Many of you will have seen the heart-rending photo of the Central American dad in the arms of his two year old daughter, both lying drowned in the shallows of a river after an ill-fated attempt to reach America. I know Central America and in particular the corrupt and sheer difficulty of life there for ordinary folk. That they make life-endangering attempts to escape to a better world in America should be easily understood.

On the other hand, in the entire history of the human race, no nation has shown more openness and generosity than America in welcoming migrants and refugees. Every country in the world is accorded a generous annual allocation of migrants, albeit the likes of New Zealand’s quota is never met. Not for nothing was the term ‘melting pot’ invented to describe America’s history which, for the record, includes the ill-described ‘indigenous people’ who in fact, like Polynesians, fled for unknown reasons, 10,500 years ago from today’s Taiwan.

A friend of mine considers the New York Times (NYT) an exceptional newspaper. I find it boring, supercilious and pretentious.

It utterly disgraced itself back in 1997 following the ludicrous over-reaction in Britain to the scatter-brain Princess Diana’s death. While now justifiably a source of huge embarrassment to Brits, the indisputable fact that the hyperbolic contrived carry-on which occurred was of such a scale as to be a major news-item.

Read this and weep.

My company is proud of the reputation it’s built with office tenants, in total circa 400 in the Wellington CBD.

Apart from the obvious attentions such as a much higher standard of maintenance than normal, we provide a number of free services, all greatly appreciated. We specialise in professional tenancies, embassies and what might described as the more prestigious government agencies such as the Ombudsman, judges offices and the like. Needless to say we maintain a full house.

Yesterday in Britain a 22 year old girl went nutty on a passenger jet. Actually, I’ll rephrase that given they’re all nutty to various degrees. Not their fault of course, but in this case, definitely more nutty than usual. Apparently she started screaming that she was going to open the door and kill everyone on board. Anyway, she was duly jumped on and held down on the floor where she lay quietly, not that she had much choice with people sitting on her. The pilot radioed he was returning to unload her, which he duly did and she was handed over to the Police, run before a magistrate and released on bail.

Here’s where it gets interesting. On the RAF learning of this, to use their infantile jargon, two fighter jets “scrambled” and “escorted” the plane back to the airport. Now what I’d like to know is exactly what they had in mind and why they thought this helped in some way.

14 God worshippers were killed and 50 injured when a tent collapsed on a religious service in India yesterday, thus inviting the obvious question, where was bloody God?

Taking a break from the relentless haranguing of prayers directed his way perhaps, or does he simply not like Indians? But it can’t be that or there wouldn’t be so many of them. The bugger certainly moves in mysterious ways.