The War to Start All Wars

The first recorded case happened on April the 22nd 2016. Residents of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea got a shock when Margaret Thatcher climbed out of her grave, grubby and somewhat confused but otherwise well for someone who had been dead for three years. 

This was the first in a spate of resurrections, frequently of high-profile people. Interviews with The Revived as they were known yielded little. The subjects did know what had happened to them. First they were, then they weren't, then they were again. Closer physical examination did shed some light. Not only were the subjects revived, their bodies were getting progressively younger.

There were other cases, rare perhaps, but they happened all over the world, in Canada, South Africa, Egypt, Russia, Belize, Guam, Iran and Argentina. Responses varied and public knowledge of these events was patchy and mixed. Governments hastily coordinated their efforts, using cover stories, monitoring and media suppression and occasionally amnestics to stem the flow of information. There were millenarian panics that had to be suppressed, not to mention the conspiracy theories, but there was no denying the facts. Too many people knew. 

Just as authorities were getting a handle the situation changed. June the 8th, 9:30am EST, a team of contractors removing rubble from the former site of a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, were killed when the building suddenly reassembled itself. At almost exactly the same time a large chunk of silt coalesced in the Ganges delta, floated upstream for half an hour, gathering size until it attached itself to Bangladesh, meanwhile several dozen icebergs were heard reattaching themselves to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and the Great Wall of China grew in length by 40 metres. 

For the next few months, across the globe there were reemergences, revivals and reassemblies. This was a global crisis, impossible to ignore. The most famous occasion was on September the 11th 2016 when the World Trade Centre began to rise up, slowly at first, then gathering speed. Tower two then tower one stood again. Flames and smoke seemed to lick backwards and poor, unfortunate folk fell up, landing in high windows. The noise was tremendous and heard miles away, at UN Headquarters, where an emergency meeting was already underway. 

While this happened the assembly stopped its deliberations. It was a relief. The atmosphere had been fraught. No one knew what was going on but accusations were flying everywhere. The Americans and Russians denounced each other with exquisite, coded terms. North and South Korea did likewise, though in a more direct manner. A coalition of EU governments gave a statement implicating ISIS. Saudi Arabia resented such accusations and the price of oil immediately rose on Wall Street. The Turkish Prime Minister blamed the internet and the Leader of the Chinese Communist Party immediately supported his assertion but added that everyone knew the internet was invented in Japan in 2001,which was a clear threat. The Americans backed up the Japanese but then backed down when the Chinese government threatened to call in their loans. The Icelandic government offered to host a peace conference. The British objected, however, insisting something had to be done and they offered the RAF to bomb something... but what?

As the horror at Ground Zero became clear the assembly was evacuated, the session postponed for an unknown future date. The building was almost empty when a letter arrived, unstamped and delivered by an unknown hand, but addressed to "The Dirgent..." When it became clear what the letter was it was taken straight to the UN Secretary General, who was still at HQ, dealing with some paperwork and tidying up.

Later that evening the Secretary General gathered the various world leaders and ambassadors still in the city for a second, secret session. He or She read the letter to the assembly.

"A the Global Dirigent of the Stelliferous,
"Speakwrite as of trillions of anno separate interlocutor from receiptor, our messuage will be approx but our meaning will be perspex. We are speakwrite unto the former dirigent, our ancientors, on a subjunct of urge. Vous connaitre our intent when you having seen the updraw of the building nearin, the two towers. The depressed state of entropy is dire. We will not become the last civilisation as of the lack of energ. Iffing you do not reflow the passing of energ into angelegenheit we will on do it ourselves. You have eine diurnal to begin the reflow."

Sudden pandemonium:

“Are we under attack...?” said the Deputy Taoiseach of Ireland.

“But what does this mean?” asked the President of the United States of no one in particular.

“Вы империалистическая дурак” the Russian President shrugged, “какого рода вопрос?”

“C'est un urgence!” said the French Ambassador, flailing wildlly, “un etat de urgence!” he added. “ceux-ci sont des terroristes de temps.“

“Souhlasím s francouzskou Zkurvysyn. Musíme uzavřít hranice času chránit moderní hodnoty” said the Leader of the Czech Senate, thumping his desk.

“Why are they doing this?” asked the British Prime Minister with an air of desperation

“Tranquila estúpido hijo de puta de cerdo! said the Guatemalan Foreign Minister with a dismissive wave, “cómo están haciendo esto?”

Sudden pandemonium, everyone was about to punch everyone else. Fortunately the was fluent in multiple languages and also a scientist. He or she stepped forward and said:

“Please, please, none of this matters... not yet at least. What is important is what we know. We know that random people and things are seeming to head backward in time while still travelling forward. Pockets of entropy are turning into anti-entropy. The implications are clear. As the Revived are getting younger nothing can stop them. They will regress until they become children, newborns, zygotes and then gametes. The process will expand, evolution will unwind and, unchecked, we will grow hairy palms, climb back up the trees, slouch across the beach, shed our lungs and feet and step back into ocean. Before long we will be reduced to protoplasmic slime. The planet itself may speed up, then sun become younger and bluer. Stars will shake off dust, supernovas collapse, galaxies regress into plasma and then... the singularity... if we do not act.”

The American President repeated, “What...? What do you mean? What should we do?”

“For millennia humanity has fought against entropy, to wrench order from chaos. Now we must switch. We must defect, chaos will be our ally, violence our means, levelling our aim... Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed leaders of the world... you know what to do...” and in that moment, for the first time in human history humanity was one, united in a single purpose. The battle for entropy, the right of things to fall apart and expire, was begun. It was war with our descendants. Cities were levelled and forests ripped up, mountains were pummelled with dynamite and the rubble ground into sand, valleys were raised, oceans were drained off, hundreds of rockets were launched to nowhere in particular, oceans were drained and the water dumped into outer space. Though it was not anyone's stated aim many, many people died in the process of saving civilisation from those set to inherit it. 

'Bonus' post - the problems of microfiction.

Here's some gabble up top - microfiction seems to becoming more of a thing. Go to a writers' group or research links and what not and you can see shorter and shorter versions of fiction blooming everywhere, not just flash fiction (1,000 words and under) but drabbles (100 words) and shorter. This was an attempt to get on a website asking for twenty-five word stories. If you get microfiction right, if you get accepted, it's a great, quick way of getting your name known (no one's really paying for this stuff). If your microfiction doesn't get accepted there's not really much you can do with it. You can resubmit novels, short stories, flash fiction and so on, not with this. SO, I'm going to blog it. Enjoy, or don't.

Timing is Everything

I asked Mr Abernathy “is that the guy you want dead?” He said:

“Yes, but could you please wait for dessert before asking me?”

A Short Search

He said “most people underestimate how far they've got to run before they're safe.” So I said:

“Let's check the attic, he's probably there.”

Gregor

As Gregor woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed. His eyes peeled open and cast about, vision was blurry but eventually focused. He was where he had been, in a pile of leaf litter in the bough of a tree, but something was very wrong.

He wheeled his limbs about, gaining no traction until he toppled onto his front. Gregor had become enormous. He collapsed under his own weight, face down. His weirdly stunted proboscis was funnelled into the Earth but, stranger still, he smelled almost nothing. The chemical silence was deafening. He hauled himself up on his limbs again: “urgh!” he exclaimed, grunting with effort. The sound shocked him. He’d never made that noise before.

Gregor began crawling around on the forest floor. Where was everybody? Questions rattled around his mind. What was going on? His mind that was once a simple relay was a now a tangled warren of pathways that set off a clashing torrent of thoughts and feelings. Where was he? He felt what he later realised was, a combination of fear, abandonment and deep revulsion. What was he?

He was heavy and large and covered in a strange, soft dermis. His pincers were digits. His carapace was missing along a pair of legs. Gregor tried to climb a tree but the friction was gone. He felt hungry. He tried eating sap, then fungus, then a handful of leaves but these things tasted foul to him. Eventually there was nothing left to do except curl up in a ball to retain heat.

Sometime later his feelings simplified to terror when he found three ape-creatures standing over him on their hind legs. Two of them were tall, one of them was short. They made noises at him; sharp noises that made him cover his ears. He realised later they were trying to communicate with him. More ape-creatures came and two of them managed to pick Gregor up. They wanted him to stand like they were doing. They were also keen to cover him in a pelt a bit like the ones they were wearing. He fell down a few times and the pelt kept slipping off but they were eventually satisfied. They took him slowly, out of the wood and put him in a box. The box started moving. Gregor felt queasy. He would have been sick but there was nothing to regurgitate. He eventually passed out.

When Gregor came to he was in a cave, a square cave, very clean, odorless and cold with an artificial sun dangling from the ceiling. Gregor was wearing a new pelt and had a strange tube burrowed into his arm. More ape-creatures came and went. They touched him, looked him over, measured him, they shined a light in his eyes; all the while they kept making their noises at him. It was hard to get used to. Later they took the tube out and brought him food and water though it took some getting used to. The food they offered him was often warm but had to be broken down with the bony protuberances in his jaw. Gregor was in the cave for a long time. He began to decipher what the noises meant. It was communication.

They wanted to know about him, particularly what he was doing when they found him. Gregor told them he had been living a normal life, eating leaves and drinking rainwater, scuttling up and down trees and rocks but the ape creatures, who called themselves humans, said this was impossible. The showed him something. They gave him a reflective square. One of them said “look.” He did. He realised eventually he was looking at himself. He was an ape-creature, a human.

In time he learned that he was human all along. The other humans, who called themselves doctors, told him he had a name, a word that applied to an individual. His word was Gregor. Despite misgivings Gregor slowly came to accept his humanity. His dreams of being an insect were just that, dreams, delusions brought on by a mental breakdown.

Gregor left the cave, called a hospital, and was settled it a place called home. Home was a small set of rooms, darker than the hospital, warmer, mustier and lonelier. They even settled him into his old job, a task to do as part of the human hive. Gregor worked in telesales, apparently, which meant ringing people up offering them something they didn’t want. Gregor settled into his new/old life. He never felt comfortable in himself, his dreams were still uneasy, but this was his life now. He accepted it.

A year on, a year was a succession of four seasons, Gregor was in his kitchen, a place where humans mixed foods together and warmed them up to prevent poisoning, stirring a pot, when he saw something scuttle across the table next to him. Gregor jumped and lashed out instinctively with the spoon. There was a tiny cracking sound. Turning the spoon over slowly guilt seeped into horror. Gregor realised he had killed one of his own.

The Curious Case of the 100% Successful Advertising Company

Case File Summary 2319

by DCI Yara Lightfoot, Serious and Metaphysical Crime Squad.

Introduction

The 100% Successful Advertising Company was founded on February 2nd 2002 by a gentleman known as Jonny Atwell. This may or may not be his real name. He has been known by other names, as has the firm associated with him. Despite taking on apparently legitimate commissions from time to time, the Company was primarily a front for a culture jamming operation using anomalous memetic methods.

To begin with it wasn’t clear that 100% Successful Advertising Company was committing any crimes¹. The anomaly generated/harnessed by the Company has the potential to seriously affect all forms of human interaction. While Atwell remains at large he may decide to share his secrets or trade them.

A memetic item is an object, tangible or otherwise, used to encode and/or transmit information. A word is a memetic object. I may say to you “can I borrow your pen?” for example. My desire for the temporary use of a pen is communicated through a chain of sounds, translated into morphemes. You may understand what I say to you or you may not. You may also act on what I say or not. What Atwell has been doing is encoding information that can only be understood and must be acted upon. He is converting human brains, complex and original, effectively into hard drives, with limited neural pathways.

Financial inflow appears to have been insufficient to sustain the Company's operations. The Serious and Metaphysical Crime Squad is working with fraud investigators to disentangle the company's accounts from other ‘information’ contained within. Some of this report will be redacted due to ongoing info-hazard screening and deactivation.

Suspect – Jonny/Rupert Atwell

Mr Atwell is the founder of the Company and chief suspect in this case. We know (or are fairly sure) he is 35, Caucasian, approximately six foot tall, with brown, mid-length hair. He speaks with an English accent, non-regionalised. 

We are currently unable to find any living relatives of Mr Atwell. He has a mother and father, Mr and Mrs Alan and Angela Atwell, though there is no record of their existence online, financial, health or local government after September 26th, 2008, the day their house in Uxbridge that they had lived in for the previous [Redacted] years was purchased by an unknown party. The house is still unoccupied and the parents are missing. NHS records indicate that ‘Rupert’ Atwell was born in Hillingdon Hospital on February 2nd 1980² though we should treat this fact with caution. He appears to have attended primary and secondary schools in West London 1984 to 1996 though again caution should be advised.

Interviews conducted with former teachers indicate difficulty remembering something consistent and true about Atwell beyond approximately the age of fourteen³. Piecing together character-based accounts we get a young man with charm and affability, a fairly good academic performance, but also some anti-social tendencies, particularly an ability to manipulate both pupils and teachers, combined with an attraction to creating chaos. This tendency accelerated during his secondary education.

One notable incident, verified, was when Atwell managed to bargain with a teacher to get one week's worth of detention commuted in return for delivering 1,000 leaflets for an upcoming school fete. This is remarkable in itself but furthermore Atwell it seems persuaded three first-year pupils to actually deliver the leaflets. Other examples given by eyewitnesses include getting the canteen staff to relabel the condiments to opposite flavours, persuading the janitor to remove the all doors in a science block and writing [Redacted] on a blackboard causing a second-year class plus the teacher to forget the French language existed⁴.

Atwell graduated in 2001 from the University of [Redacted], as Jonny Atwell, with a first-class honours degree in Computer Programming and Media Studies. After an unremarkable second year his final year grades improved dramatically. His dissertation is currently under embargo as an info-hazard. His final presentation, a short lecture recorded on VHS, the title of which was [Redacted] Synapse [Redacted] Juxtaposition [Redacted] in the [Redacted], is available for restricted viewing⁵.

Case history

These are examples, now all screened and (mostly) detoxed and set in chronological order, beginning with: “New Gym Opens…” dated January the 7^th, 2006:

New Gym Opens in [Redacted]

By Jermaine Concord

Millennium goose pimple sex alcohol over your skin now stuck to your belly? Why not turn over a new waif? Get on down to touch see good develop new body tones rubbing at the new state of the art gymnasium, Pleiades Inversion Plan B, opening next week in [Redacted].

“Reasonable prices” says owner Marshall Cartilage, “with measurable equipment and opaque results. I get revolutionary new oversight of personal trainers, ten methods in all; just wipe off the mess after you’re done!”

So if you want to get fit for the burgeoning army, classic flavours and a new you, why not try Pleiades Inversion Plan B, on [Redacted]?

The story was rewritten from a faxed press release sent to a freesheet called Get West, which was delivered round the borough of Ealing. It came from a number eventually traced to the Company.

The piece initially proved successful for the gym, actually named Marsha Jane’s for its owner Marsha-Jane Carter. Several thousand people registered with the gym and the business experienced strong profits in first six months. Membership dropped off in time and the business was wound up a little over three years later. We have been unable to trace Ms Carter. All record of her existence ends after the summer of 2009. Evidence suggests the gymnasium was not anomalous in itself and there is nothing, as of yet, to suggest Ms Carter was or is involved with the Company.

The advert proved less successful for a number of newspaper staff, who were reprimanded and/or demoted, including the editor of the paper and sub editor who approved it. The person whose name is on the by-line has not been traced however it is a pseudonym used by one of the Five Suspects (see below).

The first audio example collected (and transcribed) is called “Radiochair.” It was broadcast 12^th of May, 2008, 11.35am, on [Redacted] FM and London music radio station:

The sounds of a sound check, drums and cymbals clash, stray guitar riffs and a man shouts: “one two, one two, check, check…” The sound fades down a little.

Man: [Loud with a mockney/MLE accent] Indie schmindie, yeah? You climb to the top of the landfill and what do you see? Radiochair and they're KICKING OUT THE JANUS STATUES!

Montage of rock music emerges and continues for duration under voice-over.

Man: You’ve not heard of them before but you know EXACTLY WHAT THEY SOUND LIKE! They’ve come from the Trenchant Academy and they’ve come to SOFT ROCK YOU with their MATHS! You will SUBMIT CORPOREALLY to the Radiochair classic flavours such as [Redacted], “Bellatrix Indigo Prat Ramp (pump my squirrel…)” and “Why Not Try Animating My French Glands…?” If that doesn't glisten your crisps then you are COMPELLED to buy their new album with MONEY or FOOD!

The advert resulted in a spike of internet searches for both the band and the songs in question, lasting for approximately thirty hours. In that time two webpages⁶ appeared both claiming to have not only music but also live footage, press details and lists upcoming gigs for Radiochair. The band didn't actually exist.

No one knows how the clip was smuggled on air. The show it was broadcast on was brought to a halt soon after the presenter, Aiden Longworth and producer Juba Dettori left the station building and got into a waiting car. The last words spoken on the show were given by neither Longworth nor Dettori but a third person, a male-sounding voice, digitally altered. It said:

“Quality Control delivered test run aim fire eats shoots leaves.”

Longworth later turned up in the University College of London Hospital, heavily amnesticised and unware of the incident. Longworth was reintegrated into society in December 2009 with a new identity.

“Iceberg,” dated 15^th of September, 2008, refers to a quarter-page advert placed in a tabloid called City and Financial News. It was discovered retrospectively during police interviews conducted in 2011 with three former employees of [Redacted] Brothers into a separate matter. The advert consisted of a blue-tinted picture of a large iceberg, looming in the Thames, seen through the silhouette of various buildings belonging to the Canary Wharf complex. Overlaid in white, [Redacted] point Arial letters was the phrase: “No rainbows and Reykjavik is bracing see my friend.” This is of course the day when [Redacted] Brothers folded. Despite conducting interviews with staff at the paper we were unable to find who placed the advert, just a ledger with outstanding invoice to “100% Company.”

“Stop right there auntie…” dated 23^rd of March 2010 was a major traffic disruption in Central London eventually traced to an advert programmed into the electronic billboard above the westbound section of the Euston underpass. The advert consisted of a cropped photograph of the front of car, light-blue, unknown make or model, with a number plate bearing “LDN 23 GRD”, and a caption in black, Billboard Font, saying:

Stop

Right

There

Auntie.

SAMCS agents were alerted to the incident by British Transport Police. The advert was placed with the billboard’s owners by a firm logged as “The 100.” The firm had a listed address in Central London but the building was discovered to have been demolished three months prior as part of Crossrail construction. The 100’s web-domain was acquired by SAMCS shortly afterwards. No memetic hazards were discovered in its website until the section marked “About Us” it said:

“The 100 is next-level advertising. Through advanced entropic methodologies WE WILL guarantee you and your brand market leadership. WE WILL help you straddle the brain barrier. In turbulent economic times we are the ROCK YOU can depend on.”

“No Face Selfies,” refers to a chain of events that took place between February the 2^nd and February the 4^th 2011. They were brought to the attention of SAMCS by senior officers of the Household Regiment in Knightsbridge. The incident is known publicly as an unfortunate series of suicides that took place between the above dates in and around the Knightsbridge Barracks⁷.

In just a little under 40-hours seven soldiers, Privates [Redacted], [Redacted], [Redacted] and [Redacted], Sergeants [Redacted] and [Redacted], and Corporal [Redacted], died. It began with Private [Redacted] who locked himself in a changing room cubicle and attempted to remove his facial features with a razor blade. Before expiring due to his injuries Private [Redacted] used a mobile phone to send a picture of himself to Private [Redacted], the second victim. The meme spread in this manner.

The meme was eventually traced to a notice placed on a common-room board, an A5 sheet of paper with a picture of a manic-looking clown in extravagant make-up with a caption underneath, in [Redacted] point Courier saying: “Inside. You are beans. Inside. This is a cannery. Fetch the tin opener. Spread the word. Outside. 100. 23. I am Eris. Don't fuck with me.” After a brief investigation a staff member working for a firm with a contract to clean the facility was found to have gone missing; her name was Juno Dettori.

Associates

There are, or were, four known associates of Jonny/Rupert Atwell, all are currently in SAMCS custody.

Juba/Juno Dettori, age, unknown, presumed over 30, height 5’6”: appearance, dark, wavy hair, eye colour unknown, medium build, speaks with Received Pronunciation: known alias, Anna Matschke. Juba was a known personal assistant to Atwell. She has an anomalous talent of being able to obscure her facial features on all photographs and videos taken of her and in the memory of anyone who has seen her. Though now conscious she either does not know or is unwilling to say how she is able to do this.

Anton Lavorski, a computer engineer age 55, height 6’2”: appearance, brown hair, brown eyes: known aliases (the most common), Kaltespiel, Immortal Beloved, Traven, Fulcanelli, Kropotkin’s Revenge. Lavorski was a computer programmer living in North London. In 1989 he helped found and lead a local Anti-Poll Tax Union. He was summoned to magistrates for prosecution for non-payment in the summer of 1990, shortly after the initial hearing he disappeared.

David Mansell, age 36, height 5'9”, bald with shaven hair, he was a well-known graffiti artist, flaneur and housing agitator.

Jay Sherman, age 24, height 5'8”, blonde hair, baby-face, a sound technician, also known as Jermaine Conker, Jermaine Concord and Jimmy Creases.

Known affiliations of the Four, include:

The League against Anthroposection a terrorist group circa 1986-1999, dedicated to freeing humanoid anomalies held by the (so-called) Department of Metaphysics⁸.

Free the Furious Five, a campaign, no one was sure what it was about but in 1994 it produced a great deal of flyposting then disappeared. The only consistent aspect of the postering was repetition of the number 23.

Copyright Liberation Publishing; active from 1991 to 2008, it produced amongst a host of pamphlets, all available in the SAMCS library, including…

Rocket from the Crypt; a discordian monthly magazine with orientation toward music.

The North London Tenants and Residents Association: a collective of psychogeographers. It met once a fortnight for a discussion and tour, usually beginning in somewhere in Archway.

IWW Local 1312 is not a union branch but a police-watch group that, amongst other things keeps files on SAMCS.

Seven Proxies, a secret internet bulletin board and anarchist/discordian/situationist meeting point, only recently cracked. Hopefully it will shed light not just on this but other cases.

Atwell recruited from this milieu, anarchist bordering on discordian. The four became his employees. His associates are now in SAMCS custody. All of them in are in a post-vegetative state, having recovered consciousness but not any prior memories or identities. They are impossible to interview until the seemingly permanent brain rewiring clearly carried out by their former employer is resolved.

Further case history

SAMCS came onto the case in 2008. Having narrowed down the source of the disturbances officers pursued Atwell for several months. He was eventually found living on a boat moored off the Chelsea Embankment. Atwell was not hostile but was clearly aware of his position and did not give SAMCS interviewers much to go on. Officers did not find a basis to charge Atwell and eventually have to release him⁹.

In 2011 there was an attempt to introduce an Anti-Memetics Bill to Parliament. It failed in the House of Lords for opaque reasons¹⁰. A number of peers expected to vote for the bill either didn't turn up or voted against. The reading came two days before the counterattack on the Knightsbridge Barracks¹¹.

The new offices of the 100% Successful Advertising Agency were found to be in Shoreditch. November 2010, SAMCS placed the building and the staff under permanent surveillance. Though unable to make arrest we were able to covertly contain a number of info-hazards emanating from said firm¹². A bill was passed in 2012 and Atwell's activities were finally outlawed. SAMCS prepared for an arrest but it seems Atwell was also prepared.

For three years no illegal info-hazards emerged from the Company. The operation was due to be wound down when, on December 15^th 2015, SAMCS intelligence intercepted an advert pitch coming from the Company, a proposition for reviving a well-known advert for a price comparison website that was full of info-hazards¹³. An arrest squad was prepared. They were unable to make arrest however. The squad halted en masse outside in sight of the building. There was a banner hung from one of the office windows. It said: “You can't come in: You cannot arrest us: Signed Children of Eris.” It took nearly two days for SAMCS officers to deactivate the meme. By the time the squad got inside Atwell was long gone. CCTV footage recovered later showed a man matching Atwell’s description walking out of the building wearing a t-shirt with the logo “Nothing to See Here.” After gaining access officers found four people in the office, matching the descriptions of Atwell’s associates, each unconscious and wrapped almost head to foot in bandages¹⁴.

1 Hence the eventual Memetics and Info-hazards Act, 2012.

2 Note the date. Atwell’s NHS records are currently undergoing memetic screening.

3 It’s after this point that eyewitness accounts start referring to ‘Jonny’ rather than ‘Rupert.’

4 No eyewitnesses ever describe Atwell being suspended or expelled for his actions.

5 Very little of it survives the memetic screening process. SAMCS technicians are working on deactivating the info-hazards.

6 Both are still embargoed.

7 There is widespread suspicion that these were in fact murders and that the murderer is still at large. SAMCS allows these rumours to persist (within limits) as they draw attention from the actual events.

8 No such government department exists.

9 Of course incitement is a crime but given the bizarre surface nature of what the Company produced it was almost impossible to pin down how Atwell and his associates were inciting people.

10A critical number of peers each got lost, apparently, on the London Underground, ending up at several terminus stations before phoning for help.

11 We now believe it was a counter-attack.

12 The London Olympics passed without disturbance.

13 If taken up the advert would have been broadcast on national terrestrial and satellite television channels.

14 It seems this case is very far from wrapped up.