Professional offence taking at international level.

There's no getting away from it these days. Almost anything seems able to cause offence to someone and, rather than shrugging and assuming that it was probably unintended and coincidental, the way to do things now is to get your cock in a knot as rapidly as possible. Hence the Royal Navy having to be sorry for shooting at a practice target that upset the Spanish.

The UK has apologised to Spain after the Royal Navy used a buoy with the Spanish colours for target practice.
The exercise took place off the coast of Gibraltar earlier this week. The UK ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry in Madrid to explain.

Oh for fuck's sake. How fucking thin skinned would anyone, let alone representatives of a whole nation, have to be to think that there was anything meant by this? If it had King Juan Carlos' picture on it I'd see why some might get upset, but this is just a maritime signal flag.

According to local reports, the navy hastily removed the buoy, which had a red-and-yellow marker, when approached by a Spanish police launch on Tuesday.
Ambassador Giles Paxman conceded it was insensitive and an error of judgement.

Wrong response by both the Navy and the Ambassador, I feel. I think something more along the lines of 'harden the fuck up' might be more appropriate than furtively acting like you really were doing something wrong.

Later the UK Ministry of Defence clarified that the colours were those of a maritime signal flag used by Nato.
"HMS Scimitar was using Flag No1 during gunnery practice - not the Spanish national flag," a spokesperson said.

Just for fairness' sake let's compare the two.

Noticeably different, aren't they. So had the RN just left it perhaps the Spanish cops would no doubt have seen that while similar it was not in fact their flag and gone off to do something else. Or perhaps they'd have leapt on the chance to be offended anyway and it would all have turned out the same because nobody these days has the balls to say 'it isn't what you're getting upset about, you whining softcocks'.

Brace yourselves for France complaining that even though it's back to front the signal flag Tango suggests they have nothing more to contribute to the world than fish, and expect the Scots to go apeshit when they notice that the familiar looking Mike signal more or less means 'dead in the water'.