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I don’t usually post Public Relations Flyers, but this is rather a good idea.

I should note that the invention of the Bloody Mary Cocktail in 1933 is only one version of the history. The PR flyer says:

The drink which is an American institution originated in Manhattan by a famous French bartender named Ferdinand Petiot when he came here in 1933.

While Wikipedia says:

Petiot invented the drink in 1920 while working at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, France, a frequent hangout for Ernest Hemingway and other American expatriates.

To put it another way, the Bloody Mary may be another U-571 (i.e., Yanks rewriting history :-), but - in any case - free Bloody Marys are worth having.

Via Damian Thompson’s Holy Smoke blog, a report of a plan by Scientologists to swoop on Mumbai with their “educational booklets”, as previously happened after the New York World Trade Centre attacks after 9/11, in London after the Bus and Underground Bombs on 7/7 in 2005, at Virginia Tech after the shootings and on other occasions.

He has confirmed the existence of a plan to despatch of Scientology Booklets with the headquarters of ABLE UK. ABLE UK is a Scientology front organisation, Association for Better Living and Education:

I can confirm that. I’ve just rung ABLE UK at Saint Hill Manor, the Scientology HQ, to be told that Hubbard booklets are being rushed out “in order to pour oil on troubled water”. I think I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Conservatives are beginning to really start pushing the online battle back towards Labour. I commented a while back on the Labour’s far more web-orientated economic propaganda - even though it was pretty useless, as it was too large to be embedded in a blog, even in the main post!
But since then, the Conservatives have [...]

You can read my detailed assessment here.

I’d suggest that the crucial aspects here are process issues:

1 - The violation of Commons privilege.

2 - The facts taken behind the “the police have operational control and have not overstepped the mark” position taken by the Cabinet Ministers. Politically the next question is obvious:

Just who moved the mark to a place where this became possible, Mr Brown?

Practically, the question is different:

How do we move the mark that the police did not go beyond to somewhere more suitable for an advanced democracy?

Realistically, that is only going to happen in 2 scenarios, either a Tory majority, or a hung Parliament as a condition of Lib Dem cooperation with a minority administration.

Yes, I know the story is old now. But it’s funny.

By the way, we’re planning a series of articles about the BNP in Local Politics from a range of political viewpoints. They will include analysis, and also experience of those in local politics in areas where the BNP are active.

It was inspired by this thread, which was unusually analytical for a cross-party conversation on Labour Home.

Last week I posted about the plight of Durham Cathedral Bookshop.

Today there is an article about it in the Northern Echo Newspaper. The article features the petition we started a few weeks ago, which now has more than 300 signatures.

I’m not going to cover the Mumbai Massacre in detail as news as it’s being far better virtually everywhere else, but one thing I do wonder: I’m not sure why I’m seeing apparently live pictures of an assault to free hostages on satellite TV.

Even back in 1982, at the Iranian Embassy siege in London, there were concerns that the gunmen would be able to see the detail of the assault coming due to live TV coverage, and the actual assault was over in minutes:

However news teams were camped outside the embassy. A unit from the British news organisation ITN, using recently-introduced ENG camera equipment, managed to establish a viewpoint at the rear of the embassy. It was images from this vantage point that showed the SAS raid on the building live on television after their correspondent had been ‘tipped off’. However the SAS insisted on a short time-delay between the live events and their broadcast in case the terrorists were watching the broadcasts.

Clearly the situation is massively different due to the larger scale and continuing nature of the attack, but it’s one of the things that I’d like to know about. One possibility is that there is a delay introduced - but I will be interested to hear the detail.

Or are any casualties that result part of the collateral damage of the “continuous” and “instant” news reporting?

Sky even have a Live Blog of it all.