The Hangover News

Birmingham Bust
A BRUMMIE DRUG GANG GOT A COLLECTIVE 165 YEARS PRISON TIME
The 44-member group was busted selling crack and heroine "worth £250,000"

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A Birmingham drug gang was sentenced to 165 collective years in jail after being caught in possession of both heroin and crack during a series of police raids. Mugshots of the 44 people involved in the business were then shown on "a giant mobile TV screen" paraded down the street in Birmingham on Sunday.

West Midlands Police estimated the three kilos of heroin and crack were worth £250,000 – likely a steep figure, given Drug Wise's price estimates valuing a kilo of crack cocaine at about £64,000 and a kilo of heroin at about £52,000. The police edited clips of one of the raids into a Cops reality TV-style clip.

Siblings and parents are among those convicted, who police say they were able to catch with the help of members of the local community frustrated with visible street dealing.

Squeals and Slander
A WOMAN FALSELY CLAIMED SHE SAW HER NEIGHBOUR FUCK A PIG
She's now been ordered to pay £32,000 in damages to him

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It wasn't your average neighbourly spat. A woman who claimed her neighbour enticed one of her pigs with a doughnut before having sex with it has been ordered to pay £32,080 in damages.

Sharon Hamilton alleged that Anton Barkhuysen "ran away in shame" when she said she found him with the pig. The neighbours had been in an eight-year feud over land in Cornwall, and Barkhuysen's now been awarded the money for the slander, harassment and false imprisonment the High Court found he suffered.

Hamilton's accusation had been made on New Year's Day in 2013, and resulted in Barkhuysen being questioned about his sex life, made to give "intimate samples" and held on bail for several weeks. The judge is yet to decide who'll fit the £200,000 legal bill for the case.

Royal Refurb
TAXPAYERS ARE DUE TO PAY FOR A BUCKINGHAM PALACE REVAMP
And a petition's calling for the Royal family to fit some of the £369 million bill

*nhs is falling apart*
Queen: maybe we should put some money into it
Inner queen: but a new gaff would be nice — semi (@luxuarycat)November 18, 2016

On Friday it was announced that Buckingham Palace is to be refurbished, at a £369 million cost to the taxpayer over 10 years. Boilers, wires and piping that haven't been sorted since the 1950s are up for repair, and the Queen is to stay in residence at the palace while the works go on.

The news comes in a year of budget cuts, and an earlier announcement that the Queen was expected to take home a £2.8 million pay rise from 2017 to 2018. Taxpayers in the UK currently hand over 15 percent of the Crown Estate property empire's profits, as part of what's known as the sovereign grant.

In response, journalist and copywriter Mark Johnson launched a petition to have the Royal family pay for some of the repairs. "I am all for protecting Buckingham Palace," he told the Guardian, "but at a time when the public purse is so pressured, and on a day that temperatures dropped overnight, when the elderly are freezing in their homes and children have damp mould on their bedroom walls, to fund it publicly is something out of a Charles Dickens novel."

By Sunday afternoon, the petition had picked up more than 86,000 signatures. It would need 100,000 signatures to be considered for review by the Petitions Committee, at which point MPs could decide whether or not to debate it.

Safe Places
TRUMP SETTLED A MASSIVE FRAUD LAWSUIT FOR $25 MILLION
But spent most of the weekend tweeting about the theatre being a safe space

The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)November 19, 2016

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On Friday US president-elect Donald Trump settled a fraud case centred on his now-defunct Trump University real estate course, paying $25 million in three lawsuits. The settlement keeps Trump from testifying in a potentially humiliating case in court, and the deal reportedly allows the president-elect to not admit to any wrongdoing.

Trump had originally said he would fight the cases, where claimants alleged they paid thousands of dollars for a course that did not deliver on its promises. The president-elect told his Twitter followers that he settled the case instead to "focus on our country."

On Saturday, after addressing the lawsuit in, Trump demanded the cast of musical Hamilton apologise to his vice president-elect. Mike Pence had been booed by fellow audience members at a Broadway performance of the show, and later addressed in a short speech by some of the cast. Trump insisted the theatre be a "safe place".