To nap or not to nap?

A REPORT to the European Society of Cardiology suggests that an after-lunch nap, as enjoyed by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher (although not together) is good for the heart. So finish your meal, lean well back in your chair and enjoy an hour or so of gentle snoring. It may extend your life but, in my experience, news editors take a dim view of it.

AND anyway, if this week's medical discovery is that naps are good for us, you can bet your life that next week's medical discovery will be that naps are bad for us. In medicine, today's fact is tomorrow's myth.

TEN years on, New Orleans is putting a brave face on the legacy of Hurricane Katrina. But as many survivors will testify, there is little good to remember. The abiding memories are of armed police taking pot-shots at "looters" who were simply looking for food, a panicked hospital killing patients with lethal injections, a sports hall turned into a filthy, gang-ridden "rescue centre" and the military preventing people from fleeing and treating victims as the enemy. In its worst hour, the Land of the Free reverted to Hollywood. The authorities responded not as though they were in a disaster but in a disaster movie.

FREE speech is sacred. Even so, my stomach turns at the email from one reader who claims the bereaved families seeking a private prosecution after the Glasgow bin-lorry disaster are "more interested in the possible compensatory payout should they prove their case than they are in justice." Sweet.

AN abandoned lorry in Austria was found to contain the bodies of 71 refugees; all but 12 were men. A group of refugees intercepted on the M25 were all men. Three boats sinking off Libya were found to contain 217 migrants – all men. And take a look at any news broadcast of migrants crossing Europe or camped at Calais. Are we not supposed to notice that the vast majority of them are young men of military age?

AND while the BBC repeatedly assures us the migrants are all "fleeing the horrors of war," how can we be sure that some of these young men have not been contributing to the horrors of war and now find themselves on the losing side? If past conflicts from Bosnia to Rwanda are any guide, we will not have to wait long to find out. As genuine refugees build new lives in Britain, they recognise their former neighbours and tormentors who have blood on their hands, and denounce them. And what will happen if any of today's migrants are exposed as bombers and butchers? Not a damn thing. Mustn't prejudice their human rights, must we?

MEANWHILE Amnesty International's deputy director in Europe, Gauri van Gulik, declares that the scandal of refugees dying en route is "a tragic indictment of Europe's failures to provide alternative routes." Really? Is it not an indictment of Syrians, Somalis, Eritreans and Libyans becoming the Nazis of the 21st century and being unspeakably evil toward their own kind?

JOURNALISM was once defined as the art of explaining that Lord Cholmondely had died to people who didn't even know that Lord Cholmondely had lived. The IT industry does the same. The latest warning to flash on my screen is: "GWXUX has stopped working." I wasn't aware it had ever started working. Something to do with Windows 10, apparently.