Our senior politicians might reflect how their headline catching pronouncements are interpreted abroad, as today’s article in Pravda about paedophiles and chemical castration shows.  One cannot help but suspect that something has been lost in translation.

Having discussed the purported success of chemical castration in Europe and some states in the USA, the Pravda article then continues incongruously about male pattern baldness:

“[Physical] castration prevents male pattern baldness if it is done before hair is lost, however, castration will not restore hair growth after hair has already been lost due to male pattern baldness...[and it] eliminates the risk of testicular cancer, and it may even reduce prostate cancer”

…nevertheless I’m minded to persevere with scalp massage and drinking cranberry juice, thank you very much.

Paedophiles will be castrated for their crimes in Britain

So, the BBC reports today that David Phythian, a Councillor of the West Lancashire District Council, has been prohibited from attending football matches for three years and fined £250 by the Wigan and Leigh Magistrates' Court after pleaded guilty to using racially aggravated threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour towards Tottenham Hotspurs' Pascal Chimbonda, a black footballer, during the Wigan v. Spurs match that took place in April 2007.  The local Labour group at the Council has now suspended Mr Phythian.

The BBC report contained most of the salient facts, but I could not help but notice that one additional fact, which I should have expected from a BBC report, had not been included in the title emblazoned, "Racist abuse councillor suspended".  Of course, the word Tory was missing.  Wigan Today, the newspaper that broke the story on 1st June 2007, was not so timid.  However, it transpires that the problem faced by the BBC was that Mr Phythian was a Labour, not Conservative politician. Only by reading the BBC's full report could we deduce that he was not a Conservative.  Most people would have gleaned all they wanted to know from the first few lines of the report and assumed the rest.

The BBC is often coy concerning the political affiliation of an individual involved in "minor, local difficulties", save when it is a Conservative.  In the matter of local issues, political affiliation is almost invariably irrelevant to the misdeed committed. As such it is not necessary to highlight or headline such a fact.  The BBC should exercise such restraint even-handedly when reporting "small town" misdeeds.

Racist abuse councillor suspended

Councillor gets football ban

Race-jibe councillor banned by Labour

According to Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Web 2.0 is “killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct” with amateurs creating an “endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.”  It is, “undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent.”  Wikipedia is identified as a particular villain, being riddled with “mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings” but yet being more popular than Britannica.com, thereby threatening the latter’s financial viability. What Wikipedia has done to reference books, bloggers will do to traditional news media, believes Mr Keen.

I believe Mr Keen is being alarmist, because ultimately, quality matters.  The laws of natural selection apply in the virtual, as well as the real world.  The very best survives and the rest fade away.  Britannica.com will live on because it is acknowledged as being authoritative whilst Wikipedia is not. The mainstream media cannot be seriously challenged by citizen bloggery and will remain ascendant because of its inherent professionalism and quality in depth.  Web logs are a passing fad and the current intense activity will pass leaving only a small number of the most committed.

Part of Mr Keen’s hypothesis relies also upon a premise that the average punter cannot differentiate between different sources of information with the result that the good will fall and the bad will prevail.  Yet we know that anything free is unlikely to be as good as something paid for.  Free, net-based sources of information are just a convenient, useful point of first reference before turning to, for example, the trusted newspaper, news magazine, or reference book.

Much on the net is trashy and ephemeral but the important point is that we all know it and when we don’t want monkeys, we avoid paying peanuts.

John-Paul Flintoff - The Sunday Times

David Smith - The Observer

Malaysia is a forward-looking, democratic country that abides by the rule of law.  It happens also to be a Muslim country.

According to the New Straits Times, at the High Court Registry in Shah Alam, the state capital of Selangor, on 14^th May 2007 a Hindu man, Mr V. Suresh, applied for a writ of habeas corpus seeking the release of his wife Siti Fatimah Abdul Karim (who I shall refer to, wrongly, as Mrs Suresh) from detention at the Baitul Aman Faith Rehabilitation Centre, where she had been sent by the Malacca Syariah High Court on 8^th January 2007.

Mr Suresh had married his wife according to Hindu rites on 10^th March 2004 at a Hindu temple in Malacca.  They lived together in Malacca and together had a daughter Diviya Dharshini, born on 19^th December 2005. The daughter was raised according to the Hindu religion.  By all accounts (and unsurprisingly) Mrs Suresh had professed the Hindu faith and had changed her name.  Following the marriage, she had attempted to formally change her name and religious status from Islam to Hindu and was advised by the Melaka Islamic Religious Department to make a formal application in this respect to the Malacca Syariah High Court.  The application was filed in late 2006 and the first hearing took place on 8^th January 2007.  Upon attending the hearing, Syariah Court officials detained Mrs Suresh and placed her in the Baitul Aman Faith Rehabilitation Centre.

You might think that my righteous indignation arises from the knowledge that this poor woman could be incarcerated simply for choosing to convert and practise the "wrong" religion. Whilst it is another example of how religious courts established to protect and advance the interests of their own faith cannot be trusted to apply justice without fear or favour, affection or ill will, in fact my ire is raised because in Malaysia, unlike the United Kingdom, its citizens still have an unrestricted right to apply for a writ of habeas corpus.