FOREIGN news is what you step round while approaching something familiar. Sometimes such news is hard to grasp; sometimes it is too depressing for words. And sometimes ‘foreign news’ reaches up from the hard ground many thousands of feet below and destroys the plane you are sitting in.

The awful fate of nearly 300 people on board the Malaysian Boeing 777 inspires many glum thoughts. Not least that other people’s wars and arguments, other people’s news, can have a shocking disregard for general humanity or the happy humdrum life.

Once again, a mundane code, in this case a flight number, becomes shorthand for another unspeakable act. While the facts are still being argued over, the blame for downing flight MH17 is thought to lie with Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.

The lives of so many innocent people were lost because some ideologically screwed up moron on the ground in eastern Ukraine was too monumentally dumb to know what they were shooting at; too wrapped in the overheated righteous moment to wonder at the consequences of what they were doing.

Innocent people always die in wars. Sometimes they die in conflicts which have nothing to do with them. All that the 283 passengers and 15 crew members of MH17 were doing was passing through the airspace thousands of feet above disputed territory.

Once you look beyond the tally, and see newsprint glimpses of lives lost, the story of this downed plane takes on a wider, more human aspect. Who could not be moved by the particular tales: the avid Newcastle fans on their way to a match; the experts in Aids flying to a conference; the returning families; the adventuresome students: all lost in a cruel instant.

All the stories are heart-wrenching and it is often the small details that are devastating. One of the Britons who died was Robert Ayley, 28, a dog breeder from Guildford in Surrey who had moved to New Zealand. He was returning to his wife and two young children from a month-long working trip to Europe.

The last email he sent said: “Last day in Europe. My flight is at 12 tomorrow. Right now, I’m just looking forward to seeing the boys and Sharlene. It’s been a long, long journey.”

Foreign news? What such tragedies teach is that there is no such thing. In the modern, connected, flight-skimmed world, everything is linked and the distant is local.

An old lesson is here put in a modern setting. One hundred years ago, the outbreak of the First World War showed how other people’s arguments could orchestrate a war.

Yet as the war rumbled on the horizon, here in York people were mostly unconcerned, as reported in our First World War supplement yesterday. The York historian David Rubenstein summoned up a city unmoved by the distant doings of foreigners, pointing to a pre-war column in the Yorkshire Evening Press that suggested the normal man cared more about the activities of his household cat than events abroad.

After MH17, the aftermath is personal and political: personal in terms of loss and of the person in terms of the victims' bodies being seemingly shifted around as some sort of bargaining tool, before being handed over to the Malaysians. As for the political, the involvement or not of Russia has put President Vladimir Putin on the defensive as the world looks his way in anger.

So foreign news isn’t foreign at all, even if we do let our eyes skip the latest horrors from Syria or Gaza.

Incidentally, it is striking how many of the reporters who convey hard news from abroad are women. Lyse Doucet for the BBC, Lindsey Hilsum for Channel 4 are two outstanding exponents. Doucet has been sending remarkable reports from Gaza this week, doggedly conveying the story on the ground as Israeli missiles fall around her.

SMALLER NEWS: Council officials in York have removed love-token padlocks attached to the millennium bridge. On holiday in Lyon earlier this summer, a city of bridges, we saw many such inscribed padlocks. They were new to me and seemed rather charming, although I didn’t add to the romantic clutter.