Apparently, the Spectrum was the first home computer to break into the mass market in the UK due to its low price-point and decent catalogue of software. But I didn’t know any of that at the time.

I don’t remember when we got our Spectrum, but I vaguely remember that we didn’t have one and then at some point we did. I don’t think it was new when we got it, and it wasn’t our first computer – there was an old Commodore PET in a cupboard that I had never seen. The Spectrum was a tiny thing, with its famous rubber keys and assortment of wires.

(years later, when I was aged 8 or 9, I remember having an argument with my schoolfriends who insisted that the keyboard of a PC was only a keyboard and that the computer was a big box that the keyboard plugged into. I told them they were being ridiculous. If my old computer was small and fitted in a keyboard surely, I argued, the modern computers of 1989 would have been even smaller).

It had to be hooked up to the TV using a special output cable. Software came on audio-tapes but It didn’t have a tape recorder built in – we had to connect one to it using a line-in cable. The joystick (and we used an old Atari 2600 stick at first) had to plug into a special Kempston card that had to be plugged into the machine. If anything was knocked or dirty then it all wouldn’t work.

Loading a game took time – from a minute for a short one to several minutes for a long, new one – and if a tape had more than one game on it you had to fast-forward it first. Then we’d hear the famous loading sounds – the low header pulse while the screen’s border flashed cyan-and-red, followed by the high-pitched screeching data sound while the screen-border went yellow-and-blue. And when it was finally done we could play a game. If we were lucky.   If we were unlucky we’d have to start again.

I remember playing games with my Dad – the old text-based adventures at first, like the Hobbit and the Hitchhikers’ Guide, both famously hard, and the classic Batman game. I remember the excitement when we got Elite, and the frustration when the special Lenslok copy-protection meant we had to look at the screen though a special piece of plastic to play the game – and it didn’t work so we had to get a new one. Eventually I got and played my own games: the Dizzy series, Mercenary, Rainbow Islands, even Tetris with its eerie music (not the Russian music you know from the Gameboy – this music).

We had all these old computer magazines, and some of them had programming tips in them. I started writing BASIC programs young; I even wrote a sort-of-functioning version of a game a bit like Snake. We bought a game that let you make other 3d games for the Spectrum. I played with it for hours but never made a game that worked.

I also bought the classic magazine Your Sinclair, famed for its sense of humour as the Spectrum gradually slid towards obsolescence. The sarcasm, surrealism and self-deprecation I learnt from YS have served me well in life.

At some point we bought a newer Spectrum – with a built-in tape recorder – and we scoured carboot sales, buying up tens of games for a pound as people sold off their old tapes.

Eventually we got a Sega Mega Drive and a SNES and we put away the Spectrum for good. But, 30 years after its release, I realise how much it changed my life. I learnt how to program, how to play co-operatively and how to read technical manuals, and I think back to those Sunday mornings watching my Dad play Elite and remember what a good time it was (of course, these days he still plays more computer games than I do).

I leave you with this video which reminds me of the Good Old Days.

Photo tweeted by @KhuloodBadawi

He guessed it wasn’t.

Over the last few days, hundreds of increasingly sophisticated rockets have been fired into Israel by Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza. The rockets have been able to reach large cities like Ashdod, Beer Sheva and even Gedera, only 25 miles south of Tel Aviv proper. Most of those have been shot down by the Iron Dome system, an anti-missile defence system that actually works. Some, inevitably, have got through. A rocket hit a school yesterday, but luckily it was empty, all students in south-central Israel told to stay home to keep them safe.

Israel’s response has actually been pretty restrained – hitting the small rocket crews from Islamic Jihad and the PRC and operational leaders. There had been no reports of a girl being killed.

Avi found some websites using the picture in 2009, which was enough to prove that it didn’t happen yesterday.

I put the photo into Google Image Search, which brought up a lot of 2008 sites claiming that the girl was Iraqi, a victim of a white phosphorus attack by the US on Fallujah in 2004. I tweeted this:

@avimayer This 2007 blog says the same photo is of a girl hit with white phosphorus in Iraq in 2005. I’m not convinced. bit.ly/xLEBJe

— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) March 11, 2012

So I kept digging. Playing with the time-window, I could find no record of the photo before 2006, and several in August 2006, which suggested that this might the time it was taken. Eventually I found an left-wing Israeli website called Mahsom. The photo was captioned:

הילדה רג’א אבו שעבאן בת ה-3 נהרגה בידי הצבא ב-9 באוגוסט. צילום: סוכנות ופא

which translates as:

The girl Raja Abu Shaban, aged 3, killed by the [Israeli] army on the 9th of August. Photo: WAFA

This was the only source that named the girl, so it seemed to be genuine. But to double-check, I googled “Raja Abu Shaban” in English to see what came up. One of the first hits was this Little Green Footballs post, from August 2006, which revealed that AP and Reuters had retracted their stories about the poor girl.

AP published the following note:

EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT ** A Relative carries the body of Rajaa Abu Shaban, 5, into Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006. On Thursday, doctors said that the 5-year-old Palestinian girl initially believed to have been killed by an Israeli military strike Wednesday apparently died after sustaining head injuries during a fall from a swing in the same area shortly before the strike.(AP Photo/Adel Hana)

I passed on my info to Avi

@avimayer my research just now. See first this 2006 article bit.ly/yxg7GX Then this article on the retraction.bit.ly/z9FKuZ

— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) March 11, 2012

He found a similar note from Reuters, including their photo recall note. And then he spread the word to his 4000 followers. He forced Twitter user @ManaraRam, who had spread the photo into admitting it was false. And then the blogs picked up on it – the IDF’s official blog and the Times of Israel. Honest Reporting traced the original tweet to a UN employee.

Some thoughts on the Twitterstorm:

First, perhaps I’m naive, but I try to follow the advice of the sage Yehoshua ben Prachia, who used to say:

“הוי דן את כל האדם לכף זכות”

“Judge every person favourably”

Or perhaps I’m ultra-cynical, because I also do my best to live by Hanlon’s razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

My point is that I don’t assume the people who used these incorrect photos were deliberately lying. Maybe they made a mistake with their image searches, or didn’t check dates properly. That doesn’t mean I rule out malice absolutely, but I don’t assume it. People are generally quite capable of screwing up.

That said, no doubt there are some anti-Israel campaigners who would say “Well, this might not be an actual photo, but I’m sure it reflects the essential truth about what’s going on”. Or something. In fact, a load of them have answered in just such a predictable way. This article by Lynette Nusbacher wisely notes:

The IDF Spokesman blog says that the photos have been proven false.  False is, in context, irrelevant.  The picture has spoken its thousand words, and the one word “false” is not an adequate response.

Dr Nusbacher is partly wrong; “false” is not irrelevant, and it’s important to expose distortions when they appear. Bur she’s also right to note that the damage is done, and the wider narrative that the picture re-enforces is already well-established. Despite hundreds of rockets, the international media narrative has been “Israel hits Gaza”.

Knocking down false photos isn’t nearly enough. But it’s a start.

What happened next – when most people went home – means that Mitt Romney didn’t win Iowa.

Most states hold primary elections to select their delegates for the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012, which formally choose the Republican Party’s candidate for President. Some, like Iowa, hold caucuses.

Once, most primaries were “winner takes all”, meaning the whole state delegation would be allocated to supporters of whoever gets the most votes in the primary. Now, though, most Republican state parties (and all Democratic state parties) allocate their delegates based broadly on the proportion of votes per candidate, usually with a threshold – meaning that the candidate who comes second or third will still get delegates.

So in Iowa last night, Romney narrowly “won” the caucus beating Rick Santorum by only 8 votes. But Iowa’s delegates will be apportioned as follows:

Note that both Romney and Santorum get 11 delegates: a tie. Ron Paul, only 4% fewer votes than Romney and Santorum, takes a mere 3 delegates. Everyone else – Newt Gingrich with his 14%, Perry with 10 and Bachmann’s 6% – go home with nothing.

Rick Perry has gone back to Texas to “reassess” his campaign, which is politics-speak for “going to withdraw in the next two days”. There is pressure on Bachmann, who came sixth despite working Iowa for months, to do the same, clearing the field for Santorum to be the candidate of the Republican Religious Right.

update 13:30 GMT – Bachmann will make an “announcement” later today.

Romney will probably lead in New Hampshire on Sunday, but Santorum, with the backing of the Religious Right, could seriously challenge him in South Carolina, according to Republican pollster Frank Luntz.

A bigger challenge is Florida – it has 50 delegates in a winner-takes-all primary at the end of January, after South Carolina. Whoever wins Florida will likely be in a commanding position going into super Tuesday. Florida polling has been varied, with Perry and Cain both leading at one point and Gingrich being a close second to Romney in late December polling. Floridians could coalecse around Santorum as their Anyone But Romney candidate, especially if he puts in a good showing in South Carolina.

The Republican party is one step closer to nominating for President a man who looks like a cross between Alan Partridge and Bryn from Gavin and Stacy (see left), and whose name is a slang synonym for… well, for something unpleasant.

All of which means that Mitt Romney didn’t win anything in Iowa and his campaign is probably pretty nervous.

Is Mahmoud Abbas the new Yoko Ono? I ask because it seems very much like he’s trying to break up the Middle East’s very own Fab Four.

In 2002, roughly 18 months after the start of the Second Intifada, the USA, European Union, Russia and the United Nations came together to form the Quartet on the Middle East. It quickly released the “Roadmap to peace”, which was eventually accepted by Israel and the Palestinian Authority as the process that should be followed to reach a peace deal. The Quartet has been the main mediator in the Peace Process since then, the custodian of the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian relationship. In 2007, Tony Blair became the Quartet’s representative, and has generally been praised by the Israeli Government and the PA for the work that he’s done in the region.

But bilateralism isn’t fashionable anymore. For the last 18 months or so, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have been running a unilateral track to statehood – first trying to get all those States that recognised Palestine in the 1980s (the NAM and ex-Eastern Bloc) to reiterate their recognition, then getting the South American states to add their names, and having an unsuccesful stab in Europe too.

After this, Abbas announced that he would seek full UN member state status for Palestine.

The Quartet generally opposes unilateral steps by any side. It tried to persuade the PA not to go to the UN and instead return to talks with Israel without preconditions. It also put pressure on Israel to meet the PA’s preconditions anyway – specifically, to stop construction in settlements. Following Abbas’ application to the Security Council for recognition and membership for Palestine, the Quartet also published a formula for restarting talks between Israel and the PA.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the formula and broadly accepted the terms – albeit with reservations.

It’s pretty clear now that Abbas prefers the unilateral route, which has won him praise in the Arab world for standing up to the USA and strengthened him domestically.

So, suddenly there have been a series of attacks on the Quartet from the PA. First a couple of weeks ago, PA-run newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah called Tony Blair a liar, the “godfather of wars on the Arabs, Muslims and weak peoples” and a US lackey.

Then the PA said the terms of the Quartet statement were ‘biased’ in favour of Israel. Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudaineh said that “The Quartet has lost its credibility” and that Tony Blair is a

“servant of the Israeli government” [who is] “no longer welcome in Ramallah. We prefer not to see him here again.”

The PA leaked that they were considering formally asking for Tony Blair to be fired. And today, Fatah Central Committee member Mohammed Ishtayeh said on the radio:

“We do not expect much of the Quartet. There is discontent with its envoy Mr. Tony Blair”

“Our general evaluation of his efforts is that he has become of no use at all. He has developed a large bias in favor of the Israeli side and he has lost a lot of his credibility.”

“We hope the Quartet will reconsider the appointment of this person”

He also attacked the Quartet more generally, saying

“I believe the Quartet needs to work on itself more than anything else”

There are tensions in the Quartet between Russia and the USA over issues like Israel’s status as the state of the Jewish people. The Quartet office run by Tony Blair has helped hold the members together, but knifing Blair could destabilise the whole operation.

I think that’s the whole point. The Egyptian revoltion and Turkish realignment have changed the balance of power in the Middle East. Unilateralism is boosting Abbas and hurting Israel and the US, as well as splitting the EU. From the point of view of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, the Quartet – with its committment to promoting bilateralism and negotiations – is now in the way. Abbas thinks he can smash the Quartet, and he might be right.

So far, this has proved a good tactical move to embarrass Israel. Strategically, though, in the long run it could make life harder for Abbas and the PA. Guy Goodwin-Gil has already pointed out that a succesful bid would mean that the PLO would lose its status as representing all Palestinians. This is one reason why pro-Palestinian groups around the world are deeply suspicious of the bid. But there are many other potential legal problems and contradictions.

Article 51 of the UN Charter

If the UN recognises Palestine as a state then it has to accept that many Israeli actions will be protected by Article 51 of the UN Charter, which states:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”.

The famous 2004 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the West Bank Barrier says that Israel couldn’t use Article 51 because Palestine isn’t a state:

“Article 51 of the Charter, the Court notes, recognizes the existence of an inherent right of self-defence in the case of armed attack by one State against another State. However, Israel does not claim that the attacks against it are imputable to a foreign State”

If the UN does recognise Palestine then it seems Article 51 is back on the table and the 2004 ICJ opinion may have to be revisited too.

UN Resolutions

If Palestine becomes a UN member state it becomes itself bound by the UN Charter and UN resolutions – for example, here’s UN Security Council resolution 1373, passed unanimously in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001:

“Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,

“1. Decides that all States shall:

“(a) Prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts;

“(b) Criminalize the wilful provision or collection, by any means, directly or indirectly, of funds by their nationals or in their territories with the intention that the funds should be used, or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in order to carry out terrorist acts;

“(c) Freeze without delay funds and other financial assets or economic resources of persons who commit, or attempt to commit, terrorist acts or participate in or facilitate the commission of terrorist acts; of entities owned or controlled directly or indirectly by such persons; and of persons and entities acting on behalf of, or at the direction of such persons and entities, including funds derived or generated from property owned or controlled directly or indirectly by such persons and associated persons and entities;

“(d) Prohibit their nationals or any persons and entities within their territories from making any funds, financial assets or economic resources or financial or other related services available, directly or indirectly, for the benefit of persons who commit or attempt to commit or facilitate or participate in the commission of terrorist acts, of entities owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by such persons and of persons and entities acting on behalf of or at the direction of such persons;

“2. Decides also that all States shall:

“(a) Refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, including by suppressing recruitment of members of terrorist groups and eliminating the supply of weapons to terrorists;

“(b) Take the necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts, including by provision of early warning to other States by exchange of information;

“(c) Deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens;

“(d) Prevent those who finance, plan, facilitate or commit terrorist acts from using their respective territories for those purposes against other States or their citizens;

“(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;

“(f) Afford one another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with criminal investigations or criminal proceedings relating to the financing or support of terrorist acts, including assistance in obtaining evidence in their possession necessary for the proceedings;

“(g) Prevent the movement of terrorists or terrorist groups by effective border controls and controls on issuance of identity papers and travel documents, and through measures for preventing counterfeiting, forgery or fraudulent use of identity papers and travel documents;

Unless the PA substantially changes its practices, it will be in breach of that resolution the day that a State of Palestine is recognised. There are probably loads of other examples too.

Jerusalem

The UN officially considers Jerusalem to be a corpus separatum that is neither in Israel or in any other territory. East Jerusalem is not considered part of the West Bank. Because of this, most countries won’t acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, and will not have Embassies there.

Will the state of Palestine that the PA ask to be regognised include Jerusalem? If it doesn’t, then it looks like they aren’t that bothered about East Jerusalem being the capital of a Palestinian state. If it does, then this implies recognition that West Jerusalem is a full part of Israel, and everyone can stop pretending that it’s Tel Aviv and move their Embassies.

These are some consequences that I noticed. There are doubtless hundreds of others, too. Abbas might be secretly glad that the bid looks certain to fail.

I’ve been having a Twitter argument with Yvonne Ridley. I know I shouldn’t.

This is the second argument I’ve had with Yvonne. The last one was in 2003 or 4, when I was at university. She came to speak at Bristol University as part of an official ‘response’ to a pro-Israel article in the student newspaper (another part of the same ‘response’ was a seven-page screed by Tim Llewellyn attacking the student journalist who wrote the article). I was a student in the mood for a good argument, so I challenged her from the audience with some of the more outrageous comments, like saying suicide bombers were martyrs. At the time I felt like I got the better of her, but perhaps that was just my student bravado.

Afterwards, one of her minders followed me out of the room. He addressed me by name, even though I hadn’t given it and he wasn’t a student. He made a couple of comments, smiling and friendly, but the thrust of them was that he knew exactly who I was. He never introduced himself.

Anyway, back to the present. Yesterday Yvonne suggested on Twitter that Israel was opening the Erez Crossing to plan a ““self-defense” pogrom, with as few outside witnesses as poss“. She also tweeted “more Israelis die from peanut allergies than are killed or injured by rockets from Gaza“. She’s been arguing with Jeremy Newmark, Joe Millis, CIF Watch and me about it.

The pogrom comment is clearly nonsense, and the peanut remark is disgusting and distasteful. It’s like responding to to domestic violence against women in by saying “more women die from breast cancer every year than are killed by their husbands“. It may be true, but it’s not to the point at all. Murder is different from accidental death.

It may be true. But is it true? Where has this claim come from in the first place?

When I challenged Yvonne on Twitter for her source, she responded that  ”the answer lies within Lowkey’s lyrics“.

Lowkey is a rapper and a fan of 9/11 troofer conspiracy theories. He’s popular among Stop-the-War and anti-Israel groups and is often performs at their rallies. The lyrics which Ridley directed to me are in Lowkey’s “Terrorist“. As well including references to popular troofer tropes (“Building 7″ and “nanothermite“) it has the following lyrics:

I know you were terrified when you saw the towers fall
It’s all terror but some forms are more powerful
It seems nuts, how could there be such agony
When more Israelis die from peanut allergies

Well, that doesn’t mean anything at all. More Israelis die than what? The song doesn’t say. Anyway, it’s just a song, not evidence or a statistic. I challenged Yvonne on this and she responded that she was quoting the “official stats” and had only mentioned the song in passing.

Where did these ‘statistics’ come from? My preliminary research didn’t turn up any official statistics on the number of peanut-allergy deaths in Israel, but it should be possible to make an educated guess based on other statistics.
Food allergies have become much more common in the last 30 years. Nobody knows why, though there are all sorts of theories. People with serious food allergies can go into anaphylaxis, which untreated can be fatal. Because of this, many allergic people carry epi-pens to inject chemicals that can stop the anaphylaxis.
According to a 2006 Department of Health study (pdf), anaphylaxis from allergens kills approximately 10-20 people a year in the UK, though it is not always recorded on the death certificate. Of these 10-20, not all will be the victims of food allergies; some might be allergic to chemicals, dust or other exotic allergens. Some certainly will be food allergy victims.

People can be allergic to all sorts of foods. In young children, milk and eggs are the most common allergies, though most children grow out of them. Other common trigger foods are celery, soya, shellfish, fish and citrus fruit, but one of the best-known allergies is the nut allergy (and the peanut allergy).

Peanuts aren’t nuts. They’re peas.

Peanuts are a legume, a bean that grows under the ground. True nuts grow on trees. Some people with nut allergies can eat peanuts, and vice versa, though many people who have one allergy have both.

Peanut allergies are common in much of the world, but in Israel they’re rarer. A 2008 study compared the incidence of peanut allergy between Jewish children in the UK and Jewish children in Israel. It found:

Jewish children in the UK have a prevalence of P[eanut] A[llergy] that is 10-fold higher than that of Jewish children in Israel.

Though nobody knows for sure, scientists note that in Israel, babies eat peanuts from a very young age in the form of Bamba, and that this might be one reason for the lower allergy rates. It’a not all good news though; Israel’s ‘version’ of the peanut allergy is sesame allergy, which is much more common than it is in Europe or America.

Reviewing what we know:

• In the UK, 10-20 people die a year of all allergies
• Some of these 10-20 are food allergies, and some of these are peanut allergies.
• Israel has abut 10% of the population of the UK
• Israel has 10% of the incidence of peanut allergy compared to the UK

Based on these statistics – even allowing for possible better acute care in the UK – you’d expect about one or two allergy deaths a year in Israel, of which only a few, say one every few years, was a peanut allergy death. A recent case in Israel involving a hazelnut allergy fatality (not peanuts) was a major national story. 

Where does this wrong statistic come from? I can’t be sure, but the best candidate is the earliest reference I can find: in late 2008, on a Youtube video made by Steve Johnson for the US-focused website stopfundingIsrael.com. This website calls YouTube “Jew-tube”,  and warns of the:

“zionist infiltraitors (sic) in Australia, Canada, UK and USA. They have infiltrated the Govt. They have infiltrated the media even popular culture…”

Steve Johnson co-wrote a ‘book’ called The Truth: Mossad did September 11th 2001. His speciality piece seems to be calling up those who he considers supporters of Israel, hassling them, and making them into
YouTube videos for the Stop Funding Israel youtube channel.

This channel is fascinating. Most of the videos are by Steve Johnson. The first one claims that the Norway massacres were a false flag operation done by Israel. The next is an interview with a climate-change-sceptic scientist who also seems to deny plate tectonics: earthquakes are caused because the Earth is getting bigger. Really. There’s also a video saying the Bali bombings were really the work of the Australians.

It is Steve Johnson who called up the International Fellowship of Christians & Jews to complain about their advertising campaign, which highlighted the threat of rockets from Gaza. He said:

“From 2000 to 2008, 458 have died from peanut allergies. That’s 24 times the amount that have died from Hamas rockets”

Note that unlike Yvonne Ridley, Steve Johnson doesn’t say more Israelis die from peanut allergies than are killed or injured by rockets from Gaza; only more than are killed. But even Steve Johnson can’t even back up this weaker claim. After being challenged on his peanut statistics, he added the following in the comments to that YouTube video:

Researching the Peanut Allergy I found surprisingly that because Israel feeds their young peanuts and peanut allergies have in fact the worlds LOWEST casulty rate.

The research statistics I was quoting were actually from SESAME ALLERGY REACTIONS within Israel..Which runs from 150-200 per year.

So, he wasn’t talking about peanut allergies, and he wasn’t talking about deaths. He was comparing Israelis killed by Hamas rockets with Israelis who had allergic reactions to sesame. If the original comparison was disgusting, this one is obscene.

Still, lies are persistent and lies about Israel – even accidental lies – find themselves being repeated year after year.

Rocket fire on civillian populations is a weapon of terror. The rockets don’t have to kill very often for people to be frightened of them crashing into their homes, their schools and their places of work and worship. Since this Thursday, an Israeli has been killed by a rocket and tens have been injured. The Israeli who died was in a synagogue which was hit. A school has been hit too, injuring children.

All this means that Yvonne Ridley is not only being offensive and insensitive when she says “more Israelis die from peanut allergies than are killed or injured by rockets from Gaza“.

She’s also wrong.

This is because we keep talking about the “riots”, but what’s happened the last few days aren’t really riots. They have no political cause, no demands, no agenda. They have no single target, They are, on the whole, small groups of people out to steal and smash and burn. If the police protect shops then they’ll burn cars. When the fire brigade comes, they’ll leave and go back to looting shops.

Considering these robberies as “riots” had led some people to suggest that the police need to use the traditional tools of quelling riots. These are the wrong tools for the actual situation.

Water Cannon

Water cannons are a crowd-control measure that has never been us in mainland Britain. They are a bit like giant hoses on the front of armoured vehicles which pump out water under high pressure, and they look a bit like tanks. People near to the cannon will be pushed back and might be knocked off their feet. People further away will get wet. Water cannon can be used to break a large charging mob or a driven towards a stationary mob to disperse them.

Water cannons are pretty useless against small fast-moving groups of people who don’t really care where they cause trouble. They’re too big, too slow and too targeted. If they’re deployed at one end of a street the looters will hit the other end. If they deploy at both ends, the looters will hit the next street.

Tear Gas

Tear Gas is an irritating gas; it makes you cry, your eyes sting and it can even blind in high enough concentrations. It’s actually a fine powder, so when people rub their eyes they make it worse.

Tear gas can disperse crowds if it’s shot into the middle of them, but this can be dangerous to do unless the crowd is able to get away. It can also be used as a defensive measure to stop protesters crossing past a line.

Tear gas is more mobile than water cannon so it can be deployed more easily. But ultimately, it suffers from the same core problem – it moves on the looters down the street, or to the next street. It doesn’t stop them, arrest them or deter them overall.

Curfews

This is just a rubbish idea, for two reasons:

1. How are police going to enforce a curfew if they don’t have the numbers to police the mobs at the moment? People will break the curfew and be emboldened to start stealing.
2. Curfews are to stop trouble at night. Yesterday the looting started before 4pm. I feel like a lunchtime curfew isn’t really an option

(inspired by a good tweet from David Aaronovitch)

The news is rarely instant. It often takes hours for something to be reported as “BREAKING NEWS”. That’s because newsrooms are big and have lots of things happening. It takes time to get cameras to a scene when something’s happening. Sometimes the initial reports take time to make it to a news-desk, or are contradictory by the time they get there.

Twitter means that we can (and often do) know about things before they appear on the mainstream news. As a twitter-addict and news-addict, I follow in turn many people with the same twin afflictions. I am very used to seeing a big story break on Twitter hours before it appears on the BBC. Lots of other people are less used to this, so when they saw hundreds of tweets about trouble in Enfield but no footage on the BBC, they assumed it was some kind of cover-up.

When journalists on the scene showed empty buildings rather than ongoing riots, some people assumed it was part of a conspiracy rather than because the looters were in cars, moving fast and not wanting to be on the news nicking  42-inch tellies.

When the BBC news website wasn’t updated, they assumed there was a D-notice rather than that it was a Sunday night in August so maybe the BBC website team was just a little light on the ground.

When nobody reported on the riot in Hemel Hempstead, they complained but didn’t consider the possibility that there wasn’t actually a riot in Hemel Hempstead.

Tonight proved again that Twitter is now the primary medium for news. This doesn’t mean that journalists have no role to play. I got my news tonight from the Guardian’s Paul Lewis on the scene in Enfield and Edmonton, the Telegraph’s Andrew Hough in Brixton, and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy (who’s still out on the streets of Walthamstow trying to help). Two of those are broadsheet journalists and all were using Twitter.

In a public incident, Twitter will always beat traditional news media for speed. We’re all just going to have to get used to that rather than scrambling about for conspiracies.

I have an instant prejudice against the potluck buffet approach to advocacy. I feel people should pick a line of argument and stick with it, rather than offering all sort of different forms of case. Steinfeld and Howard’s article makes rights-based claims, offers ends-based and harm-based objections, even flirts with anthropolatry.

It’s the section on the medical argument that really bothers me though. Howard and Steinfeld, in their wish to make every argument they can, dismiss the good evidence for circumcision as an HIV-prevention method. They do this in two ways – using problematic sources, and using good sources but misinterpreting them. The offending paragraph in the Guardian article is:

What about the health argument, that male circumcision is “cleaner” and prevents HIV transmission? There is a body of research that claims a correlation between circumcision and reduced transmission rates, and this is not to be taken lightly, since it represents the strongest case for male genital cutting – at least in Aids-ravaged regions. But such research is heavily contested. A 2007 study by Dowsett and Couch asserted that insufficient evidence exists to believe that circumcision does reduce transmission, while Gregorio et al’s later analysis cast doubt on correlations between circumcision and transmission of HIV and STI’s more generally.

This is a a problematic paragraph for a few reasons. The authors say that the evidence that circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection is “heavily contested”, but the piece they link to is a lengthy statement by ‘Doctors Opposing Circumcision’, a polemic piece which is troubling in its own right. The introductory paragraph of that statement stuck out to me:

The theory that male circumcision may be protective against HIV infection was invented and developed in North America. According to Professor Valiere Alcena, MD, he originated the theory that removing the foreskin can prevent HIV infection in an article in August 1986. The late Aaron J. Fink, MD, a noted North American advocate of male circumcision, then promoted Alcena’s theory in letters to medical journals. North American Gerald N. Weiss, MD, who operates a website to promote circumcision, and others contributed to the development of the theory through a paper, which was published in Israel (1993), identifying the prepuce as a possible entry point for HIV. North American circumcision enthusiasts have further promoted male circumcision with opinion pieces in medical journals. Stephen Moses, Daniel T. Halperin, and Robert C. Bailey are other well known North American promoters of male circumcision.

Maybe I’m oversensitive, but the throwaway reference to a paper being “published in Israel” combined with naming Drs Weiss, Moses, Halperin and Fink feels like a dog-whistle way of implying that all the research is dodgy because it’s tainted by Jews and their natural pro-snip bias. In any case, Doctors Against Circumcision is not a group that exists to prevent HIV; it’s a group that exists to prevent circumcision. Anti-HIV groups claim that circumcision is protective against HIV. Anti-circumcision groups say it isn’t. Who is more likely to be neutral in this argument?

Back to the Guardian article, the authors go on to cite two papers. The first is a “2007 study by Dowsett and Couch asserted that insufficient evidence exists to believe that circumcision does reduce transmission“.

I read the paper here. It does not say, as Howard and Steinfeld claim, that “insufficient evidence exists to believe that circumcision does reduce transmission”. Instead it’s an odd sort of survey article, part science and part speculative sociology; it makes moral and cultural arguments against widespread circumcision in Africa because it might modify behaviour, encouraging riskier sex by men. It also says that the mechanism of protection provided by circumcision is unclear. But it doesn’t deny that  the evidence that circumcision is, in itself, protective against HIV infection in heterosexual sex. The Dowsett paper believes that because of all the confounding social factors, there is insufficient evidence for introducing a widespread programme of circumcision in Africa. That’s a different claim than the one made in the Guardian.

The second paper that Steinfeld and Howard mention is “Gregorio et al’s later analysis [which] cast doubt on correlations between circumcision and transmission of HIV and STI’s more generally“.

This paper is here and I would like to believe that the authors of the Guardian article either didn’t read or understand it, because if they did then they’ve totally misrepresented it.

• First of all, the Gregorio paper ONLY deals with HIV infections between men who sleep with men. This is a different set of behavours to heterosexual sex and has different infection vectors and risks.
• Secondly, the paper, actually a meta-analyis of other studies, says that circumcised men who sleep with men are much less likely to have HIV than uncircumcised men who sleep with men.
• Thirdly, while the meta-analysis suggested circumcision was protective in homosexual sex, the data wasn’t statistically significant *yet*
• Fourthly, that the higher-quality the study, the stronger the protective impact of circumcision appeared to be. Well-conducted studies showed a bigger impact than poorly-constructed ones.
• Finally,  the researchers feel that more research might provide a significant result.

All of this is pretty explicit in the last paragraph of the paper:

We found a protective, albeit statistically non-significant, association of circumcision with HIV infection in our metaanalysis of MSM [Men who Sleep with Men] observational studies,and a statistically nonsignificant association between circumcision status and STI. Our data revealed that male circumcision conferred a significant protective effect from HIV infection among MSM in studies conducted before HAART [ie effective HIV treatments] but not after, possibly due to documented increases in sexual risk behavior during the era since the availability of HAART. Additional studies are necessary to elucidate further the relationship between circumcision status and HIV infection or STIs among MSM

Gregorio has nothing to say about heterosexual sex and is “casting doubt” on nothing at all.

Summing up, the mass of evidence shows that circumcision offers the circumcised man some protection against contracting HIV during sex with a woman. There is also weak evidence that it offers a man some protection against contracting HIV during sex with a man. We don’t know for sure whether introducing mass circumcision to Africa would help stop HIV, because perhaps people would take more risks if they think they’re safe, but perhaps it would save millions of lives.

This issue is a matter of life and death, and waving away inconvenient evidence isn’t a sensible way to approach the debate.

The Sunday Telegraph wrote this up with the headline:

“Twitter reveals secrets: Details of British users handed over in landmark case that could help Ryan Giggs”

A similarly excited tone was taken by the guests on on Sky News’ Murnaghan programme this morning.

I’m pretty sure that the media are getting this completely wrong and want to look at the differences between the South Tyneside case and the Giggs case – or indeed, any of the privacy superinjunctions.

The South Tyneside case in brief

I don’t want to spend any time on the wisdom of South Tyneside Council bringing this case. Briefly, councillors on South Tyneside council believed that they were being libelled on Twitter and on blogs by others, including some other councillors. Acting for the allegedly-libelled councillors, South Tyneside Council brought a case in a California court to order Twitter to hand over information about five Twitter accounts linked to the alleged libel.

What has been handed over?

Twitter’s own Terms and Conditions explain when it will hand over data, and what data it will hand over (emphasis added):

Private information requires a subpoena or court order

In accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, non-public information about Twitter users is not released unless we have received a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process document. Some information we store is automatically collected, while other information is provided at the user’s discretion. Though we do store this information, it may not be accurate if the user has created a fake or anonymous profile. Twitter doesn’t require email verification or identity authentication.

Request User Information

Twitter, Inc. is located in San Francisco, California and will only respond in compliance with U.S. law to valid legal process.

Important points here are:

• Twitter anticipates that sometimes it will be forced to hand over data by a court order.
• Twitter doesn’t have very much data to hand over – just whatever name the account user gave them, an email address, maybe a mobile phone number (all of which could be fake), private messages (if any) and IP addresses of recent logins
• Twitter only responds to US law and is based in California

South Tyneside Council would have been passed this data after winning their case, but if the name and email address are fake and there aren’t any private messages then the only thing of use that Twitter has given them is IP addresses. The council will probably have to trace the IP addresses back to Internet Service Providers, and then get additional Court Orders to force the ISPs to hand over data to link these addresses to an actual person. If the original tweeter was using an anonymising proxy to access the Internet and obscure his IP, then this whole legal journey will come to a dead end.

Despite the over-excited media coverage, it’s routine for Internet services of all types to hand over identifying information for the purposes of libel proceedings, and it’s routine for courts to order that release. From personal experience at trying to degrade terrorist web use in 2004-6, Internet companies in the USA will stand up for free speech, protect racism and pro-terrorist sites and ignore requests from the police, but will act immediately if the issue is a civil one like copyright breaches or libel.

Why this won’t help Ryan Giggs

This case is totally different from the Giggs case except for the involvement, in some way, of Twitter.

• In the Tyneside case, the issue is libel, which also exists in US and Californian law. In the Giggs case, the issue is a newly-developed right to privacy that has no direct parallel in US law.
• In the Tyneside case, the central claim is that the councillors have been libelled – that is, that someone is lying about them. In the Giggs case, the original injunction was to prevent the release of true but private information. Giggs couldn’t sue the tweeters for libel unless their comments were false.
• The Twitter accounts in the Tyneside case were assumed to be anonymous (actually, some of them weren’t). The majority of the 75,000+ tweeters who named Giggs before John Hemming named him in Parliament aren’t anonymous; they are the personal accounts of ordinary users complete with names and photos. No need to get a court order to identify them.
• The Giggs case – in fact, all injunction and superinjunction cases – are about prior restraint on speech. In the USA, prior restraints are generally unconstitutional under the First Amendment; people can be punished for what they say if they libel someone, but not prevented from saying it.
• One extra point: the user in the South Tyneside case didn’t fight the council’s court order, even though Twitter offered him the chance.

Lots of high-minded commentators are saying that the South Tyneside case proves that Twitter is not above the law. Who ever said it was? Twitter didn’t – its extensive terms and conditions show that.

The question for the injunction-breakers is “Would a US court order the release of data in a case which isn’t prosecutable under US law?”. As there’s no sign whatsoever that they would, the Giggs tweeters can relax on that account. However,  those who can be identified from their profiles without a court order could be prosecuted under English law for Contempt of Court anyway.