The Sun today was very proud to declare that Gordon Brown was wrong to accuse them of hacking his phone, or illegally accessing his voicemail, to make their “scoop” in November 2006, and that the real source of their story was “a shattered dad whose own son also has the crippling disease and who wanted to highlight the plight of sufferers”. The man is interviewed (anonymously) in today’s paper, and claims that he never saw Fraser Brown’s medical records. This suggests that he was someone who met the Browns when they were in hospital and engaged them in conversation, then took their story to the newspapers. It’s not clear whether they paid him. They also boast that they donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. (More: Chris Atkins @ Huffington Post, who says he doesn’t believe their claim.)
It was with much satisfaction that I learned that the News of the World, the British Sunday tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, was going to publish its final edition today. This happened, for those overseas who didn’t hear, after it emerged that private investigators working for them had illegally accessed the voice-mail of 
Recently Google launched their Google Plus social networking system, and as I write I haven’t been able to get into it, as I still need an invite, despite them having launched the Android client already, and despite the front page giving the impression that it’s open for business, only telling me I’m not welcome when I log in (and I’m normally logged into Google on my home laptop and desktop machines anyway; it’s only on public computers that I have to log in). That’s annoying, but I still intend to join as soon as I can, and I expect it to succeed. (Click 
I recently got hold of two books by Simon Baron-Cohen which focus on the subject of empathy. The earlier, The Essential Difference, focusses on the difference in empathy and systemising between men and women; the more recent (published this year) is titled Zero Degrees of Empathy (the American edition is called The Science of Evil) and is about specific disorders that involve impaired empathy, in which he includes autism, Asperger’s syndrome, borderline personality disorder, psychopathy and narcissism. The first two he calls “zero-positive”, meaning that they have worthwhile qualities, while the last he calls “zero-negative”, meaning they have nothing to recommend them and lead to self-harm, social alienation and anti-social behaviour. He also posits the idea of the autistic brain being the “extreme male brain”, an idea first advanced by Hans Asperger in 1944 but only translated into English in 1991. His ideas have offended a lot of people within the autistic community, particularly women with autism who object to being described as more male than most men, as well as some who say that their empathy is much more highly developed than Baron-Cohen gives them credit for. 
I don’t plan to watch the Terry Pratchett assisted suicide show that is on tonight, but I did watch the sequence of episodes in 
Panorama last night broadcast an hour-long exposé of a locked ward for adults with learning disabilities and autism (although I did not notice anyone who seemed to have autism) on which the carers seemed to have been recruited out of nowhere, who used violence and restraint on a routine basis and then falsified the records, while senior nurses looked on and did nothing. The investigation was prompted when a nurse tried to blow the whistle but was ignored by both the company management and the Care Quality Commission, so it seems he then went to the BBC. As a result, several staff have been suspended, 
For many years, 
This article is an open letter by Emily Collingridge (right), who is best known as the author of 
