Oi hands off my DNA, none shall sleep!

I've just done night 3 of this set of 4 and it's been a pretty busy old time, I know I complain about work, but sometimes I actually do enjoy it, this shift has been one of those times. I think I prefer it busy, but just don't tell the boss! One of the things about working a 12 hour night shift is that it leaves little time when you're not at work to do anything other than sleep during the day, it also means you spend so many waking hours with work colleagues than most normal job, plus there are only a few of you doing the graveyard shift, so you quickly get to know the ins and outs of each other - oh the secrets I could tell!

There has been a little bit of an uproar in England over the last day or so after a senior judge called for all UK residents and visitors to be required to provide a DNA sample to help police solve crimes. Lord Justice Sedley said this would make the present database in England and Wales fairer and less biased, the database currently holds details of four million people's DNA. Each month, some 30,000 more samples from suspects or DNA recovered from crime scenes are added to the database, making it the largest in the world.

It includes some 24,000 samples from young people aged between 10 and 17, who were arrested but never convicted! This silly judge said "Everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention"

The Human Genetics Commission said creating such a huge database would be too expensive and prone to mistakes. Liberty, the civil rights group claim the proposal as "chilling" and "ripe for abuse". I quite agree, it's a step way to far, a massive infringement on my own personal civil liberties. Just think of what could happen if such details and the samples got into the wrong hands, to be honest it doesn't bear thinking about. It's just too much like 'Big Brother' looking over us and collecting way way to much information on us, our lives, our being and our movements.

The parents of murdered 11-year-old Rhys Jones have asked well-wishers to wear bright clothes or football strips for their son's funeral on Thursday. The schoolboy, a keen fan of his local side Everton, will be buried after a service at Liverpool's Anglican cathedral.

He died after being shot in the neck in a pub car park in the Croxteth area of the city on his way home from playing football on 22nd August. Another young, innocent victim of horrendous street crime that seems to be ever present here in England. So far 17 people have been arrested over his murder, but no charges have been brought. Somewhere, someone knows who did this crime and is saying nothing, someone holds the clue that could capture the killer, yet they are staying silent, I wont say what I think of that as I don't want to offend you with my colourful and expletive language, I not a fan of capital punishment, it's not something I believe in, however in this case I sure could make an exception.

The musical world has suffered a huge loss in the early hours of this morning when that giant of opera Pavarotti passed away at the ripe age of 71. This rather ermm rotund, bearded tenor, who was regarded by many as the greatest tenor of his generation, came to to fame when he made a stand-in appearance at London's Covent Garden way back in 1963. Soon this rather large guy with an amazing and voluminous voice had the critics and fans gushing.

Perhaps his biggest gift to the music world was when he teamed up with Spanish stars Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras at the 1990 soccer World Cup in Italy and introduced operatic classics to an estimated 800 million people in TV coverage around the globe, and 1 little person at home in West Green in Crawley!

Sales of opera albums shot up after the gala concert in Rome's Baths of Caracalla and strains of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" became as much a feature of soccer fever as the usual more raucous stadium chants and a favorite of countless millions of people the world over.

New iPods!! Fresh after you've splashed ya cash on a new iPod or iPhone if you're in the states, along they come with a new bit of high tech kit! Apple Inc. (I love the Inc part of US companies, much nice the the Ltd we have!) unveiled new iPods on Wednesday including a model with an iPhone-style touch screen and wireless Internet connectivity! Hopefully stopping rivals catch-up plans stone dead for a while!

Not only touch screens but also Apple introduced higher capacity versions of the original hard-drive iPod and added video and games to it's iPod nano, which stores songs and photos on flash memory chips. The iPhone-style iPod Touch will cost $299 thats £148 for a version with 8 gigabytes of storage and $399 for 16 GB. Those new nanos will set you back a cool $149 for 4GB and $199 for 8GB, which is not bad at all, I think. New versions of the hard-drive iPod will retail for $249 for 80GB and $349 for 160GB, which is a little bit on the steep side, but then again it is Apple so therefore it is more expensive than other makers. To a large extent you're paying for the name and the innovation, but also the style, after all there are pure Apple queens out there. You know the kinda chap, just has to have the latest 'i' whatever, regardless of cost. The kind of chap that will fork out a few hundred pounds on a iBook, iPod, iMac just because it's an Apple. The kinda person that would even buy an iVibrator if such a thing was available!

I could hardly believe it when I heard the news about billionaire Russian owner of Chelsea football club, Roman Abramovich, has ordered another private aircraft! It's not that he's ordered another one, but the type of aircraft that had my ghast so flabbered! He's only gone and put in an order for one of those new super double decker Airbus A380, the world's biggest airliner! A French newspaper released the news that Abramovich was the mystery buyer behind an order for an A380 VIP, which was revealed by Airbus at the Paris Air Show in June.

The double decker A380, which enters service later this year, is capable of carrying 840 passengers. It's first commercial flight will be from Singapore to Sydney by Singapore Airlines, yet you can't buy tickets in the normal way for unique flight. Nope, to get your mitts on a ticket you'll have to keep an eye on eBay, where the tickets will be auctioned off and all the profits going to charity. Big business does good for once, I've already registered online for my shot at snapping up a ticket, but I'm sure it's going to be well out of my price range! See http://www.a380.singaporeair.com/ for more details.

Time to sleep now, be good till the next time!