A little bit of good news...

Normally, every front page that you see is covered with some tragedy, scandal, or other horrible event, because newspapers have learnt that disaster sells. However, this has produced a very distorted view of the world and good news stories are often overlooked as irrelevant, but I think that they are necessary to allow people to believe in human kindness because if everyone believes that nobody would help them, they are unlikely to help other people and that cannot be a road that anyone can want society to travel down.

It is true though, that some people do seem devoid of the kindness that we expect that everyone has somewhere inside of them, such as the bus driver in Nottingham who would not let a 20 year old girl on the bus at 3 o'clock in the morning when she was only 20p short of the £5 bus fare. Even more shocking to me was that even after eight minutes of pleading nobody else on the bus offered to give her 20p. That girl was then attacked and raped while waiting to be picked up by her mother. Indirectly, all of the people on that bus were responsible for what happened to her because they all knew how dangerous it can be for young women when nobody else is around. It was not unreasonable to think that someone might have helped her, anybody could mistake £4.80 worth of change for £5 and they could all see what was going on.

I hope that this story can make people see how even a small act of kindness can have enormous consequences and how little it can take to change a life. It's not all doom and gloom though, there is good news out there, such as the news that 75% of the 1,200 tonnes of whale meat being autioned in Japan this year was not bought. This is amazing animal welfare news as it may indicate the beginning of the decline in the trade in whale meat and whale hunting.

Also in good news, steps have been made for more effective treatment of one of the world's most deadly virus, the ebola virus. It carries a 90% death rate because previously it could only be cured within 1 hour after infection, but as symptoms can take three weeks to appear, for most it is too late. However, a new treatment has been found that cured monkeys 24 hours after infection, a huge leap in the journey towards having effective treatment.

Lastly, and a piece of news that will affect most of us, is the decision by Walt Disney to ban junk food adverts from its television and radio stations. With the predictions that by 2050 half of the children in Britain will be obese, this news could not have come at a more crucial time and hopefully more organisations will follow suit.