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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Monthly Archives: August 2014

#30 The Substance of ‘J.F.’ versus Phenomenal ‘J.J.’

August 23, 2014

Two men in the desert, front of camera: J.F. in a prisoner’s orange overall, head shaved, kneeling, apparently penitent; J.J., knife in (left) hand, face covered, swathed in black from head to….ankle, where Grim Reaper garb gives way to non-apocalyptic desert boots.

How did they get there?

J.F., a 40-year-old, photogenic video-journalist – facial bones like the young Iggy Pop, previously said he was drawn to conflict zones because, unless someone gets up close, ‘we can’t understand the world, essentially’.

In video footage of a Q&A session at his old journalism school (Medill), he does that a lot – that is, he makes a strong statement, then softens the sound of it with an adverb – ‘essentially’; likewise, the ‘prayers and cigarettes, basically’, that got him through a previous period of incarceration (Libya 2011), also in the hands of unreliable captors (teenage Gaddafi loyalists), who shot and killed a South African photographer immediately before taking J.F. into custody.

Describing him as ‘motivated’, J.F.’s father later said of his late son that doing this important job ‘gave him energy’.

During his talk to staff and students at Medill (ignoring the Milky Bar Kid who at the first mention of violence, smirks at the girl in the adjacent seat), J.F. remarks upon the‘reach for humanity’ readily discernible among the people he was reporting on.

He reports being inspired by them, but did they also serve as his surrogates? It is valid to ask whether other people’s war zones (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) became a theatre of self-validation for J.F. He admits that writing fiction failed to fulfil the romantic idea of himself as a writer (please note, a particular kind of young American invests theword ‘writer’ with a special sort of significance); so he turned to reality rather than questions of realism. read more

#29 Price of Travel

August 20, 2014

‘Tempted? You’re only human’.

When 35 Afghan migrants were considering whether to pay their way into Tilbury – theUK port downriver from London, their travel agent aka human trafficker may have mentioned the North Sea crossing from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge; but failed to inform them of the P&O website offering ‘up to £320 free spending money’ on selected cruises.

Having paid the price of a fortnight’s cruising – exclusive yet all-inclusive (there you go, P&O, you can have that tagline for free), the stowaways completed their journey in a sealed container on board the P&O cargo ferry Norstream; with no opportunity for ‘café hopping and boutique shopping’ en route.

Amateur footage shows 34 of them shortly after the container was prized open at 6.30am on Saturday, around 18 hours after they were sealed into it. Circled by Port ofTilbury personnel in high visibility vests (motto: ‘safety first’), mostly sitting on the floorof a dockside holding area (yellow arrows and industrial paint in the manner ofManchester’s Hacienda club); variously howling, mewling, having difficulty breathing – except for the teenage girl in red shalwar kameez, who is standing calmly to one side, holding on tight to a matching canvas school bag.

Their faces have been blurred beyond recognition. But it’s clear who owns the clip: ITN; and the fee for further use is £699.

Missing from the group photo is 40-year-old Meet Singh Kapoor, who was declared dead after his young son failed to wake him on arrival. Mr Kapoor entered Tilbury in one box and left in another.

Shortly afterwards, the surviving stowaways were dispersed to three different hospitals across Greater East London: one group was taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, London E1; another to the ‘university hospital’ in the post-war new town of Basildon; and a third group to Southend hospital. read more

#28 Big Pharma

August 11, 2014

Forget Jesus – the Resurrection goes by the name of Saa Sabas.

Sabas is a 41-year-old West African pharmacist who contracted what turned out to bethe Ebola virus while nursing his father, who may have been a former nurse in theFrench colonial army.

Unlike Sabas Snr, the son survived. Now nicknamed ‘Anti-Ebola’ and ‘the Revenant’ (who comes again), he volunteers to tell the tale to superstitious villagers as scared oftreatment centres as they are of the disease itself.

And why not? Although at 60 per cent the death rate of the current outbreak is lower than earlier episodes which topped 90 per cent, most incomers into Ebola isolation hospitals still go out through the morgue.

In this context, superstition need not be ‘ancient’; all it takes is a dodgy connection – entirely spurious but almost logical – between the likely demise of the hospitalised andthe medical procedures designed to improve their chances.

For example, nurses and doctors, during the one hour at a time in which they are allowed to work directly with Ebola patients, are swathed head-to-toe in prophylactic plastic – a straightforward measure to stop transmission of bodily fluid and so preventthe virus from spreading. But this might not be the only way it is seen by those on thereceiving end.

Yikes!, cried the emaciated man (10 kilos lost to high fever and dysentery), in between violent hiccups characteristic of the disease, either I strayed into a vintage episode ofDr Who or death is already occurring and I have climbed onto the set of my own autopsy. Dash it all but I should never have come to this terrible place!

(Of course, it is the hiccups – gulp! – which are making him talk like Billy Bunter.)

Thankfully, Saa Sabas was granted immunity from any such syllogism. Having worked at the pharmacy in Gueckedu hospital, medical procedure was in his blood as much asthe Ebola virus. When he fell ill only a few days after his father died, he immediately presented himself for diagnosis and treatment. read more

#27 The news as zombie apocalypse

August 4, 2014

(Andrew Calcutt is away in the sun this week – this is a guest post by Mark Beachill)

“Quick, on Radio 4. The news said there was a zombie apocalypse.”

My girlfriend has a fascination with all things zombie. Myself I’m too squeamish to watchThe Walking Dead with her. Had she misheard, imagined?

A quick search on Google News led me to the story of a traffic accident in the USA brought on when a parade(?) of people in zombie costumes mobbed a car and the driver, panicked, knocked over a passer-by.

“No! It was in the UK and it said zombie apocalypse.”

Back to Google News. It turned out the railway station announcer in Brighton had bizarrely declared a zombie apocalypse over the tannoy. This was his description of thetorrential downpour after several months’ rain fell in the space of an hour or so, floodingthe station. Even more bizarrely BBC Radio 4 picked it up for their hourly national newsbulletin.

When we get freakish weather nowadays it is not usually zombies that are invoked. More commonly the living are said to be out of control: reckless consumption brings energy use that warms the globe and increases the likelihood of “extreme weather events”.

The threat of ecological and meteorological catastrophe means consumption must be reined in, goes the argument. In less secular times the Biblical flood that put Noah on his ark – with God’s plan to cleanse past sins and start again – might have been invoked. Today it is through is our sins against Gaia through over-consumption that are said bring warning storms. So sure are the BBC, for example, that they now limit air-time for any with an alternative view or even an alternative solution.

But, weirdly enough, perhaps the zombie metaphor is not all too distant from theorthodox explanation. Contemporary zombies are a child of the 1970s, their endless hunger a metaphor for our endless consumption prompted by critiques of mindless consumerism that first emerged in the seventies. It was no coincidence that George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the film that re-launched the zombie, had most of its action set in a shopping mall. read more

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