.... Ach, I might have known your second-to-last quote was from the Beeb site.

They have a tendency that's all too evident in the English print meeja: the delusion that a full stop is a paragraph marker.

I've no idea where that came from.

It's excessively irritating.

My daughter, every now and then used to proudly show me a sentence in our local paper, with a ring around a full stop in the middle of a paragraph.

End of rant.