Recently in News Category

Last night I was out trying to take photos of the Geminid meteor shower. It was a bit cloudy as you can see from the above photo which shows precisely no meteors. But as I set out on foot to a nearby field a bit away from the city lights, wrapped up warm with a hat, with a tripod in a case over my shoulder, I was expecting to be stopped at any moment by the police.

Under Section 44, police can stop you if they think that you're being a bit suspicious - especially in certain areas. And "suspicious" tends to mean taking photographs.

Last week The Independent got an admission from the Association of Chief Police Officers to admit that the powers were being used too much to harrass people innocently taking pictures.

"Officers and community support officers are reminded that we should not be stopping and searching people for taking photos. Unnecessarily restricting photography, whether from the casual tourist or professional, is unacceptable."

This follows numerous cases of people being stopped and having their details taken and the police insisting that they see your photos.

Anyway - that note should have put an end to it shouldn't it?

Nope.

In Saturday's Guardian, Paul Lewis has penned a piece: "From snapshot to Special Branch: how my camera made me a terror suspect."

The journalist went out to the Gherkin and took photos and video footage of the building. Security guards called the police who wanted to know who he was and to see his footage. Seemingly, filming the top of the building is fine, but not the lower part where you can see the lobby and its video cameras.

While the journalist stood his ground pretty firmly, the video at The Guardian's site is well worth a watch even though the police involved clearly realise that he's probably a journalist. Nonetheless they bandy around Section 44 as they like.

The I Am A Photographer Not A Terrorist site is calling for a mass gathering to defend street photography as a result of this and other incidents.

The whole culture that this is part of, is getting really concerning.

Newspapers haven't been having the greatest time recently. Circulations continue to fall, and there's a generation growing up who gets its news from the web, perhaps with the odd bit of a 24-hour news channel thrown in.

But that's really paid-for newspapers. We also now have the free titles. Starting with Metro, and added to, in the capital at least, by the LondonPaper and London Lite. People probably read just about as many titles as they did before. The difference is that they're not paying for them. And ad revenues alone do not make great editorial.

Against this background, the Evening Standard has been sold to an ex-KGB member who wants to turn it around. Worringly, they've put the editor of The Tatler in place as its new editor, but things can only improve from its most recent iteration. But, as you can see above, the fascinating tack they've taken with their new advertising campaign is to actually apologise to Londoners for the negativity and aloofness the title had adopted in recent times.

When I first started working in London all those years ago, I'd always buy a paper in the morning - probably The Independent - and the Standard on the way home in the evening. Even though I didn't come from a household that religiously had had a daily paper delivered when I was growing up, I'd fallen in love with newspapers.

When The Independent launched in 1986, I was 16 years old and bought the first copy. I still have it. For many years the Indie carried me along - a title that fitted my hopes and beliefs, and delivered thoughtful news. Remember, at the time it was the only paper that refused to cover Royal stories in any meaningful way. It took science seriously. It had a fantastic Saturday magazine.

Roll forward a few years, and I was still in the newspaper habit. I'd by now worked for a local newspaper group, and that had done nothing to remove the habit.

In those first years in London, I enjoyed reading the Standard on the way home. Yes, it was lighter than The Independent, but it still had a bit of foreign news - they even had a couple of foreign correspondents. The paper had a decent supplement, its sports coverage of the capital's teams was second to none, arts coverage was excellent, and it was good value. It got me home.

Somewhere along the way, things changed. I switched to The Guardian when underinvestment at The Independent and an over-reliance on campaigns and news that wasn't really news led me away from it.

And at some point down the line, I stopped reading the Standard too. This was in spite of having people like Derek Malcolm write their film reviews. But there was page after page of columnists, and less news than there had been.

Yes, like everyone else, I get more of my news from the internet these days, but in actual fact, local news coverage is hard to come by on the internet. It's mostly just the same Press Association sources repeated all over the place. The reality is that most local news still surfaces in local newspapers. But the actual "news" part of the Standard had diminished. And I stopped being a reader long before the paper's more recent anti-Ken Livingstone hysteria and its seeming attempt to become an unloved younger sibling of the Daily Mail.

Associated tried lots of things to tempt me back. They brought out their quite innovative (and no doubt very expensive) smartcard payment system - I still have 8 credits left on my card. They gave away umbrellas (that fell apart), travel coffee mugs, and rucksacks (you can imagine how good they were). The only campaign that actually worked for me was when they gave away copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson to promote the hardback release of The Girl Who Played With Fire. I'd already read the book in hardback, but bought multiple copies of the Standard so that I could give the copies to friends and family who I thought might enjoy this excellent work. As it turns out, I think that Associated actually got paid to give this title away.

The interminable features and general interest in all things celebratory mean that the paper had stopped being of interest to me. On those rare occassions that I bought it - instead of lasting me all the way home, it was doing well to hold my attention for a couple of tube stops. The headlines, staring out from the sullen vendors became more hysterical. I'd maybe glance at the cover, but I wouldn't buy it.

I'll give the relaunched title a go. But I'm out of the habit of reading a paper on the way home. Other things fill my time - either book reading, or listening to podcasts (something that certainly wasn't an option to me when I started working in London). Others play portable gaming devices or watch videos on their media players. We have a range of options to pass the time, even in the deepest of tube tunnels.

The other problem the Standard faces are the free papers. When Metro started, I admit that I wasn't sure how well it'd do. For a start, they didn't deign to make it available where I lived, and not at my interchange either. But when I did pick up copies, I couldn't really see anything that the internet couldn't give me. It's a bland concotion of the main headlines plus an over-reliance of those "and finally" stories that TV used to relegate to the end of the news. Why would I want that? Others do, but I don't. It just causes litter at the top of escalators in the morning.

So I never got into the habit.

More recently the LondonPaper launched, and alongside it London Lite. While the LondonPaper had the better design, the reality is that both of them are literally garbage. When they started out, they were pretty poor and if anything, they've got worse. The tube and public transport in general is littered with them. I assume that some of my above inflation fare increase is going to pay for all the additional cleaners they must need to tidy up after them.

In W1 at least, there is no shortage of vendors who generally block the pavement and get in the way. I have to pass between six to eight of them between my office and the tube station.

On the rare occassion I've picked up someone else's copy, it just reinforces the feeling that I've been quite correct to leave them well alone. The titles' news values are near enough non-existant. They seem to think they're competing with low-rent magazines like Now or Heat. The quality is abysmal, and they're filled with either press-releases seemingly reprinted verbatim or copy straight from the Press Association wire. Ceefax has deeper news coverage.

I've actually now begun to take offence at the vendors who thrust their papers at me. Do I look like someone who might read their tat?

I know that's a bit unfair. They're just earning a living. But these are rags in the truest sense. At least while there continues to be a battle between them, they're costing their respective proprietors money rather than making it. But is that a good thing for the future of the industry?

While I await the first newspaper to offer me a package that lets me buy an e-reader like the Sony or the Amazon Kindle, and get a year's subscription bundled in (think: the contract mobile phone model), I don't think the actual printed page is yet a dead technology. I'm still surprised that with just about everyone on full-colour presses, more isn't made of strong photography. The Guardian does it with Eyewitness and to be fair the Standard tries a bit too. But there's room for more. Tell me what's going on in this wonderful city!

Anyway, we'll have to wait and see what the new look Standard brings us. Until I've seen it, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, but this is probably the last chance saloon for the title.

A great film explaining why extending sound copyright is not in performers' interests but just record companies'. And, of course, our worst interests.

More at soundcopyright.eu.

A new year seems to mean that every newspaper worth its salt has to run some kind of promotion, and this Saturday's Independent had a very good offer: a free DVD of David Frost interviewing Richard Nixon about Watergate ahead of the release of Frost/Nixon in a week's time.

That was enough for me to pick up the paper for the first time in a while. You should know that somewhere in my loft I have issue No. 1 of The Independent and always feel very loyal to the paper even if I don't show my loyalty in always buying it. Perverse, I know.

While I think the paper was foolhardy to jump to a pound before anyone else had done - save the FT (granted, everyone else is around 90p - or will be from Monday) - I know that they struggle and yet they do some things well.

But a couple of real disappointments were to be found over the weekend. And they seem to come from making too many cost savings.

Saturday's paper had the results of an "Investigation" that showed the - shock/horror - B&Q's sale prices are not much better than a previous sale that had been held in October. They spelt out the fact that B&Q had sold products at higher prices for 28 days as required by law, but that having put the prices up for November and December, they'd dropped in January to similar levels.

Except that even this non-story didn't hang together. They highlighted a shower bath panel that had cost £100.56 in October, £169 in December and was now £84.49. Well to me, despite the price having increased in December, the price is now significantly lower than it had been in October. If I bought it today, I'd save fifteen quid on the October price. That's substantial on a hundred pound item.

This is not a story. It's as though someone in the newsroom evidently bought that panel in October and thought they'd got a deal. Then they'd noticed the price increase in December before dropping to a new lower price in January.

Guess what? Retailers change their prices a lot!

I can only assume that somebody in the Indie's advertising department has fallen out with B&Q too.

This story took up a full page.

Otherwise, Saturday's paper was OK. John Walsh's tribute to John Mortimer was fine (although a side panel repeated the notion that he'd written the screenplay for Brideshead Revisited - he did write a script, and was credited, but he others wrote the one used), and it was unfortunate that events had overtaken a story about the creator of Mad Men demanding more cash before he signed on for a third season (he now has).

But if anything, I was more disappointed by Sunday's paper. A page three story about the Prime Minister of the Turks & Caicos Islands told us little to nothing about exactly what he was accused of having done wrong. The story just stopped. It had so little detail I thought that I must have picked up Metro by mistake. If there's one thing I want in a Sunday paper, it's detail.

The safety net scheme being devised for UK banks got just a hundred words on page 4. But worst of all was an otherwise excellent article on inauguration of Obama. It started on page 8 where it was accompanied by a photo of his train journey yesterday; it continued on page 10, where it was the second lead after a sister Obama story; and it concluded on page 13. Other stories about Obama were on page 9 and page 11.

The layout was utterly atrocious. If the entire piece could not have been contained on a single page, or double page spread, which it easily could have been, it should certainly have demanded no more than one page turn. I wouldn't expect a student magazine to have design as bad as that. Is there anyone left at the Independent working on page layout?

Elsewhere, a weak story noted that lots of films were being made based around toys, and was given a double page spread. Meanwhile, an interesting piece about an ancient Greek vessel being reassembled was given a half page, of which only around a hundred words were devoted to the story. The rest was an illustration and a curious map that showed both where the vessel was found off Sicily, and the location of Portsmouth where the restoration work is taking place. Why did we need a map of Portsmouth? We know where that is. Indeed, to anyone who didn't read the story, you'd have thought that the boat had sailed from Sicily to Portsmouth in ancient times.

Again, that's not to say that there aren't good stories to be found in the paper. And I much prefer reaching international news before I reach the comment section. In too many Sundays - take a bow The Observer and the Sunday Times, international news is hidden away towards the back.

I fear that the real reason for all of this is cost-cutting.

I noted a suggestion earlier this week that the Russian oligarch and ex-KGB member Alexander Lebedev who's thought to be buying the Evening Standard might also want The Independent. Maggie Brown, on the Media Guardian podcast, thought that it was an appalling notion that Lebedev should own even the Standard. She'd be apoplectic ifhe bought the Indie too - a paper she was at launch with. I must admit that instinctively I'm uncomfortable with the notion too, but I'm also aware that the long term prospects for The Independent are not good.

A news report announces the fact that CNN launches on Freeview this week - effectively replacing Nuts TV. That's got to be good news for Freeview viewers, giving them an additional news service alongside the BBC News channel (never News 24!) and Sky News (will it remain on Freeview?).

But The Guardian's report (perhaps based on a CNN press release, and illustrated by a picture of very occassional presenter Mylene Klass) is a little misleading:

News channel CNN International is to join the Freeview digital TV service from Thursday, just days before the inauguration of new US president Barack Obama.

The channel will air on Freeview 84 seven days a week between the hours of 9pm and 1am.

It's that last little bit that's problemmatical. While inaugural events are taking place all day, the main address takes place at midday Washington time, which is 5pm UK time. The parade then kicks off at about 7pm UK time. So by the time 9pm rolls around and CNN reaches Freeview screens, most of the key action will have already taken place. BBC One, for example, is carrying live coverage between 4pm and 6pm UK time, while ITV, er, isn't.

Still, four hours a day of CNN is better than none.

This morning, the BBC Trust rejected plans for a local BBC video news service.

Concurrently, Ofcom published the results of its Market Impact Assessment and concluded that the plans would have had a significant negative impact on commercial news providers.

The BBC proposal would have seen it producing more localised news which would be delivered on demand either via fixed or mobile internet. The BBC's aim was to provide another layer of depth to its current local and regional services which often stretch significantly. For example, if you sit in North Norfolk, the local news will also cover goings on in Watford.

Most commercial news providers were utterly opposed to the plans for understandable reasons. Local newspapers have suffered enormously as they've seen their advertising revenues fall. Traditionally much of their cash came from classified ads, and lucrative property and jobs ads. Yet all of these have - to one extent or another - moved over to the internet. As a result, they have less money to invest in news gathering and we're seeing redundancies, and closures. The one thing they have going for them is their ultra-local news. And they didn't want to see the BBC getting their hands on that.

Meanwhile, local commercial radio operators were similarly opposed to the BBC's plans. As well as their on-air local news provision, the more forward thinking operators have been investing in online local news provision as the newspaper groups have. They want their sites to become the local news portals for a given region. If successful, they're in a strong place to develop new online revenues (seemingly the only area of the UK media landscape that is showing growth).

They make good points, and I think the BBC Trust and Ofcom are probably right. But I think we also need to think forward a little. As newspapers suffer, so their newsrooms are shrinking. Fewer reporters mean that news is harder to come by. As Nick Davies pointed out in his excellent book Flat Earth News, with a retrenchment in journalists, comes a retrenchment in journalism. No longer does either a local newspaper or local news agency have a regular person sitting in the local courts or council chambers all the time.

And we're seeing some local radio news operations being cut back - either by creating news "hubs" for a group of local services, or by even removing the one advantage local radio stations have over other broadcasters, and removing local news at certain times of the day altogether.

Can we really get all our local news online? I'm not sure we can.

If there aren't any decent primary news gatherers - i.e. local news reporters on the ground - then everybody will be republishing the same Press Association copy. And that's not enough. Like elsewhere in an open society, competition is important for news providers too.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, but as budgets are squeezed, plurality of news providers remains important. If we all rely on one source - something that we're getting closer and closer to - then we become less open. Without the concern that your competitor is going to scoop you, a reporter isn't as incentivised to work harder and dig deeper. Who's going to look hard into more difficult stories?

Perhaps beyond that danger is nobody at all covering the news. Local newspapers will have closed down. Local radio will cover things at a very superficial level perhaps having one or two people in the newsroom (including the newsreader). And local television won't really exist and the likes of ITV offers the same "local" news for everyone between Carlisle and Newcastle.

As ever, these are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

With Ofcom's review underway, and with the usual calls for the BBC's cash to be spread a bit thinner, with "top-slicing" and the like, commentators are often keen for the UK to adopt a model similar to public television in the US. There, cash is raised by subscribers pledging money directly. Relatively little state and federal funding is actually received by broadcasters - something in the region of $500m or so for radio and television. So pledge drives are required to get viewers and listeners to support stations, and corporate sponsors are sought out to provide cash.

That's the future some would like to see the BBC have. But in retaliation I'd say look at the dismal state of US broadcast news. ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their nightly news programmes at 6.30pm and that's it for most of the country. The programmes are relatively parochial, because the networks have cut back on their overseas bureaux. There was even talk recently about third placed (in news terms) CBS doing a deal with CNN to buy in their news, thus ending a news provider that famously once had Edward R Murrow broadcasting from the London rooftops during the Blitz.

There's no word yet whether or not this will come to pass, but that does bring us to the US cable news channels. You've got CNN (CNN International, the service we get to see on this side of the pond, is a different beast), Fox News and MSNBC. Again, these services tend to concentrate on domestic news to a large extent, and are made up of a series of personality-led programmes (see the current fight between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News's Bill O'Reilly). While I'm sure Murdoch would love the ratings that Fox News brings in the US in place of the rather more restrained and truly balanced Sky News, brings, I'm not sure that this would help us in our understanding of events around the world.

PBS, of course, has The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - a significantly more measured and reliable news programme. But this programme is struggling because it's lost one of its major corporate sponsors, and is unable to make up the shortfall of cash.

"Not only are corporations cutting back on all forms of advertising during the current economic slowdown, but public television’s model - soliciting long-term commitments - is also increasingly out of step with the changing needs of corporations, which no longer sponsor public television programs for purely philanthropic reasons."

No wonder so Americans are finding themselves left with, well, the BBC on either BBC America where a US-oriented service has recently launched, or on PBS (although that's not without it's problems).

Is that really a future that we want in the UK?

Last night I was flicking around the outer reaches of Sky, and came upon CCTV just as the top of the hour was approaching. So I decided to see how the awful Chinese earthquake was being reported in south western China on the English language version of the Chinese state TV service.

Well of course it was the main story, but what was really interesting were the pictures, or lack of them. Unlike the BBC or Sky, who seemed to have a reasonable quantity of imagery of collapsed buildings as well as stills of people being pulled from the rubble, CCTV mainly had images from other cities that had felt the force, but where buildings hadn't fallen, and where the worst damage was limited to cracks in those buildings' infrastructure.

Certainly they had people from the Chinese seismelogical organisations explaining the quake, and an interview with the Chinese premier explaining how help would be on its way. But little in the way of "action" footage.

It can't really be embarrassing for the Chinese government to admit that a major earthquake can cause large amounts of damage can it?

Meanwhile over on the BBC's dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about Robert Scoble being one of the first to share reports about the earthquake, as he used Twitter to pass on links and other people's "twits" to his gargantuan following on that service.

The tenet of the piece is that Twitter is becoming a news source. But I'm not sure I agree with this. As I said, when the UK had our insiginificant little earthquake a couple of months ago at 1am in the morning, I Twittered it, and read other people's Twitters prior to Five Live, Sky News and BBC News 24 beginning to report it. But does that really mean that Twitter's a news source? I'm not so sure. I still want verified information.

Twitter can be a way to pass on news stories, but it's limited to where the technology is available, and the use to which it's made locally. For example, I suspect that if something big happened in Brazil, it'd be Orkut I'd look towards. But as ringsting-iom wrote in his comment on the BBC blog, the mobile networks went down very quickly, so getting Twitters out isn't easy.

And I don't recall a similar Twitter explosion following the cyclone that hit Burma where of course the military junta keep everyone under very close scrutiny (and are now causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of its citizens by being very suspicious about all the aid being offered to them).

First hand citizen journalism will continue to play an important role in what gets reported, but it's not the same as a properly resourced news organisation with the facilities to check and double check what's happening - not what I think might be happening.

I was disappointed recently, when watching the Ewan McGregor/Charlie Boorman series Long Way Down, that they reinforced the nonsense about water going down the plug clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on whether you're in the northern or southern hemisphere. Along the border, there's a few quid to be made perpetuating this party trick to unwitting tourists. Michael Palin got similarly tricked in his series Pole to Pole. But it's not true, and you can see it yourself in your own sink.

Anyway, Long Way Down wasn't a news programme. But over the last few days, we've heard an awful lot about a pair of twins who were said to have unwittingly married following their separation at birth. A judge then annulled the wedding. Now while I can't absolutely prove this didn't happen, I'm really not at all happy with the facts of the case as I've seen them so far, and there's no proof so far that it did happen.

Here's the BBC's version of the story. And here it is in The Guardian.

But the story has actually emerged via Lord Alton during debate over the human fertilisation and embryology bill. He said he'd been told the story by an unnamed High Court judge. Yet that's not far removed from the "friend of a friend" basis of most urban myths.

Now while I wouldn't hold the News of the World up as the bastion of truth, their reporters, obviously sniffing a great story if they could get hold of the couple in question, only seem to have got as far as talking to the judge who's president of the High Court Family Division. He's not heard of such a story despite it surely being a cause celebre if it had happened.

So to me, this is case unproven, and really doesn't deserve the coverage it has received until it's been confirmed one way or another. You'd imagine that the couple would be in for a big payday from the News of the World or Mail on Sunday if they wanted to tell their story. But even if they want to remain anonymous, I think first hand proof positive is essential before we can take this at face value.

Until then, have I told you about the friend of a friend who got mugged in London and woke up in Turkey with just one kidney...?

The Beeb has updated the iPlayer to incorporate Flash streaming versions of programmes as well as the Windows XP only downloads previously available. This makes programme watching available to Mac and Linux users which is good news.

It also means that I can link to a programme like last nights Can Gerry Robinson Fix The NHS which was a fantastic watch, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not watching the previous series. Although it's only live for another six days despite being current affairs/documentary fare. It seems unlikely to me that too many Gerry Robinson box sets of DVDs will be sold!

Later in the evening, Robinson came up against David Nicholson, the Chief Executive of the NHS on Newsnight. That's also worth a watch, but you'll have to be quick as I believe that only one day's programming is archived. And Newsnight isn't available via the iPlayer. I assume that's something to do with the rights to agency footage that might be included in reports. That said, I notice that NBC seems able to video podcast its Nightly News.

Last night's Newsnight is worth it for a great piece of investigative journalism into a recent report from thinktank Policy Exchange into "The Hijacking of British Islam."

Researchers for the Policy Exchange went into 100 mosques and claimed to find books and pamphlets available with pretty hateful material. Their report was widely reported, and Newsnight began their own report into what had been uncovered. But when they got hold of some of the receipts that researchers had from the various mosques to prove where the material had been purchased, there was something fishy. Some of the receipts had misspellings on them or subtly wrong addresses. And many also seemed to have been generated by inkjet printers - Newsnight employed a forensic scientist to look at the documents. They also determined that it was likely that the same handwriting was on more than one receipt. Finally, it appeared that one receipt had been written on top of another. When their reporter went around some of the mosques in question, it didn't all stack.

Now this was an incendiary report, getting front page coverage. But if the research on which the report was based was indeed flawed, then that questions the report's overall validity. There seems to have been limited opportunity to actually question the researchers themselves.

Now it does seem that some of this hateful material can be found in some of these places and bookshops. Although I suspect that there's some "radical" thoughts from some Christian sects if you look hard enough in a Christian bookshop. But when the Policy Exchange's director (Dean Godson) appeared on the programme, he was blind in his defence on the report despite it quite evidently being based on some very dodgy research. It probably doesn't completely invalidate his findings, but for whatever reason he was unwilling to accept that his researchers had either misled him or lied to him. Paxman was on the attack and his blustering defence only made him dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole.

Policy Exchange has a press release currently on their homepage which continues to refute their findings and questioning Newsnight's methodology and reporting. They end by saying that they're meeting today to discuss legal proceedings against the BBC.

Surely a far smarter move would be to consider the obviously fabricated evidence that they were provided with, and to look more closely at how their evidence was collected. It seems apparent that incendiary material is available in some places. But a long legal case is only likely to end with them having derision heaped on them.

Newsnight's 17 minute piece is here and the follow up interview is here.

[UPDATE] Newsnight editor Peter Barron responds to Godson's accusations here.

[UPDATE 2] A Telegraph piece from the weekend is rebutted in today's letters by Peter Barron.

There was a great film on Newsnight last night highlighting the child labour abuse in Uzbekistan where during the autumn the schools all close and children are sent off to pick the cotton. They don't have any choice in the matter, and they sleep away from their homes.

This cotton is then sold by the Uzbek government to the cotton trade who process it, largely in Asia, before it becomes cotton goods that turn up in many UK high street stores.

Why are some clothes so cheap? Because the cotton is picked by children for a pittance.

It's really down to us in the West to take an interest in where the materials we buy come from. Fairtrade cotton?

Over the weekend, during the start of the Premier League we saw pitchside advertising, and yellow bracelets in rememberance of Madeleine McCann. News coverage was also ongoing, marking 100 days of her disappearance.

Now I won't talk about her particular case any more because I have no real knowledge of it. But it does seem to me that the media has, overall, carried a ridiculous amount of coverage of this story.

For the family, of course, it's a tragedy. And if I were in their shoes, then I'd probably try to gain the same amount of publicity as they've managed. But there's no two ways about it - the coverage has been disproportionate. Many many children go missing every year. Some put it as high as 77,000! And while the majority are probably short term runaways, there are many more who are never seen again. But we don't get coverage of many of them.

As a commenter here says, a girl had been missing in Essex for two weeks near Manningtree. It was big news locally, but I didn't know anything about it until I saw the local East Anglian TV coverage last weekend. Sadly, a body has now been found. And for every child missing in East Anglia, there are more in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the north-east, the south-west, the midlands and so on.

We don't hear about them.

So why has this case brought such a media storm? Is it because she's a cute little girl with media-savvy parents (or advisors)?

And why has so much of the under-lying insinuation in the reporting been "aren't Portuguese police rubbish? They can't handle a case like this. Send in the Met."

All round, this case makes me very uncomfortable. The coverage is mawkish, and in many cases, being covered for commercial ends.

Such wonderful news.

Alan Johnston has now been held in captivity for 100 days.

I didn't pick up a copy, but it seems that The Independent on Sunday's readers aren't overjoyed at the changes that were made over the weekend...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6710863.stm

I'm on the move, and I want to catch a news bulletin. What should I do?

From today, if I want to, I can subscribe to ITN's Newsfix on my mobile phone for £2 a week. Or maybe I'd prefer to watch the BBC's free stream of News 24.

What would you do?

(OK - so the BBC's stream is probably going to be limited to Windows Smartphones and their ilk).

Oh - and on a non-3G phone, each ITN bulletin will use about 500k. How much extra will that cost you on your data package?

Happy 45th Birthday Alan Johnston, wherever you're being held.

I'm still struggling with my free Chinese Phrasebook that came with this morning's Times (if you bought it in a WH Smith), but in the meantime here are two excellent pieces from today's Guardian.

First up is a G2 cover story on the Gillian McKeith. Now I've never seen an episode of You Are What You Eat, but I've seen all the spin-off foods on supermarket shelves and clogging up space at Holland & Barrett. Some of this "nutritional" information that's being spread about really needs debunking, and Dr Ben Goldacre - he really is a doctor - is the man to do it. And one of his Bad Science readers has forced McKeith to drop her "Dr" title on the basis of how her "PhD" was acquired (distance learning via a non-accredited US institution).

The other piece is a full page in Media Guardian about the rise of quiz show gaming on the radio (free reg. required). This is something I was moaning about only the other day, as it became clear that Chris Tarrant's return to commercial radio was as a presenter for one of these shows. Personally, I'm staggered that a professional broadcaster like Tarrant would agree to present such a low-rent show. Granted, I haven't heard it yet, but we're still talking about a genre of programming that relies solely on listeners paying to play. Gambling, in other words.

In the Media Guardian piece, contributors say that they'll have a higher level of trust with listeners than TV shows like The Mint. Why? This is exactly the same, except it's on the radio, and by the sound of things, it'll be in more peak time than most of the TV shows are. Times are tough in the radio advertising market, but this is not the way to go - it's short termist, and loses all the trust listeners to radio stations do have.

One mistake in the Guardian piece is that the author has been taken in by a station's name - Classic Gold Digital (my emphasis). While it certainly does appear on DAB radio sets, it's a station that's mainly heard on AM stations around the country. They're no more or less "digital" than any other station. Statistics from the DRDB about how many DAB radio listeners there are in the UK are spurious. On average, 16% of radio listening is through a digital platform (around half of which is DAB listening).

[UPDATE] Returning to the Goldacre piece:-

Andrew Collins is an excellent writer who maintains a blog. I read the first volume of his memoirs a few years ago. These days he's a fine radio presenter on 6 Music, he's film editor of the Radio Times, and a columnist on Word magazine. I respect him an awful lot.

However, he has profoundly different views to me on people like McKeith. If you've got a while, read his thoughts on the Goldacre article, and most importantly, make sure that you read all the comments underneath. Collins returns frequently to address those comments.

It's interesting to try to understand how the "other side" thinks, and how rational person might be so mislead. Still, when was the last time you fundamentally changed your views on something on the basis that a pile of commenters were oppposed to you? I guess what actually happens is that your views become ever more entrenched.

In a 21st century socially networked world, what's the first thing that any budding journalist should do when they hear about someone being arrested for a crime?

Yes - it's check out whether they have a Myspace page. And I guess you could go on to find out whether they've got any photos on Flickr or who they went to school with on Friends Reunited.

Obviously, we don't know who's innocent or guilty yet, but I guess that forensic trails are online as much as offline these days.

A terrifying account.

I'm sure you'll be as relieved as I am that the UK Threat Level has been brought down to SEVERE which means "an attack is highly likely".

Obviously, having come off CRITICAL, when an attack was "imminent" we can rest a little bit - but not too much!

In the meantime, airport security restrictions have been slightly relaxed, but passengers won't be able to take advantage of them until tomorrow because it'll take time to let the security personnel know about them. See how smooth the whole system works?

We had the usual John Reid & Douglas Alexander show on television and radio this morning letting us know all about this. Briefcase-sized hand luggage will be allowed as well as things like laptops. That'll help some parts of the business community - if they stop flying then airlines go under. It won't help Ryanair and Easyjet who'd be happy if we only brought on hand baggage as they can turn planes around quicker that way.

Meanwhile duty-free retailers, and in particular Boots, will be delighted to see any kinds of liquids or gels being banned. That's going to mean lots of shaving gear, bottled water, deoderant and the like being sold in their stores.

There are some awfully cynical letters in today's Independent. I'm very cynical myself!

You don't want to take any liquid onto a plane - it might be explosive.

Still - best to get rid of them in a large vat in a crowded airport lounge.

Mediaguardian's carrying a story talking about how ITV News rolled out a news special to follow events today.

They may well have, but at around 7.10am this morning when the BBC was carrying live coverage of John Reid and Douglas Alexander reading a live statement (also carried on Five Live), GMTV was in an ad break. BBC Breakfast was by then running non-stop on the one story, while over on GMTV they were running a text vote on wedding dresses while puffing their interview with someone from Emmerdale that was coming up. I thought that maybe even Five would have ditched their kids programming to take a live Sky News feed, but they didn't.

All very slow off the mark.

Only the other day, I was attempting to lampoon the new government Threat Level index. At the time we were on Severe, but at 6.00am this morning we went to CRITICAL. This means "an attack is expected imminently".

As the world and his mum now knows, anti-terrorist police and security services have foiled a plot that seemingly was designed to blow up multiple planes in the sky. They've arrested quite a lot of people in London, High Wycombe and Birmingham.

If that is the case, and security services were aware of the imminent possibility of the attack, then I suppose I should eat a bit of humble pie. Perhaps the Severe level was worthy. However, I'm still not exactly clear what the Threat Level index is really supposed to achieve. Within days of it launching we're at the highest level. But the plot's been foiled.

How long do we now await an imminent attack? What form will it come in?

While there's chaos at airports as hundreds of thousands of August holiday makers have trips delayed, postponed or cancelled, I noticed a distinct lack of additional security personnel on the tube today. Over the last 12 months, there've been days when central London stations were crawling with police. Today there wasn't a sign of anyone. But we know from last summer that last minute changes in terrorist plans - switching to the bus from the tube - aren't impossibilities.

The fact is that someone who wanted to could probably drive a carload of explosives right into Westminster if they really wanted to. And as a free country, there's very little we could do about it. Yesterday, John Reid was saying that anti-terror critics "don't get it."

What don't we get?

The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.

Anti-terror critics just don't get it, says Reid

· Politicians, judges and media 'put security at risk'
· Home secretary hints at more legislation to come

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Thursday August 10, 2006
The Guardian

John Reid yesterday accused the government's anti-terror critics of putting national security at risk by their failure to recognise the serious nature of the threat facing Britain. "They just don't get it," he said.
The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.

"Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world," he said.

I really don't agree with this at all. We're not safer in Reid's world. We've lost.

Are we really in a worse place than when the IRA was bombing pubs, department stores and town centres?

They don't get many criminal bombers in China, or Burma, or Cuba. But do we want their authoritarian regimes? Thought police? 1984?

No doubt, in the coming days and weeks, things will calm down a bit. But in the meantime, John Reid will be talking plenty to us about threat levels. (Incidentally, why isn't the content of Reid's speech up on the Home Office website yet? [UPDATE - It's here on the Labour Party website, via Spyblog)

As I say, it seems as though the police have indeed broken up a pretty nasty cell. In time, we'll learn more details. How many people were involved? Have all of them been rounded up? How did they come by the information?

Meanwhile, over on Comment is Free, Martin Bell believes this government has brought these attacks on itself and that "our government has endangered us."

This evening two men were charged by police with intercepting phone messages.

I've no idea at this point what's actually happened, but as far as I can see there are a few ways that this might have happened:

* An unchanged pin used by dialling a phone and entering the number. This won't work on my service provider but there's another better way...
* Dialling a generic voicemail access number, entering the target phone's number and then entering the pin. This might be a default number or a specific number.
* Social engineering. Getting pin numbers by spinning a likely tale to a phone company operator getting them to reveal a number to you. There are bound to be ways for this to work even if I don't know what they are. That's how people in the past have got bank records and the like.

Thinking about it all, it's remarkably easy. Indeed your home answering machine is even easier with popular brands using default numbers. Dial in, press #, and enter the number. You've got the messages.

There are going to be big implications from this story.

Threat Level. It sounds like a bad action TV series doesn't it? Well for years now America has had its own Homeland Security Advisory Scheme.

Here's what it looks like:

Currently America's on Elevated - the middle rung if you like.

Obviously, we in the UK were really left out by this. It might be dangerous in New York, but we need to know how dangerous it is in London. Fortunately, the Home Office and MI5 have come up with their own system to scare us stupid.

The various levels are:

• critical - an attack is expected imminently
• severe - an attack is likely
• substantial - an attack is a strong possibility
• moderate - an attack is possible but not likely
• low - an attack is unlikely

We are currently at threat level SEVERE!

Yup - an attack is likely. And it'll be Al Qaeda (or Al Qaida if you're MI5). Be very scared. Stock up with bottled water and canned food. I hear that polythene and Duct tape are also essentials.

Here are the websites you need to bookmark now for regular checking:

The Home Office
The Security Service
(Is it me, or is that MI5 link a bit arbitrary looking? Page269.html?)

Of course what the government really needs to make available is a nice RSS feed of our current threat level. You know, something that I can put at the top of this site, and into Bloglines, onto the front page of my customised Google and into MyYahoo. That sort of thing.

I'll be honest, I don't go to the Home Office's website all that often, except when I've gotten really scared by something that John Reid has said when defending the need for ID Cards. I know all those illegal immigrants are after my job after all. Probably my home too.

Keep 'em peeled!

Who says that even journalists in warzones aren't competitive? Listen to Stuart Hughes's piece from late last night describing the BBC's coverage of the day's evacuation of British citizens from Beirut.

As you may or may not know, a US TV presenter (journalist?), Katie Couric, is takeover the anchor job on the CBS Evening News in September. This is seen as something of a big thing in the states, since she's a woman, and they've not actually had a solo female network news anchor in the States until now.

But more interesting is the role that comes with being a news anchor in the States. You also become Managing Editor on the programme. In otherwords, your job isn't just to read off an autoqueue.

The same seems to be the case in France, where I'm told the main TF1 news presenter is very proud of his Breton roots, and unfailingly manages to get lots of references to Brittany into his bulletins.

In the UK, it's very different. Each news programme has its own editor, and while some of our presenters are very powerful - Jeremy Paxman and Jon Snow for example - they don't actually get to determine the news order. And that seems right to me. Whilst I wouldn't accuse these presenters as no longer being practising journalists, I'm sure that they'd agree that the demands of studio presenting means that there's less time to go out and about on stories. (Although Jon Snow is, for example, currently in the Middle East during the latest crisis).

I don't think I'd feel comfortable having someone who's paid "to read out loud for a living", as I once heard newsreading caustically described as, determining the agenda. It also seems a little unfair on the long-working staff members working behind the scenes of the big-money news presenter if their boss, and the direction of their programme becomes at the mercy of whatever big-name signing your network has just made.

Wow. ITN and the Daily Express spent £65,000 on a mobile phone video clip of the police entering an East London house in a raid this morning. To say that the quality is dreadful really doesn't do it justice. It's not even as though it reveals anything substantial apart from the fact that a lot of police piled through the house's door.

I suppose £65,000 means I should keep my video camera well charged.

Tragically, on the day that John Simpson put up a sterling defence for journalists doing real work out in Iraq, and not just being holed up in the Green Zone in Bagdhad, two British journalists working for CBS television have been killed by a roadside bomb.

Simpson was responding to complaints from Rageh Omaar, quoted in The Independent. Sadly, the original article is now behind the Indie's paywall.

This being the end of May, it also marks the end of the so-called Everest season. It's that brief window when the weather allows climbers to attempt to ascend the world's highest mountain. But this year an awful lot of climbers have died on the mountain.

Every year, the number of parties attempting to summit seems to increase, and it's not surprising, since, for under $20,000 there are plenty of tour operators who will effectively drag you up the mountain to a lesser or greater extent.

OK, so climbing Everest isn't quite the achievement it once was, with Sherpas roping up just about the entire mountain in the early part of the season to ease the paying clients over the coming weeks. But you do hear stories that make the crowds on Everest in that brief opening weather window sound like the slopes of Snowdon or Ben Nevis on a sunny August day.

I'm not a climber - just an occassional walker - and I've certainly never been to the Himalayas or anywhere close to the "death zone" at 8,000m. I have read plenty about the issues, however, including books by Joe Simpson.

So it's really scary to hear some of the reports you still get from Everest where a different kind of morality seems to exist. Read this piece on the recent death of a British climber, David Sharp, for example. 40 climbers went past the man as he died. Now I don't suppose that there was a great deal that they could have done for him except perhaps trying to get him back down. But that would have jeapordised their own chances of summiting. (Another report of the story from the Telegraph).

What would I do if I was out for a nice walk in the hills without a mobile and found a man bleeding to death? I have no real first aid training, so I'd patch him up as best I could and then head back to civilisation as fast as possible to get help. Not really the same, although I probably hadn't spent $20,000 to get to the top of the hill I was walking on that day, so my giving up the trip wouldn't worry me.

Another story that has just come to light is about the man who was left for dead, but then found to be alive the next morning. A rescue mission was put in place and, at time of writing, a full recovery seems likely.

Over the last couple of years there have been a couple of expeditions to collect the belongings and indeed, the remains of George Mallory, the pioneering British moutaineer who died in 1924 attempting to scale Everest. The fact that they were able to find his body, still preserved on the mountain tells us something about another dirty secret of Everest. Many of those who die on the mountain are just left there, and will remain there year after year. They may, in time, be covered by rocks. But the snow melts and in any case, in some of the more extreme sections of the hill, it simply gets blown off. There are no vultures at those altitudes to give the body a Tibetan "sky funeral". You have to walk past the bodies of those who've gone before you.

All in all, I find it to be a very sorry indictment of our society that this behaviour can still take place. Indeed it's questionable morally that we should even be in the country "holidaying" while a civil war is essentially underway.

It was sad to hear about the death of Val Guest. He died last week, but no newspaper (perhaps with the exception of the subs only Variety) has yet run an obituary.

He had a fabulous career, working with Will Hay in his early days, through to directing the Hammer versions of the Quatermass films amongst others. He also co-directed Casino Royale, but I don't suppose that Confessions of a Window Cleaner or the Cannon and Ball vehicle, The Boys in Blue, were ever foremost on his CV.

In 2001, I was lucky enough to hear him speak at a screening of one of my favourite films which he directed, The Day The Earth Caught Fire. I also got a signed copy of his autobiography, So You Want To Be In Pictures. I'll be honest and admit that I've only ever dipped into this book, so I can't comment on the poor reviews it gets at Amazon.

One way or another, he had a significant impact on British films over the years and was an important figure, and he will be missed.

Because I stay up far too late all too often, over the past few weeks, I've caught a few editions of ABC television's World News Tonight when it's shown on BBC News 24 at 1.30am every morning.

It's very easy to hear the words "World News" in the show's title, and then see that the majority of the stories are solely about America. Indeed, some of the features really belong to news magazine programmes, but the programme is still pretty good. It's not a bad programme however.

I like to watch it as something of an insight into the minds of how America is thinking. This is where many of them are getting their information on the world around them, and it's interesting to put it into perspective with our own news. (Yes, I know plenty of people are actually getting their information from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert as well!).

So it was with sadness that I heard the news that ABC's co-anchor Bob Woodruff, along with his cameraman Doug Vogt, had been caught in an attack on the convoy they'd been travelling through Iraq with. I've seen a few shows that he's done with his co-anchor, and it's obvious that he does get around a bit, presenting news from, well, the world.

In the aftermath of the incident, and obviously, it's unclear yet how badly hurt Woodruff in particular is, it's notable that there's a lot more coverage on his case, than the thousands of others who've been injured in the line of duty.

Yesterday, the 100th British soldier died in Iraq, and I think it's fair to say that we don't cover the issues enough in this country either, albeit that the casualty figures are a fraction of what the US is suffering.

But maybe the injury of someone as high profile as Woodruff will bring home the suffering being felt by thousands of families when their loved ones are injured.

The guns are really out for Ruth Kelly at the moment. We're into the second week of a scandal that threatens her job as Education Minister with plenty of people and papers awaiting the claiming of her scalp.

Here's the big spread in today's (well yesterday's now) Observer detailing her week and the developments.

But it's not quite as cut and dried as the story is currently being painted. First of all, I should make clear my disgust for paedophiles, and those who frequent websites that show such images. I'm not trying to defend anyone here.

But the first case, highlighted in The Observer last weekend, based around the East Anglian teacher Paul Reeve, is not quite as clear cut as it's being presented. And Kelly may actually have been correct in letting him continue teaching. I have no knowledge of the specific case, just the fact that Operation Ore is not quite as cut and dried as it's presented.

Operation Ore was based around the credit cards logged for certain transactions from a company that ran many pornographic sites. Last year PC Pro magazine published a significant article by journalist Duncan Campbell, explaining that many of the people listed had actually used other adult services owned by the parent company and would not have even known about the child pornography that was traded by the company at a certain stage. Pornography, whatever you might think of it, is not the same as paedophilia. A lot of it is perfectly legal last time I checked.

However everybody who'd bought something on one of those websites was labelled a paedophile by the police, yet proof was always going to be hard to come by, hence the "stark choice" faced by Reeves and others: go to court and protest your innocence or be put on a register.

Declining to go to court does not make Reeves guilty. I couldn't say why he didn't, but I'd guess that the social stigma that'd be immediately attached to his name being widely published in a climate where "paediatricians" are mistaken for "paedophiles" doesn't make it too surprising.

Teachers subscribing to pornographic websites might not be an edifying thought, but I'm guessing quite a few teachers, like many others in society, have bought other pornographic material - maybe they've viewed it via the auspices of Rupert Murdoch's satellite system. (I'd be curious to see what the Daily Express's coverage has been like!)

With a lack of proof, surely it's entirely reasonable that he should have been allowed to teach - 'innocent until proven guilty' still being the way the law works in this country. The problem is that people don't understand the full problems behind Ore, and despite a story in The Sunday Times, it's widely seen as beyond reproach.

The quote in The Observer's article "'You could not access those websites by accident. It was not a website you could stumble into,' said one person familiar with Ore" is misleading in the extreme then.

Now, I don't doubt that Ruth Kelly's department hasn't made mistakes, and Kelly isn't widely liked (I don't especially like her myself). Although I do hope the approbium she faces isn't anything to do with her being a member of Opus Dei - far too many people seem to believe everything they read in that *novel* (I don't especially like Opus Dei either, but have no problem with her being a member).

Blood sports are banned in this country now, but I think the press pack is well and truly out for Kelly's blood now and like the hounds, when they've got a sniff of it, their blood boils and they lose themselves in the excitement of the chase and the prospect of the kill, irrespective of whether it's really going to help lower the fox population (I might be stretching this metaphor a bit far, because I certainly don't think of Kelly as a "fox").

Of course, there do seem to have been other offenders who've slipped through the net, and not from Operation Ore, so there is a real problem here. But is it quite as large as it's being painted?

I'll be curious to read if any other papers pick up on this aspect of the story. Maybe I've missed something, but it's a brave paper, however liberal at heart, that takes a anything aside from the obvious point of view when it comes to suspected paedophiles.

Is it time for the return of the sorely missed Rough Justice? Or perhaps a Panorama on the issue?

(OK, that headline's a little misleading) [Update: I've completely changed my mind - that headline is utterly correct]

Thank goodness the news has come through that in Dover, Pennsylvania schools cannot teach "Intelligent Design" because it's really just Creationism.

Hey, I've no problem if people want to believe the world was made in seven days. Just like I've no problem if people want to believe the earth's flat. Just don't go teaching your daft ideas to kids. Simple.

[Update: You've got to read the judge's decision in full (PDF). It's lucid and packs a powerful punch taking apart the pro-ID lobby limb by limb. "ID is not a science...[it is]...grounded in theology"]

I see that BBC correspondent Caroline Hawley's leaving Baghdad at the end of the year after two and a half years. There's a nice piece by John Simpson in the BBC's Newswatch section of their website. There are critics of "roof-top" journalism that can see correspondents stuck in the Green Zone just regurgitating stuff that other - Iraqi - people have told them. But Simpson defends the BBC's correspondents as well as some of those from British newspapers, whilst pointing out that other news organisations don't maintain correspondents in the city.

He also says that there's plenty of original journalism still being done. I guess that it's just done a little more surreptitiously without necessarily taking a camera crew with them.

I didn't take my digital camera out and about with me today, but if I had, I could have taken some slightly unclear photos of a smoke filled northern sky.

I didn't hear an explosion at 6am this morning, although I did hear an alarm clock sometime around that time. Disappointing, since the explosion was supposedly audible as far away as Holland.

The 24 hour news networks are going mad of course, with round the clock coverage. Very colourful pictures, but not a great deal to report as the authorities have decided to let the oil burn down before putting the fire out.

In the meantime my ever-so intelligent countrymen are heading to petrol stations to panic buy fuel. Yes - one oil depot going out of business is going to bring the country to a grinding halt. It's not like we have fleets of lorry-type machines that can carry tanks of fuel. You could call them "fuel tankers" if we did. They could carry petrol all around the country to ensure that everyone can buy fuel in the forthcoming days, weeks and months.

Then there's all the worry about what's going to be put into the atmosphere. Well guess what? All that fuel was going to be burnt anyway. Not all in one place at one time, certainly. But all that soot and carbon dioxide was going to end up in the atmosphere.

On News 24 the BBC showed footage taken by a pair of "amateur documentary makers" who rushed towards the blaze this morning to capture close-up footage of the blast. Eventually good sense got the better of them and they pulled out. The BBC presenter mumered something about it being a problem in a society where nearly everyone's mobile phone is capable of taking video, with people heading into dangerous situations to get their footage on TV. Of course he said this after we'd spent five minutes gawping at their exclusive footage. And this is the same channel that had been soliciting pictures and video from viewers all day long (as had Sky News).

Still my favourite line of the day: "The huge black plume can be seen from space." A bit like car licence plates in that respect then?

Isn't Associated Newspapers taking an interesting line over the new pub opening hours that have just started?

Today's Mail has "Thanks Tessa" accompanied by a series of pictures of young people pissed on the streets of Britain. In actual fact, this has happened every day of the week for years and years. In fact, I'm mightily impressed that the Mail managed to get fresh post 11pm last night photos for the front of today's paper. They were taken last night weren't they? And in any case, I'm sure that there are no Knightsbridge wateringholes that have ever seen inebriated Mail reporters. Oh no.

Compare and contrast with yesterday's Standard which helpfully published a 12 page listings supplement detailing pubs in London that have extended their hours. Probably so we know where to avoid or something.

Whilst not in any way wanting to belittle the tragic loss of life in hotels across Amman, Jordan tonight, I've got to feel sorry for the BBC's Caroline Hawley. Fresh from the nervousness of Baghdad, she ends up in one of the bombed hotels in Jordan - hitherto relatively safe.

Wow. Blair's lost the vote in the Commons today regarding the 90 day detention. Thank goodness that enough Labour MPs saw sense in this. The 28 day vote's forthcoming.

[UPDATE] The 28 day vote has been passed. Of course this is still up from 14 days. I'm sure that this'll still give the police plenty of time to find out if you're a terrorist or not. If they haven't got any evidence, why exactly did they arrest you in the first place?

Yup - the stupid British public think that it's a great idea that the police can lock someone up for three months without even charging them. Isn't this another blindingly stupid idea? Politicians well know that the public at large simply don't understand what the full ramifications of this kind of legislation truly is.

Your average "man in the street" might think this is a great idea, until they realise it's them who're being locked up for such a long time without anyone having any kind of evidence to keep you locked up.

Once more, we're losing some of our civil liberties, something this government is fast getting a reputation for with their pointless ID Card scheme.

Tuesday's Sun has an "evocative" picture of someone suffering at the hands of terrorists, but this is not going to stop that. What it'll do is simply mean more innocent people are locked up for longer.

Maybe the Government can step forward and give us a few hard and fast examples of some cases where terrorists got away because the police didn't have any evidence and weren't able to hold them. I suspect not, because the current 14 days is quite enough.

I think that like most people, I've spent the last week or so watching the news in complete and utter disbelief.

It began on the Bank Holiday as the storm came ashore, and I must admit that I watched both the news channels over here as well as some of the streams from local TV stations in the New Orleans area.

There was the usual footage of reporters being blown around in the wild storms, and the eye of the storm passed over.

Then the real tragedy unfolded. I won't detail that here. Let's just say that I've watch a lot of news footage this week. It quickly became apparent to me as a viewer, and a user of the internet, that people were in trouble and little if anything was happening.

It's very early days, but several conclusions must already be obvious:

* The evacuation plan was abysmal and didn't take account of anyone who wasn't able to evacuate themselves. Compare and contrast with Cuba who recently shifted a million people successfully.

* Those in charge of organisations in place to help after natural disasters such as this are practically criminally negligent. Help was so slow as to be completely unbelievable.

* That it was the poor, and in particular the black population that have suffered the most. White and black have lost homes - but it's the African-Americans who've lost more lives and had to endure unbelievable squalour.

* That Bush, whatever you thought of him before, has misread the situation to an unbelievable degree.

* That the US simply doesn't get the environmental impact that it's having on the world. And that this was an expected tragedy.

What are the solutions to all this? I don't know, but in the short term it's going to take people and money to get Gulf shore citizens back on their feet. In the medium term, as fuel prices continue to rise, Americans are going to have to drastically change their lives and their attitudes to energy. And in the medium to long term, real changes are going to have to be made in the ways that Americans live in their environment.

And the biggest change of all needs to be social. Caring for your fellow citizens is not some kind of weakness. Providing and caring for others is the greatest sign of civilisation and a country and world that's grown up.

The BBC are carrying a report about a climber called Tomaz Humar who's been trapped on a mountain in Pakistan for several days now. The Pakistani army has now rescued him in a daring high-altitude manoeuvre that involved lifting him off the mountain dangling on the end of a rope. There are some spectacular pictures of him on the end of a rope on Humar's website. Click on the small pictures on each entry.

[Update - check Tomaz's website again for incredible video footage of the rescue]

It's a shame you don't seem to be able to subscribe to BBC columnists via their site.

For example, John Simpson writes authored pieces, but the feed given on his current piece is for the Middle East feed, since that's where he is just now.

Unfortunately Byliner doesn't cover the Beeb.

I never purposefully set out to listen to Alistair Cooke read his Letter From America, although as a sometime Radio 4 listener I heard plenty of them, if less so in recent years.

The BBC are "sort of" replacing him with Harold Evans, another British journalist of long standing who now resides on the other side of the Atlantic. His first contribution can be found here, and makes for a worthwhile read. I'm not completely sure I agree with him 100% but then again, I don't live there.

But I think that Rasha from Cairo (second comment down), has a very fair point when noting the lack of numerical mnemonic to remember the Egyptian attack last month. I completely agree, and positively loathe the way it was immediately tagged 7/7. Hands up anyone who can remember the date of the Omagh bomb? No? Didn't get the whole date thing did it.

It just seems thoroughly insensitive to other country's tragedies that we somehow elevate ours above theirs? I suppose floods in India or famines in Niger don't get neat days for the nomenclature because they happen over days, months or years, and aren't the effects of terrorism. The fact that the scale is as large, if not larger than Sept 11 is neither here nor there.

In any case, I'm pedantically against calling Sept 11 "9/11" since events didn't take place in November. (I'm with Eddie Izzard on this one).

I think this cartoon from today's Guardian really says it all.

See also today's leader.

Reading this piece talking about Jon Stewart's new set for The Daily Show is worthwhile. I did raise a smile at "Senior UK and Falkland Islands Correspondent" Rob Corddry's disgust at the lack of national pride./

C'mon! Where are the bumper stickers, the Union Jack lapel pins, the wanted dead or alive posters?

This American likes his sorrow in t-shirt form!

This immediately me think back to seeing George Bush at the G8 conference last week. As ever, he wore his Stars and Stripes lapel badge. Here's Bush arriving.

But Bush isn't alone. Several of the world leaders sported one badge or another. Personally speaking, if I was the US President, I'd hope that my face alone would be enough for most people to recall that I basically ran my country. Having the visual indicator seems a bit too much. Is it something to do with living in an MTV society where we can't remember anything from one moment to the next?

The photos on the G8 site are a bit too small to see, but what badge is being worn by Mexico's President Vicente Fox Quesada, the International Energy Agency's Claude Mandil, the Secretary General of United Nations Kofi Annan, Director of the World Trade Organisation Supachai Panitchpakdi, and James Bond villain and star of The Power of Nightmares, Paul Wolfowitz?

Is it a badge of the G8 meeting itself? Can anyone buy one as a souvenir? I mean, it's not as though it's the same as a laminate that gets you back stage at a gig or something. And these people are supposed to be free trade advocates aren't they, so you'd have thought that they'd have set up a webstore or something. At the very least you should be able to get stuff via Cafe Press. That doesn't even cost you anything to set up.

There's a big trade in "pins" as Americans call them, so anyone with any idea would at the very least get theirs on Ebay pronto and clean up (I've had a look, and I couldn't see anything beyond Make Poverty History bands - glad nobody's profiteering off those then).

Finally, I suppose I really shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the G8 conference is actually sponsored! It's true. Look for yourself here. What do Ford, Sun and Diageo get out of it then? Better trading terms in China or something? And does this mean that I can sponsor a term of Parliament perhaps? How much will it cost to get my logo stitched into the breast pocket of Tony Blair's suit for Prime Minister's Questions?

The two minute silence was scrupulously observed here at work, with most people heeding Ken Livingstone's wish for Londoner's to go out in the street. I stayed in the office, but looking out the window showed I was in the minority.

I won't repeat what I said the other day about minutes of silence. And it's right that we remember the dead. But I still find myself troubled with what gets "remembered" and what doesn't. In this instance, the silence was observed across Europe.

Atrocities are happening all the time, and you hear about tragedies such as the 24 children who died in a suicide attack in Bagdhad yesterday. The children were all aged between 10 and 13 according to the report. A US soldier also died, more children are in hositpial, and it seems that the attack might have happened when troops were handing out sweets to the kids. Oh, and there's already been another suicide attack in Bagdhad today. Should we not remember these poor victims too?

When it was being developed, Drop The Dead Donkey, the comedy series set in a newsroom, was provisionally titled Dead Belgians Don't Count/. The reason was the unspoken newsworthiness pecking order of the dead from different nations.

I'm making this up, and I apologise in advance if anyone is upset by this, but it goes something like this:

1 Brit = 4 Americans = 8 Australians = 10 French = 13 Spanish = 20 Israelis = 30 Iraqis = 100 Pakistanis = 500 Rwandans = 1000 Chinese

What I mean is that the column inches afforded to the deaths of this many people are essentially equal when it comes to coverage of tragedies involving people of those nationalities.

Have a look on the BBC News site today for these stories from the last 24 hours:

76 Kenyans killed in massacre
Bulgarian child killed in gangland bomb attack
Pakistan train crash kills 132
Motorcyclist dies in Lancashire traffic accident

(All found by searching for the word "killed"

Of course not all these stories are given the same prominance on the BBC's website, but I think it highlights what I'm trying to say.

That categorically doesn't mean that we shouldn't remember the London dead. But maybe we need to think just a little beyond our own locale. If you lost a loved one in the blasts last week, it won't be of any solace to you, but around the worlds far greater tragedies are happening almost daily.

It's always entertaining to watch Sky News's feed of the CBS Evening News at 00:30 each evening (it's delayed by an hour). Last week, on the day that London won the Olympics, and world leaders met at Gleneagles for G8, the headlines were all about Hurricane Dennis. Fair enough, but I'm sure that G8 really warrented more than the 20 seconds or so it got. The Olympic story, while somewhat further down the pecking order, got a couple of minutes with little to no time spent dwelling on the poor New York showing.

Last night, however, a big story was the fact that the national average price for gas in the States has reached $2.33. (See this story in USA Today).

Let's put that in context shall we? In the UK, according to the AA, unleaded petrol was around 86p per litre. $2.33 equates to 35p per litre. (Guess who read their Google Friends newsletter this morning?)

So stop complaining, get some smaller cars, don't burn as much fuel, and you might have fewer hurricanes hitting your coast at the cost of several billion dollars a time.

Back on the tube this morning for the first time since the bomb blasts. I read a book and tried to drown out fellow passengers discussing how they were "nearly" caught in the blast at Liverpool Street or wherever. I could probably make a case for myself about how I "might" have been on the Piccadilly Line train that had a bomb on board. But trains run every three minutes, so the likelihood is slight. I could quite as easily have ended up in a train crash like that at Hatfield, or a plane crash. I could also be rammed into the central reservation on the motorway. It could happen, but probably won't. Taking some sensible precautions and keeping an eye out for suspect packages is about all I can do.

Nonetheless, I saw at least one person on a tube platform this morning in tears, but that could have been for anything. And the train I travelled in on was a lot busier than usual, but that was because many displaced Piccadilly Line passengers were using the service.

As another aside, I watched a bit of the Moto GP from California late on BBC2 last night. They too had a minute's silence before the start of the race, and it was much better observed than the F1 GP drivers had been earlier in the day. Mind you, the tannoy announcer at the track talked through the whole thing. Oh well, there's no need to get competitive over these things.

I do think that the preponderance of minutes of silence is really a product of a more secular society. In the past, we'd have all grieved for the dead when we went to church/mosque/temple/synagogue that week and said our prayers. The percentage of the population that visit a place of worship has fallen, and so we find solace in taking part in minutes of silence, not in prayer but remembrance.

There does seem to be some kind of unwritten set of rules about how many minutes silence we observe depending on the incident. This week Europe is to observe two minutes' silence to mourn the dead and injured.

Back in January, we observed a three minute silence for the, perhaps, 250,000 dead from the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Remembrance Day, November 11, gets a two-minute silence in the UK as we remember the dead from our wars.

All of these are gestures. There's nothing wrong with a gesture of course. Many appreciate them. But I still wonder about "the rules" for what deserves such a gesture and what doesn't. The tsunami was an unavoidable "act of god". Of course communications could have been improved and many fewer might have died as a consequence, but tragedy would still have struck sadly. WWII was completely avoidable, in the sense that it was a man made event. Similarly, the bombings last week were the making of one man or a group of men (or women).

Yet as Will Smith so memorably explained to us a week or so ago during Live 8, something like 32,000 children die in Africa every day - one every three seconds. Should we observe a silence for them?

They've taken it down now, but earlier today, the UK Google page was sporting some kind of black ribbon (a bit like the AIDs ribbon) remembering the victims of the bombings. I'm really very uncertain about this. I don't think we need it. We didn't get a ribbon for the victims of the Omagh bombing where 29 died.

And Gia got sent a very strange graphic which, as she says, is completely unnecessary.

Earlier today, someone suggested to me that we should have some kind of wristband that effectively said "Fuck You" to terrorists. But where does that fit in with our other armfulls of wristbands? Just going about our daily business is surely enough to say that we don't care and we're not scared.

And please, no charity singles! If you want to give money to charity, then go simply make a donation. Don't give your back catalogue a boost by jumping on the bandwagon. There's no need to talk about your donation either.

It was great to see that thousands went into London today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of war ending. There were some obvious parrallels between events of the early forties and today, but high security or not people came out in their droves.

The flyby of WWII planes was spectacular, and I was lucky to enough to see them on their return (to Duxford?) as they came overhead. Actually, had I realised, I heard several of them on the way out too.

There's something incredible and thrilling about the sound of those fantastic Vickers engines that drove so many of our planes during the war. The growl really reaches you. We've heard it in so many films and consequently it's more recognisable a sound than any contemporary car - they're so quiet you can't hear them. A few years ago I saw a fabulous display at RAF Duxford which involved something like 16 Spitfires flying in formation. It was a sight to behold, and one to hear too.

The various sporting events around the country marked last Thursday's bombings with minutes of silence. Now I can't say a great deal about people who don't observe these things, that I haven't said and done before. But for all the rights and wrongs of them - and we have a two minutes coming up this Thursday - if you're going to observe the silence, do it properly. The "silence" at Silverstone during the British Grand Prix today was a joke. Maybe it was a little unclear exactly when it started, although the track marshals we saw in the pictures seemed to get it, but some of the drivers were pictured chatting through the whole thing. It was embarrassing as the director desperately cut away to others who were observing it properly. They had to keep going back to the drivers because they were supposed to be the focal point. But even Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 supremo, was happy to have a chin-wag during the procedings.

Guys - if you can't do it right, don't bother.

[One final thing about the Anniversary celebrations. Did anyone else think it was suspicious when the poppy leaves quickly fell in front of the Royal balconey at Buckingham Palace. They were released from the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber at quite a great height, yet they reached the front of the palace very fast. A cynic might think that another set of poppy leaves were released from somewhere on the roof of the palace.]

Obviously the wall to wall coverage of the London bombings is continuing today, but here are a couple of things that have raised my ire over the morning.

Lots of reporters were out and about at the major stations this morning seeing how Londoners were coping with transport in this morning, and would they get back on the tubes. Many of the reporters noted that trains seemed quite empty this morning and then asked the question, was it because they'd been warned to stay away this morning (yes) or was it because they were scared of using the tube (emphatically no). OK - so a few people won't want to get on a train again, but then some people won't get on a plane again after learning of a plane crash. And plenty of people die every day on the roads, often in circumstances in which they were entirely blameless. Sometimes, they might not drive again. But the reality is that we all "get back on the horse". We have to. We work in London, and short of moving out, we've got no choice.

Three million people a day use the tube. How else are they going to move around London? Bus? Bike? Walk?

There's also the small matter of several lines being closed or as good as closed. For example, the Picaddilly line is closed between Arnos Grove and Hyde Park - ie. the whole of north and central London. As a consequence, the Victoria Line is hit hard, and GNER services are still not coming any further that Peterborough, hitting WAGN services with extra travellers.

And it seems as thought the Picaddilly Line in particular is likely to be closed for some time to come - probably months - since bodies are still being recovered and there are reports that the tunnel might actually be in danger of collapse.

The other thing is talk about how ID Cards may or may not have prevented this outrage. Even Charles Clarke isn't claiming that the cards would have made any difference.

And one final thing. Let's name and shame those hotels that were stinging commuters stuck in London for hundreds of pounds more than their normal rates last night.

It's difficult to know what to think of people who can bomb so callously targeting random men, women and children.

The authorities have been really good, and although transport was closed down in central London, people have been walking out of "Zone 1" to many of the mainline stations that are open.

Personally, I had to travel somewhat further afield since Kings Cross wasn't open at the time I left the office, and as I type, they've only recently opened the surburban line services. At Finsbury Park station, which I eventually reached via foot and then bus from Holloway, staff were pretty organised as they filtered people onto each of the two services that were running. With GNER services out of action, it's undoubtedly going to get very crowded later on and I was fortunate that I was able to leave the office early enough to avoid any queues later on.

Much of London had shut by the time I'd left the office anyway, with the majority of shops already closed.

Londoners are a tough bunch. Many of our parents and grandparents lived through the blitz in WWII. We've had IRA atrocities in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I remember the day that the Harrods bomb went off, when I was in Selfridges. So terrorists aren't going to stop many from going about their daily business.

It's all pretty chaotic, and we sit here pretty helpless wondering what the best thing to do is. Staying put is the best option for the time being.

It's seems like there are around six blasts around London in what seems at the moment to be a co-ordinated terrorist attack, not dissimilar to that in Madrid .

The timing seems linked to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles.

Not such a happy birthday for her as she "celebrates" her 60th birthday under house arrest.

Incidentally, I still get annoyed that The Economist insists on calling Burma "Myanmar".

Today there was plenty of coverage of a worthy UN initiative resulting in a publication called One Planet - Many People. I saw some coverage about it on TV this morning, and today's papers had photos.

The publication compares satellite photos taken years apart to show the impact of man. I was eager to learn more and have a look at the photos myself - surely on the web.

So could I find the full publication. Sadly it's only available in printed form. Still a book might be quite nice with lots of great photos.

Well yes, but it's $150! We'll all be rushing out to buy that then...

I know that not everything can be free on the net, although I suspect many of the photos probably come from places like NASA since as far as I know, the UN doesn't actually own any satellites of its own. But pricing it so steeply that even most libraries are unlikely to buy it does not seem a good way of getting the message out about World Environment Day.

I know it's really bad to admit it, but I just know I'm going to struggle with not thinking that the new French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, is a man.

The BBC are about to start streaming the Bob Geldof "Live 8" press conference. At the side of their player is the following disclaimer:

This news briefing may contain some strong language which viewers and listeners find offensive.

Last week Kamel Bourgass was jailed for 17 years for plotting to spread ricin on the streets of London. He'd been earlier convicted of the murder of a policeman, Detective Constable Stephen Oake, during a raid to a arrest him back in 2003.

The trial had taken place in camera, and so it was only on last Wednesday, when he'd been convicted that reporting restrictions were lifted. Why exactly were reporting restrictions placed on the trial? It wasn't in case Al Qaeda caught wind of what was happening, it's because Bourgass had already been convicted of the murder that took place while he was being arrested. If that had been reported, then it would have prejudiced the following case(s).

He was convicted of attempting to spread ricin, including "smearing it on car door handles in the Holloway Road area of north London".

Fair enough. A pretty nasty terror attack averted.

Last Wednesday evening, the BBC reported the case in detail on the main ten o'clock bulletin, and pretty much repeated the same Mark Easton report on Newsnight, although covering it in slightly more depth this time. A version of this report can be found here, along with a link to the video.

It all made quite a scare story. Indeed it seems to have been a long term Al Qaeda plan if everything was to be believed.

David Blunkett, then Home Secretary said: "It is absolutely certain that al-Qaeda were planning and preparing for co-ordinated attacks. We were very close indeed to disaster. We were actually much calmer and much more reassuring to the public than we felt ourselves."

But is it all as straightforward as it seems?

Why were four co-defendents of Bourgass acquitted? Lack of evidence seems to be the reason.

And is ricin a good poison for a terrorist to use? The BBC's own site suggests that it's very easy to make but is actually quite hard to ingest needing to either be injected into the bloodstream, put in an aerosol spray at close quarters or put into food or water. (Incidentally, it's really not hard to find out how to make ricin if you want to do something so stupid)

So is there really evidence to suggest such a largescale plot as was reported?

Following this case, we next get the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair pushing for ID cards following the case. This comes at a time in an election campaign where only the Labour Party have got ID cards in their manifesto. Not really a time, then, for cards to be talked about by an "independent" person. Here's a link to his interview on Breakfast With Frost.

But what I don't understand is that surely we're being peddled a myth about Al Qaeda and what the true limits of what it's really capable of. I mean, I saw the Adam Curtis documentary series, The Power of Nightmares that pretty much refuted much of the accepted wisdom of the power and influence of Osama Bin Ladin.

Indeed Adam Curtis spoke after receiving an award for The Power of Nightmares at the Broadcasting Guild Awards on Friday.

"The extrapolation from the very tiny bit of evidence that was reported in court to the reports we did on the Six O'Clock News and other bulletins was not in any way justified," he said.

"As someone who had been in the court room and watched the trial collapse, I could not understand how you could take that very limited evidence and extrapolate from that a story of a threat as ghastly as September 11.

"In the post-Hutton era I think that raises very serious questions. I could not understand how the facts could be used to stand up such an interpretation and frightening portrayal. I was baffled and astonished."

As a coda to this, last night were the BAFTA television awards, and The Power of Nightmares won the factual series award. What we saw on television was Curtis and a couple of others come up onto the stage, say exactly two words, "Thank you," and then get off. It seems that what we saw was severely edited (the awards were once again not live).

Today's Media Guardian reports that his speech criticising media coverage of this very case, was cut by the BBC:

Mr Curtis, a senior producer in the BBC's news and current affairs department, said reports of an "al-Qaida plot to poison Britain" that could have consequences "equal or greater to 9/11" were "massively exaggerated or a complete fantasy".

But apparently it was nothing to do with politics! A BBC spokesperson "denied it was politically motivated, and said it was one of a number of edits made to the awards because of timing."

Oh. Right.

(Incidentally, I thought the overall coverage of the BAFTAs was poor. The direction was shoddy, with cutaways to celebrities in the crowd who were often the only ones *not* laughing at the jokes - nothing like a sour Alistair MacGowan. And then major categories, including, disgracefully, the Richard Dimbleby award to Jon Snow, were chopped down into an "earlier this evening" segment. They did find time for the "Best Soap Opera" award. And finally, many of the factual categories didn't get the clips package before they were awarded, so we had the sight of host, Graham Norton, rushing over to the lectern after the thank yous had been made, to let us know we were going to see a clip of the winner at least. It all came over very poorly on screen.)

See also here and here . Finally this is definitely worth a read.

Sky News actually have an inset live video feed of the chimney at the Vatican out of which white or black smoke will appear, depending on whether or not a new Pope's been chosen. Are they going to keep this up for possibly as long as the next few weeks?

The Pope's finally died and the rather macabre and more than faintly disturbing sight of the world's media camping out waiting for an old man die is over. We've now moved on to the rememberance of his life and some of the great things he's achieved.

Make no mistake, some of them were very great indeed. His staunch opposition to communism heralded the falling of the Berlin Wall. His world travels reinvigorated the Church wherever he went. He brought the Papacy into the 20th century (at a very late stage).

In later years, I think we've been more aware of his conservatism, with a failure to confront some of the Church's more pressing issues like the ordination of women, the falling numbers of clergy and the appalling cases of paedophilia. And then there was his failure to change the Church's opinions on contraception, particularly in light of a rampant AIDs epidemic that's hurting Africa badly.

These are issues that the next Pope will have to address. And that choice of Pope will have more impact on a secular world than is maybe given credit.

In 1982 the Pope visited Britain and as a good 12 year old Catholic boy I travelled with my family to Mass at Wembley Stadium. I didn't get to actually go into the stadium since tickets were limited - to 100,000 or so. Instead I was in the car park with dad as we waited with tens of thousands of others. I can't remember how bad the travel must have been that day given that upwards of 200,000 were there that day. Before going into the stadium, the pope-mobile took a tour of the car park and we all cheered him as he passed by. My parents have cine film of that day somewhere. Dad wouldn't let me take the film myself since he thought that it would be a shame that I'd only get to see the Pope through a camera's viewfinder!

Anyway, sorry though I am that he's gone, the Church has an opportunity to make a very important decision at this juncture.

So former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens says that there are 200 terrorists on the streets.

Who's he trying to kid?

Is he about to get into politics? Does he really know what's going on in this country? With that many terrorists on the loose, it's a wonder that I manage to get to work and back every day without being blown up or soemething.

Well the campaign for a national holiday is going great guns at the minute. At time of writing, a massive 34 people have decided to support my ongoing campaign to gain us a public holiday on the occassion of HRH Prince of Wales' wedding.

Some naysayers have pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out that we never got a day off for Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones' wedding. What I say to those people is that Prince Edward is not the immediate heir to throne. It's different see?

Anyway, once again the power of the web has come into its own, as demonstrated by that incredible list of 34 people, including some whose names I don't even know.

Sign up now! http://www.petitiononline.com/08042005/petition.html

So Charles and Camilla are to marry. But isn't interactive television a wonderful thing? At only 25p or so a go, you get to have your say!

But as I type, the viewers of Sky News have voted 62% against approving of the marriage. Now I'm no constitutional expert (particularly as our constitution is actually unwritten), so I'm not sure whether this is binding or not...

Anyway, the whole shebang takes place on Friday 8 April. But at the time of writing, it's not been made clear whether or not this is a national holiday.

Now I'm not a raving Royalist, but I do believe that we, the people, should be able to share in the nuptuals of the future King of England. And as such, it seems only right that we celebrate with a national holiday. The fact that this means a free day off work on a Friday, is neither here nor there, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was getting on some kind of bandwagon just because I fancied a three day weekend. You can't possibly believe that I could be as shallow as that.

Anyway, I ask all readers of this site, both of you, to please sign my petition and hopefully we can swing the Government into action and give the people what they want!

Sign here: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/08042005/petition.html

Today, I got seperate emails asking me to join reader panels for The Evening Standard, The Times and The Sun. Apart from the fact that I've obviously been too free and easy with my email address, what does this all mean?

Well News International obviously embarked on some reader research today. I think it really means that a lot of different media outlets, have spotted a very cheap way of conducting research.

I should hasten to add that I'm not really a regular reader of any of these publications. I do partake of the odd offer however.

While it will be hard ever to extinguish from my mind, the bit from Jam featuring the day Robert Kilroy-Silk "went mad", running naked around a shopping centre. But in the meantime, he's just formed a new political party - Veritas.

Of course he's just left the UK Independence Party who were pretty anti-Europe - indeed I'm not sure if they had any other policies. Although it's interesting that he's chosen that pan-European language Latin to supply him with his party's name. Veritas means "truth".

And lest we forget, that before he became a bigoted anti-Arab, Express commentator, and purveyor of miserable daytime television, he was once a Labour MP.

Sadly I missed the BBC3 programme about him on Monday, although I expect it'll get another 50,000 repeats. And I can confidentally say now that I'll be missing each and every one of them.

There are a couple of articles (which I only noticed via Stuart Hughes website) on Media Guardian attacking and defending the BBC's coverage of the Asian Tsunami.

Here's the attacking piece by The Guardian's Matt Wells, and here's the rebuttal by the BBC's Head of News Roger Mosey (both articles require free registration to read).

As a viewer stuck in a non-digital world as the story broke on boxing day, I'm not quite as critical as Matt Wells, but I wouldn't say that the coverage was perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

I certainly disagree that the BBC should absolutely have to get their star reporters jetting onto the scene with any kind of urgency. The BBC did have local correspondents in place around the area and since they live and work there, they're in a strong position to carry out the reporting duties. Cerainly they need back up from London in terms of additional people and there's no reason not to send people out, but star names are not what's needed for understanding the situation - just clear reporting.

Private Eye still has its regular "Live From" box highlighting needless two-ways carried out between the studio and the local reporter on the ground. I wouldn't say that sending people to a disaster area is pointless, but there seems to be little need to host the news from the local area. More importance is placed on this than is really necessary.

I do think that the Christmas schedules did mean that it was hard for viewers to find out what was going on in the region with reduced length bulletins planned. Many of these were extended, and some more programming should have been dropped as the scale became clear, but I think that's a wider malaise of the broadcasting industry who seem to think that nothing really important ever happens at Christmas (There were some elections in the Ukraine which would have received wider attention had there been the airtime available, and I imagine that various other things were happening throughout the UK, but you'd have been hard pushed to learn about them on national TV).

Overall, I'd say that they could have done better, but it wasn't that bad.

There may be a specil Boris Tribute issue of Private Eye this week, but he can speak some sense. (The Spectator article referred to by Boris is, for the time being, here - free registration required)

[Why isn't the image here showing up in Internet Explorer? It seems to be working OK in Firefox and Opera, so what's up?]

Channel Four news publish "Snowmail" - a daily update of what's going to be in tonight's show programme. Here's an excerpt from today's:

Canary Wharf: Threat, what threat?

Went back to my sources today (yes, two, Lord Hutton.) Both reolute in their dismissing of the story. So it remains strange tonight that such a story broke so conveniently upon a day when the government wanted to unveil 'tough on terrorism' plans. We remain on the trail of the latest Queen's speech and its content. But nothing else to hand tonight on it.

Sadly, the archived programme which I missed is only available to subscribers, but it's quite clear that the threat is completely made up. And until someone can demostrate otherwise I won't believe anything to the contrary.

It seems Labour is going to use fear as their primary reason for us voting for them next May.

Finally we're near banning one of the most barbaric legalised activities in Britain - hunting with dogs - and in particular fox hunting. I'm fed up with all the feeble complaints about how this form of animal-torture is part of country lifestyles. Slavery used to be part of our "lifestyles". Only relatively recently have women been entitled to vote.

We have to change. Certainly deal with foxes that are pests, but in a humane manner.

This morning we had various interested parties saying how they'd carry on anyway, breaking law. Well lock them up if that's the case! If you break the law with impunity, chuck them in Belmarsh. Some might run into a few of the illegal immigrants that they've had working their land in seasonal times...

And I don't think the Countryside Alliance quite knows what it's now letting itself in for if it procedes with a legal challenge in terms of challenging the Parliament Act that'll allow the Commons to force through the law one way or another.

If that were to be overthrown then we'd have the face the issue of an unelected body dismissing the wishes of an elected one. That'd have major constitutional ramfications, and would probably end the Lords as we know it.

Very dangerous.

The BBC have recently launched their Newswatch website, established in response to the Neil report following the Hutton affair.

As well as a website, Ray Snoddy is presenting a weekly ten minute programme which is available to stream. The first edition of this asked about the need for all the Live two-ways that we see. This is a feature of television news that's regularly lampooned in Private Eye. The BBC editor put up to rebuff the seeming nonsense put up some good defences, but we all know, like they do, that it's not nearly as necessary as it they claim.

The programme also goes out on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings on News 24.

The weekend saw a tragic accident on a level crossing near Reading with a car on the line causing it. It seems likely at this point that it was a deliberate act for the driver to go on to the line. A selfish way to commit suicide by any account.

I've just watched a Newsnight report summing up what happened, and the mentioned accidents such as Hatfield and Potters Bar. While acknowledging that these were caused by different things, I think it's completely wrong to mention them in the same breath as this incident.

Of course level crossings are dangerous places - particularly so on high speed lines, but even if we put CCTV, tunnels and bridges at every crossing, it wouldn't stop a determined person getting their car onto the track.

And let's put this tragedy into perspective. This was the first time for twenty years that passengers have died in such an accident, whilst normally it's the car driver (18 dead in the last year). But 3,431 people died on the roads in 2002. That's over 9 people a day. And over half of those are car drivers or their passengers.

Do we spend billions making the roads safer? More speed cameras perhaps, or traffic calming measures? That'll go down well.

We can never be totally safe. But trains are pretty safe. More people died in car accidents on Saturday than at Ufton Nervet. But nobody's examining learnings to made from those accidents. The same number of people also died on Sunday. And today. And will do tomorrow. Many of those people will also be as blameless as the passengers on that fateful train.

But what to do? Speed limiters in cars? Close down dangerous roads. 30mph max speed limits.

I rest my case.

I see that the BBC News website has introduced a "From Other News Sites" box on some of their stories. According to the explanation, this facility is supplied to them by Moreover, and I've got to say it is a useful tool for discovering more about a story you're interested in. I guess the big question is whether some sites will get dropped for reasons that might go against the BBC's own guidelines - maybe including swearing in the linked pages, or material that the BBC might not be legally able to publish. I'd suggest that although this link is automatic, it'll be monitored very carefully for sensisitve stories by editorial staff.

UPDATE: The Beeb have now announced this technology as Newstracker

While the most of the world has been coming to grips with the horific consequences of the Russian tragedy, America was wrestling with a hurricane.

Channel 4 News' Jon Snow puts the US coverage like this in today's Snowmail:

I see we have allocated 30 seconds for the hurricane in Florida... weekending in America it was almost impossible to find out anything about the Russian tragedy. The wall-to-wall coverage of wet reporters, blowing palm trees and scudding rain were enough to make one want to put to sea to escape the transmission footprint.

And if it wasn't the hurricane it was a basketball player's rape charge.

I think the UK media acquitted itself well with its coverage - with the exception of Express newspapers. On Saturday, there was only one headline, and most papers, irrespective anything their marketing departments had planned, and TV campaigns that had run, put over the whole of their front page to the terrible tragedy. Not the Express. They had a CD Rom to give away, and half the front page in which to flog it. The same with the Star and its CD.

Then on Sunday, it was the Sunday Express that tried to get a British angle with a story that had no foundation. Not everything in other parts of the world can be tied into Britain. There probably weren't any British tourists caught up in events (the usual standby), or even working there. Sometimes the news is just the news and needs to be reported as such.

The Today Programme had a short item on the failure of the UK's E-University this morning. The piece was all a bit too short considering that the scheme had £60m spent on it. And many concerned all received bonuses despite the project's abject failure. All round a scandalous waste of money. Online learning can work, but it needs to be done properly. Maybe MIT's OpenCourseWare would be a better place to start?

The BBC have today published the Neil Report, which is effectively the BBC's response to the findings of the Hutton inquiry. I'm not a journalist, and I don't particularly work with journalists, but good and accurate journalism is a fundamental principle of a democracy. And the BBC is probably the world's greatest news gathering organisation, so a report examining the organistation's journalistic values is of vital importance.

The report speaks of five journalistic values: Truth and Accuracy; Serving the Public Interest; Impartiality and Diversity of Opinion; Independence; and Accountability. [NB. Fox News might want to consider points 1, 3 and 4 in particular]

I won't go into all the details of the report, since it's worth a read in its own right, and I can't really do justice in a few words to a 27 page report that's taken several weeks/months to put together. So instead, here are a few things that I find particularly worth noting.

Single sources and anonymity: Sources should be named for the most part, and if they're not, reasons why not should be given. Stories based on a single source should be "in the public interest."

Fairness: The BBC should be fair to all - both contributors and the audience.

Two Ways: Should not ordinarily be used to break serious or defamatory stories. [This section seems to be the main focus of righting any wrongs Andew Gilligan may have committed]

Outside Commitments: Restrictions are placed on what BBC journalists or presenters may do outside of the BBC, whether freelance or not. These don't strike me as harsh as were maybe first reported.

The report goes on to highlight a whole section of what should be learnt from the "Gilligan affair", before branching off into training.

Overall a fair and reasonable document I'd have thought.

Thanks to Rob for pointing out in my comments that John Gibson, Fox News' commentator, is at it again, speaking out over his disdain for Ofcom's ruling. And should you really not be able to complain if you think the company you work for is being unfairly maligned by others? Gibson seems to think so.

And still he can't leave the subject alone! On Friday he was back with yet more.

Quote: I was absolutely correct in every word I said.

Ofcom: a) Ofcom does not accept that Fox News’s claim that an appointment of a monitor to detect ‘pro-Arab’ bias is proof of an “anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest” within the BBC.

d) There is no evidence, and Fox News did not provide any, that the BBC “insisted its reporter had a right to lie”.

So who's the liar now Mr Gibson?

Certainly the BBC have taken a kicking over The Hutton Inquiry, but that was one incident. It is not the one-sided biased news organisation that you suggest.

Fox News on the other hand is certainly that. Feel free to provide me with anything to refute that? (Incidentally "Foxnews" and "biased" in Google return 37,200 pages. Irrefutable evidence, if Fox News' testimony is to be believed, that this is in fact the case).

To be honest, I couldn't care less about some partisan US cable television service on the other side of the pond. But some sad and deluded souls believe what they see on television. It's for that reason that I'm glad we have the broadcasting rules that we do in this country.

Oil prices are rising again, and over the weekend I read a couple of good pieces about where we're going with oil. First there was this piece in The Observer (the online version of which is sadly lacking the longterm oil prices graph). It actually accompanied another fascinating article about Shell's recent travails.

Then I read the cover story from this month's National Geographic (online version not fully available). This was quite an eye-opening piece detailing where any likely new oil is going to come from, but that we'd all better start facing the fact that there are going to be serious oil shortages in our lifetimes. The article even raised the question about whether it was oil that was the real reason that Bush went to war. Yes - I know that quite obviously it was, but the fact that National Geographic asked the question says something.

It seems that maybe I should have two charts in my hysteria meter: Rhetorical threat, and Actual threat.

That way, every so often in a presidential election year when things aren't going too well and Americans need to be scared to their senses, I can reflect that, while at the same time show the true danger levels.

A must read article.

I'm pretty sure that my email didn't push them over the edge, but it's good to see that 4x4s are to be banned from The Ridgeway. Campaigning and does do some good!

It's not often that I pay Janet Street-Porter all that much attention, but in today's Independent (no direct link since at time of writing I couldn't get onto the site, and in any case, the article is bound to be for subscibers/payees only) she makes an excellent case for responding to the government's consultation on the use of mechanically powered vehicles on Rights of Way.

This really boils down to people using four-wheel drive vehicles and motorbikes on certain categories of paths and roads around the country. And it's pretty self-evident that some of these vehicles can cause vast ruts in the ground, destroying paths, and turning others into muddy quagmires.

Here follows my response to the consultation sent via email:

William Propert-Lewis
Countryside (Recreation and Landscape) Division 5
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
ZOne 1/01
2 The Square
Temple Quay
Bristol
BS1 6EB

Adam Bowie

Ha. I'm glad everyone's caught on to this story, and I really wish I'd mentioned it at the time I saw it. Basically Coke's new Dasani water is "purified" tap water.

My top tip for any bottled water is to look carefully at what it says on the label. If it doesn't say "bottled at source", then you don't know where it comes from. If it doesn't say "Natural Mineral Water" then it's nothing special at all. Waters like Highland Spring, Buxton, Evian and Volvic are all Natural Mineral Waters that come out of the ground at the place specified on the label. And don't be fooled by anything called "Spring Water" without also being natural mineral water. We have some stuff at work in the cooler called "Cotswold Spring", and as far as I understand it, although it comes from a spring somewhere in the Cotswolds, it doesn't mean much more. The full UK legislation can be found here.

The Food Standards Agency lists all UK Natural Mineral Waters (nothing called Cotswold Spring on that list) and the EU publishes a European list (PDF).

One other thing to note is that nearly all carbonated mineral water sold in the UK is produced artificially with carbon dioxide being added later. Even water like Perrier which is carbonated at source, has the co2 removed and then pumped back in. I've drank one naturally carbonated mineral water which you used to be able to get from Sainsburys, and the thing to note is that it was very lightly carbonated in comparison to most waters you can buy.

Personally, I'm more than happy with my Thames Water, even if it does scale everything up!

David Kay has quit his job searching for those elusive WMDs in Iraq. Seemingly it's not just down to there being nothing out there to find, but personal reasons too.

But this is vital news in a week when the Hutton Report is published. While that report is specifically looking at the death of Dr David Kelly, it will also pronounce on the Government and the BBC, as well as some named individuals. What it won't do is get to the bottom of whether there really was a case for war. I suspect that it'll be a long time before anyone anywhere ever does.

As a service to the general public, with planes being cancelled and countries being invaded, I've decided to introduce the brand new Hysteria Meter. Based very loosely on the UK and US Governments' regular pronouncements about how safe we are at any given moment, this meter will accurately reflect the current way of thinking at the highest level.

If anyone has any knowledge of Javascript, and interactive version would be an excellent idea.

It came as something as a suprise, since I thought that he would be holed up in some far flung corner of the globe, but Saddam Hussein's been captured with a shot being fired.

There's a great article in today's Guardian by Nick Davies which looks at how all our intelligence agencies work, or rather, don't work together.

Over a few thousand words, he details the problems that confront intra-agency initiatives dealing in particular with a terrorist threat in the UK. Some of it is quite shocking:

the Customs officers who intercepted a lorry with three tonnes of smuggled hand-rolling tobacco; who knew that the Real IRA had been raising funds by smuggling tobacco and diesel oil; who knew that the local Special Branch had asked to be informed if any such load was spotted, and who nevertheless seized the tobacco, released the driver and handed over the lorry to its owner without saying a word to the Special Branch.

There have now been two injunctions in two days relating to a story that The Mail on Sunday first attempted to run this weekend.

It seems particularly dubious use of the law since one can't comit libel until it's actually been printed.

But here's the run - I think I know what the story is, and no doubt it's no doubt flying around the internet as I type, but the public at large must be kept in the dark. Look - this stuff is going to get out, and there's no way to do a King Canute with the deluge.

There was a fantastic article in The Guardian last Friday detailing the environmental travesties that are taking place across the USA. It seems that the US simply can't face up to what's happening.

Actually I say "article" but it's more of a mini-book, being several thousand words long.

I thought that I ought to record this.

I was on my way to Enfield Town station, taking a back route through Holly Walk when I approached the market place. I couldn't help but notice that crash barriers seem to have been placed up, there were police in evidence, and all the market stalls were bedecked with Union Jacks.

Aha, a film, I think. There must be some kind of film crew out and about.

But as I walk closer I see that the market stalls have been totally rearranged, with the stalls layed out in circle, and the middle of the square quite empty.

Well empty aside from The Queen and her entourage. Yup. I had stumbled upon The Queen visiting Enfield's market. I was probably the only person there who didn't know that she was coming, as a crowd of several hundred had gathered to see her.

I suddenly felt quite guilty because I was carrying both a suspicious rucksack and a suspicious holdall. I felt the eyes of the police (and no doubt unseen security services) looking at me.

This article (in The Scotsman of all places) explains it all. The market is 700 years old this year!

Sad news from today's Mirror, that Terry Lloyd was actually shot in a second attack after he'd got in a mini-van of an Iraqi who was going to help him. There were also injured Iraqi soldiers in the van, one of whom was killed, when they all came under fire from a Helicopter gunship, seemingly in contravention of the Geneva Convention. Now we know why John Simpson was so damning in his criticism of trigger happy Americans.

In an interesting turn of events, Ryanair has suspended flights to Strasbourg after a court launched an investigation into Ryanair receiving 1.4m Euros from the local Bas-Rhin Chamber of Commerce.

I must admit that I've always seen something like this coming. Ryanair gets payments from a number of smaller regional airports around Europe in return for running flights to those locations. These can be billed as marketing payments, although most of the marketing I see is just lists of locations rather than anything too specific for a region.

There's a European commission enquiry underway at the moment examining payments and benefits received by Ryanair for using Charleroi (or Brussels - Charleroi as Ryanair term it. It's not exactly close to Brussels however) as a hub airport. There could be up to 17 other deals to inspect.

There's an interesting piece in today's Times about this practice as well.

I can't see that in the long term, this sort of practice can continue. Surely it's not that far off taking back handed bribes?

Ryanair themselves of course don't quite frame it in the same way...

When one is awarded one's degree at the ceremony, in my case in a large tent on the grounds of Bath University, it's common that some great and good person is given an honorary gong.

It was with great pleasure that Wilfred Thesiger was there to receive an honorary degree of some sort (I say "some sort" because Bath University's website is wholly unhelpful in the matter).

Sadly, he's passed away at the age of 93.

I must admit, although I've owned a copy of Arabian Sands for years, I never really did read it, and I know that I must.

There are obituaries at the BBC (and here), The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

Sadly Alexander Walker, film critic for over 40 years at the Evening Standard has died at the age of 73. You didn't always take his side of things with films, but he always remained an excellent and never less than fascinating film reviewer - one that I'd always read.

The Standard's obituary is here, The Guardian's here, The Independent's here, The Times' here, and the BBC's here.

As I sat and read in the park this afternoon, listening to the cricket, I read a couple of very interesting stories in the Business section of The Observer.

The first was a piece about a tiny set of islands called São Tomé and Princípe - just off the coast of West Africa. I've got to admit that I'd never even heard of them before.

Bush met their president last year - honour indeed for such a small set of islands. Could it have been anything to do with $120bn of oil within their territorial waters?

(Incidentally Expedia Maps are missing a trick by not supplying a URL for you to paste into emails etc to point stuff out.)

The other item won't be appearing in tomorrow's clippings one would guess...

So Berlusconi's managed to get himself off some more alleged crimes. It's ever so handy to be president when you don't want to be found guilty of something. You just change the law.

Well surprise, surprise. The "mobile labs" that coalition forces found are not quite that. They're for manufacturing hydrogen for barrage balloons. Somewhat less harmful.

I look forward to Blair apologising for saying otherwise.

Good to see that the Burmese (never Myanmar) are still up to their old tricks, holding Aung San Suu Kyi in "protective custody".

As we learn that the Americans have caputered Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, we must begin to wonder where in the world he's likely to be held.

And Guantanamo Bay seems the likeliest destination. The front page of this morning's Guardian carries a report that the Americans are shamefully holding children they captured in Afghanistan.

Of course we're talking about a nation that executes children, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. Prisoners are being held with no rights, not being considered either criminals within US jurisdiction (and hence being charged and given access to lawyers), or being prisoners of war. These people come from a number of nations throughout the world, but there they are in the US bit of Cuba.

Meantime, what is Castro up to all of a sudden? Just when he could be winning more popularity around the world, he suddenly launches a crackdown on dissenters.

You always have to keep an eye out about what's going on in the rest of the world when war is afoot. Zimbabwe has also launched a series of vicious attacks on the opposition, with Mugabe's henchmen seemingly going about their business in a big way (would link to an Independent article, but it seems to cost money).

I simply don't understand why it's happening. I can understand a good deal of the looting of public buildings, palaces and the like. By why was the National Museum destroyed.

Every so often I think about the works that were lost for all time in Library of Alexandria. Somehow the destruction of libraries and museums seems worse that the destruction of anything else. Buildings can be rebuilt, but knowledge is lost forever.

Robert Fisk in today's Independent details the latest devastation to take place in Bagdhad, and the lack of resolve on the Americans' part to do anything about it.

So Baghdad has "fallen". We got the no doubt iconic image of Saddam's statue being torn down (in fact it made fascinating viewing as the TV news channels covered it all afternoon).

There is still the question of where Saddam is. I can see him being on the run for quite some time. I can also see small acts of violence happening for quite some time.

Without any law and order in the country, there is a lot of anarchy with looting of government property, and even journalists are being mugged in the streets.

The other night the Americans bombed a restaurant that they thought Saddam was in. Intelligence is now suggesting that he got away before the bomb hit. So exactly how many chefs and waiters can we bomb until we catch him? There must be an acceptable level.

Now I don't doubt that it's pretty awful that captured US soldiers are being paraded around on TV, but quoting the Geneva Convention not allowing prisoners to be put on TV seems just a tad rich considering that last week, I seem to remember seeing Iraqis surrendering and being searched by British soldiers. There certainly weren't any interviews, but they definately showed faces etc. I daresay we won't be seeing repeats of those images.

It continues, and somehow the TV news coverage enthralls and disappoints at the same time. It does strike me that correspondents have far too little time to actually do any reporting rather than pieces to camera.

Sky has poor David Chater reporting live practically around the clock. Last night there were a few explosions in Bagdhad, and he was back on the TV practically pleading to be allowed a few hours sleep before coming to air again.

Sadly, "friendly fire" seems to be the biggest taker of casualties to date, with three helicopters and a Tornado having either crashed or inadvertantly been shot down. And the guys missing from ITN are not believed to have been victims of "friendly fire" too.

There was a very interesting piece in one of the papers yesterday saying that the war has been taking an unexpected route (not quite the total anhilation that might have been expected of "shock and awe") because of the peace protests that took place around the world. In other words, we may not have prevented war, but it is being fought in a very different manner. Rather than engage cities in hostile street to street fighting, they simply get cut off and moved around, leaving any remaining forces to either disperse or give up.

Well obviously less than two hours after I wrote my last entry, the war really did start. Albeit in an unexpected way.

It seems as though the Americans are going directly after Saddam. And there was me thinking that they had some kind of law about deliberately killing another head of state? (Second question down, also more specifically here).

Is this morally right? Well certainly the war itself is morally very shakey and I have yet to be persuaded that it's justified. But in the circumstances of it taking place, then targeting key personnel to put a swift end to it is probably the way to go - particularly if it avoids engaging in fights young Iraqi conscripts who have no desire to be there.

In the meantime, Saddam, or some trigger happy underling, has launched three missiles at Kuwait.

No war just yet - but it can surely only be a matter of time. The B52s are still in Britain, so I'd say that the onslaught won't start tonight.

Although I knew that the Correspondent programme I was talking about yesterday was delayed by 24 hours, I hadn't realised the storm of protest its movement had generated. This article in today's Guardian details the calls and emails. I've got to say that it was very strong programme that just shows the lack of true democracy in Israel. I suppose they constantly feel embattled, yet you can't sit on both sides of the fence at the same time.

I'm not too sure what to think about the firemen's strike that we're enduring just now. On the one hand, I certainly wouldn't want to endure a fire just now - but then I never would. And it has certainly caused me some inconvenience today, with the tube operating a far more restricted service than I was anticipating. Getting home from work was a nightmare. But then they do earn pretty poor wages considering they put their lives on the line everytime they go to work.

I'm absolutely certain that I would prosecute every one of these cretins who are wasting the army's time going out on hoax calls, and setting fire to cars on wasteland and the like. The police say that they'll prosecute, but how many arrests will we really see.

Well Michael Moore's response to the (now captured) sniper attacks in the Washington area reflects my own.

Although I fell asleep during the course of the programme, I tried to watch last night's NBC News on CNBC Europe last night, and was that an eye opener. The programme had, I think, EIGHT correspondents scattered around and looked like it was going to spend a good 20 of its 30 minutes duration (excluding ads) talking about the sniper capture. All fairly understandable, although only because we all "love" serial killer stories. But was there one feature on the fact that America has so many guns out there maybe being a contributory factor in this (or other) killings.

I don't think that anyone asks that kind of question. Is it seen as unamerican?

I suppose I come from a different culture. A culture which, if there had been a sniper on the loose, would immediately ask why members of the public needed sniper rifles.

A bit uncomfortable this, but like a previous piece I wrote about the recent Cambridgeshire child murders, I feel this needs something to be said.

Today is obviously a year on from some of the most terrible scenes that many people have ever witnessed. Thousands of people lost their life in the various attacks in North America last year. Nothing should trivialise their memories.

And yet...

We are faced with a deluge of programmes "remembering 9/11". Am I being heartless in thinking somewhat cynically about this? I really don't believe so.

In America's history, probably since the end their Civil War, they have not had to face direct hostilities on their mainland. Certainly there was Pearl Harbor in the second world war, but they never had the occupation that most of Europe endured, the forcible eviction of their citizens from their homes into prison and concentration camps. They never had bombers pass over their heads in the night sky, knowing that at any minute their house could be next.

Most of the tragic events that the US has had to endure in the last century have been away from their homeland.

Undoubtedly, the destruction of pair of buildings as symbolic as the World Trade Centre has never happened before, but I really think it's the sudden realisation of their insecurity that has taken ahold of the American public. It's the tragic fact that America is now involved, like it or not.

Where am I going with this (and I will admit this is a train of thought argument rather than a carefully considered essay)? Well the US now holds a massive sway over not only the British people but the Western World. They are the only superpower. We just pay more attention to their way of thinking.

Instead of "September the 11th", it's "9/11" because that's the (illogical) way that Americans write it. What the US president does in the next few months could determination relations in the Middle East for another fifty years.

Add the American dimension to the fact that the "drama" played itself out live on TV with thousands of hours of footage available, and the significance becomes even bigger.

Let me reiterate that I'm NOT downplaying the enormity of it all. Devastation has not happened on that scale due to "terrorist" acts in human history. There are, and have been similarly monstrous acts dictated by individuals however, and we don't have to leave Europe to find them, even in very recent times.

Nonetheles, the scale and import of it all leaves me feeling frankly uncomfortable.

On the plus side, I believe that many Americans are beginning to realise that they're not hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, by quirk of geography if not more. They're asking the important questions such as why anyone would want to do this. The work of a singular madman is one thing, but a large group of individuals, who find support numbering in their tens of thousands (and maybe more) must be understood. But the cowboys and indians depiction of right and wrong still holds too much sway it seems. Bush says we must do it, so we must do it. It's black and white. There are no degrees. Is Saddam Hussein the logical next step on, or are we really witnessing a general writing of percieved wrongs including the "unfinished business" of Desert Storm?

In the last week or so, Newsnight on BBC2 has had a couple of wonderful reports by Charles Wheeler looking at how the young are seeing events in the year since September 11th. Some of what he showed is promising, while others were worrying. I fail to understand why the US Presidency bestows some kind of Papal Infaliability upon the holder in the eyes of the public. I could understand it during wartime, but in peacetime?

In the end, yes I will be watching "9/11" on BBC1 tonight. The stories of heroes and heroic failure. The tragedies. Coping with life afterwards. For many thousands these are the personal horrors that they must go on living with.

But do we really understand the aftermath of the war between the Hutus and Tutsi which left 800,000 dead, or what is left after the horrors of warfare throughout the former Yugoslavia? And right now 13 million are facing starvation in the countries of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. They won't be live on TV, and there'll be no footage to rival Independence Day coming out of there.

Now this could be seen as quite contentious. Am I alone in thinking that the tragic events in Soham have been blown totally out of all proportion?

The events are outdoubtedly sad, and one hopes that the guilty people will be prosecuted and imprisoned. But from the moment the girls were announced as missing, right up until this moment, there have been some very disturbing side effects.

1. The newspaper rewards were grossly misjudged. Newspaper rewards are rarely paid out, and unfortunately can attract timewasters and "DIY detectives". And the publicity they garner seems more likely to be for the papers' benefit than social responsibility.

2. The possibility that those arrested may be unable to be fairly tried. Within hours of arrests being made the Mail on Sunday had published big articles with ex-boyfriends and girlfriends. Cue the usual, "but he was strange" type comments that always come with 20-20 hindsight.

3. The wrong paths that we were led down including the internet, and cars going to Newmarket (witnesses giving press conferences within hours of speaking to the police must surely be viewed with suspsion).

4. The minute's silence at just about every sporting event this weekend. The BBC News on Saturday night began with footage of Premiership footballers, golfers, and even shoppers at Sainsburys, pausing for a moment's silence. Not having been shopping at the supermarket on Saturday afternoon, I would hope that the supermarket concerned was a local Cambridgeshire one, and not across the whole coutry. Sport should pay its respects only when truly relevent. Arguably Man Utd since the girls were so obviously Man Utd fans, but this minute's silence was akin to that paid after Sept 11. Sadly children are murdered far too frequently, but we cannot pay them all these respects repeatedly. I truly believe that sport should really pay it's respects to deaths of beloved colleagues and former players, and also national tragedies. This was a personal tragedy - not a national one.

5. The rearrangement of TV schedules. We learn today that ITV are not going ahead with a Lorraine Kelly series in which the children of single mothers pick men for their mothers to go dates with. It's inappropriate in light of recent events we are told. Was it any more appropriate before? When does it become appropriate again? The BBC postponed it's heavily publicised mini series Messiah 2. It's a grissly (if the first part was anything to go by) psychological thriller. But why is it now inappropriate? Will it be more so in the Autumn? I can fully understand it, if there are child murders or other elements of the story are too close to real-life, but otherwise, should all murder-mysteries be pulled? Today the BBC is reporting the sentencing of a couple of children who murdered a third over £10. Will this make the Six O'Clock News tonight, or even the local London news? Probably the latter, but most of the country will know nothing about it.

Is all this down the essentially irreligious nature of today's society. In times gone by, people would have gone to church on Sunday and said prayers at the appropriate point in the service. We know that the Church is still important and many went to local services. But for the public at large, they have no opportunity to grieve, so they need their minute's silence, even if the context is inappropriate.

And we mustn't forget that this happened in August - a traditionally slow news period. Undoubtedly there was always going to be significant coverage in a case like this. But should Bush The Fool have attacked Iraq over this time, then I can't help but think things would be different.