sheesh

[hatam_soferet]

Wow, what terrible journalism. Reads like the sort of comprehension exercise one does for GCSE English, where they give you three pieces of real journalism and require you to produce a precis. In lower tiers, this means that you winnow out some tangentially-related facts and string them together in arbitrary order, with no apparent awareness of useful things like paragraphs or article structure, and you get marks for things like copying the spelling correctly. Presumably the BBC's staff writers' journalistic training stopped there.

A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics has taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial horns in a plane to ward off swine flu.

About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns, called shofars.

The flight's aim was "to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it", Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

The flu is often called simply "H1N1" in Israel, as pigs are seen as unclean.

Eating pork is banned under Jewish dietary laws.

According to Israel's health ministry, there have been more than 2,000 cases of swine flu in the country, with five fatalities so far.

"We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us," added Mr Batzri was quoted as saying.

Television footage showed rabbis in black hats rocking backwards and forwards as they read prayers from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism which counts the singer Madonna among its devotees.

The shofar is the horn of a ram, and is used to mark major religious occasions in Judaism.