Villain
The British countryside, for being racist. That’s according to Haroon Mota, the founder of a hiking group for UK Muslims, who says non-white visitors face “barriers” when they try to visit rural areas. It’s possibly “just a sign of my white privilege”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, but I can’t for the life of me work out what these barriers are. Does he mean fences, or drystone walls? “If so, the good news is that they aren’t insurmountable. There’s usually a gate, or a stile.”
Hero
Louis Robinett, a nine-year-old from Dorset who has set a new 5km park run world record for his age group. The speedy youngster shaved 13 seconds off the previous top time, set in California six years ago, finishing in 17min 40sec.
Hero
James Milward, a Surrey IT expert who got so tired of foxes and badgers fouling his garden that he created an automated system which identifies the unwanted visitors and pings out high frequency sounds to scare them away. Milward tells the BBC he knows it “sounds crazy”, but that his gadget, which he calls the Furbinator 3000, keeps his lawn clean enough for his children to play on.
Villain
The French, for their absurd over-reaction to a bedbug outbreak. Newspapers have obsessed over the supposed crisis, and Mathilde Panot told her fellow MPs it had “turned the lives of millions of our infested citizens into a nightmare”. But it’s a big fuss over nothing, says The New York Times. Numbers of the blood-sucking pests are only “modestly” higher than usual in Paris, and as many as two-thirds of calls to pest control are from people mis-identifying other bugs.