A 50-year-old woman who used a cooking knife in a bid to murder her husband at their home in Tenby, Pembrokeshire will be sentenced later.

Shafia Sofan was found guilty of attempted murder by a jury at Swansea Crown Court on Wednesday.

She used a traditional Pakistani botie knife with a 25in (63cm) blade to hit Mohammed Abdul Sofan as he sat watching television. BBC.

This story caught my attention not because of the murder but the knife – surely a mistake – that’s a knife with a blade that’s over 2 foot long – what sort of food requires such a blade to prepare?

A Google returns nothing of use; however the Western Telegraph provides further information

A botie is a 25 inch long hooked blade used by the Pakistani community to cut up vegetables and meat. Western Telegraph.

Still makes you wonder what sort of meat and veg the Sofan’s used – I’d be hard pressed to need a blade half that size in our kitchen – surely this is journalistic error?

I didn’t watch any of the news coverage of the hunt for and subsequent suicide of murder Raoul Moat – The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker watched more of it than a sane man should.

Reporters were competing to get as close as possible to an armed confrontation with a mentally unstable gunman with an acknowledged hatred of the media. On air, they whispered down phones so the police couldn’t hear them. Sky’s James Matthews crept to “within metres” of the standoff until an armed officer caught him. “Crept up silently, first I knew was when I felt his breath on my cheek,” he tweeted. There were other tweets from TV reporters, written in a breathless hurry. Channel 4′s Alex Thomson apologised for the rush: “Sorry lots of Bberry tweets in dark running thru people’s gardens evading cops – some spelling may have gone astray”. Charlie Brooker, The Guardian.

There’s a police standoff with a Gunman so what do the press do – everything they can to make the police’s job harder – bloody morons.

Rupert Murdoch’s a scary bastard and Polly Toynbee paints a bleak future for new reporting.

Murdoch is bidding to take over the 61% of BSkyB the family doesn’t already own. Awash with dollars, he has had a good recession and can buy the shares cheap with the pound so low: BSkyB is set to make billions in the next few years, its heavy investment period over.

Since he effectively controls it already, why does that matter? Unfettered by other shareholders, he can roll up Sky with his newspapers behind his paywall, merging news reporting operations across all his media: buy Sky, get the Times and Sun free, plus broadband, telephone and iPhone apps all at knock-down prices. His dominance will grow: when Virgin challenged him in court he just bought up Virgin channels. With a golden cash flow, he can eat up any opponents and squeeze all other media. With no shareholders to protest, BSkyB will fund his loss-making newspapers for ever because they guarantee him the political hold over any government that tries to regulate his unstoppable empire. Sky’s budget is already twice that of BBC Television’s: it will grow far faster. Plurality is further diminished with only his newspapers secured by this cross-media subsidy.

Soon internet, radio and TV will converge into one set, indistinguishable from each other. When Gaunt‘s shouty SunTalk online radio station arrives via the same set as any other radio and TV station, the Murdoch’s will demand to know why the BBC should receive a licence fee for a bit of a system no different from myriad online stations. The Murdoch’s will protest at Ofcom regulating the standards of “television” and “radio” when Gaunt’s SunTalk rant is accessed on the same remote control as regulated and politically neutral stations. Murdoch wants his journalists writing and broadcasting interchangeably across all his media with equal freedom to express his views everywhere. Fox News, here we come. Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.

Polly Toynbee writes that all that’s between Murdoch and his goal is Lib Dem Vince Cable – if you’re hoping for Cable to stop Murdoch on current evidence of the Con-Dem coalition it seems highly unlikely.

Charlie Brooker believes newspapers are the most dangerous drug.

It’s perhaps the biggest threat to the nation’s mental wellbeing, yet it’s freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this “awareness” is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they’ve even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it’s called “a newspaper”, although it’s better known by one of its many “street names”, such as “The Currant Bun” or “The Mail” or “The Grauniad” (see me – Ed).

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often “cut” the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.

Tragically, widespread newspaper abuse has become so endemic, it has crippled the country’s ability to conduct a sensible debate about the “war on drugs”. The current screaming festival over “meow meow” or “M-Cat” or whatever else the actual users aren’t calling it, is a textbook example. I have no idea how dangerous it is, but there seems to be a glaring lack of correlation between the threat it reportedly poses and the huge number of schoolkids reportedly taking it. Something doesn’t add up. But in lieu of explanation, we’re treated to an hysterical, obfuscating advertising campaign for a substance that will presumably – thanks to the furore – soon only be available via illegal, unregulated, more dangerous, means. If I was 15 years old, I wouldn’t be typing this right now. I’d be trying to buy “plant food” on the internet. And this time next year I’d be buying it in a pub toilet, cut with worming pills and costing four times as much. Charlie Brooker, The Guardian.

Charlie Brooker has a point – doesn’t he?

The Observer is to close three of its monthly magazines and become a four section paper as part of a redesign that will hit newsstands next year.

Guardian News & Media’s redesigned Sunday title will have four weekly sections – news, sport, an expanded Review section and the Observer magazine – and the award-winning glossy supplement Observer Food Monthly. The other three supplements, Observer Sport Monthly, Observer Music Monthly and Observer Woman, will close.

Business and personal finance coverage will move into the main news section of the paper, while travel coverage will be incorporated into the expanded Observer magazine. Steve Busfield, The Guardian.

Not before time, I can only describe Woman supplement as appalling and the others at best as dull even the “award winning” food supplement.

Two posts on the state of journalism well worth reading, one from Jim Bliss in which he takes to task The Guardian‘s music writer Steven Wells who defends the right of American Jazz magazine Maxim to review the latest albums of the Black Crowes and Nas without hearing the complete albums, but just one song. As Jim writes

I’m not suggesting that the reviewer should have forced himself (or herself) to listen to the entire thing, just that they should be honest; “having listened to one track from the forthcoming album by The Black Crowes, I was unable to bear any more. I guess if you’re a fan of dull, generic stoner-rock then this might interest you, and you’ll probably want to check it out if you liked their previous stuff. Me? I’m going to boil my head instead”.

As Jim also points out, can we actually trust the reviews in The Guardian, certainly not those of Steven Wells.

The second post, this time from Bristling Badger reports the appalling treatment the press dished out to Heather Mills-McCartney with particular reference to the stories that Mills suggested we drink rats milk. What Mills actually meant was drinking cows’ milk was as unnatural as drinking rat or dog milk; she was clearly implying we should drink none of these things. Bristling Badger quotes Juliet Gellatley director of vegetarian pressure group Viva!

The reporters who filed this story about Heather advocating rats’ milk knew it was untrue because I amplified on what Heather had said. One actually admitted that he understood precisely what she meant but the “drink rats’ milk” claim made a damned good story. What this reveals is an utter lack of any integrity in most of the Press – sadly not just the tabloids but the so-called quality papers, too.

Every event I have attended with Heather has been grossly misreported by the Press and has involved spiteful and vicious personal attacks on her integrity and her sanity. The irony is that one of the most common accusations about Heather is that she is a fantasist and a liar – by people whose stock in trade is fantasy and lies.

Reading these two posts and you’ll also find out how much more of a berk, than you ever thought possible The Daily Mail’s political editor Benedict Brogan is.

It’s probably an uncomfortable point to make, however at Obsolete, Septicisle doesn’t shy away he compares the press coverage the disappearance of Shannon Matthews has received and the press coverage the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has and is still receiving.

After one week Shannon Matthews’ case has all but disappeared form the front pages of the press. Why is that? Septicisle speculates.

Could it possibly be because this is a distinctly working-class family, where the father and mother have split up, and where the mother is, not to put too fine a point on it, not as aesthetically sympathetic as Kate McCann was/is? Or that this has happened up in the sunny climate of Dewsbury, a classic Yorkshire town, which simply can’t compare to the attractions of Praia da Luz for the travelling hacks?

Thursdays Express when Shannon Matthews had been missing two days, rather sums it up when Madeleine McCann’s supposed sighting in France makes the front page.