an interesting news week

Well if you were the editor of a news channel, this must have been one hell of a week for you. First off the William and Kate wedding. Regular readers will know I’m not a big royalist. Many of the lesser figures in the Royal family deserve to be in places other than a fabulous Cathedral; like in a sentence with an assortment of words like ‘lamp-posts’, ‘from’ and ‘dangling’. Only joking. But I watched the wedding with my family and you know, I had to admit that it made for decent viewing. The Beckhams trying to be properly posh, the hats worn by Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the nose-off between Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Mike Tindall, Charles and Camilla having to slum it by sharing a coach with those pushy Middletons, all left an indelible image on my mind. But jesting apart I think I can proudly say that I can’t think of anywhere that does this spectacle better than Britain and whilst the Royals are rubbish at marriage they do put on a good wedding. I’ll give it 2 years…

Then just as we were wondering where the honeymoon destination might be we learned that a very secluded villa had just come onto the market complete with a range of security features designed to keep the world at bay….

The news of Osama Bin Laden’s killing did come as a news bolt from the blue. And how decent of the Navy Seals to wait until Kate and William had put the Aston in the parking lot, if you get my drift, before letting OBL have it with both barrels. A couple of things about this were intriguing – there’s been a bit of teeth gnashing in the press about whether it would have been more civilised to capture him and put him on trial rather than execute him. But I think most reasonable people feel that his terrorism was so abhorrent that he gave up the right to his rights the moment that first jet hit the twin tower. However it was a little disturbing for the details of the circumstances of OBL’s killing to change so much over the course of 24 hours. Especially as it appears that the President and his team watched all the action in real time. Surely they would have seen whether he was armed or not or quivering with fear behind his wife. But apparently not.

Was it just me but I also thought that the President had just a little too much glee in his voice as he made his announcement that the head of the Al’Qaeda was dead. He must sense that after months and months of seeing his popularity plummet, he’s now a shoe-in for that second term of office. It must have been a real struggle for him not to hold up a sign proclaiming the final score Obama 1 – Osama 0. Still I’m glad the hunting down of one of the world’s most dangerous men happened on his watch and not George W’s. Lastly on this subject, I can’t help wondering just how tough are the entrance exams for the Pakistani secret service? I also have an idea where Lord Lucan and Shergar might be hanging out.

And then today the news comes on that one of my sporting heroes, Seve Ballesteros, had lost his battle with cancer. I’ve written before about how much I enjoyed watching him play and admired his determination to succeed. Matchplay against a brain tumour was the one he couldn’t win sadly but he leaves us with many fantastic sporting memories.

And finally we’ve had a referendum over here in the UK – a pretty rare occurrence – to decide on whether to change the political voting system from the traditional first-past-the-post method to one based on AV (alternative or preferential voting). It was complicated because the two sides of the Government coalition, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, favoured the different schemes. Nobody I knew actually gave a monkey’s uncle about the referendum  but the outcome was a resounding defeat for the Lib Dems (supported by the Labour party) and their leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg for had campaigned hard for the AV vote. Not only that but they also lost a shedload of seats in the local elections which accompanied the referendum vote. Poor old Cleggy, a year ago he was the star of the political scene. Now that he’s been soundly thrashed by that Campo character let’s hope we’ve heard the last of the dummer whines from the Lib Dems. See what I did there?

Yes it’s been quite a week for news stories.

pp

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