Newspapers are wondering why nobody reads them anymore. Having splashed out £1.50 on the Independent-on-Sunday today, I can tell them one good reason: they don't have any news in them.

Now, I realise I'm not buying the Economist here, and Sunday newspapers are not exactly expected to be papers of record, but I expect more than half a page of foreign news. Well, OK, so there's four pages in total with 'World News' as a header. One page is a worthy feature piece on women who suffered in the Pakistan earthquake, linked to the paper's charity appeal. Another page is pure comment - Rupert Cornwall calling for a Perot-style independent to run in the US presidential elections in er... 2008. Incidentally, the Independent, more than any other newspaper I've seen, loves to mix comments with its reporting. Never more so than in Robert Fisk's reports from the Middle East, which are always thought-provoking, but not anything you'ld recognise from journalism school as 'reporting'. A further page is again not news, but an analysis piece on the CIA torture issue. This is just a rehash of every other report from the last few days, with no original reporting in it at all.

So, here's the news bits. The first is on the British peace activist who has gone to Baghdad to try and save hostage, Norman Kember. Again, there's nothing new here, although the reporter did get at least go up to London suburb Pinner, where Kember's family lives, and through some thrusting investigative reporting discovered that he lives in an 'affluent, tree-lined street'. Next to it is a four-inch space-filler from AP on the apparent death of Al-Qaeda leader, Abu Hamza Rabia.

There's another quarter-page on Gordon Brown's intervention in the EU budget debate, which is the only piece of European news in the whole paper, although arguably it wouldn't be out of place in the UK news section. The rest of that page is taken up with a non-story about Emilio Estafez's new film on Robert Kennedy. He had to film quickly apparently, because the Ambassador's hotel in LA, where Kennedy was shot, was about to be demolished. A couple of inches in the diary, perhaps, but a whole story?

And ...er that's it. Nothing else happened in the world worth reporting, according to IoS. Perhaps it was a quiet Saturday? Perhaps during the week nothing had happened of note that needed further analysis? Perhaps IoS just couldn't be bothered.

So here, in no particular order, are some random stories they really couldn't find space for.

1. Kazakhstan elects a new president. Controversial election, with fraud a certainty, and protest a possibility, in oil-rich country in Eurasia. Plenty of colour to keep IoS readers happy - an ongoing corruption case involving US oil majors and President Nazarbaev; serious human rights violations; restrictions on media, etc. In fact, the only coverage either the daily or Sunday Independent has given Kazakhstan recently was an inaccurate and patronising '50 things you didn't know about Kazakhstan' piece, back in mid-November, mostly in response to the controversy around British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen' s Kazakh character, Borat.

2. Uzbekistan: 25 men sentenced to jail terms of up to 22 years for taking part in protests in Andijan back in May that ended with a government massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians. [Yuh, but we covered that when the first trial ended. Its so over, surely].

3. UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland goes to Zimbabwe, perhaps a useful way to update readers on the horrors of Mugabe's regime, and discuss the contradictions of UN aid policy?

4. Taiwanese opposition wins key mid-term elections, an important event in ongoing Taiwan-China tensions.

Well, maybe none of those grab you? What about competitors? Here's today's NY Times international headlines:

Attack Kills a Top Leader of Al Qaeda, Pakistan Says
19 Iraqi Army Soldiers Are Killed as Insurgents Fire on a Convoy
U.S. and Britain Try a New Tack on Iran
Rival Drug Gangs Turn the Streets of Nuevo Laredo Into a War Zone
U.S. Delaying Food Donation to North Korea
Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst
Pro-Democracy Groups Are Harassed in Central Asia
Lebanese Link Mass Grave to Syrians
Conservative Poland Roils European Union
Taiwan's Opposition Gains
Group of 7 Is Still Split on Subsidies
Names of the Dead
India Accelerating: Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future
Young Iranians Follow Dreams to Dubai


But then, the NY Times, whatever its failings, is still trying to be a serious newspaper. There's at least plenty of discussion about where US journalism is going wrong. In the UK, papers like the Independent are happy to give space to knock their transatlantic counterparts. There's not so much printed on why the British media is failing its readers so badly.

dead seagull

The dead seagull rotting away on my roof is somehow symptomatic.