Five foul-mouthed parrots have been separated after learning to swear at a Lincolnshire zoo.
The parrots, named Billy, Elsie, Eric, Jade and Tyson, joined Lincolnshire Wildlife Park’s colony of 200 grey parrots in August, but shortly after, they started encouraging each other to swear.
Steve Nicols, CEO of the wildlife park said that they saw it very quickly and they’re quite used to parrots swearing but they’d never had five at the same time and that most parrots clam up outside, but for some reason, these five relished it.
The parrots have since been distributed to other regions of the park so they don’t set each other off.
No one had complained about the parrots, but they were separated for the sake of young visitors and in the hope that they would pick up natural calls from other African greys.
He said that people had come to them about it but they thought it was highly entertaining but that nobody had complained about it, and he said that when a parrot tells you to f**k off, it entertains people very favourably and that it’s brought a big smile to an extremely difficult year.
The park is also home to parrot Chico, who made headlines in September after learning how to sing a range of pop songs, including Beyonce’s ‘If I Were A Boy’.
Mind you, I don’t blame the parrots for swearing, I’d be swearing as well if I was stuck in a cage. Mind you, I’d pay extra to see talking swearing parrots and they should all be put back together – we don’t separate humans when they swear.
Swearing parrots are amusing and they have the right to swear at us – you humans get in the cage and see how long it is before you swear at your keepers and the zoo is missing the gimmick – after-hours tickets to see the sweary parrots, they could even charge extra for attractions like chimps that fling poo at visitors and the animals that are always shagging in public.
And you can’t blame them for swearing – after months of COVID lockdown, my swearing has got progressively worse as well and these Polly’s clearly wasn’t wanting a f**king cracker.
President Trump’s tax returns, or lack thereof, were in the limelight at the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, as moderator Chris Wallace pushed him on a startling revelation from The New York Times this week that Donald Trump paid only $750 yearly in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
Donald Trump unsurprisingly deflected while also asserting he’s paid millions in federal income taxes and admitted wanting to avoid doing so, stirring another uneasy exchange, well, one of many with Democratic presidential candidate and ex-Vice President Joe Biden.
After Chris Wallace asked the question again about Donald Trump’s taxes, the President disclosed that he doesn’t want to pay tax and said that before he was President, he was a private developer and that he was a private business person and like every other private person, unless they’re stupid, they go through the laws and that’s what it was.
Joe Biden said that he’s clever because he can take advantage of the tax code and that he does take advantage of the tax code and that’s why he was going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts and make sure that they invest in fact in the people who need the assistance because people out there need help.
Donald Trump interrupted Joe Biden and asked repeatedly why he didn’t do that in the last 25 years? He then continued and said it was because he was the President, screwing things up, but the President kept talking over him, at which point Joe Biden said that he was the worst President America has ever had.
Even staunch right-wing commentator Bill O’Reilly, who regularly comes to Donald Trump’s defence, called out Trump’s deflection.
“Show us your tax returns,” Biden said twice as Donald Trump stumbled through his response to Wallace’s question.
Hours before the debate on Tuesday, Joe Biden posted his 2019 federal and state tax returns on his official campaign website, along with those of his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).
Joe Biden’s tax returns for years prior to 2019 were already publicly known, but Donald Trump has broken with decades of precedent and declined to release his tax returns despite saying he would do so.
This is the time that people should be united, making their voices heard, but instead, they would rather fight and tear each other down.
Donald Trump is good at avoiding everything, including paying his taxes, addressing white supremacy and well human decency, but I can see why people support such a despicable man, with his extramarital affairs, his treatment of asylum seekers, his greed and selfishness in regards to anything financial – I mean, I think I’ve got most of them covered.
I’m not even trying to put the man down, he does that all by himself.
He’s supposed to be the President of the United States, but there’s nothing presidential about him, with his lies and he never answers anything directly because he’s simply disrespectful to people.
He’s a bully, nothing more and he’s made the US the laughing stock of the rest of the world, but the people love him, perhaps we should rename him Jesus!
And Donald Trump has no understanding of the world that we live in. He talks down to people, lies and cheats on his taxes and he’s very good at manipulating everyone into believing he’s some sort of God.
Angelica Gaitan, 46, was discovered unconscious and suffering from hypothermia off the coast of Colombia.
She was found by fisherman Rolando Visbal and a friend floating 1.2 miles off the town of Puerto Colombia on the Atlantic side of the country at about 6 am on Saturday.
It said that her first words after being saved were “I was born again, God did not want me to die.”
She was brought ashore where locals tended to her before she was taken to hospital.
Angelica Gaitan was reunited with her family as she told investigators what had happened to her since vanishing two years ago.
During her time in the sea, she stayed afloat for eight hours as sharks circled her as she drifted in and out of consciousness, but then with time beginning to run out, she had a miraculous stroke of luck when she was spotted by a fisherman who initially thought she was a log until she waved her hand to call for help.
Rolando told Columbia’s Caracol Radio that they nearly didn’t go out fishing that day after issues with his boat’s engine stalled an earlier trip and he said that if they hadn’t had the problem with the spark plug on Friday, they wouldn’t have gone fishing that day and the woman would be dead at sea.
He said that Gustavo had warned him to be careful with the trunk and he started to turn about 15 degrees to the right, then to his surprise, the trunk moved and he thought it was something supernatural.
Angelica was pulled towards the boat in a lifebuoy that the pair had tossed to her and which she used her last ounce of strength to put on.
The pair tried to have a conversation with her and gave her water.
Rolando said Angelica didn’t say anything when they dragged her on to the deck and she was so frail, he believes she would have drowned if she had spent any longer in the sea and he said, so it turned out that they didn’t catch any fish that day either, but they fished a life and they believe that this was God’s intention.
Mystery continues to surround precisely what happened during that time with her version of fleeing domestic abuse at the hands of her partner disputed by her daughter.
Angelica says that after living rough then being forced to leave a refuge, she decided to take her own life and hurled herself into the sea.
She said that for 20 years she had been in a toxic relationship and that the abuse started in the first pregnancy and that he would beat her and violently abuse her.
She said that in her second pregnancy the abuse continued and she could not get away from him because the girls were small, and that numerous times she would report it, but that the police only took him away for 24 hours and that when he was in the house again, the assaults returned.
She said the day she decided to leave the house was after a vicious attack and that in September 2018 he broke her face and attempted to kill her, but that she managed to flee.
She lived rough in the city of Barranquilla for six months before she sought help and was housed in a shelter, but she was reportedly forced to leave because her partner was no longer living in the city, which sent her into a deep depression.
She said that she didn’t want to continue with her life and that a woman had loaned her money for a ticket and she took the bus straight to the sea.
She said that she just wanted to end everything and that she had no support from anywhere, not even her family because her partner had kept her away from her social circle and that’s why she didn’t want to continue living.
Angelica remembers being on the seashore and finding herself in isolation and decided to jump into the sea.
She said that she just let the sea take her and hoped that the suffering would soon end, but she said that she doesn’t recall much more as she slipped into unconsciousness.
She said that the man who saved me in the middle of the sea told her that she was lifeless and floating and she said that thank God she was alive and that he tossed her a life preserver and then brought her to the health centre where she’s receiving the necessary care.
According to a news outlet, her family say they last heard from her in 2018 when she left to go to Ecuador to live with her brother.
The paper also reports that Angelica claims she was abandoned by her family after suffering domestic violence.
Local media tracked down the woman’s daughter Alejandra Castiblanco who said she’d not known about her mum’s whereabouts for the past two years and that the daughter seemed to nullify Angelica’s story, saying her father had never been abusive to her and that he had never lived in Barranquilla.
She said that they don’t know who attacked her, or how she ended up in the sea and she said that her mother had suffered heart problems for years and that after a heart attack her mental health had deteriorated.
Alejandra Castiblanco and her sister are presently raising money to bring their mum to the capital Bogota where they live and hope she will now be taken care of by family.
Obviously, there’s more to this story than meets the eye, for which we don’t know about at the moment, but for whatever reason, this lady was in the sea, for now, at least, she’s safe and in the hospital being cared for and no doubt, in due course, the two missing years question will eventually be answered.
However, this news is going to get Youtube conspiracy theorists going into overdrive, plus the fact that she vanished for two years to flee a violent partner and now the newspapers print it for everyone to see including the partner.
Experts at Mater Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, used a high-speed camera to test the effectiveness of various kinds of face coverings and they discovered that wearing a surgical mask or cloth covering limited the number of droplets that were suspended in the air.
But without any protection, their experiment revealed that aerosols could be propelled more than two metres and remain in the air for an hour.
The research was conducted by Dr Kevin Nolan, an engineer at the University College Dublin, and Ronan Cahill, Mater Hospital’s professor of surgery, and was carried out using two separate methods.
The first was Schlieren technology, a method which uses high spec mirrors and light to reveal the density of fluids and gages, as well as the speed and distance they can travel when someone breathes, coughs or sneezes.
Dr Kevin Nolan told a media outlet that they can see that large droplets descend quickly to the ground while smaller particles which can contain the virus linger in the air and he said that when someone with COVID 19 coughs or sneezes some of the particles carry the virus and others don’t, which is why he refers to it as Russian roulette.
As Schlieren technology doesn’t cover great distances, the team also came up with a method using high powered lasers to demonstrate how far droplets can travel and how long they stay airborne.
Dr Kevin Nolan said that their combined investigations demonstrated that wearing a mask had a tremendous impact on how far droplets could travel and he said that conspiracy theorists would have you believe that masks don’t work because the virus is so small and can travel through material, but that it’s a misinterpreted science.
The researchers also discovered that aerosols carrying COVID 19 could exit through the abdomen during keyhole surgery, potentially putting whole teams of medics at risk and they emphasised the importance of staff taking additional precautions when it came to carrying out laparoscopic surgeries on COVID patients.
Dr Cahill added that their findings had made it easier to picture precisely what’s happening within the environment when someone expels aerosols and he said that when you can see precisely what’s happening using the technology it’s extremely shocking now they have a different way of looking at it.
Unfortunately, if you’re going to catch COVID 19, you will. You can wear a mask, scrub your hands until their red raw, clean your home with bleach, clean shopping that’s brought into the home, yet you can still catch it.
And by the standards that they’ve mentioned, we should all have COVID 19 by now, as we all spent the first few months wandering around through mists of droplets lingering in the atmosphere for hours without masks on.
Sweden doesn’t have compulsory social distancing and they don’t appear to have a problem, but then that’s because they trust their Government.
And surely pubs should not be open at all, but it’s okay the Government believes that COVID only comes out after 10 pm, but if it’s lingering for an hour beforehand in the pub, that could be disastrous.
And what about those people that don’t have to wear a mask because of health reasons, what chance will they have? But then the masks have worked extraordinarily well so far in universities and now we have another lockdown, that’s worked really well, hasn’t it?
And people that live in China religiously wear masks, even before the COVID was reported, so why so much of the spread of it in China? But it’s funny how Sweden has done okay with no over the top constraints.
We need to build up our immunity against viruses like this. Not hide from it by going into lockdown and then coming out and hoping it’s gone, and so many rules just don’t make any sense, and yes, I do wear a mask where I have to, just like the rest of the sheep, but only because I don’t want to end up with a huge fine.
Dozens of people in Webster County have taken to social media to share rage over the sentencing of Aaron and Petie Schwartz after the two were convicted of child molestation – the brothers received five years probation.
The brothers, who confessed to raping their 12-year-old relative, could still end up behind bars.
Last week, Webster County Prosecutor Ben Berkstresser filed a motion to have Aaron and Petie Schwartz’s probations revoked, arguing the brothers had contact with the victim after they were convicted, which is forbidden under their sex offender supervision agreement.
Court records reveal Petie Schwartz, 18, and Aaron Schwartz, 22, could serve up to 15 years in jail if their probation is withdrawn – a hearing on the matter is scheduled for October 6.
Webster County Prosecuting Attorney Ben Berkstresser asked a judge on Thursday to revoke probation in the cases of two Seymour area Amish men who pleaded guilty to child molestation earlier this month, online court documents reveal.
The Springfield News-Leader reported the two men took a plea agreement to evade jail time.
Under the agreement, their 15-year jail sentences were suspended, provided they obey all probation conditions set by a judge.
Initial charges filed in June accused each man of six counts of statutory rape and one count of incest.
According to investigative reports from the Webster County Sherriff’s Office obtained by the News-Leader under the Missouri Sunshine Law, a doctor’s state hotline call reported on June 6 initiated the investigation – the victim has had a baby in recent weeks.
Probable cause statements from each case reveal that the girl was found to be pregnant and admitted to a doctor that she had been having sex with the two men.
Investigators said the pair each confessed to having relations with the child about six times over the previous year and both admitted to investigators that they were conscious of her age.
One of the brothers is the father of the child, Berkstresser said, according to the Webster County Citizen and he said it needed to be noted that in this case, there were four brothers, two of them juveniles, while the other two legally are adults, but all of them had sexual relations with their sister and there was no question that this happened.
He said, in the end, this wasn’t a case of a parent and child, where a parent in a position of authority sexually abused or exploited their child. This was a case where four siblings engaged in acts with their sister and he said that he offered a 15-year prison sentence founded on that.
This is extremely sad indeed and these boys need punishment or they will replicate the behaviour again.
The poor young girl has lost her innocence and become a mother and she will need love, counselling and protection and these brothers need to be in prison for an extremely long time.
This poor girl will probably be shunned for the rest of her life and her child too – the community she lives in will condemn her and she will have to leave.
And this judge needs to be removed from the bench, his verdict overturned and these men sent to jail and we should be extremely furious with the prosecutor who allowed this to happen.
And what sort of message is this sending other children their age? That nothing bad will happen to them if they get caught doing such a heinous crime like that and that some judge will feel sorry for them and basically slap them on the wrists and send them home so that they can do it again.
Hayley, 33, had painted her nursery pink, filled it with girly gear, picked the name Isabella and written it on the room’s walls.
Friends threw her a pink-themed baby shower with gifts including an ornament engraved with Isabella, but Hayley was in for a shock when she gave birth after 33-hours of labour at a hospital in Stockton on Tees, County Durham, just over a week ago.
She said: “When the midwife said, ‘He’s here’ I was like, ‘What do you mean He?’
“At two scans I’d been told my baby was a girl”. But when she gave him a cleanup and lifted him she saw his bits.
It meant she had to come up with a new name – Alfie – as well as redecorate the nursery and take back a load of clothing.
Single mum Hayley, a teaching assistant, added that was the craziest experience.
Her dad had quipped, “What would you do if you had a boy?” and it happened.
She said she was over the moon when she found out she was going to have a girl, but that she absolutely loves Alfie and wouldn’t change him for the world and that it was meant to be.
Hayley isn’t the first this has happened to and it won’t be the last, but baby scans are not 100 per cent accurate and errors can be made and what’s wrong with not knowing what sex your baby is and waiting for the surprise at the end of the delivery?
Of course, this is barely a story, it happens all the time, but it’s so nice that the baby was born healthy and that should be the most important thing when having a baby, not the gender of what the baby will be.
The creepy crawly plunged its fangs into Paula Smith, 52, making her leg to triple the size and she believes it was retaliation for destroying its web.
Hairdresser Paula Smith had to go to A&E after the bite because she had blisters the size of 10 pence coins on her calf.
She had been walking her dog with husband Neil, 53, near her home when she felt the spider nip her leg.
Paula Smith looked down to find the creature on her right calf before she knocked it away.
Three days later, after her leg had become puffy and blisters had materialised, she noticed red track marks streaking down her leg and decided to go to A&E. The doctors confirmed she’d been bitten by a false widow spider, whose bites produce necrosis of the flesh.
Most bites from bugs result in symptoms comparable to a bee or wasp sting but the fact that they’re looking for a mate at this time of the year has sent them into a bit of a frenzy.
Before heading to A&E, gran of five Paula Smith said she rang 111 after her leg became swollen and solid to the touch. She said her leg felt like someone was blowing it up, it got tighter and tighter as the night went on.
By the time she got up the next morning, it was like a huge balloon.
They went to the local chemist and they gave her hydrocortisone cream, recommended her to elevate her leg, take ibuprofen to take the swelling down and to take some antihistamines.
Within 24 hours it had blistered, gone really red, the skin had started to break down and it started to look mottled all across her calf and down her ankle and foot.
Staff at the hospital prescribed a five-day course of antibiotics and advised her to continue using hydrocortisone cream.
The doctor at the hospital said in the worst-case scenario if it wasn’t sorted immediately with antibiotics it can turn into sepsis.
Last month a roofer feared he would lose a leg after being bitten by a false widow spider.
Tony Mayne, 32, was called into hospital as his knee started seeping pus and his leg turned red and ballooned.
The United Kingdom appears to be getting hotter and hotter summers and as this happens we will no doubt start seeing more dangerous and venomous species plague the United Kingdom in the end.
Generally, spiders make it over here in fruit freights, but they don’t normally endure long in our environment, but no doubt that will change in the years to come.
These essential components, needed to guarantee everyone is vaccinated against the disease, are in short supply including glass vials to store the medication.
Sources in the logistics and medical sectors claim other features the country is floundering with are refrigerated lorries to transport the drug and pallets to pack it, as well as PPE for medics who are administering it.
This comes despite Health Secretary Matt Hancock saying this month that a mass rollout of a vaccine could be seen in the early part of next year. However, a logistics expert working on the delivery of the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) told a news outlet that Downing Street has not contacted the research team or its manufacturing partner AstraZeneca.
Philip Ashton said he expected the Government to be working closely with them to ensure the supply chain procedures were in place should the possible cure get the green light in the coming months.
Philip Ashton, chief executive of logistics group 7Bridges said that he was not aware that the Government had spoken to the OVG about the logistics of getting the vaccine to the whole population yet.
He said that they may not get the mass vaccination on the timeline they think and that it was doable if the Government starts the planning right now and he said that they can expect frontline workers and high-risk populations to be vaccinated by the end of the year, but vaccinating the whole population would be a real challenge.
The logistics expert did not think that the United Kingdom had enough cold chain trucks used to ferry the vaccine and it’s been reported that the Oxford vaccine will need a controlled temperature of between 2C and 8C during transport or it will not survive.
Britain will need up to 120 million doses, it’s calculated to vaccinate the whole population and also have booster doses ready for those who require them.
Another unidentified source working with the OVG team said No 10 has not contacted them over the logistics of mass production. This comes after a government medical adviser suggested people in the United Kindom could wait two years before receiving the vaccine.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), said that most of the people that he’s spoken to who are involved in vaccine development believe that they may have a vaccine in six months, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to roll it out in mass scale by that time.
And that it’s a problem because the UK is dependent on a certain type of glass which is only available in the EU and this may be hard to source after December when demand increases and people aren’t going to put up with being told what to do for much longer, so they want to hope they get a vaccine soon.
And if things persist like this, bad things could happen across the whole country because people are getting furious now and the chances are that by the time the so-called vaccine comes along, the virus will be gone – this really does enhance our confidence in the Government.
At the heads of the Swansea Valley, ensconced on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, you’ll find Ystradgynlais, the second biggest town in Powys, but just a stone’s throw away, or about a mile from high street to high street to be clear, is neighbouring Ystalyfera.
Both traditional mining communities, they share shops, schools and even a postcode, but now local coronavirus lockdown means they’ll be worlds apart. And while it might take less than 30 seconds to cross from one borough into the other, local lockdown rules imposed in Neath Port Talbot have created an unimaginable and worrying problem for some.
If only to highlight it’s closeness, the Cwmtwrch recycling centre is listed on both Powys and Neath Port Talbot Council’s website as a designated drop off point, but from 6 pm on Monday, September 28, the Neath Port Talbot local authority area entered a local lockdown, meaning residents, including those in Ystalyfera wouldn’t be able to leave the county unless it was for essential journeys.
But what does this mean for its Powys counterpart, or for the people who live and work on the border?
Robert Megson is the proprietor of The Aubrey Arms, dead set between both counties and while his postcode says he’s in Powys, the official boundary of Neath Port Talbot, and lockdown, is just 352 metres away.
He said that they’re right on the border, but usually they’d be having people coming from everywhere and that the pub gets a tremendous amount of local business, as well as people from further away and that they also get a lot of people from Ystalyfera as well.
He said that the crazy thing was that the new rules meant that somebody in Builth Wells could travel there and come and eat in the Aubrey, but somebody a stone’s throw away in Ystalyfera can’t, which was madness.
And while the new lockdowns had been extremely difficult for the pub and restaurant, Mr Megson said the 10 pm curfew was the final nail in the coffin and that even before the lockdown in NPT was announced they’d seen a tremendous decline in business, about 30 per cent – even just the talk of lockdown had an impact.
And it seems that this is the only place with these travel constraints, which makes absolutely no sense and the Welsh Government has delivered no scientific proof but appears to be implementing them arbitrarily.
It makes sense that Wales should trim down their contact with others, increase social distancing, not socialise indoors, all wear masks and start contact tracing, but it makes no sense that they all have to stay in their local authority area.
But then we have lunatics running the asylum and it’s an utter embarrassing shambles that will go down in history and people are getting frustrated and furious and rightly so and something is going to give as everyone has a breaking point.
And it seems that this coronavirus is the most intelligent virus known to man – far more intelligent than the Welsh Assembly, it seems.
The Prince of Wales has warned that as many as one million young people could need urgent assistance due to coronavirus and he said our youth was facing a uniquely difficult time amid the uncertainty of the COVID 19 pandemic.
In a rare intervention, Prince Charles said the destructive despair of unemployment is facing Britain’s youngsters once again and he said that the young are in particular need of measures to protect them from the most destructive effects of the crisis, adding that the country must not let positiveness drown under a surge of economic predictions.
He added that while it’s all too easy to assume that nothing can be done, the task ahead was undoubtedly vast, but it was not impossible and he said there has never been a time as uniquely challenging as the present, when the pandemic has left possibly another million young people needing urgent assistance.
Contemplating on how he established the Prince’s Trust charity in 1976, with the severance pay he got from the Royal Navy, Charles added that he was old enough to recall other times when hope was scarce and despondency seemed the only thing in great supply.
He said that in the mid-Seventies, when he left the Royal Navy, youth unemployment was one of the pressing problems of the time and it seemed that they should do something to try to make a difference, however small.
The Prince’s Trust has helped its millionth young person, with research from the Trust revealing that 55 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds are more anxious about being unemployed than they were a year ago.
The Prince’s Trust set up the Young People Relief Fund in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic to deliver additional aid to those pummeled by the economic fallout.
However, if he actually cared, he has a bunch of castles, palaces and mansions – he could sell these off to help the economic fallout, rather than being more worried about the elephants and peasants carbon footprint.
Thousands of students are paying considerable sums of money to attend universities and this year, graduates are now discovering that nobody is waiting to welcome them into the workplace and that their futures are extremely bleak indeed.
Sadly the world has transformed and the local technical college might be a better option for future employment than university and Charles and his family are all JobCentre proof and they will never have to claim Universal Credit or lose their property or be a slave to the corporate owners.
And it’s clear the way of working we once knew is over because automation and now COVID 19 has accelerated its demise and it’s time we began implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and taxing the multi-billionaires more heavily. I wonder how much Charles will donate?
The Royal Family should simply stick to smiling and shaking hands with the public because they actually contribute nothing to anyone and they live in the life of luxury and haven’t got a clue what it’s like to struggle and of course, the Windsor’s are an authority on unemployment.
Thousands of promising young people will be studying hard at university, hundreds more just graduated, wondering if their years of study have been an expensive waste of time as there are no jobs waiting for them and this true cost of this virus will be the future of young people all over the world.
And believe me, Charles is never going to be as worried as the young people themselves, yet he’s in a position financially to make a difference to these people, instead of giving a worried speech and informing everyone of something that we’re all well aware of.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 