Wikileaks: the new Amnesty

The USA hierarchy is steaming about the Afghan papers put up on the web by Wikileaks. Where Amnesty International trod by raising publicity about whistleblowers and democrats held in prison and/or being tortured, Wikileaks has posted classified information from the aggressor's mouth.

This is The Bourne Identity for real. What price for the US secret services persuing the Wikileaks board and information moles with every thing they have got. Welcome to spying in the 21st century.


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Illnesses of convenience

Hmm. It seems that far from being on death's door, the man jailed for the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, has now been told he has made than ten years to live. What a surprise.

Almost as much a coincidence as jailed Guinness fraudster Ernest Saunders miraculous recovery from Alzheimer's disease and Great-train-robber Ronnie Biggs continued respite in a Barnet old people's home.

And we're not talking about untold trips to Lourdes.

The common denominators? Money, infleunce, and politics.


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Another con bites the dust

So, another stakeout ends in a blaze of gunfire: Raoul Moat, the Northumbrian killer on the run, has shot himself when cornered.

The sad truth is that this was a predictable outcome. Think of Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger, and Adolf Hitler, and a pattern forms. I can only think of Saddam Hussein and Radovan Karadzic as examples of people who came quietly when surrounded.

Perhaps in times of economic uncertainty we are more aware of heinous crimes, as a backdrop to financial hardship. Whether symptom or cause, these cases spring from despair but are magnified by the media. Once such a crime spree starts cascading, the media supplies the oxygen to keep the fire raging: taking the criminal alive would almost seem like an anti-climax.

And how come the most infamous of these episodes always seems to happen in rural idylls? Hungerford, Dunblane, Cumbria and now Rothbury? Why not, say, Birmingam, Cardiff, Edinburgh, or London? After the fuss has subsided, there may be an eerie fascination for a certain type of tourist in visiting the scenes of the crimes.


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Stepford spies

What could be more American than motherhood and Pavlova cake?

Richard and Cynthia Murphy, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley (and six others) seemed to be regular citizens until busted by their incompetence days after an official visit to the US by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

It appears that the ten Russian spies were unmasked by the FBI finding a 27-letter password next to a computer disk belonging to one of the group during a secret raid. The FBI then sat back for years listening in to threads of emails and mountains of documents, detailing expense claims that would have given British MPs a run for their money.

And then the American authorities reeled them in, way before any damage was done. The SVR is no KGB.


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Hard Graff

Is there any scheme that can be said to be a perfect crime? The Graff Diamonds heist might have seemed perfect to the perpetrators, but it ended up being close without the proverbial cigar for the sharp end of the operation.

The criminals forgot that using theatrical make-up needed professional application. The expert who changed the robbers appearance simply went to the police, given the unusual nature of the crime.

The robbers did, however, nab £40 million in jewellery that may never be recovered. The twisted moral of the story is that if you are going to rob a jewellers' store, make sure you get other people to carry out the raid. If they get nicked, you can be out of the country with the booty.

Bloody Sunday, blooming Tuesday

The Saville Report on the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre has been published.

Previously mocked as wasting time (12 years) and money (£190m), the report has exonerated the Irish people killed by British soldiers. Now who can judge the balance of cost between peace and justice.

David Cameron offered a fulsome apology in Parliament. Hopefully, the people of Northern Ireland will see the verdict as a cathartic exercise rather than an new opportunity for dissident groups to seek revenge.


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Alan Bennett and the ice-cream robbery scam

Alan Bennett, the famous diarist, playwright and Beyond the Fringe veteran, has fallen victim to a con in central London where two women splattered his raincoat with ice-cream and offered to clean it up, while stealing £1500 he had just withdrawn from his bank.

The probability of being robbed in the street does not vary whether someone is well known or not, but the silver lining for Mr Bennett is that he can write about it in his diaries. The episode might even be the kernel of a new play.

This would be an interesting form of revenge, turning adversity into profit while highlighting the scam to warn off repeat offences and copycat pickpockets.


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Dunblane revisited

A man has run amok in Cumbria with an arsenal of guns: twelve people dead so far and no motive revealed. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver, went beserk over three hours in various parts of the county before, seemingly, taking his own life: a common end to such tragedies (see Dunblane; Hungerford).

No doubt there will be an inquiry. The bottom line? You can't really know your neighbours well enough. And disaffected loners seem to be a common theme.

At least, unlike the USA, such shootings do not tend to be committed by young people. Dunblane was perpetrated by an adult outsider; Columbine was enacted by students at the institution. But this is probably due to a respective lack of access to arms rather than a difference in morals.


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Grandad hands back marathon medal

Organisers of the London Marathon took a double take when ">checking the electronic tags of 69-year-old Anthony Gaskell. He ran the first 12.5 miles in about two hours, but apparently finished the rest of the course in just over an hour: a pace that would have smashed the world record.

In fact, he had pulled out of the race injured and skipped a loop in the course of 10 miles, making for the finishing line to retrieve his clothes. He didn't even stop to think he'd won.

Belatedly, he was disqualified.

Red faces all round, and not from the exertion of running (especially in fancy dress).


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BP: for their next trick ...

BP is the oil-industry's equivalent of Tommy Cooper: except that the failed conjuring tricks they have been performing on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico not only don't work, they aren't funny.

So far BP has tried the 'top kill' approach to stopping the oil flow. This consists of trying to plug the gap with all shades of rubbish and capping the pipe: they have tried drilling fluids, mud, tyres, golf balls and cement. BP has also tried closing safety valves.

Now they are going for the grand finale: cutting the pipe in half further down its length to get a clean break,  and then trying the capping procedure all over again.

The tension is palpable. A good outcome, and Hollywood producers will be primed with chequebooks for an action movie starring Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman and Angelina Jolie (Deepwater Horizon, anyone? No pitch required, ho ho); fail, and BP will be writing the cheques to the US Government and reading said writing on the wall. The directors may even be reading it on the wall of a prison cell if recent applications of the Anglo-American extradition 'treaty' are applied (e.g. Gary McKinnon, austistic hacker extraordinaire; the Enron bankers from NatWest).

If the above scenarios may be fantasy (for now), one thing is for sure: either way, BP will be picking up the tab. Barack Obama needs someone to blame, even if the disaster wasn't strictly his fault. Laissez-faire policies with respect to big oil are ingrained on the American psyche: the Bush presidencies of father and son need particular highlighting.

And Michael Moore won't be far behind with his particular brand of TV Nation reportage: Obama and Me; Fahrenheit 494.6 (the temperature at which gasoline burns); or perhaps even Slicker Uprising. All bets are off.


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Musical chairs at the Treasury

If John Paul I was the Pope of the moon (he died in office after 33 days), then David Laws was the Cabinet minister of the honeymoon: he resigned today after 18 days over an expenses claim blunder masquerading as a privacy issue. It was the Telegraph wot dun it.

Welcome to the political pleasuredome. Life in power can be nasty, brutish and short, although with the swiftness of Mr Laws' departure, he may well be back after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has had a rake over his rent arrangements.


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Saving Facebook?

Facebook has been shamed into reviewing its users privacy policy. Settings are now one click away, rather than needing a IT qualification to tick the correct boxes hidden deep with the site's infrastructure.

Will this work? The jury is out. Most people probably won't even notice the change (they like the openness of the web) or, even more likely, there will be ways determined hackers can find cached material or crack the new privacy arrangements.

The challenge of breaking into private areas might attract new hackers, as will all the inherent publicity Facebook has drawn to its new policy. Hopefully, though, the new plans will improve on the free-for-all of the status quo.


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The torture defence

Hmm. Immigration policy may be tricky to implement this new parliament. Two Pakistani students, alleged to be linked to al-Qaeda, have been judged to be dangerous but impossible to deport due to the threat of torture or possible execution back in the old country.

Western values trumps the law of the jungle in this case. Perhaps there ought to be counter-madrassas, teaching against fundamentalist religion, here in the UK and perhaps in the USA? But who would teach the curriculum? Presumably moderate Muslim clerics?


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Political knife crime

Stabbed in the front: Stephen Timms, the safest Labour MP in the country, gets it in the stomach.

Stabbed in the back: senior Tory and Labour dinosaurs are already sharpening the cutlery already regarding the coalition Government.

The flashpoint is the mooted new rule about needing a 55 per cent for a 'no confidence' vote to succeed in bringing down the Government.

The press honeymoon, at least, is over.


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In off the black; snooker bribery claim

John Higgins, the former World Snooker champion, has been suckered by an elaborate News of the World sting to throw some frames at a tournament later in the year and has been suspended from the circuit.

Great excuse, though. He thought he was in a meeting with the Russian mafia and 'agreed to their proposals' simply to get out of the situation 'alive'.

It remains to be seen if the enquiry into the sting justifies his behaviour. The problem is that smears of this sort are hard to expunge. When an allegation is made but then followed by a correction, research shows that people who believe the original charge will be even more convinced by the subsequent rebuttal on the grounds that there is no smoke without fire.

If Mr Higgins is telling the truth, he will have to sue the News of the World and lobby the Press Complaints Commission into muzzling the tabloid's so-called 'investigative journalists'.


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How to ruin your own reputation in a fortnight

Orlando Figes will now have to work hard not to be remembered as the academic who set fire to his own career. Years of building a reputation can be destroyed in an instant.

Posing as 'Historian' when reviewing works of history on Amazon, he raved about his own books and trashed his rivals' work, including Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky.

This may be seen initially as trivial, as playground antics, but when his rivals smelt a rat, Mr Figes instructed his lawyers to sue for libel in an attempt to smother their reaction. This tactic backfired when he was forced after a fortnight of posturing to admit his authorship of the caustic reviews.

Such behaviour goes down like Agent Orange in the academic world. Mr Figes is unfortunate in that the extremes of his behaviour will serve as a warning and a case study to other authors similarly tempted to bash competitors' books.

In an increasingly wired world, online reviews can matter: as Mr Service has said, 'there is such a thing as negative publicity' as sales of his book did not benefit from a 'dead-cat bounce' from curious readers wondering if the criticism was over the top. In other words, during the two-week siege, sales of Mr Service's book tanked.

Hmm. If wonder if the lawyers will now pursue Mr Figes, who is now on compassionate leave of ill-health grounds from his post at Birkbeck University?


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The short arm of the law

Mark Thomas, the comedian and activist, has been awarded £1200 compensation and an apology for being searched unlawfully by the Metropolitan Police. Why?

Because having an 'over-confident attitude' after delivering a speech does not constitute sufficient reason to be manhandled.

Expect this incident to feature strongly in Mr Thomas's next tour; already he is saying the Met have sponsored the shows.


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We're all in this together: too right we are

Invitation to join the Government of Britain, eh?

Shades of Neil Kinnock's roar at Labour's Sheffield rally in 1992? The Conservative party manifesto sounds at first glance a bit triumphalist -- and 118 pages in a hardback format looks a bit reactionary.

Does anyone actually want the extra responsibility of voting in new police officers, sacking incompetent teachers, running schools, or firing the local MP? One top of doing your own job? The only people with the time or inclination to do this will be rich socialites with right-wing agendas. And who decides the criteria with which standards can be judged?

It's a dog's breakfast or, misquoting Gerald Kaufman, it might just be the longest political suicide note in history. And the best of it is, the Tories don't yet suspect a thing.


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Real Virtuality on the curriculum

An antidote to people's media sensitisation towards violence is been tried with success in Merseyside schools by the charity Support After Murder and Manslaughter (SAMM).

Young children are being shown stills from videogame franchise Grand Theft Auto and 'Itchy & Scratchy' from The Simpsons in the context of comparing violent images with what is going on in their own lives. Images are marked as 'bad real life', 'good real life' and 'not real'.

And the result? Kids are realising that comic-book violence is not real; in life acts and behaviours have consequences. And they report being disgusted by the stills.

Perhaps there is hope in clawing back civil society from the clutches of glamourised, depersonalised media violence.


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Cider House of Commons rules

Cider and perry got the brunt of yesterday's Budget hikes, to the tune of 10 per cent. This was ostensibly to crack down on the problem of binge drinking cheap hooch, witness the ability until recently to buy a pint of cider for 26p in Sainsbury's supermarket.

So what's a poor boozehound to do, now that so many alcohol options are being taxed to the hilt?

Like the recent mephedrone problem in drug culture, where legitimate substances (in this case plant fertiliser) are being abused for cheap yet self-destructive highs, perhaps hard-core drinkers may be tempted to try cheap underground sources of alcohol without the benefits of quality control? Or maybe try to brew moonshine at home? And cheap supermarket loss leaders are not going to disappear overnight, as the British obsession with alcohol is deeply ingrained.

The next phase will be to print warnings on labels, as with cigarette packets, and warn drinkers of the long-term health dangers of over-indulging. While such tactics may be admirable and desirable, the Government earns too much from taxing alcohol to bite the bullet too hard. And too many MPs enjoy a tipple or two, especially in their subsidised bars.

In a few years' time, should social attitudes change, we may see bans on people drinking in public spaces(including outside pubs): the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, made a big play about banning alcohol on the tube. But too many voters enjoy their booze for politicians to get really serious about limiting access to alcohol: accusations of nanny-state policies don't go down well at the ballot box.


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