Current affairs link dump Sat 18 Feb

Reporter’s Death Puts Focus on Difficulties of Covering a Secretive Syria

The conflict in Syria has become, for journalists, one of the most difficult and dangerous assignments in many years, with at least five having died while covering the uprising that began there last March.

Tiny shrimp leave giant carbon footprint

If the seafood is produced on a typical Asian fish farm, a 100-gram (3.5 ounce) serving “has an ecosystem carbon footprint of an astounding 198 kilograms (436 pounds) of CO2,” biologist J. Boone Kauffman said.

Irish borrowers in arrears: The power of the personal

THE financial crisis and its aftermath can be told as a tale of enormous, impersonal forces operating on a global scale. But it is also made up of millions of individual stories, of households coping with arrears, unemployment and great private stresses.

‘Being raped by a gang is normal – it’s about craving to be accepted’

A female former gang member has exposed the growing levels of sexual violence against young women who join them, saying that many are willing to risk being raped in return for the status of membership.

Employers reject jobs scheme that’s all work and no pay

A scheme under which jobseekers can lose benefits if they do not complete up to 30 hours a week of unpaid “work experience” is in disarray after companies and charities abandoned it in the wake of public anger.

Who is, and is not, invited to Cameron’s emergency NHSbill summit? A data visualisation.

David Cameron is holding an emergency summit about the troubled NHS bill on Monday. There has been a lot of chatter on twitter about who is, and is not, invited. It’s notable, for example, that the elected head of the Royal College of GPs has not been invited: the NHS bill is all about putting power in the hands of GPs, but they have such serious concerns about the bill that they’ve called, with regret, for it to be dismissed.

This is not wartime Nazi Germany and Cameron’s attacks on the vulnerable and needy must be stopped

… over the past week or so I have sat back and watched our Coalition Government surpass itself in its campaign of terror against some of the most needy in our society.

Paul’s Pantry turns down Planned Parenthood food donation

Boyce says Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin started the annual January food drive two years ago in Milwaukee. Boyce says this year the food drive expanded to centers across the state. She says Paul’s Pantry was supposed to pickup the Green Bay collections, but it never happened.

 

UK daily newspaper headline word clouds, January 2012

Below are word clouds containing headlines from the UK’s daily newspapers: The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Independent, i, and The Sun.

Headlines were gathered from Front Pages Today and Sky News; in the case of front pages with more than one headline, the most prominent was recorded.

The word clouds were created in Wordle. Click on an image to launch the gallery.

The Times

The Guardian

The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Mirror

The Daily Mail

The Daily Express

The Independent

i

The Sun

With thanks to @chainbear for the idea.

i reports on ‘Blue Monday’; is sceptical of polls

This time last year, science writer Ben Goldacre explained the origins of the ‘Blue Monday’ myth:

…let me briefly clarify how Blue Monday is definitely bullshit.

The “most depressing day of the year” began life as a “wacky academic” equation story. This is the kind of thing PR companies offer as “advertising equivalent exposure” for companies who want their brand in the papers.

The equation stunt was not the work of an academic, it was paid for by Sky Travel, and Blue Monday comes just after your first pay cheque arrives, the perfect time to book a holiday.

His warning was not heeded by i, which today tells readers in a brief article (Jenny Stevens, p. 17):

Today is the mother of all bad Mondays—allegedly the most depressing day of the year.

According to psychologist Cliff Arnall, who invented what he claimed was a mathematical formula for misery back in 2005, the combination of factors including miserable weather, post-Christmas debt and shattered New Year resolutions all conspire to make the Monday of the last full week in January the gloomiest day of the year.

The myth even made it into the ‘Letter from the executive editor’, who concedes that ‘it is hardly the most scientific formula you’ll read.’

Yet on page 41 the paper appears sceptical of a poll commissioned by Channel 4:

Why the inconsistency? Perhaps they needed to fill some space.

In partial defence of Rick #Santorum, the hypocrite

A story is doing the rounds, and has most recently appeared on Jezebel, in which Rick Santorum is a hypocrite for saving his wife’s life via late-term abortion in 1996. Santorum, of course, is a notorious anti-abortion campaigner and in particular has been a critic of late-term procedures.

But Karen Santorum did not have an abortion in 1996. According to a report in the Boca Raton News and the Philadelphia Inquirer the following year, Rick Santorum

was within hours of deciding whether to have to use an abortion to save the life of his wife, Karen Garver Santorum, who was in her fifth month of pregnancy.

Ultimately, they did not have to make a decision; nature made it for them. Karen went into premature labor brought on by infection, delivering a boy who had a fatal abnormality.

The article, by Steve Goldstein, makes clear that antibiotics were administered to Karen Santorum after she went into labour, contradicting current blog reports that the delivery was drug-induced.

Interestingly, Santorum’s views on abortion appear to have hardened since this ordeal: Goldstein reports that at the time, Santorum was open to allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest—he no longer believes this is acceptable.

Santorum is still a hypocrite, however: he told Goldstein at the time,

If that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to. I consider it a blessing that we didn’t have to make that decision.

As Amanda Marcotte points out, none of this deterred Santorum from later campaigning against the use of medical procedures that would have saved the life of his wife, that he was prepared to use himself.

Rick Santorum is a throughly unpleasant human being with openly theocratic political intentions: the annullment of existing non-traditional marriages; support for state-level bans on birth control. There is plenty for which to criticise him—but his wife did not have an abortion in 1996.

Associated Press mistranslates Cuban statement on Castro Twitter rumours

The Associated Press reports that an official statement from Cuba Debate called Twitter users spreading rumours of Fidel Castro’s death, ‘necrophiliac counterrevolutionaries’.

This is a basic mistranslation, as a brief web search shows. ‘Necrofilia’, as it appears in the original Spanish context, means in this case:

A morbid obsession with death or one of its aspects.

A more appropriate translation would have been ‘death-obsessed’, or similar. But, as one Twitter user pointed out:

 

The effect of the mistranslation is to make Castro, or at least those speaking for him, look faintly ridiculous.

Daily Mail and Ephraim Hardcastle apologise to Jemima Khan

The Daily Mail diarist Ephraim Hardcastle has been forced by the Press Complaints Commission to apologise to Jemima Khan, following the publication of a fabricated quote. His mea culpa reads:

Following my item on December 7 in which I claimed that the late Sir James Goldsmith had remarked that victims of the Holocaust ‘lacked the initiative to get out’, I would like to clarify that he said no such thing. A number of Sir James’s relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, and he counted two Holocaust survivors among his closest friends. As his family has pointed out, he would never have made these remarks. My apologies to the family for any upset caused.

Khan responded in a series of tweets, and opined:

It appears that of late, Hardcastle is making a habit of inserting false claims into his copy. In October the Mail was made to apologise and pay substantial libel damages to Lady Kristina Moore—despite the paper’s insistence that it had not libelled her.

Perhaps the Mail should start looking for a more reliable diarist?

David Cameron’s Christian nation

The news of a politician delivering a speech tailored to appeal to a certain group of his supporters should not come as a surprise: like almost everything David Cameron does, his speech on the King James Bible was an exercise in public relations.

While the ability to pander is a political prerequisite, I feel it is not too much to ask that the Prime Minister keep from contradicting himself in the same speech (but doing so over a period of time is expected—see Cameron’s promise of ‘no top-down reorganisation’ of the NHS).

If the object of the speech was to declare the importance of the Christian religion to British public life, and in the process assert its moral superiority and benefits—as appears to have been the case—then Cameron has failed to meet his goal.

Consider, on the one hand: “Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love … pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities … these are the values we treasure. Yes, they are Christian values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that.”

And on the other: “But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. … Let’s be clear. Faith is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for morality. There are Christians who don’t live by a moral code. And there are atheists and agnostics who do. But for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction. And whether inspired by faith or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.”

If the Prime Minister believes that either of these sentiments is true, he should pick one and stick with it.