Paper Monitor
10:46 UK time, Wednesday, 3 January 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
What's going on at Daily Mail Towers? Was editor Paul Dacre among the millions of workers to have taken an extra day's holiday as the Christmas break came to a close? Or is Paper Monitor suffering the reverberations of a prolonged New Year hangover? The reason for this befuddlement... a double-page colour spread that looks like one of those early 1990s Benetton adverts, picturing 190 immigrants, each from a different country, who have settled in the UK.
Don't let the text - "This historic image reveals for the first time how the whole world has flocked to Britain" - deceive you. There's no mention of foreigners scrambling to get through passport control, asylum seekers (bogus or otherwise), or tidal waves of spongers. Instead, scores of beaming, healthy, scrubbed faces look back at the reader - each person holding a flag from their country of origin.
Paper Monitor feels like reaching for a can of sugary pop and singing "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
It's an impressive sight, with a person to represent every member state of the 192 countries in the United Nations, except two: the Pacific island nations of the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
Which leads Paper Monitor to ponder whether any of its readers are from those two states. If so, or if readers know of any who are, drop us a line using the post form on the top right of this page.
Elsewhere, the papers, from the Mail to the Guardian, run pictures of the near-deserted pavements, train stations and public squares that on any normal working day would be thronging with people - a reflection of all those who stayed in bed in what's been termed the "Big Sickie"
Has no one considered that they were all shut away in a studio, posing for a Daily Mail photographer?
The 
