Above: cartoonist Johannes Leak’s take on the week’s revelations. 

It’s good news week,
Someone’s dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere,
And blackening the sky …

Good song from the old one-hit wonder Hedgehoppers Anonymous, even if its 1965 lyrics seem a little dated and, frankly, a bit out there too.

Someone’s found a way to give,
The rotting dead a will to live ….

Doctors finding many ways,
Of wrapping brains on metal trays,
To keep us from the heat …

Yeah, well, the news cycle can be a bit weird. No doubting, though, that some days, some weeks, you just have to love the news train. It’s wild entertainment, pure and simple. Stories are ridiculous, unbelievable, venal, political, self-serving, unprofessional … the whole gamut. Seriously, check it out, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.

Odd that we’ve got all these people worrying about artificial intelligence who seem to forget there’s no shortage of the stuff about already. Fake news? Now or in the future, It’s the real news you want to worry about. The lack of intelligence is withering. Take a look at the carry-on by some of these media sweetheart geniuses recently.

• US clown prince Trump’s indicted on seven counts relating to classified documents he took home to Mar-a-Lago from the White House. I did nothing wrong, he insists in broken record style. Tell it to the judge. Or better still, go try buy a judge.
• Lisa Wilkinson and Brittany Higgins are caught out weaponising rape claims to try topple a government. Nope, nope and nope, nothing to do with us, says everyone they targeted, including PM Albo. Yeah, no.
• Wilko’s then slammed as a racist for ridiculing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s name while also proclaiming she has a black cleaner at her home. Priceless.
• Journo Samantha Maiden, meanwhile, argues nobody deserves having their private phone contents disgorged across the media. Rather than a journalistic or public interest curiosity in the damning contents of the closed-shop $3 million woman’s phone, she’s perturbed at a lack of curiosity about how Higgins’ texts made it to media outlets. Curious and curiouser, as it looks like it’s the one thing Higgins and her cronies didn’t give to the media.
• Speaking of phone hacking and other tricks, Britain’s clown Prince Harry goes to court on a media witch-hunt but fails to produce one iota of evidence to support some 30-odd media articles he says were predicated on information gathered by unlawful means. Didn’t read about it? You’ll have to wait for the edited Netflix version.
• Australia’s Reserve Bank, impossibly oblivious to the Federal Government bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking housing, and jacking prices and inflation skywards, raises interest rates again to further push the prices up. A real Lowe blow.
• Vocal yokel Pauline Hanson highlights a $4.5bn National Indigenous Australians Agency with 1300 staff she says are already doing precisely what The Voice is meant to do … except we don’t know what The Voice is supposed to do. Polls show PM Albo’s plans are losing traction with the public. But is anyone listening?
• Loose unit Lidia Thorpe says she’s lodging a racism complaint with the Human Rights Commission against her old Greens party mates. Probably best if it’s ex parte hearing.
• Dictator Dan Andrews goes all Joh Bjelke-Petersen, banning government adverts in newspapers in a move that will threaten their flagging profits. He says he’ll take his ads to social media and elsewhere. PR genius, not.
• Melbourne breakfast-for-the-brain masthead The Age cuts its daily editorial opinion columns back to Saturdays and ‘when required’. Herald Sun and 3AW’s Neil Mitchell chortle in their cornflakes while The Age quietly advertises for a deputy opinion editor to come up with ‘bold ideas for columns and columnists’. But not their own masthead ideas. That’s quality journalism for you.

So, yep, it’s good news week all right. Someone’s definitely contaminating the atmosphere … and we didn’t even get on to climate change.