The news pudding - spit or swallow?

This picture was taken on Hackney Road in June 2005 (The date can be seen above Ricin 'Terrer').

A month later on 7 July 2005 real bombs went off in London killing 52 people and injuring 700.

On 21 July a man tried to blow-up the 26 bus on Hackney Road not far from this newsagents in a follow-up attack.

According to reports from the scene of the failed bombing, witnesses told the police that there were "strange smells" and white crystals around the unexploded bombs.

Perhaps these witnesses thought that these bombs were similar to all the other ones that allegedly and endlessly exploded around the borough. But it wasn't all rubbish. I worked not far away from this spot for one of the papers whose bill posters are featured in the photo. I can't remember the ricin terror, the triad bomb or Europe's war with France.

But I do remember in 2001, just after the 9/11 attack in New York, when one of my colleagues asked the editor (who sat next to me at the time) what the funny looking powder on his desk was... "someone's sent me some anthrax" he said.

The building was evacuated and I remember being terrified and embarrassed. I think I sided with the serious worried people, not the people cracking jokes about death - which turned out to be a mistake. The police turned up looking bored and wandered into the building without even putting their masks on - apparently they had dealt with hundreds of hoaxes.

Judging by the photo above my colleagues and I managed to keep that fear bubbling for four years before it was justified.

Anyway, I spent ages copying out the quote below expecting it to link seamlessly with this subject. I'm sure there is a link but it's 2am and I've failed to find it. It is a depressing description of how journalism failed to deal with something real and terrifying, the main point it makes is: "Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding...."

In his book Dispatches Michael Herr said that conventional journalism failed to deal with the extreme circumstances of the Vietnam war - although it doesn't seem to work particularly well under any circumstances: "And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work, met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter."

"If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they'd go out and get it.... They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding...." - Michael Herr, Dispatches.

Perhaps a communications pudding is all we should ever expect.

Election fraud epidemic: More to come

The Guardian reports that Diane Abbott chaired a meeting on terror laws and tabled an early day motion (EDM) calling for an immediate independent review.

A quick check shows DA has tabled 10 EDMs since December 2008 and signed 153 in the same period. It wasn't easy to check if tabling ten constitutes DA as an EDM junkie (so I didn't check) but her signing of 153 EDMs is small fry compared to a number of MPs who have signed over 1000.

In comparison Meg Hillier has signed none and tabled none. There was no mention in the rules that ministers couldn't sign or table EDMs although all ministers appeared not to take part in this process.

As mentioned previously in this blog, Abbott's EDM on unemployed people volunteering for charity work was pulled because it was unfounded, but her EDM on unemployment remains in place and has been signed by 49 MPs. Last year DA said that Olympic developers were falsely claiming to employ local people. Her claims were aired again this week by Robin Wales, Mayor of Newham, who asked how many of the site's 4,101 employees have long term residency in the five Olympic boroughs. His borough has an unemployment rate over 9%. This story from the BBC seems to give good back ground: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7563886.stm

One of the EDMs signed by Abbott is about electoral fraud. Today there were conflicting reports about the state of election fraud - one says there's a problem as six are jailed for electoral fraud.

The other says there was no evidence of electoral fraud in the 2008 local elections.

As the prosecutor in the former piece said: "This week the newspapers are full of what has been called the swine fever pandemic, but there has been another epidemic that has been working its way across the United Kingdom in recent years.”

For some background on Hackney try: http://hackneyelectionsfraud.blogspot.com/

There wasn't much real Hackney news about today. The Telegraph has a piece that mentions moving away from Hackney, as does the Times. The former went to West London, the latter to somewhere else to farm sheep. Basically they had nothing to do with Hackney at all and they're only mentioned as proof that I've looked.

Otherwise Reuters reports more Olympic doom.

Paul Finch, chairman of the review group overseeing architecture and urban design of the London Olympics, said: "If you look at the Olympic site and consider what the map will look like a couple of months after the games, once all the temporary facilities have been taken out, there are going to be an awful lot of great big gaps in the site -- this is really the big challenge now."