Gair Rhydd

Welcome to big school

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So, you’ve made it. You’ve passed your really really easy A-Levels (didn’t you read the papers on results’ day?), and are now in Cardiff. Even though in my day your three Bs would only have been worth a B, two Cs and a D in General Studies, you’re at officially the best university in Wales. No pressure.

Okay, okay. I’m being a bit harsh. Maybe you just worked very hard and had excellent teaching and exam guidance. It’s just that that just doesn’t fit the ‘exams are getting easier’ ideology which, as a journalist, I am required to follow. So shush. Dissenting opinions will be silenced, or at least relegated to the letters page of The Guardian.

It's all over the front page

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Hello and welcome to this mini-column, in which I’ll cast a critical and inept eye over recent newspaper front pages because I am poor and can’t afford to actually buy newspapers. It’s also possibly the only column in gair rhydd history inspired by Catatonia.

The honour of being the first subject of this column is diplomatically shared between just about all of the tabloids for their August 5th editions. You see that was the day that the police files on the case of popular dead three-year-old Madeleine McCann were released, so it became a battle to see who could smear the biggest picture of her empty bed across their front page.

Is it just me...

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...or was China's Olympic slogan a little inappropriate?

One world, one dream. It’s a lovely idea – the sort of vague, noble sentiment you might expect to have heard from Martin Luther King or Gandhi. But maybe not from a country with a recent history of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

Apart from sounding quite a lot like something Freddie Mercury once sang, the official slogan for the Beijing Olympics was a bit cynical when you consider China’s treatment of Tibet and some of the less savoury incidents in its not-too-distant past (Tiananmen Square, anyone?). You have to ask yourself exactly what the ‘one dream’ we have apparently been subscribed to is.