Category: Current Affairs

I don’t normally read the Daily Mail, or its website, but I had to go over and check out how it reported the research from Keele University (pdf) that showed an endemic disregard for the law among the soi-disant respectable middle class. The Daily Mail’s article is here, although I don’t know for how long, and the BBC report is here.

It’s hardly surprising that the Daily Mail doesn’t think to point the finger at itself – it’s a tabloid, after all, so it lives on spin – but I wonder whether any of the journalists recognised their habitual tone of spluttering outrage in this description:

The middle classes justify their [immoral] behaviour by treating it as a “revolt” against apparent injustice

And so the Daily Mail’s philippics against ‘rip-off Britain’, ‘corrupt’ politicians, high taxes and ‘scroungers’ have come round to destroy that very moral rectitude that they claim to be supporting.

Read the comments on the Mail piece to see some quality DM hypocrisy – the responses there at the moment can be paraphrased as either (a) “They aren’t really crimes, the real crimes are the ones committed by those evil people who aren’t us”, and, hilariously, (b) “it’s only because Blair is so evil that other people commit crimes”.

I thought the Olympic logo was bad enough, but a user on Metafilter points out:

[The] logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving someone a blow-job. Once you see it this way you will never be able to see it as being anything else.

Nooooooo!

A great Google Maps mashup allows you to define a sea level rise and see which bits of the world would be flooded as a result. Turns out that Brighton at least is comparatively OK, even with a rise of 14m, but some areas around Wish Road get it in the neck, even at the quite plausible 6m. Link via slacktivist.

Nicolas Sarkozy, now the next president of France, has taken himself off to a luxury yacht to unwind from the rigours of the campaign. Not his yacht: like our own Prime Minister, M. Sarkozy seems not to be short of rich friends now he’s in office. Pictures of the luxury accommodation at Coulisses de Bruxelles.

It’s not just those nasty European bureaucrats who have long rows about chocolate standards.

Jean Quatremer at Coulisses de Bruxelles discusses an interview with Tony Blair in Le Monde, and sums up better that I could the results of those French voters who voted ‘no’ to the European constitution in the hope of something better later on:

Le message envoyé par la France a été compris par ses partenaires comme étant un “stop” et non un “encore”. C’était prévisible. … En votant pour des partis extrémistes en juin 2002 (13% pour l’extrême gauche et 19% pour l’extrême droite) et contre le TCE en 2005, la France a envoyé un signal de repli sur soi. Nicolas Sarkozy et Ségolène Royal, en faisant campagne sur l’identité nationale, en ont tiré les leçons, surfant sur cette vague nauséabonde au lieu d’essayer de la contrer. Dommage.

So Sir Michael Lyons is going to be the new Chairman of Governorsthe new BBC Trust (report). On the basis of his earlier work, the news will now be two years late and contain nothing you don’t already know.

Le Monde has an interview with Jacques Delors on the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

Happy birthday for tomorrow to the European Union – 50 years old. In celebration, the BBC explodes some famous mythical European regulations, including the straight bananas, the Mumbai mix, and the end of the pint.

Iraq war a bad idea? Not to the committed Republicans of the Victory Caucus, which is always a reliable place to find upbeat reporting on the fledgling democracy that is Iraq today (think Switzerland, with oil, apparently). If you think their logo and terminology is a little familiar (Victory Mansions, anyone?) Glenn Greenwald in Salon points out that you might be thinking of 1984.