the unconscious casualties credit card [ Would it really surprise you if an office bound Virgin trains revenue director wanted to include that? ]
• Seek any passengers who are suitably equipped to deal with said emergency. He said if a doctor or nurse does not come forward, they would ask for a 1st aid trained person.
• Phone ambulance
• Put passenger in recovery position

What was interesting and different from my Arriva experience last week was that he was very clear that he could move a casualty if the situation warranted it.

Are a train operators 1st aid procedures are high on the list of decision criteria for most potentially unconscious rail travelers? I think not.