Jenny Taylor's blog

The finest – and first – free press in the world has become a tragic and bawdy farce.  The upshot of the Leveson inquiry will be some form of press regulation.  As the Guardian points out today, if Leveson calls for the Portuguese police to divulge the name of the journalist to whom it gave a copy of the translation of Madeleine McCann’s diary, which he has the power to do under  the terms of the inquiry, that is regulation. 

Our popular press is now largely disgraced – but its fall should not be relished.  I write as someone who love

The massacre of Copts last weekend in protests in Cairo is wholly ominous and I can add little to the best account of it I've read: New York Review of Books' writer Yasmine el-Rashidi's brilliant eye-witness account and analysis. 

Why then do I feel the need to write anything at all about the 25 deaths outside the state TV station on Sunday?  Is it really any of my business? 

The cyber-air is

 An Iranian friend of mine comments on the visit by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the United Nations General Assembly today, where he has once again been offered a platform by the Columbia International Relations Council and Association.  That morally sophisticated group of young American élites is ‘thrilled to have this opportunity’.   ‘Everyone was really enthusiastic,’ Tim Chan, student spokesman, is reported as saying.

A kind interpretation of CIRCA’s mot