IF FOR nothing else, 1995 will be remembered across the globe as the year that humanity en masse could witness the trial of one black entertainer, day by day, detail by detail, for nine months, via television.
The OJ Simpson trial was an extraordinary ongoing event. It was bound to be big news in the US because he had been such an American hero, the black guy who started out with none of the advantages and ended up with them all including beating the murder rap. But the rest of the Western world fell dutifully into line with the obsession. Nine o'clock every night in this part of the hemisphere was Trial Time. as hordes of backs reported every exchange and analysed, loosely, every nuance. The Bronco Chase, the Sports Bag, the Bloody Glove, became better known in the mass consciousness than Mao Zedong's Long March, the Crown Jewels or the sword Excalibur.
It all demonstrated the enduring power of American "cultural imperialism" if something is that big a story in the US, then it's going to be one heck of a big story everywhere else. The fact that most people would have been hard pressed to say who Orenthal James Simpson was before the untimely deaths of his former wife and her friend seemed to have little bearing on the interest elicited by the case.
Another trial of almost unbelievable horror took place in far less glamorous surroundings throughout the autumn - and thankfully without the constant presence of a television camera. The trial of Rosemary West in Winchester, southern England, was an experience that tested the most hardened of court reporters. Debate raged as to whether the media should be reporting any details of the proceedings at all, so de-basing was the litany of lethal cruelty to young girls, including the accused's own daughter.
In a less accessible location, another courtroom received much less publicity until the verdict was carried out, hastily and brutally. in November. Only then did the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer and activist. and eight other members of the minority Ogoni people. receive anything like the outraged reaction that, for example, the proposed sinking of the oil platform Brent Spar in the North Sea drew at an official level earlier in the year. The whole world bears part of the shame for the summary hangings of those nine men.
Escape from a death sentence was the fortunate end of the story of Sarah Balabagan, a young Filipino maid working in the United Arab Emirates, who was given the death penalty for killing her elderly Arab employer, after he allegedly raped her. After international protests the court commuted the sentence, with the proviso of a payment of "blood money" to the dead man's family, on appeal. The pathetic tale again drew attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Filipinas who work as domestic servants around the world, often poorly paid and exploited physically.
IN EVENTS which started outside the legal sphere, but are inexorably to end up there, 12 people died after a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March. A new horror joined the terrorists' list of semtex etcetera. as it became clear that the members of the small Aum Shinri Kyo cult had been manufacturing the gas at vast warehouses in rural Japan, with a view to imposing their will on a society which runs like a well-designed machine - until something like this throws a spanner in the works. The experience was traumatic for the Japanese people, still picking up the pieces alter a disastrous earthquake around the city of Kobe in January.
From sects to sex, always a winner for press interest. The champion of the year was of course, the Princess of Wales's Panorama admission in November that she was "mad about" James Hewitt, but had been very let down". Perhaps Nelson Mandela feels the same way about his erstwhile partner Winnie, a larger than life lady who runs up similar bills. President Mandela is now facing the painful business of extricating himself from a union which looked better in the days before Robben Island and subsequent world statesmanship.
But entering that blessed state of matrimony in 1995 were Imran Khan. cricketer par excellence and philanthropist in his native Pakistan, and British heiress Jemima Goldsmith. The fact that the bride was a blond jetsetter with a very worldly lifestyle hardly seemed to suggest that her husband was planning to win the popular vote in an oft-speculated-upon challenge to his predominantly Muslim country's Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.
And from not too far from Pakistan came the edifying story, via an Irish Times correspondent, of how the answer to a maiden's prayer in the eastern Indian state of Bihar is obtained in some cases by a swift blow to the head: the "bachelor kidnappers" have struck again.
And for the year's skateboarding duck story, a basketball-playing rat ("the rats love the game", the wire agency caption told us cheerfully) at a scientific centre in Finland was hard to beat.