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15 December

So, the big question of the day is whether Kimberley Quinn used David Blunkett's improper influence to contact the Austrian embassy and fast-track a visa for her nanny and if so, what implications this has for the Home Secretary's future and ....

Christ, another day of being depressed in the extreme by 'news values'. Still nothing in the media about those 15,000 Papuans starving to death on that mountainside, I see. No room left after all the columnists have weighed in with their valuable opinions about trust and infidelity, I suppose. You'd also be forgiven for not knowing that, four days ago, the biggest war since the end of World War Two (it's already claimed nearly four million lives) resumed again - the conflict in the Congo. George Monbiot wrote a column about this yesterday but hardly anyone else has bothered to mention it. It's part-funded by the British government, and is in essence a resource-battle over who gets to control the coltan mines of the Congo. Coltan is used to make the mobile phones we all use every day.

Cheery stuff, eh? And these aren't the only examples of this sort of thing, of course. It goes on all the time. I suppose the eternal message remains the same: millions of dead black people don't sell newspapers. Unless there's a charity single involved.

Happy Christmas!

Posted by paul at December 15, 2004 01:33 PM

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