Last Straw

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Service. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

Mark Thompson, writ­ing on his web­log News­less  —  Time to stop break­ing the news, and start fix­ing it:
I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that there are four key parts to news stor­ies, and we typ­ic­ally only get one of them, even though journ­al­ists pos­sess all four, and the other three are argu­ably more important.

Could be interesting. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian:
The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp  –  put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests?
Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see police work […]

Douglas Hogg  —  the Brit­ish Tory MP who included the cost of clean­ing his moat on his expenses — reck­ons:
A par­lia­ment­ary salary does not sup­port the life­style to which most pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes aspire.
Which got me won­der­ing as to which char­ac­ter Hogg most resembles in Animal Farm. My money’s on Pin­keye.
He car­ries on to sug­gest:
The salary of MPs […]

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on ter­ror.’
Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

Then try fol­low­ing the debate pro­pa­ganda war on health care reform in the U.S.
Dar­ing Fire­ball has a couple of pearlers:
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two
Update: Stephen Hawk­ing:
I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have received a large amount of […]

This week marks the 64^th anniversary of one of the largest and most hein­ous acts of ter­ror­ism ever per­pet­rated: the nuc­lear bomb­ing of Hiroshima and Naga­saki by the United States of Amer­ica, the only coun­try to have ever used nuc­lear bombs to mas­sacre civilians. The largest attack, also per­pet­rated by the U.S., was the fire­bomb­ing of […]

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing story this week illus­trat­ing how sex offender laws in the U.S. have run amok and are not only mak­ing mat­ters worse but are des­troy­ing the lives of many inno­cent people in the pro­cess.
Plonkers with bal­lots + self-serving polticians = per­ver­sion of justice.

Andrew Clark writ­ing for The Guard­ian: “Rupert Mur­doch said qual­ity journ­al­ism is not cheap and so he intends to charge for all his web­sites,” includ­ing the Times, The Sun and the News of the World.
Two comments.

The Sun and News of the World are not qual­ity journ­al­ism. They’re tabloids.
A pre­dic­tion: Murdoch’s plan to charge for gen­eral news […]

Fam­ily of Ian Tom­lin­son  —  who died after being hit by police­man at G20 protests — speak out.