Last week the Leveson inquiry finally reported, and the key points can be found here, but they include a new independent regulator backed by statute but independent of government and the industry, with membership not compulsory but non-members monitored by Ofcom; the watchdog should have the power to fine a newspaper up to 1% of turnover or £1m, whichever is smaller, with “sufficient powers of investigation”, a libel resolution unit, and possibly a First Amendment-style law. David Cameron immediately opposed statute-backed regulation, claiming that it would “mean for the first time we have crossed the Rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into law of the land”. He is opposed in this by Labour, the Lib Dems and much of the Tory party as well as some of those who reported to the inquiry about their experience of press intrusion, phone hacking etc., but supported by the Tories in his cabinet (and, of course, the commercial media).
Leveson: what about the content?
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Hope Not Hate has reproduced an article by Shiraz Maher from the Spectator, titled 
A number of newspapers, and the BBC, have reported today that a foster family from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, have had three children removed from their care allegedly becuase they are members of the UK Independence Party, which supports withdrawal from the European Union and a restriction on immigration, especially from eastern Europe. The children had been placed with them on an emergency basis in September, and 
I’ve been pretty astounded at the tone of the response to the Church of England’s General Synod’s decision to reject the appointment of female bishops on Wednesday. The motion had been supported by the incoming and outgoing Archbishops of Canterbury and passed by two of the three houses — the Bishops and Clergy — but rejected by the Laity. This has led to the suggestion that the church is out of step with the rest of British society, almost making itself irrelevant, and that if it continues to refuse, its 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords should no longer be allowed to do so. Rowan Williams (right), the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury, articulated the view of “irrelevance” particularly vociferously.
Yet again, Casualty gets the medical facts wrong in one of their plotlines. This time the condition involved was 
Last Friday I wrote here about Simon Wessely, the psychiatric professor at King’s College Hospital in London who is notorious for promoting psychological theories about certain chronic illnesses, won an award for “courage” presented by an organisation he is on the board of. The organisation was Sense About Science, which claims to champion sound science over “dodgy science” as well as campaigning for the rights of scientists (such as by campaigning to reform libel laws so that scientists are not caught up in libel suits as a result of debate). I actually know of a few people in the chronic illness community who are strong supporters of most of what SAS stand for, and this made their endorsement of Wessely all the more disappointing to these people. However, a conversation with an activist friend last Thursday brought home how much damage Wessely’s theories have really done.
When I first got into blogging in 2004, one of the most prominent voices in the blogosphere (she was, and is, also a newspaper columnist) was Melanie Phillips, who by that time wrote for the Daily Mail (she had previously written for the Times and before that, the Guardian). She is widely known on the anti-war left and among Muslims as “Mad Mel”, for her seemingly hysterical denunciations of any concession to Muslim sensitivities and her fanatical devotion to the interests of Israel (not so fanatical as to go and live there, mind you) such that she would repeat the propaganda from the likes of MEMRI, “Honest Reporting” and the like as if they were facts, and accuse people of anti-Semitism if they treated Palestinian claims to their own land with anything but the contempt she believed they deserved. The “Mad Mel” soubriquet came because of her repeated insistence that “the West” was selling itself out and allowing itself to be destroyed from within by the Left, Muslims, and assorted other enemies. Yesterday, 
On Wednesday, 
Nadine Dorries, the conservative (with a small ‘c’) Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, has been suspended from her party (and likely faces de-selection in the run-up to the next general election) following her travel to Australia to take part in the ‘reality’ show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. She claimed she had been planning to use the show to talk politics to the other contestants, but it has been pointed out that any political speechifying she did would be edited out under British TV neutrality rules, as has happened to politicians who went on previous reality shows. She is, of course, not the first MP to take time out of Parliament to go on a reality show, but is the first from a major party.
Yesterday I took the plunge and installed Windows 8 on my laptop. I had hesitated to do this, because of various reports such as that the Desktop (that is, the running of the normal apps like the web browser you are probably reading this on) had been downgraded to a kind of app itself, with Metro, the interface for mobile-derived apps, given priority. However, other reports said that the new OS was thoroughly stable and based on Windows 7 and would run everything Windows 7 ran. In addition, the upgrade only cost £25 (confusingly, they offer you a “Windows DVD” for £13 extra, but that is for a DVD in the post, not an ISO you can burn to DVD).
The past week or so I’ve been following a series of posts by the blogger 
I spent the past two days upgrading my Android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S (model i9000) to the new version of Android. There have actually been several new versions since the last one Samsung could be bothered to provide, but the one I have settled on is the latest, codenamed Jelly Bean (they name them after confectionery products in alphabetical order). I got my phone in July or August of 2011 and at the time was quite impressed with its performance compared with my previous Android phone, a HTC Hero (rebranded G2 Touch by T-Mobile). However, perhaps because applications have got bigger and more complex since then, or perhaps because they’re optimised for newer versions than I was using, most of those I use have seen a decline in performance, frequently hanging or crashing, often during an operation such as pulling down to refresh a timeline (Plume is the worst for that). I read about Cyanogen Mod in the Android magazine, and had a look into that because unlike most other Android developers who produce operating systems you can upload to your phone (known as ROMs, although it’s not really ROM anymore), they actually have a website, a forum, and a wiki which gives directions on how to install it.