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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Category Archives: News of the World

#116 Ping Goes Presidential Poll

November 5, 2016
  1. Besides the unexplained ‘ping’ or ‘hum’ coming up from the seabed off Canada’s Baffin Island, as voters go to the polls to elect the forty-fifth president of the United States, the American political class has been forced to listen to an unprecedented pinging noise given off by its disgruntled electorate.

 

  1. Strange noise trumps known facts; ‘post-factual’ Trump, strangely effective presidential candidate.

 

  1. The inexplicable noise issuing from underneath the Fury and Hecla Strait between Baffin Island and the Canadian mainland; the sound and fury rumbling up from scorned American voters, understandably heckling all who’ve sailed so long amid the self-serving currents of mainstream politics.

 

  1. Scaring away the wildlife; spooking the Washington highlife.

 

  1. Not that the baffling sound of Baffin Island Sound needs a conspiracy theory to explain it. We just haven’t worked it out yet. Not that voters haven’t worked out Donald Trump yet. Just that many of them want this on record: we the people find the American elite more unaccountable than he is.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                               

#115 Refugees At Halloween

October 30, 2016

If there were wounds it would help.
As victims – see, he bleeds – we could welcome them.
Or gashed with plastic and fake blood applied with a make-up brush,
At least then we’d know they really are The Walking Dead.
‘Keep the zombies out,’ we’d shout. ‘Don’t give them a home.’
‘A refugee’s not just for Halloween.’

Instead of ambiguous, they might have made themselves more obvious.
Don’t they realise, it’s the open-ended we don’t know how to hack?

Whether the under-18s kicking a ball about in the temporary territory
Set out for them by French police, will bring with them
The wreckage of their camp – nothing but a plague upon our houses.
Or, supposing they’re allowed to come, perhaps they’ll add
A dash of something different. Not guttersnipes at all,
But popping up in Shoreditch as readily as
They’ve taken to their new container quarters.

We might look at this as the chance to overcome our own uncertainty….
Or not.

#114 What A Waste: 50 years after the Aberfan disaster

October 29, 2016

Thought they’d done all they ought, these men
Re-appearing above ground as photographic negatives
Blackface and white around the eyes.
At the end of their shift – cages for coal monkeys,
Coming up to see children set free by parents’ lives laid waste.

Above the village, the ridge of tippings tips over.
Shale and slurry left over from mining coal,
A glistening sludge licks down the hillside faster than a running man,
Moist and hard like the tongue of Time itself,
Then swallows the schoolchildren whole.

From just before the First World War, fifty years of men hollowed out,
Lives worked out (Not so bad, now there’s pithead baths
And no charge for the doctor), their husks hanging high above the next generation.
Check to see if it’s piled up safely….
No time to waste on that.

#113 A Question Of Consent

October 16, 2016

Sculpted features and lips cherry red against his sombre suit, Ched Evans seething, subsiding, standing next to his solicitor reading a statement, close to the fiancée who stood right by him throughout.

Convicted of rape in 2012, now exonerated after a re-trial, in the meantime the Welsh footballer served two-and-a-half years of a five-year prison sentence.

Three in a bed that early summer night. Hardly enough floor space in Room 14 for three young muckers to be anywhere else. Bedspread’s the corporate colour purple. Legs spread and calling the cum shots, he has always said. Too drunk or drugged (not by him) to have given her consent, she has always maintained.

But how did they end up here, in a scene of well-used furniture and a woman who feels ill-used? The chronology is clear enough: exiting the Zu Bar, dark interior and don’t look at the carpet (now permanently closed); wobbly walk across seaside town well-past its best. And was there kissing in the back of the cab?

Timing is key to the court room. But our line of questioning is of a different order: how is this tawdry scene the counterpart of what we often see, for example, on the football field – flair, determination, even nobility? Aside from who said what or not that night about having sex, if This Is Your Life – the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ LLareggub but spelled the other way round – the wonder is that any of us consent to it.

#112 Hurricane Donald

October 15, 2016

‘Down below, pull the handle.’
Sounds like tomcat Trump’s instructions to his latest puss.
But, no – it’s TV host Billy Bush having to show The Donald how to get off the tour bus.
Easy to laugh when man makes mockery of Man.
But how did that part of us he represents,
Wherefore we doth protest so much, ever get into this parlous state?

Is it that storm force winds have whittled us down to who we really are,
And all that Maketh Man is merely Mannerism? If not,
Then what turned Youth into this cartoon? Pop-eyed and bulging,
Beaverish with a Roy Orbison comb-over, every woman his Mighty O.

Even the apology ’s another mockery in the making.

They’re building a water city: criss-cross canals and houses light as boats.
No, this is one of those towns in Haiti with names like French perfume,
Smelted down by hurricane winds and tides.
Timbers no tougher than the lattice on a loaf of bread,
Ramshackle houses that were bound together somehow,
Now raw and open like patients etherised on operating tables…..

Or America exposed, Hope abandoned, talking pussy and showing all she’s got.

#111 About A Bout

October 1, 2016

Sometimes sponsored by the Meat House (Bar and Grill), welterweight Mike Towell came in at 10st 6lbs 8oz, went out on a stretcher, and ended on the slab (swelling and bleeding to the brain).

Iron Mike molten; away like the cheese – skinny fries or chips with that? – in the 12 hours since his life support was switched off. And the dickie-bowed blokes in the Sporting Club’s hotel venue, who’d come for a full programme of tenderised beef, feeling nauseous at news of his death a day later.

Lissom limbs, lithe torso, tenderness of bared flesh as he steps onto the scales, barely maintaining that give nothing away-ness which goes without saying.

From pinched weeboyface to Presbyterian patriarch, now there’s a full beard on him. Acting up as he climbs into the ring, leveling with his opponent, listening-not-listening to the cheese wire voice of the referee, lecturing both before the bout begins.

Why not simply sacrifice him? Slit the throat of the white-socked ox and mix his blood with wine (Argentinian Shiraz Malbec £24 a bottle in the hotel bar). An answer comes: because he was smart as well as stubborn; because he might have won – the battle against Nature and his own.

Instead, the ritual casualty who shouldered our reality, brutish and short; and made himself its meat and drink.

But its ending with his untimely end: this was never fixed.

#110 Advice To A Daughter Lamenting Her Late Father, Keith Lamont Scott

September 25, 2016

Occasions when your father saw the rising in your eyes

Watched you coming in to the light.

Reading it all like any canny kid

Caught him catching you coming up,

Coming on, coming into it

And the impression this made on you both.

Such are the contours; so is life handed on.

Maybe slower this year after his traumatic brain injury (car crash).

Slower and perhaps less often.

And all the while you’ve been raising your game:

Higher, faster, further.

Still, you and he; sometimes the stillness.

Camera’s in free-fall – you’re feeding to Facebook live.

Frenzy of shouting, screaming, shrieking

Did you ever have stand-up rows like this?

But here there’s no side to take

’Bout boys or clothes or staying out late

Only your shock and awe, hearing your father is no more –

No more than a parcel of flesh and as many police bullets

As failed to find their way out of his fat, black body.

Take all the noise you need for now, any number of decibels

To shield you from the quiet of the grave.

Only recall and return one day to the still of the light,

And the lively look in a father’s eyes, upon his daughter bright.

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

September 18, 2016

Phone video footage is circulating of an altercation between police and a young black male car driver in North London.

It’s ridiculous – the fresh-faced police officer acting like a juvenile delinquent, except the term itself’ s too old for his tender years.

First pulling at the car window then hitting it; stepping back screeching before taking his truncheon to the windscreen.

A dozen blows to smash about a quarter of the screen; a tantrum that shocks because it’s bathetic.

And all because the kid behind the wheel won’t get out of the car; ‘kid’ because the 25-year-old driver who’s locked in and refusing to come out, still contrives to speak youth so the grown-ups can’t comfortably understand.

He needn’t have bothered. On this showing, the adult world just isn’t there to hear him.

Never mind misread him.

#108 Thinking Behind Mindless Killing

September 17, 2016

The Catholic church around the corner is dedicated to a Portuguese peasant girl whose visions of the Virgin Mary prompted the following declaration of her faith:

My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love you. I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love you.

These words are addressed not only to God himself, nor are they simply an intercession on behalf of those who lack faith in him; the girl’s prayer is also a personal statement of her self-belief.

Our Father who art no more nor ever was.

They would say that, wouldn’t they? I mean the teenagers who’ve been hanging round The Stow, the post-war shopping precinct in Harlow, chalking up plentiful police reports of anti-social behaviour (month after month, and for so long the original cohort must have moved on and grown up by now).

Surely they would say something like this, if disposed to speak of the faith and the self-belief that’s been disposed of (behind their backs, without them knowing, despite them trying to appear all-knowing all the time).

Are you kidding? Is this a gang of juvenile Kierkegaards, struggling for belief in a God of Uncertainty. Nothing could be further from theological discourse than the killing of 40-year-old Polish factory worker, Arkadiusz ‘Arek’ Jozwik, who died in hospital two days after he went out for takeaway pizza….and took a blow to the head instead. The only Sorens are the ones who were arrested.

Or, maybe that’s how they vented it – their aggravated sense of loss, and hating themselves for failing to locate, locate, locate anything other than their own paltry existence.

Chunky chap, low centre of gravity – can’t have been a complete pushover. Four years in the meat factory since he came over from Poland, whereas you’re not sure you’d last four minutes before running a mile. read more

# Pointing Towards Syria

September 11, 2016

Honey on the elbow – try sucking and you’ll see.

Though even this prospect ‘s worth more than you or me.

Yet we are here, present and correct, while peace in Syria’ s

But a sweet smear; a smudge on the lens of war-past-war.

Was it ever thus? Is this still politics continued by other means?

In Geneva the protagonists play on, much as they always might

They are the high and mighty, after all.

In Aleppo young men with mortars play out their immortality to the last drop

You don’t have long, lads; aged 27 it turns sour, anyway.

But who knows what the people think? People more partisan

With every falling shell…or past caring whatever it was they once cared about?

Man in gown, transgender pink, not in the ballroom as you might think.

Admitted to hospital suffering from the effects of chlorine inhalation,

Brought on by a barrel bomb – no barrel of laughs in the swimming pool.

The hospital has moved above ground again. Back to normal? Only that the ground floor and basement are now full to overflowing, forcing the reclamation of upper storeys where the ‘walls are open’. Intentional or not, the Syrian doctor’s turn of phrase is undoubtedly poetic. She says again that ‘everything is not enough’. From her lips this is by no means a statement of infinite entitlement. According to another doctor, a Syrian-American who recently returned to the United States, they don’t even have painkillers. In which case the miracle is that people keep on coming.

And the point of pointing this out? The point is to point. Addressing atrocities in terms other than the immediate, means calling to you, dear reader, across the wasteland. It’s important, you see, to retain the capacity for we, renewed by reference to things more important than you and me. And if this makes us ambulance chasers or even vultures whose collective existence feeds on the dead and dying, let’s hope the true nature of our dependence, depends on what we go on to do with it. read more

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