"MPs are demanding the BBC back down over plans to play the song Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead on the official singles chart this weekend, after a concerted campaign to make it number one. The Judy Garland song has been seized on by opponents of Margaret Thatcher to celebrate her death from a stroke earlier this week and it has already sold 20,000 copies since Monday. A collection of right-wing newspapers – which just recently were campaigning for media freedom against the Leveson report –have also demanded the BBC desist from playing the song, no matter where it ends up in the charts."
"British people can now aspire to and despise four new levels of social classes, according to a new survey conducted by researchers in partnership with public broadcaster the BBC." Replacing your classic "upper," "middle" and "working" cohorts are seven new classes: "Elite," "Established Middle," "Technical Middle," "New Affluent Workers," "Traditional Working," "Emergent Service Workers" and "Precarious Proletariat." Distinctions aside, they will all stab you for looking at them funny. Which one would you be?

"The authors found that, despite the overall decline, emotion words have become relatively more frequent in US texts than in British books since about 1980. Conversely, before then, any differences between books from the two sides of the Atlantic had been minor. Such changes were not seen for general words selected at random. 'Our results … support the popular notion that American authors express more emotion than the British,' they write." —If you think British literary fiction is coolly understated while American literary fiction is mostly hysterical overwriting about nothing important, new research suggests you are correct.
"The annual Shed of the Year competition to search for the UK’s most wacky and wonderful sheds is underway." Are there photos, you ask? Are there photos? Why, gentle reader, there is a whole PHOTOGALLERY.
"The 'normal' teenager loves fake tanning, blonde highlights, manicures and getting dressed up for parties themed around her favourite reality TV show. She is the daughter of a black cab driver and dreams of one day being a performer in the West End – like Essex celebrity Denise Van Outen." —But there is something surprising about her! Can you guess what it is?
Maybe it would be easier if they just start detailing what percentage of British meat didn't used to be a pony.
"A gang of swan killers are being hunted by police amid fears the birds are being stolen to eat."