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In the jungle

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  1. "The government has been accused of wasting taxpayers’ cash after being forced to pay record levels of compensation to people affected by disruption at the Passport Office.

    New figures show that £3.1m was paid out in “reimbursements” in the seven months to December 2022, significantly more than the £2.2m paid out in the whole of 2021-22.

    The £448,000-a-month spend is more than four times the average monthly figure before the pandemic and comes after a period of severe disruption for His Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), with hundreds of thousands of people affected by application backlogs over the summer.

    A report by the government’s spending watchdog in December said the delays were caused by a surge in demand after Covid travel restrictions were lifted, and the inability of HMPO to cope. A lack of staff and limitations in government systems exacerbated the problems, the National Audit Office said.

    Documents show ministers were alerted to several issues with key contractors before the increase in demand, with the Observer revealing in July that one outsourcing firm was failing to meet targets for responding to calls and emails as early as May 2021.

    HMPO does not routinely pay compensation where applications take longer than the published time frames. The payouts include the reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses incurred by customers because of operational errors and refunds for fast-track applications that were not processed in time.

    HMPO also makes payments for emotional distress caused by its mistakes, although it says this is not routine, with claims assessed on a case-by-case basis. “Exceptional” circumstances where consolatory payments may be made include a missed wedding or funeral due to an error, or where irreplaceable documents were lost."

    From today's Guardian

  2. 2 hours ago, connda said:

    Well you just learned an important lesson in life.

    Our car is in my wife's name, but we've been married 15 years and even with the occasional pissing matches, we're together for life.  If she dies?  The car is mine as it's in her Will. 

    But registering in the name of a 'girl friend?'   There's you're major mistake.  Kiss that car goodbye. 

    Let it go and rack it up and a "Lesson In Life."  Then buy another car.  Hope the first one didn't cost much.  People love driving status symbols. 
    I bought my Suzuki brand new for 350K.  I simply want a car to get me from Point A to Point B.  And at 55 miles/gallon?  Works for me.  But how many people do that.  So many people want the bells and whistles, fancy-pantsy, Hi-So, BS.  What's the difference between that and my 350K new Suzuki?  Nothing.  It gets you from Point A to Point B.  The rest is just hubris.
    What did you spend on the 2nd hand?  600K?  1M?  Hopefully for your sake it was a cheap junker. Really - that's all you need or a nice cheap new car. 

    That'll be a Celerio; probably the manual.

     

    A good choice IMO.  I think they are on offer now at 328K.

  3. 4 hours ago, Dogmatix said:

    I think it will be like the re-enactments that police were supposedly ordered to stop doing with great fanfare but continued without a pause.

     

    Reporters have to pay the police for access to film arrested criminals and crime scene articles.  A favorite photo is a picture of an arrested foreigners passport.  I can't see them stopping that, even if China is making a fuss. 

     

    Anyway the big triad cheese "Tuhao", married to a Thai police colonel, is Thai and, according to Chinese law, should have given up his Chinese nationality when he got Thai nationality, or had it revoked when the Thai Interior Ministry wrote to the Chinese embassy to advise them he had got Thai nationality, as they do.  So reports should just emphasise that he is Thai, until such a time as he is convicted and a court orders the revocation of his Thai nationality.

     

    Did you ever consider the possibility that the Chinese gangster married to a Thai police colonel might have got his Thai citizenship corruptly?

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