Two chess extremists brutally murdered a tiddlywinks player in front of dozens of shocked onlookers.

You’re born, you cry, you grow, you don’t get enough love from your father, you bully, you miss school, you get into fights, you’re aggressive, impatient, misogynist, pliable, easily brainwashed.

You join the military, you obey orders, you learn to shoot, bomb, kill, you enjoy it, you shoot, it feels good, you kill, you laugh, you murder, you joke, you bomb a school, a hospital, a village, it’s fun, your friends die, your legs get blown off.

The Germans. Don’t you just hate them? They talk funny, they’re well organised, and then there was that Holocaust thing to boot.

No wonder everyone in Britain loathes them. Whether it’s gassing Jews, building great cars or bailing out Greece, there’s no shortage of reasons to hate the Krauts.

The Nobel Peace Prize won in 2009 by US President Barack Obama has been detained at Guantanamo Bay to allow military interrogators to ask it why they’re still detaining people who haven’t been found guilty of fuck all.

The prestigious gold medallion named after Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel was discovered in Afghanistan, where Obama had left it for the last three years despite promising to take it home and keep it somewhere safe.

Team GB is just one Olympic gold medal short of a total which would entirely recapitalise Europe’s debt-ridden banks and save the single currency from oblivion.

Victory this afternoon for Nicola Adams in the first Olympic women’s boxing final in history, plus another gold for a horse, means that Great Britain’s elephantine medal haul is now big enough to erase the contagion of fear among continental traders and return the Eurozone to its pre-crisis state of blissful ignorance.

Horrible disease-spreading rats have been heroically slain by a special breed of super mice assassins who deserve to be worshipped by all other mice.

The raid hit at the heart of the Great Evil Rat Empire and will severely weaken the resolve of their leader, Roland. His hopes of fathering a murderous rat mega-litter appear to have been dented, at least for a few minutes.

When does an empire cease to be an empire? When member countries gain independence, or when their populations are no longer exploited?

According to the former definition, the British Empire concluded within a few years of the Second World War. And yet, the exploitation has continued.