underreported news from Europe

I may turn this into a feature. Or I may not.

While I’m deciding, here’s today’s stealth news (which might be described as anything that didn’t make it into the 24 stories that get reported daily by the global media)***:

In Brussels, there have been three nights of rioting since the beginning of Ramadan:

Last night the police arrested 45 rioters. One of them will be prosecuted for assaulting the owner of a shop. Philippe Close, the chef de cabinet of the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said that the authorities would continue their efforts to defuse the situation in a peaceful manner, but he announced that the police will be less complacent in future, “since we cannot tolerate that this [Marollen] neighbourhood falls victim to a problem from outside the neighbourhood.”

The immigrant youths claim that they are upset by the death of Fayçal Chaaban, a 25-year old criminal, in a Brussels prison last Sunday. Yesterday morning the authorities announced they would hold a meeting with the youths to hear their grievances about security in prison, but the meeting, which was due last night, could not take place because of the riots.

Once again, it’s the yutes.

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*** I’ve mentioned this before but didn’t elaborate. In May, I think, the third annual report in a fascinating series on the “state of the news media” published, among its other findings, a feature called “A Day in the Life of the Media.” Among the interesting details was this tidbit [emphasis mine]:

While the news is always on, there is not a constant flow of new events. The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events. On cable, just half of the stories monitored across the 12 hours were new. The concept of news cycle is not really obsolete, and the notion of news 24-7 is something of an exaggeration.

I recommend reading the whole thing.