Reviews Category
We don’t just report off-beat news, breaking news and digest the best and worst of the news media analysis and commentary. We give an original take on what happened and why. We add lols, satire, news photos and original content.
Local News special: playing badminton with a stroppy Shropshire pheasant called Phil (video)
“AT first we didn’t really notice him but we began to realise he was not like other pheasants – at first his stalking was very innocent. He would stare at us through the windows. Whichever window we looked out of, there he was. Sometimes he would jump up on the windowsill for a better view,” says Sally-Ann Hudson, 44, from Wentnor, near Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire.
“Sometimes I go from one room into another, and he will run round the outside of the house following my movements. He even tries to get into the house and I am sure would readily come in if the door was left open. He wakes me up every morning angrily headbutting the French windows downstairs.”
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In pictures: the 2013 Breaking News Photography Pulitzer Prize winners
THe 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography is won by Rodrigo Abd, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra, Manu Brabo and Muhammed Muheisen, all of the Associated Press, for “their compelling coverage of the civil war in Syria”. Photojournalism does not get better than this:
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Injured men are carried to a hospital during fierce fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government troops in Idlib, north Syria, Saturday, March 10, 2012. U.N. envoy Kofi Annan met with Syrian President Bashar Assad on Saturday in Damascus during a high-profile international mission to mediate an end to the country's yearlong conflict. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Photojournalism, Reviews | Comment
Boston Marathon bombs: confronted by horror the people are not terrorised just closer together
AFTER the bombs ruined lives at the Boston marathon we learned again that terrorism destroys. It frightens and reduces. But it doesn’t win. Life goes on. Society holds together. Today. around 1000 journalists are stood outside the Boston Federal Courthouse. News is that a man has been arrested.
The Boston Globe claims: “Suspect being taken to US District Court in South Boston.”
The Boston Police Department counters: “Despite reports to the contrary there has not been an arrest in the Marathon attack.”
But we’re not surprised if the culprits are caught. We expect them to be. We expect to win. We all want to see who did it.
And life goes on.
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Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Boston Marathon bombs: Lu Lingzi is non-white victim number 3
VIRGINIA Trioli (aka Virginia Troll), of the ABC, that we are only interested in the Boston Marathon bombs because…
…we are overly focusing on what happens to rich white people in the West…
Well, Virginia, after eight-year-old Martin Richard and restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29 died, the third person murdered by the bombs is 23-year-old Chinese student Lu Lingzi, a mathematics and statistics student at Boston University.
Such are the grim facts.
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (9)
Apology of the week: the Sun reviews the ‘Real life Mr Bump’
OTHER than that the story was correct. The Sun:
In an article ‘Real life Mr Bump has had 34 ops’ (11 January) a picture caption mistakenly said that Mr Terry Butler had been ‘in prison’ for 15 months instead of ‘in hospital’.
We apologise to Mr Butler and regret any distress caused.
Oops!
Have 4chan found the Boston Marathon bomber?
HAVE the folks at 4Chan located the Boston Marathon bomber?
The Boston Police Department has requested that the public send in any videos of the Boston Marathon. They will surely reveal clues. Alexis Madrigal notes:
If Federal or local police do need help [with video analysis], they could reach out to Digital Media Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis, which is run by the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association. …
After the Vancouver riots, police in that city brought the video they received from citizens to the lab. “Working around-the-clock shifts, analysts and technicians examined more than 5,000 hours of video while tagging more than 15,000 criminal events and individuals,” trade journal Evidence Magazine wrote in 2012. “The approach proved quite powerful. Whereas investigators required four months to process just 100 hours of video after the riots in 1994, the thousands of hours of video recorded in 2011 were processed and initially tagged in just two weeks.”
And why not open it up to everyone on the web? Show us all the images and let us seek out the nutcase(s)? The people at 4chan are way ahead of you:
For what it;s worth, the chap in these photos looks like his backpack is far too light. If you have any information don’t post names online, tell the police. We don’t need more innocent people being affected.
Over at Reddit, more sleuthing is underway.
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (8)
Boston Marathon bombs: praying for Jeff Bauman Junior
YOU can see the photos from the Boston bombings here. We saw the AP’s picture of one man’s injuries. Not every publication thought it too much. You can see our cropped version of the man as he’s helped by first repsonders and Carlos Arredono.
And now some good news. Well, better news. The man was rushed to the Boston Medical Center ER. His name is Jeff Bauman Junior. He’s lost both of his legs. His father, Jeff Bauman Senior, writes:
“Can everyone pray for my son Jeff Jr.? I just can’t explain what’s wrong with people today to do this to people. I’m really starting to lose faith in our country.”
He adds:
Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, they did help greatly. Unfortunately my son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to have both lower limbs removed due to the extensive vascular and bone damage. I was with him last night and am heading back down to Boston – Boston Medical Center to be with him today. He went back into surgery last night at midnight for exploratory due to fluid in his abdomen. He came out at 2:30 and doctors informed us he was doing better. Thanks again to all you guys and girl
You can help Jeff here.
When people say they are praying for someone, it can sound glib. Tony Woodlief helps :
Sometimes I wake up in a hotel bed or my apartment and I forget where I am, what bed this is and what city this is. I shower and sometimes I shave and I mutter sentences that have no meaning because they are not in the right place. They are divorced from all place, these words like I don’t understand this and I can’t do this and Please help me. I mutter these sentences and I stop, the washrag over my face or the blade to my neck, and I wonder where the words came from, and who they are for, and why I am saying them, and if only God understands why we talk to ourselves in the bleary dark morning hours.
Only God understands if they are prayers or laments, and how words can be both, how every sentence spoken out of place is really just another way of saying: Where am I to go?
Heather MacDonald does not believe:
I take it that believers do not ascribe such inconsistent results to capriciousness on God’s part, but rather to their own limited capacities to understand God’s ways: “Thy Will be done.” But why continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values. It will not do to say: “God does respond to our prayers, but in ways that we cannot fathom.” Saving a child from cancer and letting a child die from cancer cannot both be a sympathetic response to prayer; if we had wanted a stricken child to die in order to secure an earlier entry to heaven, we would have said so. And if premature death from cancer is such a boon, why doesn’t a loving God provide it to one and all?It is humans who work with passion and commitment every day to try to save their fellows (and a range of other creatures) from suffering and sorrow. Emergency room medicine is constantly evolving to try to ensure that gun shot victims and people crushed by cars survive. Doctors and hospital staff work frantically throughout the night to try to revive a failing heart or a shattered brain. They do so out of love and compassion, while God, who could restart an exhausted heart in an instant, demurs. The only source of love on earth is human empathy. Transferring our own admirable traits onto a constructed deity just obscures the real human condition: we are all we have, but that is saying a lot.
If you can’t pray for Jeff Bauman, we can at least contemplate what it means to be him.
Posted: 17th, April 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (3)
The Boston Marathon Bombs were the work of Muslims, the Tea Party, whites, immigrants, Nazis, al-Qaeda, anarchists and the US Government
WHO set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon? Everyone who has an agenda knows:
CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen twice suggested that “right-wing extremists” could be behind Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings… Bergen was asked to explain if the bombing could have been an act of terror. Bergen answered in the affirmative, and proceeded to name possible suspects depending on the type of explosive used.
Setting off two bombs at the end of a public race could be an act of terror. Well, he’s the expert:
“I think the actual – the constituency inside the bomb will make a big difference about how we identify the person who did this,” he explained at the end of CNN’s 4 p.m. ET hour of live coverage. The perpetrators “could be a right-wing extremist group.”
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Boston Marathon bombs: after the massacre the story in photos
AFTER the Boston Marathon bombs, what happened? Three people are dead. Scores are injured – many badly. The two bombs were set inside domestic pressure cookers packed with metal fragments and ball bearings.
Neighbours sit outside the house of Krystle Campbell’s parents in Medford, Mass.,Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Campbell was killed in Monday’s explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Miss Campbell was 29.
“Pray for Martin” is written in chalk at a park near the home of Martin Richard in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston,Tuesday, April 16, 2013. 8-year old Martin was killed in the bombing at the finish line.
Left to right: Martin Richard; his mother, Denise, who has undergone brain surgery; his six-year-old sister Jane who lost a leg in attack; older brother, Henry, 12; and father Bill, who ran the race.
Dr. Brien Barnewolt, chair of emergency medicine at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, speaks to reporters at the hospital, Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Barnewolt was among the staff who treated the 14 patients injured in the bombing at the finish of the Boston Marathon who were treated at Tufts.
Nine children were wounded. Two have had their legs amputated. Liz Norden had two sons running in the Marathon. Both have lost a leg.
Nicholas Yanni, 32, of Boston, speaks to reporters at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Yanni, and his wife, Lee Ann Yanni, 31, not pictured, were among the 14 patients injured in the bombing at the finish of the Boston Marathon who were treated at Tufts
Neighbours hug outside the home of the Richard family in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.
Boston police officers block access to Boylston Street while standing with hundreds of runner Mylar thermal blankets near the scene of Monday’s Boston Marathon explosions, which killed at least three and injured more than 170.
Tammy Lynch, right, comforts her daughter Kaytlyn, 8, after leaving flowers and some balloons at the Richard house in the Dorchester.
Police conducted an overnight search in this apartment building in the Boston suburb of Revere, photographed Tuesday, April 16, 2013, and removed items from the apartment of a young Saudi national visiting on a student visa who was questioned in connection with the bombings Monday at the finish of the Boston Marathon, a law enforcement official said. He said the man was tackled by a bystander, then police, as he ran from the scene of the explosions. But he said it is possible the man was simply running away to protect himself from the blast, as many others did.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, below, is wheeled up to a microphone to speak during a news conference.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers, far right, speaks as Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, left, and Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick, center, listens during a news conference in Boston.
Runner Megan Cloke pauses after placing flowers on the doorstep of the Richard house in the Dorchester.
Workers find bags containing runners’ personal effects as they return them to their owner near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Peace is written on the sidewalk in front of the Richard house.
Two police officers have rifles and watch from the roof of the Lenox Hotel overlooking the finish area of the 2013 Boston Marathon.
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis speaks as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick listens.
Boston police on bicycles patrol on Commonwealth Avenue.
Members of the Massachusetts National Guard wait for orders on Boston Common.
The flag on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol is lowered to half-staff on Capitol Hill, Monday, April 15, 2013, in Washington. Says President Obama:
“Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack or why, whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organisation, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual, or individuals…We also know this — the American people refuse to be terrorised.”
Louisiana bans saggy jeans
PEOPLE, for some reason, get the hump about the way other people wear clothes. Be it too much cleavage, a hijab, a comedy slogan or the tightness of trousers, people who don’t have to wear any of these items go batshit mental because they believe that everyone should dress ‘appropriately’, subscribing to a vague set of imagined rules by people who have absolutely no right.
And so, we look to America where some idiots have decided to fine people if their trousers are deemed to be ‘too low’. You’ve seen it before – young people wear their jeans so they ride low, leaving a bit of underwear on show. People get incredibly irritated by this fashion trend, when of course, they shouldn’t be gawping at people’s arses anyway, the mucky buggers.
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Boston Marathon Bombings: Carlos Arredondo is the illegal immigrant who was there to help
THE grimmest photograph to emerge from the Boston Marathon bombing is of a man with his leg missing, the white bone protruding through shards of loose skin where once a foot was. The man is in a wheelchair. His face is grey. To his side are a male medic. Behind him a woman pushes the chair. Touching the victim is a man called Carlos Arredondo. (The image is above. It’s been cropped.)
Mr Arredondo tells the man: “Stay with me, stay with me.”
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Posted: 16th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Boston Marathon massacre: it was about hurting ‘rich white people in the West’
THE Boston Marathon massacre was heinous crime. But to the ABC’s Virginia Trioli it has a message. Those nursing amputations and the loved ones of the dead and dying have it all explained:
The contrast of course with what goes on in, I mentioned Iraq in passing just before, what goes on there and also in Afghanistan on a weekly basis has not been lost on many people this morning. We did report this morning of course that there were a series of bomb attacks overnight in Iraq and it’s important to mention that again, 37 people dead and more than 270 others were wounded. Several cities were hit in those bomb blasts, the capital Baghdad, Kirkuk in the North and Nasiriyah in the South. They were coordinated attacks according to police there during the morning rush hour and they mainly involved car bombs. That’s the contrast that we always have on a day like today when it seems to me where we are overly focusing on what happens to rich white people in the West, versus what happens on a daily basis in those countries.
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Posted: 16th, April 2013 | In: Reviews, Sports | Comments (6)
52 live animals found in Plymouth house fire triggered by roast dinner
Posted: 16th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Madeleine McCann: the Costa Teguise angle gets revised
THE 62-year-old arrested as part of an investigation into the alleged abduction of a three-year-old girl at Costa Teguise, Lanzarote, has been released on bail. The Press Association has sent that news to all publishers.
The man has been bailed to return to Milton Keynes police station in early May. He’s not been charged with any offence. He is simply helping police with their enquiries.
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Posted: 16th, April 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews | Comments (2)
Boston Marathon bombs: all the facts
* THREE people have been killed by explosions at the Boston Marathon. Seventeen are in a critical condition. Many more are hurt.
* There were two explosions, 17 seconds apart.
* Witnesses reported a loud explosion on the north side of Boylston Street, just before the finishing line.
* One of the dead is Martin Richard, an eight-year-old boy, 8, who was waiting at the finish line for his father, Bill Martin. The boy’s father and sister are “grievously injured”. The family live in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
* A woman in her twenties is dead.
* The youngest victim is a two-year-old boy, who is in hospital with head injuries. (See above. Image posted on Twitter with father’s permission.)
* The FBI are seeking a “darker-skinned or black male”.
* People were injured by flaying ball bearings.
* So far, at least ten people have lost limbs.
* The attack took place on Patriots’ Day, which marks the first battle of the Revolutionary War.
Who took 1000 pigeons from Trafalgar Square and can we all praise him?
WHO has removed / stolen 1,000 pigeons / feathered vermin from Trafalgar Square? And can we all give him a round of applaus?
The Independent calls him a “culprit”. You might call him a pest controller.
What we know about the man is that he is in his twenties, white, wears blue overalls and a red baseball cap.
Bernie Rayner, a licensed seed seller, tells the paper:
“There are around 4,000 pigeons here. I reckon a quarter of them have gone in the last few weeks. I challenged him and he claimed he was a member of a pigeon racing club in Peckham and they were for competition. But they are too old and out of condition for racing.”
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Massive wuss of a policeman has a massive cry thanks to marijuana cake
THUNDERING wimp, Mike Berkemeier, a policeman from Ohio, has been chilled to his core after he accidentally ate a cake filled with marijuana which belonged to his daughter.
The additional ingredient of cannabis left him feeling disorientated and confused. Then a bit horny. Then hungry. Then amused. Then sleepy. Possibly.
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Bras are useless, so burn them (take them off first)
SCIENTISTS are always discovering brilliant things and curing all manner of awful diseases. Some, however, focus on any old crap in a bid to justify their jobs.
Take, for example, a French scientist who has declared that bras are useless.
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Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Amy Child launches Spazio
AMY Childs, Ronsealed star of The Only Way is Essex, has helped launch a Chelmsford kitchen design shop’s move online.
The name of the outfit?
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Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
The 2003 Harvard school quiz: ‘Was your rough sex wedding listed in the New York Times?’
DID you go to Harvard? Matt Yglesias did (@mattyglesias). He’s posted this Harvard class reunion survey questions on Twitter.
The Harvard Class of 2003 – 10th Reunion Survey is here:
It gets better. The hosts seems to be working on a seating plan:
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B-Movie Watch: Malibu Express and Hard Ticket To Hawaii
MALIBU Express (1985) is the first firm in Andy Sidaris’s series Bullets, Bombs and Babes. Wooden actors and top-shelf Pets played out scenes featuring beaches, bikini, wood-hewed hunks in trunks and imaginative ways to die.
Look out for such titles as: The Dallas Connection, Day of the Warrior, Do or Die, Enemy Gold, Fit to Kill, Guns, Hard Hunted, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Malibu Express, Picasso Trigger, Savage Beach and Return to Savage Beach.
Hard Ticket to Hawaii was better still. The Frisbee scene being memorable:
Murdoch’s Times accuses BBC of using bribery and blagging to get stories (bit rich for the LSE’s North Korea mission)
BLAGGING and bribery at the BBC? When the tabloids don it, we’re told it’s tawdry, toxic and worthy of State control. When the BBC does it, do we have a different view? The Times (prop. R. Murdoch) reports:
The BBC pulled an episode of Panorama shortly before it was due to be broadcast after one of its producers was accused of attempting to bribe a security consultant for information.
The producer allegedly e-mailed Sean Ghent, consultant to Harlequin Property, suggesting he might not be paid by the company and dangling the possibility of work with Panorama.
Harlequin, a developer of luxury homes in the Caribbean, complained to the BBC last Wednesday and the next day the programme, which had been due to air on Monday, was removed from the schedule.
The Radio Times described the programme as “an investigation into financial scandals that could wipe out people’s life savings, including a £250 million Caribbean rental-home development scheme”.The BBC said yesterday that it had suspended a member of the Panorama team and started disciplinary proceedings. The corporation’s statement came as a prison officer and former police constable were jailed for selling information about a notorious killer and celebrities to The Sun newspaper, owned by News International, which also publishes The Times.
Reader martinseugne writes:
Seems to me that this was public interest journalism. Newspapers are trying too hard to tar everyone else with the same brush. The sort of wide spread newspaper excesses that Leveson investigated had no public interest defence whatsoever.
Who decides what the public interest is? The public should, surely?
The Times follows that story of alleged bribery with the front-page sgtory: “BBC kept students in dark over Korea trip“:
The BBC withheld key information from students, placing them in danger during the making of an undercover documentary in North Korea, according to the London School of Economics.
The group from the LSE were not informed until they had landed in Beijing, en route to Pyongyang, that they would be accompanied by a three-person Panorama film crew posing as scholars and academics. Some may even have been kept in the dark about the scale of the risk they were taking until they were inside North Korea…
The LSE said that the BBC’s alleged deception had placed its academics at risk in sensitive areas around the world because they could be suspected of facilitating undercover journalism…
Asked why the students had only been informed in Beijing that it was a BBC documentary, a spokeswoman said: “The fact that it was a BBC journalist is neither here nor there as it is journalists per se that are banned for North Korea, not the BBC specifically. The students were all explicitly warned about the potential risks of travelling to North Korea with the journalist.”
So that’s blagging, then. And it might be worse because the Times online headlines that story:
Students complain BBC risked their lives in North Korea
But there is no comments in the story from any student saying their life was put at risk. The LSE newspaper, The Beaver, reports:
BBC Programme Uses LSE Students to Gain Access to North Korea Amid Nuclear Tensions WITHOUT Informing the School
Hayley Fenton, Arisa Manawapat, Ira Lorandou, Matthew Worby, and Liam Brown’s story contains no one mention of lives in jeopardy.
The BBC has refused the London School of Economics’ request for a BBC Panorama programme about North Korea to be pulled after revelations that the footage was gained by allegedly misleading and possibly endangering LSE students…
A student who went on the trip, wishing to remain anonymous, told the Beaver that “we were not made aware of the presence of several BBC journalists at the time of the flight to Pyongyang. We were led to believe that John Sweeney was a History professor, although it was later implied that he was not a professor at the LSE.”
John Sweeney… Him! Did not one of the students know who Sweeney was?
John Sweeney, one of the reporters who travelled undercover with the LSE students has refuted the allegations made in the letter, stating that the LSE students “knew and understood what was at stake for them before [the] trip.”…
The LSE argues that the BBC’s unauthorised use of the School’s name could affect whether actual LSE academics can gain access to the hermit kingdom for research purposes. In a statement to students and staff, the LSE claims that its “academics work on aspects of many politically sensitive parts of the world, including by travel to those locations. It is vital that their integrity is taken for granted and their academic freedom preserved.”
Alex Peters-Day, General-Secretary of the LSE Students’ Union told the Beaver that “it was not the BBC’s place to make decisions on behalf of the students on the trip, nor was it the BBC’s place to put at risk all those within the School.”
“What the BBC did was reckless and ethically reprehensible and I am just glad we are not facing a situation where our students are being detained in North Korea.”
The risky BBC risked every student at the entire LSE? Aren’t student supposed to challenge power?
And whose ethics? Didn’t the LSE take money to educate Colonel Gaddafi’s son?
Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (3)
In 1970, the Fairfax County Bunny Man was terrorising the locals
THEY never did find the Bunny Man who was terrorising resident in Fairfax County, Virginia. On Oct. 22, 1970, the Washington Post, reported:
Fairfax County police said yesterday they are looking for a man who likes to wear “white bunny rabbit costume” and throw hatchets through car windows. Honest.
Air Force Academy Cadet Robert Bennett told police that shortly after midnight last Sunday he and his fiancee were sitting in a car in the 5400 block of Guinea Road when a man “dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears” ran from the nearby bushes and shouted: “You’re on private property and I have your tag number.”
The “Rabbit” threw a wooden-handled hatchet through the right front car window, the first-year cadet told police. As soon as he threw the hatchet, the “rabbit” skipped off into the night, police said. Bennett and his fiancee were not injured.
Police say they have the hatchet, but no other clues in the case. They say Bennett was visiting an uncle, who lives across the street from the spot where the car was parked. The cadet was in the area to attend last weekend’s Air Force-Navy football game.”
Posted: 15th, April 2013 | In: Flashback, Strange But True | Comment (1)
Regret the error: Yale is not 6000 miles above sea level
REGRET the error: Apart from that the NY Times story on Yale and Quinnipiac being local rivals was corrects.
Correction: April 12, 2013
An article on Thursday about Yale and Quinnipiac’s reaching the semifinals of the N.C.A.A. men’s hockey tournament misstated the distance above sea level of Colorado Springs, where Yale played the last time it advanced to the national semifinals, in 1952. It is 6,000 feet, not 6,000 miles.
Such are the facts…
