Horse adds light relief to UK phone hacking saga

(Mandy Jansen)

Britain is being consumed, not so much with a food safety scandal, as it is with a culinary cultural nightmare. To their horror, the British have discovered they have been eating horse meat in their burgers, their frozen lasagnas, and who knows what else. Perhaps for months, maybe even years. Britons may have had to eat horse and donkey meat during the Second World War — although they would have kept a stiff upper lip about it — but generally viande de cheval, as the French say, is taboo. “No horse meat please, we’re British,” proclaimed the Guardian.

(The Joy of the Mundane)

People throughout Ireland and the U.K. have been scandalized by revelations that some of their beef products (such as frozen beef lasagna) have actually been made with horse meat instead of beef.

This week the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) made a horrifying discovery — three meat processing plants had somehow allowed horse meat to get into beef burgers that were then sold in supermarket chains in the UK and Ireland.

The Bumi saga deepened on Friday with allegations that hackers broke into the chairman's computer to steal documents used to spark a crisis at the mining group. An investigation by a private security company suggests hackers retrieved information from Samin Tan's laptop, which was sent to a member of Bumi's board by an unnamed "whistleblower", plunging the company into chaos.