With the demise of Lehman Brothers and financial experts proffering apocalyptic predictions of a rerun of the 1929 Great Depression, the great feast of capitalist consumption threatens to give way to mass austerity and despair. Gloomy news bulletins dominate the air waves and TV screens. Things are going badly for Gordon Brown; rising food bills have been met with the launch of The Workhouse Cookbook, complete with recipes for gruel and images of a famished Oliver Twist begging for some more; kn
The world of journalism is a perpetual auditing of the world's despair. Well, this week perhaps it would do us good to hear about events on the sunnier side of the street, where happy-endings proliferate.
So, some good news: deaths of children und
er five have fallen by 27 per cent in the past 20 years, and the rate is still declining. This week the first parliament in which women outnumber men was elected in Rwanda, signalling new hope for sexual equality in a country where macho score-settling once dominated. In Bangladesh, a £29.2m programme will give work to two million poor families on repairing the damage caused by floods. Microphones immersed in the sea just a few miles from Times Square have picked up singing - by endangered whales calling to each other in the approaches to Manhattan.
Building worker Branislav Gomilic, who fell six storeys down a Montenegrin lift shaft, miraculously survived his ordeal. Teacher Hannah Upp was rescued from New York's Upper Bay by deckhands on the Staten Island ferry. Two missing girls - Jessica Harvey, 15, from Cambridgeshire, and Jamila Stone, also 15, from Glasgow, have happily been returned to their families.
Other good finds this week included a single sheet of a Mozart score in a French library; a Birmingham cat reunited with its owners after going missing for nine years; 500 new species of crustaceans; and a new world's largest prime number. True love was found by at least two couples. First, Chester Locke, a Taunton man who was barred from seeing his sweetheart 40 years ago, and is now to marry her at last; second, Nepalese porter Ramchadra Katuwal, who declared this week that, after 24 failed marriages, he has finally found lasting happiness with No.25.
And there's more. This week Berlin's Kiss FM has taken a stand against the general dumbing down of broadcasting standards by deciding to do its morning show entirely in Latin. Meanwhile, in Cambridgeshire, a rare upside-down rainbow has been sighted - a huge multicoloured smile dominating the skyline, and another affirmation that wonderful things can and do happen.
The full article contains 441 words and appears in News Letter newspaper.
