Current Affairs

Matthew Taylor, former IPPR guru and Downing Street advisor, has left office with a speech criticising the media’s hostile attitude to politicians, and the rush to the extreme that can be seen from the Daily Mail to the Internet. Is there really such visceral, knee-jerk hatred of politicians around?

A post on Fistful of Euros contains this little gem from the Vatican: “The Holy See has reiterated on many occasions that the right to freedom of expression … is subject to just limits, in particular when the exercise of this right would offend the religious sentiments of believers,” the Vatican

Link: Good Riddance.

Did you hear the story about red wine cancelling out the effects of fatty foods? Yes? But did you hear that to get that effect you’d have to drink 750 to 1,500 bottles of wine a day? Thought not.

Philip Cowley writes an excellent rebuttal of Simon Jenkins’s ludicrous hyperbole on Parliament. Why anyone takes Jenkins seriously, I cannot imagine. One of the quintessential sounds of the English morning is a distant Jenkins, barking up the wrong tree.

There is a detailed, and important, and terrifying article on Ars Technica, explaining how easy it is to hack the electronic voting machines increasingly being used in the US. Example (with my emphasis): In order to use a supervisor card to access the AccuVote, you must first enter a four-digit

Rolling Stone magazine excoriates “the worst Congress ever”.

The BBC reports on a foolish joke by a local councillor, who made some unwise remark about gay marriage. Unfortunately, in the interview, he just makes a bad situation worse: “”I believe in the law of Moses. I’m not a religious fanatic. As long as they do it behind

One piece of good news in the struggle between terrorism and politics: IRA ‘no longer a terrorist threat’ (Guardian).

The Onion’s piece (Senate Wins Fight To Lower Allowable Amperage Levels On Detainees’ Testicles) is altogether too close to the reality of a world where the Senate has allowed noted humanitarian G. W. Bush to define the term torture, and to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he fancies. (BBC,