Laura TannaONE OF the things I love about England is their newspapers, not that our own aren't good. It's just that with so much craziness here, there sometimes isn't enough room left to report on all of the craziness elsewhere. For instance, some readers of The Times might have been gripped by the headline "Woodworm invade Venetian art," describing the latest threat to Italy's beautiful churches, particularly ancient books, paintings and even the beams and carved wooden panels. The culprit is hot, humid weather encouraging worm larvae to multiply.
No, what caught MY attention was the article beneath: "THIEVES USE APES AND SNAKES TO THREATEN VICTIMS" (capitalisation mine). Now isn't that a novel thought? Here we are feeling panic at the siege of gun crimes when unfortunate victims in Paris, France are now facing castration by Barbary apes or poisoning by dangerous reptiles.
Seems that gangs have smuggled into France up to 500 apes from North Africa and Gibraltar and these become aggressive when brought up in isolation. "'There is every reason to be afraid,' Marie-Claude Bomsel-Demontoy, a vet at the Natural History Museum in Paris," is quoted as saying in The Times of October 2, 2000. "The male apes, considering men to be their rivals, [will attack] their sexual organs first." How does that grab you?
Jamaica isn't the only country to glorify "Dons," holding them up for subliminal emulation. On the same day, October 2, 2000, The Daily Telegraph had a front-page article about the death of Reginald Kray, complete with COLOUR PHOTOGRAPH. Give me a break, please. Printing "murderer" under the photograph did little to dissuade me that The Telegraph was hoping to sell more papers. "The murderer who with his psychopathic twin Ronald established one of the most ruthless criminal gangs ever seen in Britain, died in his sleep yesterday," was their lead sentence. Better he should have been mugged by one of those gangs in Paris and his misfortunate encounter relegated to the back page!
Fighting
The person who really was unfortunate in being relegated to parts unknown was William Hague, leader of The Conservative Party. The man gives the speech of a lifetime (being married to a news junkie I caught part of it on television) and what happens? The Serbs decide to burn their Parliament and overthrow the dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Scenes of dramatic street fighting pushed Hague right off the front page. If the truth be told, journalists didn't do Hague justice. He'd been hysterically funny about the Labour Party conference in Brighton, which had started the week before. Among other witticisms, he listed all the different ministers who were quite publicly feuding with each other, and then slipped in: "Last week in Brighton, the security was so tight it was Wednesday before they stabbed each other in the back."
If you're like me, the only thing I knew about the man was that he looks rather like a wimp but has a beautiful blonde wife. The way Hague impressively handled questions from the floor, for well over an hour, I came away thinking that Tony Blair has a serious challenge on his hands in the next British election.
And the Millennium Dome hasn't helped Blair's party one bit. The papers were quite pointed that this "tourist attraction" by year's end will have attracted only 4.5 million paying visitors instead of the projected 12 million. According to The Sunday Telegraph of October 8, 2000, "The Dome has so far received 628 million pounds of lottery money, 229 million more than was originally anticipated," not to mention the many millions of pounds the government put up of taxpayer money. That would make for a lot of crash programme work.
The Japanese company which had bid to buy The Dome for over 100 million pounds appears to have backed out. I thought the most novel suggestion being bandied about was that since no one seems to know what to do with this white elephant in Greenwich, and since it was basically built on gambling profits, why not turn it into a casino and make profits for more socially redeeming ventures, like health and education or paying off Third-World debt.
Speaking of Third-World countries, Zimbabwe was very much in the news, with armed police shutting down the country's first independent radio station, in The Times of October, news that millions of black Zimbabweans are faced with homelessness and losing work as a result of Mugabe's political thugs having successfully "occupied" more than a thousand farms.
Reports in Jamaican papers that Zimbabwean food riots are intensifying come as no surprise. A socialist friend from Uganda who settled in Zimbabwe rather than leave Africa when Idi Amin took over, came through earlier this year after a conference in Cuba. The way this friend kept automatically looking over the shoulder to make sure no one else was hearing what was being described about Zimbabwe gave me the creeps. No one should have to live with that unconscious fear of retaliation from a totalitarian regime. News of Zimbabwe reminded me that freedom of speech is still Jamaica's greatest weapon in the fight against those who would sell the country for their own profit.
Finally, one couldn't leave an English paper without finding at least one heartwarming story about a furry friend being saved by human kindness. In this case, Ivan, the ten-year-old Russian eagle, had been kept captive in a cage so small that he could never flap his wings. After the Russian zoo closed, David Buncle, a British falconer, overcame the bird's fear and taught it how to fly. A stunning photograph of Ivan perched on Buncle's arm, the bird's wings spread majestically against the sky, suggested the power of doing something about the iniquities of man.
