Muslims, The Press And Summer

Muslims And The Press

I have been struck by a couple of recent newspaper articles, or perhaps rather the absence of them. In London recently there was a demonstration by thousands of muslims against the violence of Daesh. However, you could easily have missed that fact if you weren't there. It wasn't reported in most of the UK press; anyone who reads the Mail, Express, Star, or Sun remember reading about it? Here in France a large number of muslims have attended a Catholic service at the church in Normany where the Catholic priest was murdered, to show sympathy and solidarity with the congregation. Any chance of that being reported in the Mail, Express, Star or Sun, as the murder of the priest of course was?

In my youth I remember being shocked when no lesser a paper than The Times (a reputable newspaper at the time, incidentally) was hauled before the Press Council, the UK body then responsible for press ethics, and found guilty of distorting the truth by not reporting a signifcant event: the Sharpeville massacre somehow escaped its attention. In fact, I believe that that was only the second time that The Times had been found guilty by the Press Council, the earlier time being for the same offence and, I think, something to do with Hitler; it might have been Crystal Night that was somehow overlooked. I note this only to make the point that omission, failure to report an event, can be as much a distortion as misrepresenting whatever has happened. However, I believe the Press Council had jurisdiction over newspapers only, not comics and I'm not sure about the current body or whether it is able to distinguish between the two.

Summer Rolls On

We've had a few days of storms and some rain but the excessive heat is still with us; 38 degrees in the shade this afternoon. So I've been watering frantically to keep plants alive. The formal village festivities are already over for this year and its grandchildren time for the older residents. I seem to have acquired a pet masonry wasp, the type with a thin thorax and bulges at both ends. It has been buzzing around my head as I sit at my PC for a couple of weeks now and goes into the book shelf beside me, presumably building the little masonry pots in which it stores an egg and a paralysed spider. It must go out at night because every morning when I open the door onto the balcony it comes buzzing in to continue its work. The end result is rather gruesome. When the egg hatches the grub eats the spider, turns into a wasp, breaks the pot and flies off. But that's nature. When I go to my books I'll try not to disturb the pots until they are empty.