Backbencher

Reading the Sydney Morning Herald was more interesting than I thought it was going to be. One of the first headlines that caught my eyes was “I will tear out here eyes with pleasure: “Virgin hunter” denies murder pact’. This was an article about the killing spree that began back in 1987 and ended in 2003 in the France Belgium area. Michel Fourniret is a self-confessed serial killer in France with the accomplice of Monique Olivier. Olivier is claiming that there was no pact between her and Fourniret, and that she did not agree to help entrap the victims. Instead, the letters that she wrote were just ‘words’ and nothing more. There is a whole slew of issues throughout the trial of how many people that Fourniret killed, and what part, if any, did Olivier have. Some other article title was “Girl, 5, thrown to death out of sixth floor window” and ‘Father drowns three children in bath’. The story about the drowning was actually placed in Baltimore, Maryland and the death of the 5 year old girl was actually in Sao Paulo.


What baffled me the most about the main page of the Sydney Herald was the fact that roughly 80% of the ‘eye catching death’ stories were from other parts of the world. I don’t know if that is there ploy to get readers to look into the news, and then find that there is nothing interesting besides politically going on in there nation? It appears that the Herald uses the same eye catching material that Americans use, but because they do not have [or do not want to admit they have] these types of stories, they use stories from else where. The next time I read the Herald I’m going to remember not to get worried for my friends that are in Australia because these titles have a better possibility to actually be a story from where I am living.