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Chronicle exclusive: the vanishing station
For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.
Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.
Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.
Bath Spa railway station. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.
The site of Bath Spa railway station according to the Bath Chronicle For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉
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Spot the hypocrisy
The right-wing Daily Mail national newspaper group – consisting of the Daily Mail and its sister publication, the Mail on Sunday – is not known for its love of foreigners.
The Mail group has been a consistent campaigner against Britain’s membership of the European Union, whilst in recent years it has consistently whipped up hysteria against migrants coming to Britain and/or the EU and foreigners in general.
As regards migrants, the Daily Mail was heavily criticised at the end of last year when a carton by Stanley McMurtry (“Mac”) linked the European migrant crisis (with a focus on Syria in particular) to terrorist attacks and criticised EU immigration laws for allowing Islamist radicals to gain easy access into the United Kingdom.
The New York Times compared the offending – and offensive – cartoon to Nazi propaganda, whilst Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International stated the following to The Independent:
The Daily Mail’s cartoon is precisely the sort of reckless xenophobia that fuels the self-same fear and hate loved by those responsible for atrocities in Paris, Beirut, Ankara and elsewhere. Now more than ever is the time to stand together in defiance of the perpetrators of violence with all of their victims and reject this disturbing lack of compassion.
Another frequent target for the Mail group’s bile has been Britain’s overseas development aid programme, currently accounting for £12.2 bn. of the government’s budget, about which it has been moaning (although the Mail would call it campaigning. Ed.) for nearly as long as Europe.
According to figures from the government, the UK’s overseas development aid budget accounted for under 0.7% of gross national income in 2015. Today’s Independent reveals that foreign aid accounts for just 1.1% of the UK government’s expenditure.
However, such largesse is anathema to the Mail and Mail on Sunday and the latter has put its latest outpouring of bile against foreign aid on today’s front page, as shown below.
The Mail on Sunday – free xenophobic bigotry for every reader Was the editor asleep when the front page was put together? Or is editor Georgie Greig blind to the irony of splashing a banner announcing the giving away of a “Free Giant Glossy Wall Map” above an attack on foreign aid. The map giveaway also proudly announces the reverse of the map shows “every flag”. This is presumably so Mail on Sunday readers will be able to identify both the countries and their flags to which foreign aid will no longer be going if it gets its narrow-minded, isolationist way.
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Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures
A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.
The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.
The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.
Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.
To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.
As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?
* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
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Trip Advisor under fire over Welsh reviews
Trip Advisor, the world’s largest travel site, is under fire from Welsh speakers for refusing to publish reviews in Welsh, the Daily Post reports.
Tour guide Emrys Llewelyn had posted a bilingual review of Caernarfon‘s Blas restaurant, but was told by Trip Advisor it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t one of the site’s current 28 languages, which include Finnish, Serbian, Slovak and Vietnamese.
According to the Daily Post, Mr Llewelyn said: “Trip Advisor’s attitude is disgusting. They do not recognise our language nor culture.”
In response Trip Advisor stated the company was looking at expanding the number of languages used on the site, but added the following:
Unfortunately, the process of adding new languages to Trip Advisor is one that does take a significant amount of time and investment – it is not simply a ‘flick of the switch’ process. The reason for this is that, in order to maintain the integrity of our site, we must ensure that every language in which we operate is fully integrated into our moderation and fraud detection tools and processes.
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Grauniad corrects itself
Along with the majority of the press, those writing for The Guardian occasionally confuse the written and spoken word when two languages are involved; somehow the British media have great difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart (posts passim).
Yesterday The Guardian acknowledged its errors by publishing the following correction and clarification.
One article (Merkel backs May’s decision not to trigger Brexit until next year, 21 July, page 6) referred to the chancellor “speaking in German with an official translator”, and another (No free trade without open borders, Hollande tells May, 22 July, page 1) referred to the president “speaking in French with an official translator”. While Collins dictionary says “translator” can mean “a person or machine that translates speech or writing”, our style guide advises using “interpreter” for people who work with the spoken word, and “translator” for those who work with the written word.
Well done Grauniad; I’m glad your style guide acknowledges the correct use of terminology.
Hat tip: Yelena McCafferty
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Defendant declines to appear without interpreter
An Albanian man charged with two counts of murder has refused to appear in court until an Albanian interpreter is present so he can understand the proceedings, today’s East Anglian Daily Times reports.
A man appearing on the charge sheet as Ali Qazimaj was due to appear before magistrates in Ipswich this morning in connection with the murder of elderly couple Peter and Sylvia Stuart of Mill Lane, Weybread, Suffolk.
In the defendant’s absence, his solicitor Stephen Harris expressed his frustration with Capita which is alleged to provide courts with interpreters. Mr Harris also informed the bench that his client’s name was Vital Dapi, not Ali Qazimaj.
Magistrates referred the case to Ipswich Crown Court for a hearing this afternoon.
Ipswich Crown Court. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The defendant was subsequently brought before the Crown Court this afternoon and the case was adjourned until 19th August for a plea and trial preparation hearing.
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Tidy BS5 in the Post
At the weekend, Cllr. Marg Hickman, the cabinet councillor for neighbourhoods and a great supporter of the Tidy BS campaign, shot the video below at the junction of Perry Street and Stapleton Road – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot which your correspondent has been reporting to Bristol City Council for the best part of two and a half years.
However, Marg also sent the video to the Bristol Post, which used it as the basis for a piece in yesterday’s online edition.
The Post’s report states that Marg also sent the footage and photos to the city council in the hope Bristol Waste, which manages street cleansing and waste collections, will finally begin to get to grips with the problem.
According to the Post a council spokesperson said:
The refuse team emptied the bins this morning, and Bristol Waste Company have two men on Stapleton Road every week day, so they will clear up following attendance from the refuse crew.
One of the street cleansing supervisors has been sent to check the area to make sure everything is clean and tidy.
The council may have sent out a street cleansing supervisor yesterday to check, but one needs to be at that location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your correspondent reported another load of fly-tipping had mysteriously appeared in the same spot overnight.
Although progress on the ground may be slow, the Tidy BS5 campaign seems to be making better headway in the corridors of power since Marg’s intervention prompted Marvin Rees, Bristol’s elected mayor and past resident of Easton, to tweet on the filthy state of Stapleton Road, voicing his commitment to get our streets tidy.
However, Marvin and Marg have a big problem on their hands, as dumping litter and rubbish seem to be endemic throughout the city, not just in deprived BS5. Bristol’s annual Harbour Festival ended on Sunday evening and the Post noted in a separate report that the clean-up from the event is still continuing today, Tuesday.
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Anglesey newcomers urged to learn Welsh
New residents on the island of Anglesey who are not Welsh speakers could be targeted with welcome packs from the local council urging them to learn to speak Welsh, the Daily Post reports today.
The Post continues by stating that councillors on the Isle of Anglesey County Council (Welsh: Cyngor Sir Ynys Môn) will next week discuss a report on the authority’s new Welsh language strategy which aims to increase the percentage of islanders using Welsh in their daily lives.
This is in part to counter a decline in the percentage of Welsh speakers revealed by census statistics. In the 2011 census, 57% of Anglesey residents were Welsh speakers, compared with 80% in the 1950s. In 2001, the figure was over 60%, whilst back at the start of the 20th century, the 1901 census recorded that nearly 91% of Anglesey’s population spoke Welsh.
According to the Daily Post, the lowest percentage of Welsh speakers is found in the popular seaside village of Rhosneigr with a mere 36%.
One of the major challenges facing the Welsh language is the new nuclear plant at Wylfa, which is likely to bring thousands of non-Welsh-speaking contractors to the island during the construction phase.
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Blunders at the speed of light
There was good news this week for Bristol businesses with a yearning for high speed internet connectivity.
The Bristol Post reported on the deployment of ultra-fast 1 Gbps internet in the city.
While journalists at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth are quite competent at their main task of churnalism, such as copying and pasting the words of wisdom given in press releases by men in suits – as in the article in question – standards slip dramatically and the absence of sub-editors and the associated lack of quality control are patently obvious when Post staff try simplifying complicated technical concepts, as shown by the following sentence.
Shall we just examine the above sentence in detail? There’s plenty wrong with it both technically and grammatically, which schoolchildren sitting their SATs examinations at ages 10 or 11 years would be embarrassed to get wrong.
Firstly, those glass cables. The proper designation is “optical fibre cable“; and as is well known the correct use of terminology is important. An optical fibre cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibres that are used to carry light, whilst an optical fibre itself is a flexible, transparent fibre made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. So an optical fibre cable can be made of either glass or plastic, i.e. not solely glass.
Data from an internet connection is transmitted as light down an optical fibre cable. Light travels at the speed of light. However, it is the method for providing the internet connection which is “highly reliable and efficient, not the speed of light. The subordinate clause, i.e. “which is highly reliable and efficient is misplaced and should at any rate have been preceded by a comma.
Finally, there’s that speed of light; it’s so reliable and efficient that its precise value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s). It is commonly denoted as c, as in Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence formula. Furthermore, c is the maximum speed at which all matter – and hence information – in the universe can travel.
In the slightly better old days when the Post still employed proper sub-editors, any decent holder of that position would have taken that sentence to bits and re-written it roughly as follows:-
“These fibre optic cables deliver an internet connection reliably and efficiently at the speed of light.”
Or alternatively:
“These fibre optic cables deliver a reliable, efficient internet connection at the speed of light.”
Unfortunately, local newspapers and their online analogues nowadays seem to have forgotten that quality matters and with quality comes a reputation and with the latter, authority.
