The programme is available on iPlayer for another 6 days and is worth a listen; although I could have quite happily gone without ever hearing the King Singers sung version.

From The Guardian:

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

The Guardian was due to appear at the High Court at 2pm to challenge Carter-Ruck’s behaviour, but the firm has dropped its claim that to report parliament would be in contempt of court.

Full Article

From the Guardian:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Reading The Spectator and The Third Estate it seems this is the question that The Guardian is being prevented from reporting:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

This would seem to be the report that Carter-Ruck are trying to supress.

It’s hard to belive that we, in the UK, still live in a democracy and not some kind of Orwellian state controlled not by Big Brother, but by Big Business.

But it’s also pleasing to see how quickly and widely this story has spread through the ‘blogosphere’, and that as of writing the top trends on Twitter currently include: Guardian, Cart-Ruck, Trafigura and #carterruck.

Maybe Carter-Ruck will think twice before slinging injunctions around next time…

I don’t like or normally use the term “monetise”, but it is the big question hanging over Twitter; how are they gonna make money from this thing?

We saw last week that Twitter have secured another found of funding described as “significant”, and so we assume that at some point these investors are going to want to see a return.

Many ideas for how Twitter might monetise the service have been put forward: paid accounts, premium accounts for brands and companies, advertising on the page, advertising in Tweets etc. But I have another thought about how Twitter might be planning to integrate advertising or paid content.

In the sidebar of the of a Twitter user’s homepage is a trending topics panel which shows the topics, keywords or hashtags being tweeted about most at that point in time. Clicking on one of these takes you to a search for that term or keywords which can be updated as new tweets appear.

Clicking on the trending topic ‘iPhone’ this morning I went to the usual list of tweets but then noticed this new, at least to me, content at the top explaining why ‘iPhone’ was a trending topic:

I’d not really got why Twitter had added trending topics to the site as it just seemed to be a tool for spammers to piggy back upon, but once you see this explanatory content it starts to make a little more sense. I can see this easily becoming advertising (Google keywords anybody?) or paid for content: each use of the word iPhone could be a link to Apple.com for example. This would allow Twitter to start to generate revenue from the service and without a negative impact on the user experience. Interesting…

Of course this would make trending topics even more of a spam magnet and doesn’t address the large number of users accessing Twitter via other clients and applications, but it does point to a potential approach for Twitter to start making money.

What do you think?

It is this character, this personality that makes a city almost like a person. As with people you might get on with that personality or you might not.

Sometimes a city will grow on you, sometimes you know you will never like a city and sometimes it will be love at first sight.

Over the last few years I have definitely realised I am a city person, not that I don’t love the country and I will always love the coast, but cities and me we have an understanding.

In the words of Underworld Mmm Skyscraper I Love You.

John Ruskin

I’m still left open mouthed and shocked every time I see footage of the planes hitting the towers and the buildings collapse. When I visited Ground Zero I was surprised that I didn’t feel more emotional. I’d expected to be moved by the site, but instead it just felt like a large building site; which amazingly eight years later it still is. What is amazing is just how big an area it is, and that so few of the surrounding buildings were destroyed.

I’m still undecided how I feel about the new towers that will, one day, be built there. Part of me feels that new towers must be built to show the terrorists they did not win, but another part of me feels that with so many lives having been lost at Ground Zero the site should become a memorial.

I did have one moment in New York that really brought 9/11 back to me. I was standing the lobby of my hotel when a classic American fire truck roared past with its sirens blaring trailing a huge American flag. It made me think of similar footage I’d seen of the fire crews rushing to the towers and of course how many of them died there as well. It sent the hairs in back of my neck on end and a shiver down my spine.

My thoughts today are with the familes of those that lost loved ones.

Photo: this photo was taken by a friend from American Express at 6 am on 9/11. She was leaving for work in the World Finance Centre, next door to the World Trade Centre, and was struck by how beautiful the towers looked.

This was followed by finding a book of The Nation’s Favourite Poems at a relatives house over Christmas which made me realise that I was aware of more poetry than I realised, and also that poetry was more accessible than I had previously thought.

High Flight by John Magee has quickly become a favourite of mine. I had always thought that it was much older than it actually is, and that it was more metaphorical in its view of flight. I was surprised and delighted to find that it was written by a WW2 fighter pilot about his love of flying.

It’s a wonderfully eloquent description of the joy flying brought him; made tragic when you learn that he died shortly after writing it – it was in the last letter his parents received from him.

High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Office John Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941