After getting a bit sick of reading about Iceland’s plummeting economic situation in the UK press, I thought I’d have a nose around the Australian newsfeeds for a bit to see what was afoot Down Under. Refreshingly, the headlines I spotted were:
- 30 lesbians impregnated by the same man
- Food shop infested with rats and pigeons
- Oz radio newsreader skips broadcast for Facebook
at least it’s nothing to do with the bloody credit crunch!
(In case you haven’t heard, most of the Icelandic banks have run into hot water due to the inter-bank lending crisis, and have frozen their accounts until it’s sorted. Once such bank is Icesave. For 20 points, guess which bank currently holds my savings account?)
“Interestingly”, Patrick Hosking of The Times (online) and others branded depositors in Icelandic banks as greedy, and under-informed, and said ” The irony is ‘rate tarts’ who knowingly put money into institutions they knew nothing about in pursuit of an extra interest are being bailed out”. It turns out that among those greedy perpatrators are 116 local councils in England and Wales, Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police, some units of the NHS… it’s not like the rate was disproportionately high, either – if it had been 2 or 3 percent better than elsewhere then that would send a warning signal, but the difference was only about 0.3-0.5%.
By the way, I don’t want to imply that UK news is all serious & doomsaying, or Australian news is all frivilous and underweight… I was extremely disappointed to read that the Australian Government is persisting with their “Internet content filtering scheme”, which it will be impossible to opt out of. Particularly after they fought to convince China that “they should have nothing to fear of open internet links” during the Olympics.
