Nearly a hundred recommendations have been made by Lord Leveson to put some ethical backbone in Britain’s brash, sometimes corrupt and often sleazy press. The 1,800 page report is an encyclopaedia of the dark arts of yellow journalism: phone hacking, lurid sensationalism, covert surveillance, blagging, door-stepping, harassment, a reckless disregard for accuracy…  

But the core of his concerns is privacy. The News of the World, the tabloid which Rupert Murdoch closed down as a response to public outrage over revelations that some of its journalists hacked into the phone of the murdered Millie Dowling, was stupendously, incredibly, horrendously expert at invading the privacy of celebrities.

Exhibit A in these abuses was veteran tabloid journalist Paul McMullan (see video above). He was so proud of his craft and so eager to display it to the Inquiry that he was requested to curb his torrent of stories and pictures. Mr McMullen is an extraordinary raconteur, a rogue so colourful that his testimony cries out to heaven for a film to bring him to the picture theatres. (Hugh Grant looks a bit like him and would do an excellent job.)

Lord Leveson quoted McMullan’s musings on privacy… click here to read whole article and make comments

In trawling for ideas for regulating Britain’s unruly press, the head of the government inquiry, Lord Leveson, pinched a few ideas from Ireland. Its Press Council offered, he thought, a reasonably sophisticated system for maintaining standards of fairness and balance in its media.

But the Press Council hasn’t stopped the Irish press from being incredibly unfair and slanted in its coverage of the death of Savita Halappananvar. Without a minimum of professional integrity no regulatory system will be fool-proof against this kind of abuse.

The Irish Times headline “Woman 'denied a termination' dies in hospital” on November 14 ignited an international firestorm. The story became the best-read article in the newspaper’s history. Media around the world condemned Ireland’s “backward” no-abortion policy.

The story which generated this frenzy is now beginning to unravel – but there have been no mea culpas from Ireland’s blinkered press.

Kitty Holland, the journalist who broke the news, has admitted at least twice that her narrative was misleading and that she had papered over the ambiguity and uncertainty about the facts of Savita’s illness and death.

Not that she has been shy about admitting it. Only three days… click here to read whole article and make comments

Photo: EPA/Andy Rain

The good Lord Leveson has certainly set the cat among both the press and political pigeons. His elegantly crafted proposal for establishing a self-regulatory regime for the press, backed by statutory under-pinning (which could have satisfied both sides of the statutory/self regulation divide) has come up against the harsh realities of Westminster’s realpolitik.

After eight months of hearings, Lord Leveson and his team have produced a 2,000-page report containing a wide range of recommendations; but the main issue is what form of regulation, if any, is appropriate for the British press for its “take no prisoners” approach to newsgathering.

All sides agree that the practices of some newspapers – phone hacking, harassment and intrusions of privacy – were totally unacceptable and need to be controlled. However, the newspapers, and their allies, claim that these offences are all unlawful and should be dealt with by the police and courts, without the need for any government-imposed regulator. “Leave us to regulate ourselves with the police as back-up” cry the press proprietors.

Those on the other side of the argument point to the fact that five times since World… click here to read whole article and make comments

Headlines everywhere the day after the 2012 election claimed that the single issue motivating voters was the economy. But if that were the case, Barack Obama would not have won.

The past four years have been an economic disaster, with unprecedented government spending on stimulus efforts that failed miserably, chronic unemployment bedeviled by more people dropping off the rolls when they gave up looking for work, higher numbers of people without homes and relying on food stamps, small businesses unable to grow or hire because banks wouldn’t lend and government wouldn’t get off their backs with regulations, gas prices doubling and food prices rising.

Those headlines were wrong. President Obama won re-election because of an astounding, slick, savvy and highly successful ground game and campaign geniuses who ran that machine like General Patton and his divisions ran a military campaign. Credit is due where it is earned, and the Obama team blew away even the top pundits who never saw it coming, through Election Day itself. It was Obama’s shock and awe.

It wasn’t the economy that delivered. It was demographics. Sheer, simple, brilliantly executed machine politics crafted to get out the vote… click here to read whole article and make comments

One positive lesson from Tuesday night is that assisted suicide should be struck from the progressive agenda. While voters re-elected Barack Obama, added two Democrat senators, elected an openly-lesbian senator in Wisconsin, supported or legalised same-sex marriage in four states, and legalised recreational cannabis in Colorado and Washington, in the playground of progressive politics, Massachusetts, they rejected physician-assisted suicide.

Question 2 on the ballot asked whether a doctor should be allowed to prescribe a lethal drug to end the life of a terminally ill person. This is already legal in Oregon and Washington on the West Coast. If assisted suicide had gained a beachhead on the East Coast, it would have been taken up quickly throughout New England.

But voters rejected it by 51 percent to 49 percent.

The narrow margin does not convey the success of the No campaign. As late as mid-September, a Suffolk University poll found that 64 percent of voters favoured legalising assisted suicide. The cause seemed lost.

What turned voters around? Four factors seem to have been at work.

First, disability activists were strongly opposed. They feared that legalised assisted suicide would put pressure on them to take an early… click here to read whole article and make comments

Cartoon by MeAndFolly

As the destructive roar of Hurricane Sandy dwindled and died last week, leaving Americans along the Atlantic coast facing colossal damage, the climate change alarm bells could be heard in all their urgency. Warming oceans and melting ice caps could have played a decisive role in creating the “Frankenstorm” that claimed 100 lives, left hundreds homeless and will cost $60 billion to repair. “Now will they listen?” the global warming pundits demanded of the sceptics.

This week the alarms are sounding again for many Americans, but it’s nothing to do with continuing stormy weather. The cause does, however, have a lot to do with ecology: human ecology -- the integrity of the human being who is both matter and spirit and the conditions under which he or she may thrive and contribute to genuine social progress.

On Tuesday just over half of US voters put Barack Obama back in the White House. This is a president who supports abortion and free contraception as women’s rights, who has declared support for same-sex “marriage”; whose last campaign ad propositioned the youth vote with the sultry line, “If… click here to read whole article and make comments

In the lead up to the US presidential election most Chinese didn’t see a substantial difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In both rhetoric and substance they were seen as much of a muchness. Sure, Mitt Romney had spooked Chinese punters when he promised to label China a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office. And Obama trumped that when he stopped a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer from establishing a wind farm in Oregon because of national security concerns over its proximity to a naval base.

But few Chinese paid too much attention to this anti-Chinese posturing. A common refrain here was “China is just a scapegoat of the US election. To win the election the candidates need an enemy to blame and attack for all that’s wrong in America; but once the election is over it will be back to business as usual.”

In a business sense Romney, despite his currency manipulator charge, was seen as more positively disposed to China. Obama’s claim that the Republican contender had exported American jobs to China was seen as a commitment to globalization and open markets.

Nonetheless,… click here to read whole article and make comments

The United States held elections last night, and nothing changed. Barack Obama remains president. The Democrats remain in control of the Senate with a non-filibuster-proof majority. The Republicans remain in control of the House of Representatives.

The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House -- a body where party discipline is the norm -- under Republican control, passing legislation will be difficult and require compromise. Since the Senate is in Democratic hands, the probability of it overriding any unilateral administrative actions is small. Nevertheless, Obama does not have enough congressional support for dramatic new initiatives, and getting appointments through the Senate that Republicans oppose will be difficult.

There is a quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves." I am not sure that the current political climate is what was meant by the people disciplining themselves, but it is clear that the people have imposed profound limits on this government. Its ability to continue what is already being done has not been curbed, but its ability to do much that is new has been… click here to read whole article and make comments

TUESDAY, 11.26PM (NEW YORK) So that was it. Billions of dollars and so much effort, only to continue the status quo. But in so doing we must grasp the fact that the United States is now a fundamentally different country than ever before.

Yes, of course, two parties have pretty much divided the nation for generations, but within that division was a general consensus around what American was and should be. Not now, no longer, never again. This is black and white, religious and secular, working for oneself and working for the state, north and south.

With demographics as they are, it’s difficult to see where and how the Republicans will ever be able to carve out a new coalition of support, unless the party becomes something other than what it is supposed to be. Two moderate, ersatz conservative candidates in succession have lost to a radical in radical’s clothing, and it’s unclear if a genuine conservative could do any better.

If the Republicans become a progressive conservative party, akin to Britain’s Tories for example, the right will split; unlike any other Western democracy, a quarter of America’s population is devout and will… click here to read whole article and make comments

The 2016 presidential race has already begun, as evidenced by politicians such as the mayor of Los Angeles dropping by to visit the luncheon of the Iowa contingent at the Democratic National Convention. (Iowa is the state with the first votes for president in the primary calendar.)

Anyone seriously interested in running four years from now is already considering how to build the organization and fortune necessary to do so. Remember, each side spent $1 billion trying to win this year.

We don’t know what will happen in the US or internationally over the next four years, and another economic or military crisis could reshape the race. History and suggests that Republicans will have another good year in the congressional and gubernatorial elections of 2014, diminishing the pool of possible big name Democratic entrants. But the US economy should also be stronger and popular provisions of the new health care law also go into effect in 2014, perhaps leading to more public support for Obama and Democrats. Who knows?

But as of Election Day 2012, here are the Sweet 16 looking to 2016:

THE DEMOCRATS

Joe Biden: The VP made what was treated… click here to read whole article and make comments