Earlier this week, Hicham Yezza wrote about his experiences of being arrested as a suspected terrorist, being detained for six days and then released without charge:

Once in custody, almost 48 hours passed before it was confirmed that the entire operation (involving dozens of officers, police cars, vans, and scientific support agents) was triggered by the presence on my University of Nottingham office computer of a … document called the “al-Qaida Training Manual”.

Sounds good grounds for arresting someone, until you realise where this document came from:

Rizwaan Sabir, a politics student friend of mine (who was also arrested), had downloaded the

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What does the selection of Joe Biden to be Barack Obama’s US Vice-President candidate tell us about the state of Obama’s campaign and where it is headed?

Joe Biden is a long-time white male senator in his mid-60s from the East coast with two previous Presidential bids behind him. It’s certainly not a choice based on reinforcing Obama’s message of change: white male senators are hardly a novelty in US politics, especially Presidential politics, and the selection continues the overwhelming Democrat preference for picks from the eastern third of the US. Oh, and did I mention that he’s also one of …

Yesterday’s energy policy push by Nick Clegg has received wide coverage in the media, including:

Daily Telegraph:

The thinking of Nick Clegg, the LibDem leader, is both fresh and dramatic. He envisages energy self-sufficiency in this country by the year 2050 and claims this can be achieved cleanly.

The LibDem plan is based on a combination of greater energy efficiency and a step-change in the provision of renewable energy from wind, wave, biomass and solar power.

This stands in sharp contrast with the energy policies of both Labour and the Conservatives which are

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The Independent reports:

Nick Clegg will today unveil plans to make Britain an exporter of green energy by 2050, as he called for a programme “on the scale of the Apollo moon landings” to transform Britain’s dependence on foreign oil, gas and coal supplies.

In an interview with The Independent, the Liberal Democrat leader demanded the scrapping of new nuclear and coal-fired power stations, instead proposing the establishment of a renewables delivery authority to oversee a massive expansion of wind, solar and wave energy, funded by guaranteed premium prices for green energy.

He said: “Renewable

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Earlier this week, Guido poked fun at The Guardian for publishing an opinion poll where the voting intention figures added up to 101. Of course, there isn’t really any mystery or error in all of this, because figures are nearly always rounded off to the nearest whole number when these sorts of polls are published. It’s therefore actually quite common to have polls were the rounded-off numbers add up to 101 or 99 or even sometimes 98 or 102.

So far, so silly. However, today’s Daily Mail carries a piece in their Ephraim Hardcastle column repeating the story (though without …

The disappearing flag and the unfortunate halo. The latter is presumably the result of some slightly clumsy lightening of the photo (though if it was another party’s leader in the photo, you can imagine the sort of intemperate comments that would appear from SNP supporters about how this was the lowest and most desparate acts of evils since the same party leader ate babies for breakfast yesterday). But as for the former? Very hard to see any explanation other than a mix of pettiness and silliness.