The most exciting thing you’ll hear in a science laboratory is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny...’ So said Isaac Asimov. But he might as well have been speaking about journalism. For when a reporter notices something odd, you know a scoop can’t be far away. In 2013, a British reporter based in Nepal noticed a strange thing. A steady trickle of coffins was coming back into the country via the international airport, sometimes two or three a day, sometimes more. The boxes contained the corpses of working age men, many of them young. That’s odd, he thought. It was one of those startling moments when you realise a very bad thing is happening, literally in broad daylight, and nobody knows. The reporter, Pete Pattisson, jumped on a flight to Qatar to find out why. The upshot was one of the Guardian’s most remarkableinternational scoops of the decade. Pattisson’s work, coupled with pressure from human rights groups and trade unions, forced Qatar to reform the situation - though as Pete found out last month, there is still much to be done. And with just a year to go to the 2022 World Cup, it remains to be seen whether the tournament goes down as a glorious festival of sport or a travesty built on the bones of hundreds of migrant workers. “Qatar is a better place for migrant workers today, but only just,” Pete tells me. “The ‘kafala’, or sponsorship system under which workers could not leave their job, no matter how abusive it was, has - on paper - been dismantled. A minimum wage has been introduced of 1000 rials, or £200, a month. “But many workers told me it is still difficult or impossible to change jobs, and the minimum wage works out at just £1 a hour, in one of the world’s richest countries.” So will Pete, an avid football fan, be watching the World Cup this time next year? “Yes I will watch it, but as I do I’ll remember the hundreds of men I have interviewed over the years and the stories they told me of labouring for long hours in the searing heat, low pay and squalid accommodation. And I will remember the names of those who died building this World Cup and the families who struggle on without them.” * A long way from Qatar and Nepal, reporter Sandra Laville also came across something rather curious that made her think ‘that’s funny’. In her case, it was a statistic. “I came across this figure that only 14 percent of waters in English rivers were of good ecological standard,” she recalls. “I thought ‘that’s really low’.” She started asking questions - of officials, scientists at the Environment Agency, and crucially of campaigners determined to improve the quality of their local environment. The big breakthrough came when she secured data from water companies on when and where sewage had been released into rivers. When she totted up the answers it came to a total of 1.5m hours of dumping in a single year. “I remember swimming in the sea 25 years ago when there was a big scandal about sewage being poured into the ocean,” Sandra tells me. “I couldn’t believe this was happening in rivers too.” The revelations have put pressure on the authorities to come clean on the locations and instances of sewage discharge; on the water companies to take action and invest; and on the regulator to ensure that everyone improves their game. “Nothing will change overnight - this is a massive underinvestment in infrastructure,” Sandra says. “But this has really exposed what they have been doing.” She is modest about the impact of her work. “It’s not just me, it’s the campaign groups I have given voice to.” Two scandals, two stories. Two reporters who understood that the first task of the journalist is simply to notice.
Local sewerage MP's https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/new...kCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
Just to say this was a guardian email I did the right thing paying nine quid a month for their independent journalism. I was paying more than that a month 20 years ago for a paper every day.
From the excellent QPR fans' site, Loft For Words... The brilliance, the sheer intelligence of 'arry Redknapp:
A little bit unfair, they cut the bit were the thick c*** donated 5k of his dog’s money to his chosen charity.
Looks like Thompson Plastics is on fire in Hessle, looks a bad one... please log in to view this image
I'm at a loss to understand any motive for this kind of behaviour, it's worse than abhorrent. On top of everything else bad that's involved the Met how does Cressida Dick keep her job? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-59389906