The Lighthouse
A watch on events
Mick North
August used to be the silly season, a month when nothing really serious happened and the news became frivolous. For anyone nostalgic for such times, if they ever existed, BBC News provided an appropriate item, the story of a prodigal garden gnome called Murphy reunited with his owner after an absence of seven months. Murphy brought back an album with photos of his trip to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. Elsewhere in the world, however, it has been the Saakashvili season. During a week when winners and losers were never out of the news, analysts have been assessing which category Georgia’s pro-Western President Saakashvili has fallen into. The consensus shifts from day to day. One cartoon depicted his sending troops into South Ossettia, the majority of whose population hold Russian passports, as a small boy poking a huge bear with a stick. It is uncertain what exactly the Russian bear had been doing or what kind of stick the boy had used. Rumours abound about the dubious activities of Russia’s peacekeepers or Georgia’s ethnic cleansing of South Ossettians. Bush, Medvedev (aka Putin) and even our own Mr Miliband will point fingers, but the clear losers have been the people of South Ossettia and Georgia, irrespective of ethnicity. One BBC correspondent kept describing Georgia as a far-away place, perhaps to invoke parallels with Czechoslovakia in 1938: for South Ossettia read Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain dismissed the Nazi takeover as ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’, but in our smaller world we must learn about the Georgians. Despite recent events they are pursuing membership of our clubs, NATO and the EU.
The first gold medal went to a shooter. Can guns really be sports equipment or toys as well as offensive weapons? While sportsmen and women shot airgun pellets at paper targets in Beijing, someone was firing a pellet into the eye of a nine-year-old boy in the East End of Glasgow. Last month another Glasgow schoolchild was hit with a pellet whilst on holiday in Bolton. She had been taunted by a group of boys because of her Scottish accent. Team GB’s shooting coach has continued to whinge about the damage Britain’s handgun ban has done to the prospect of winning medals. He exaggerates. The last pistol shooter to win an Olympic medal competed in 1912. Referring to the Dunblane massacre last week he commented that ‘countries where gun crime is far worse than the UK haven’t had a knee-jerk reaction to similar atrocities’. And that’s precisely why they continue to have much higher rates of gun crime.
INBOX
Islay McLeod’s
Scotland
Net losses: my day with the fishermen
[click here]
Kenneth Roy’s
Week
For the BBC, ping-pong is now the priority
[click here]
Alan Fisher’s World
No-one here thinks the war is over
[click here]
Young Scotland
Programme
promoting
intellectual development
Scottish
Academy of Merit
recognising outstanding achievement
Young Scot of
the Year
encouraging outstanding
promise
