Metro's World Today (14th Jan 2015)

Today's Metro paper has shown me what a strange place the world can be. It's not just the things people do, it's the way we talk about them afterwards that make me laugh. And yes, I know this basically means I'm laughing at people's sufferings or tragic mistakes, but sometimes you have to laugh; otherwise you might take life seriously and get very depressed, very quick. Besides, all laughter is about suffering to some extent, isn't it?

Here, in no particular order, are a few of my highlights from today's news.

# An Israeli newspaper, for very Orthodox Jews, has printed a report on the Unity rally held in Paris. Loads of world leaders, linking arms to demonstrate their solidarity with victims of last week's terror attacks – including, of course, several French Jews deliberately targeted for being Jewish. The rally has been widely-reported, along with variations of photos of world leaders clunking awkwardly down the street, arm-in-arm. It looks a bit like how I imagine Last Orders at the United Nations Saloon Bar.

But when this Orthodox Jewish paper printed the picture, something was missing; they airbrushed all the women out. So, President Hollande (France) and President Abbas (Palestine) look pretty cosy, because they've been squeezed together to cover up the absence of Chancellor Merkel (Germany). The paper's reasoning? Not, as we might suspect, their belief that woman have no space in public life, but reasons of 'modesty'.

These women, trust me, were hardly caught accidentally posing in their underwear, or stretched across the bonnet of a convertible with strategically-placed soap suds. Merkel was very much wearing a coat. Mayor Hidalgo (Paris) was tucked away inside a long coat and a scarf, with her hands in gloves. So it can only have been their exposed faces that Orthodox Jews might find offensive...now, I know Merkel's not aged well, but that's a bit harsh.

Helpful highlighting of the new intimacies between leaders - notice Mali's President Keita trying to keep Hollande and Prime Minister Netanyahu from running away...

# A father has been sent down for four years after mixing up his son's lunchbox with his own drug-dealer's kit. Yep, sent the kid to nursery with a set of scales, two knives, a spoon and a tupperware box of cocaine and mephedrone. We've all been there. I bet lunchtime must have been a blast.

My favourite part is that the father, having realised the mistake (imagine how disappointed his drug ring must have been with their lunches) turned up at the nursery, demanding the drug-sack back. Do you remember Tots TV and their sac magique?

Tots TV - off their squidgy faces

But the best story of the day has to be the cuckolded Chinese wife who cut off her husband's penis...twice.

The husband sent a 'saucy email' to the woman he was having an affair with, and obviously thought he was being dead clever by not sending it from his own phone. Except the other person whose phone he used was, of course, his wife. And he forgot to log out of his account afterwards. Unsurprisingly, his wife discovered the email pretty quickly - and took a pair of scissors into the bedroom, where he was asleep and naked.

She snips off his penis and presumably disappears, leaving him to it. He's rushed to hospital, where hospital staff stitch the member back on – no comment on how much of it was removed, or how useful it was to him after the stitching.

The wife, enraged to hear that her good work has been undone, sneaks into the hospital with her scissors and, er, snips her snip all over again. This time, she throws the offending member out of the window before running off. Her husband – naked, spraying blood everywhere, and presumably in a bit of pain – chases after her. The Police are called, after witnesses describe a naked, bloodstained man beating a woman in the street. So, she's taken back into the hospital as a patient along with her newly re-mutilated husband. It's not a happy reunion – especially as she's been charged with GBH.

Metro reports that the chopped member wasn't found, probably having been 'stolen by a stray dog or cat'.

Oh, and don't forget the mistress. She's not worried about her 23-year old married lover losing his fertility; not when he has five kids already.

Meanwhile, in Cambodia...

An office boss, keen to show off his martial arts skills, boasts about his strength, inviting staff to hit him. He presumably hasn't heard of Houdini, but I bet he has now. One worker took his request to heart and beat him senseless with a stick. He was so into it that staff had to pin him down to 'stop him doing real damage' – in Cambodia, you have to do more than send someone to hospital with concussion to cause 'real damage'. The guy only got a caution from the Police, possibly helped by the large number of witnesses claiming the manager had literally been asking for it. My favourite part is that one co-worker told reporters: We don't know if he didn't understand the rules or if he was just fed up.

There's also East 17's Brian Harvey tidying up after his smash-up protest, and Woody Allen's TV series, for which he claims to have 'no ideas'. After a quick browse of Metro's website, I worry that every day might be like this.

Protesting the Proms: Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

London's Royal Albert Hall, home of the BBC Proms, scene of the protest

Last night, for the first time in its 117-year history, BBC Radio 3 stopped its Royal Albert Hall broadcast of a Proms concert because of a politically-motivated protest. Just like that. Mid-performance (Bruch's Violin Concerto, since you ask), taken off the air.

The broadcast started at 7:30pm, which is nothing unusual. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, pro-Palestinian protesters had been vying with pro-Israeli protesters in a shouting match for some hours. Meanwhile, inside, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was about to begin their performance. But every time their Indian-born conductor stood ready for a new movement of Bruch's work, the IPO found they couldn't start – protesters inside the hall were making too much noise. The BBC broadcast was taken off-air twice, and radio listeners didn't get to the end of the concert.

The BBC Proms are hardly the place you'd expect to get heckling and disruption so serious it causes an early end to radio broadcasting. This is supposed to be a civilised event, attended by civilised, cultured people. That makes the reasons behind this protest all the more worthy of examination.

A few years ago I was in Birmingham when the REP Theatre staged Behzti (Dishonour), a play featuring rape in a Sikh temple. Local Sikhs found this distressing, understandably, and a couple of hundred of them protested outside the theatre, eventually resulting in the play's run being cut short. But that – and several other disrupted performances that come to mind – had some pretty controversial subject matter, which is what protesters were complaining about. Bruch's Violin Concerto contains nothing especially objectionable; the issue this time was the orchestra itself.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is proud of its status as one of the leading cultural ambassadors of the state of Israel, as well as happily recruiting non-Jews to its ranks. Before the 1967 Six-Day War (the one where Israel grabbed a whole load of land while fighting a range of Arab nations), that was fine; Israel was the under-dog surrounded by powerful adversaries, still a young nation defending its right to existence.

But since 1967 and the increasing Israeli expansion into its newly-occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza), with Israel's reluctance to give up control of the contested Golan Heights, it's rather harder to sympathise with Israel. These days, they're the ones risking international condemnation through their treatment of different ethnic groups, as Palestinian Arabs did in the decades before Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. Since occupying regions such as the West Bank, Israel has been expanding its settlements (of, at best, dubious legal standing) and getting involved in conflicts that do nothing for stability in a troubled region (conflicts that aren't really about Israeli self-defence any more).

In a statement on their website, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – responsible for the protests outside last night's Proms – argue that the IPO has 'lent itself to the official Israeli propaganda campaign titled Brand Israel, which aims to divert attention from Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights to its artistic and scientific achievements'. I'm all for promoting the scientific and artistic achievements of Israel (or any other group of people, for that matter), but the IPO's alignment with the Israeli Defence Force is a worrying example of artists getting (perhaps too?) closely involved in politics. I grant you, art and politics can't and shouldn't be entirely separated, but artists lose their ability (maybe even their right) to comment on politics when they get too closely involved. The IPO is quite right to promote Israel's artistic achievements internationally, but performing morale-boosting concerts for the troops (as the IPO has been doing since 1942) implies a condoning of the actions of those troops. Much as I'd like to keep this performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto separate from Israel's encroachment of the West Bank, the IPO itself has made that difficult with their IDF concerts. The Palestinian protest last night has at least been successful in bringing the connection between the two to light.

When I say the Proms is an event for cultured, civilised people, it's worth pointing out that those protesting against the performance aren't themselves uncultured. Far from it; their in-hall protest included what one audience member described as 'singing to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy' – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features the words of Schiller's poem, To Joy, in its fourth movement. While I can't help thinking that disrupting a classical music concert inside the hall itself runs the risk of making your protest look churlish (dare I say philistine?), using Beethoven's Ninth – with its overarching theme of brotherly love and the constant struggle to improve the human condition – redeems that cause immeasurably.

Thanks to Boeke, for the image of the Royal Albert Hall on Flickr.