There’s a good story in this morning’s Australian about yesterday’s wave of anti-government strikes and protests in France. But its timing is odd, to say the least.

The
whole article is in the future tense: “Trains, buses, schools, post
offices, power stations, airports and motorway tolls will be affected
… The morning rush-hour promises to be fraught, with half the
country’s trains hit … “, and so on.

Stop and think about
this. Rush hour in Paris is, let’s say, about 9 am France is eight
hours behind Sydney, so that’s five o’clock yesterday afternoon here.
By the time readers look at their Oz over breakfast it’ll be about 15 hours in the past. So why does a newspaper published overnight think it’s still in the future?

The answer is that the article is lifted from another of Uncle Rupert’s publications, The Times,
published yesterday morning in London. But in the age of instant
communications, would it be too much to expect them to have slotted in
a later version? The Times website has a perfectly good update here, but nothing for The Australian.