First Band Aid, now Radio Aid (Guardian)

This seems like a very positive story. I’m not personally a fan of commercial radio, but the fact that every station in the country has united behind this has to be a good thing.

Well done for putting the most bitter commercial rivalries aside in the name of a good cause.

Pepsi delays TV ad after tsunamis (IHT)

Is this one of the most unfortunately timed advertising campaigns in history? It must be in the top ten: An advertising campaign based on giant waves in the current world climate.

Unfortunately, Pepsi have threatened to sue anyone who publishes images of the ad, and so it’s quite difficult to track down. But because I’m just the best, I’ve found it for you here.

Monkeys point way to treatment for HIV (Guardian)

From the relatively little I know about HIV, I think that this looks like a particularly promising lead. I rarely have high hopes for science stories, but this one looks like it could be worthy of following up at some point.

Keep watching this one.

MPs’ fury at Blair and Brown (Guardian)

Well, it appears I’ve been misjudging this story. It would appear that a rivalry far more bitter than that which I had imagined does indeed exist between these two, and that they really are employing the most puerile tactics to attack each other, and helping to destroy the party in the process.

I thought they were more intelligent than that.

This certainly cannot be good for the country. United leadership is effective leaadership. Of course, how you define effective is open to opinion (I am certainly no fan of the New Labour agenda), but one reaches one’s goals most effectively when one’s team is united against a common enemy. The lack of a strong enemy is probably what has brought about the infighting in the first place: With no-one in particular to attack, Brown and Blair attack each other.

With the Conservative Party’s history, it is a little difficult for them to launch a sustained moral attack on a warring leadship, which leaves the door open for Charlie Kennedy. If he can make big enough gains in the forthcoming (we assume) election, then he could easily hold the balance of power. And that would be a lovely situation in which to find himself.

Of course, the other possibility in all of this (though I accept that the chances are practically zero) is that Mr Brown launches an all-out assault on the Prime Minister now, delaying a General Election until much later in the year, or even into next year, with him leading the party. Or, possibly, somebody else altogether leading them.

Whatever’s going on here, it’s damaging to Labour. And if Michael Howard doesn’t give a convincing and strong performance at this week’s PMQs, then he’s not worth his salt. Mr Blair should be looking pretty silly come Wednesday afternoon.

But there’s a silver lining here for Mr Brown: He has clearly shown himself to be in touch with the majority of the electorate… He doesn’t believe a word Mr Blair says.

Waterstone’s sacks employee over blog (Silicon)

It would appear that Homebase let me off relatively lightly for my posts when I worked there. Then again, they probably just never figured out how to use a computer enough to find the site.

It got there first, it did it best, and now it’s on a roll (Independent)

Nick Pollard explains far more eloquently than I the reasons why I prefer BBC News 24 over Sky News:

[Sky News] is deliberately more concerned with the human interest angle of stories than the BBC: a report about the first baby born in tsunami-hit Sri Lanka in 2005 was unlikely to have made it on to News 24; even if it had done so, such an item would not have ended with a mawkish coda from the reporter “… and she’s beautiful.”

The channel is also over-branded, say some: if viewers are not watching the Sky News Weather or the Sky News Money slot, they are being asked to press the red button for Sky News Active. Meanwhile, the word “Sky” – in brash red, white and blue – is sometimes on screen in three places.

Pollard is unabashed. “You have to stand out. And, in a way, you have to shout to your viewers.”

I don’t want mawkish human interest stories, I want stories that explain the true global impact of events, and analyse them in this light. Why on Earth is the first child born following the tsunami in any way newsworthy?

I don’t want news channels to shout at me, and I certainly do not want to watch a news channel with so little taste that it’s head can say something as frankly disgusting as this:

Sky has had “a good tsunami”. Such a feeling is certainly evident inside the company’s HQ

If someone from the Beeb had said this, there would be resignations.

Gates brought down by Media Center bugs (Silicon)

This truly is one of the funniest things I’ve seen for a while – Bill Gates made to look reasonably stupid as a result of the flaws in his own products. Finally, divine retribution for all those times your PC has crashed at the most inconvenient of times.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/gates.flv” /]

This is an interesting take on the reaction to the broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera. I do hope that, up to now, I’ve not said anything which people will consider offensive, because that’s simply not what this blog is about. I certainly hope I don’t come over as dictating what people can and can’t be offended by. However, the blog post I point to makes me slightly uneasy, simply because of quotes like this:

Blogging should be something that adds to this world’s knowledge and understanding, not a means of disseminating predjudice.

Just as I should not dictate what offends him, why should he dictate what blogging should be about for me? Especially when posts such as this prejudge the opera. I do not pretend to understand why people would find this opera offensive, unless they take specific parts completely out of context. And, let’s face it, we can do that with the Bible and be mortally offended.

I used to attend church quite regularly, until a particular question occured to me – not a question, I hasten to add, that is meant as an insult to Christians, more a question that exposes my ignorance. How can people who claim to believe that what they do in their life of about 70 years could result in eternal damnation possibly lead anything like a normal life? If they truly believed that there was a possibility of spending an infinite amount of time in unbearable suffering, surely they would spend a relatively tiny seventy years in abject squalor, dedicating every second of their life to the service of God. Surely they would have followed Jesus’s example and given up all of their possessions and wealth to dedicate their life to their religion. And yet very few Christians, and almost none of the clergy, do this. Why have large church buildings when the Bible tells us that we best serve God when serving others? Surely the buildings should be sold, and the money distributed to the poor? So my, no doubt ignorant, conclusion from this is that very few people actually believe in the God portrayed in the Bible. Certainly none of the people threatening to burn their TV Licences can truly believe in God, because how do they consider that sitting watching TV is dedicating their life to their Lord?

Abusive calls give BBC chiefs a Jerry Springer moment (Guardian)

Christians complaining about fictional abuse in an Opera screen on BBC Two make threatening and abusive phone calls to BBC Executives, meaning that they now have to be protected by guards? If they’re doing it themselves in real life, why do they complain about it in fiction?

Time to end feud, Brown tells Blair (Guardian)

When I first saw this article, I thought that I had been mistaken in my earlier posts, and that there actually was an awful lot of bad blood between Mr Brown and Mr Blair. Which would certainly be a big story.

But then I saw this, which made me reconsider. This is a case of Brown using the apparent bad blood to make Mr Blair look bad. Obviously, this shows that there is a degree of animosity between the two, which, I dare say, is not helped by this kind of thing. Mr Brown is desperate to be seen as the good guy in all of this, so that he can become the new party leader. But he’s not nearly such a good manipulator as Mr Blair, and he hasn’t realised that pulling this sort of stunt will damage Labour at the next general election: Something for which the party will not forgive him, and that will preclude him from being allowed to ascend to party leadership. He’s being foolish.

I realise now, though, that there is greater animosity between the two than I had at first realised, and this could very well do some serious damage to the party. But was the speech clash part of this argument? I still think that’s too puerile a trick for Mr Blair to pull.