During the Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel was accused by Human Rights Watch and numerous local and international media outlets of attacking two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana on July 23, 2006. Following these accusations, some websites claimed that the attack on the ambulances ‘never happened’ and was a Hezbollah-orchestrated ‘hoax,’ a charge picked up by conservative commentators such as Oliver North. These claims attracted renewed attention when the Australian foreign minister stated that ‘it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax.’

In response, Human Rights Watch researchers carried out a more in-depth investigation of the Qana ambulance attacks. Our investigation involved detailed interviews with four of the six ambulance staff and the three wounded people in the ambulance, on-site visits to the Tibnine and Tyre Red Cross offices from which the ambulances originated to review their records and meet with supervisors, an examination of the ambulances that were struck, an on-site visit to the Qana site where the attack took place, and interviews with others such as international officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross who were involved in responding to the attack on the night it happened.

On the basis of this investigation, we conclude that the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead. The physical and testimonial evidence collected by Human Rights Watch disproves the allegations of a ‘hoax,’ made by persons who never visited Lebanon and had no opportunity to assess the evidence first-hand. Those claiming a hoax relied on faulty conjectures based on a limited number of photographs of one of the ambulances.

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The government has bowed to privacy concerns about a new NHS computer system and conceded that patients should be allowed a veto on information about their medical history being passed from their GP to a national database.

Following a Guardian campaign against the compulsory uploading of personal details to the system known as The Spine, Lord Warner, the health minister, will announce a plan that would allow individuals to review and correct their records and withhold them from the database.

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A brutal moment came last Tuesday for the 15-strong team from the Serious Fraud Office, led by assistant director Helen Garlick. The team’s leaders were ordered down to Lord Goldsmith’s offices in Buckingham Gate with their boxes of files. These contained the fruit of more than two years’ digging into allegations that huge Saudi bribes had been paid by arms group BAE Systems to get weapons deals.

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“We’re not going to have a war, we’re going to have the appearance of a war,” says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet’s screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about the 2006 war on Christmas - a war that tells us much about the growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.

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“The standard for recording attacks acts a filter to keep events out of reports and databases,” the report said. “A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count.”

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The Home Office is at the centre of a fresh row over its handling of asylum applications after it emerged that hundreds of people who have fled the slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan have been told by officials that it is safe to return to their homes.

Among those who have been refused permission to remain in the UK is a woman doctor who was gang-raped by Sudanese soldiers for protesting to aid workers about the rape of more than 40 schoolgirls.

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I am a big fan of the “intelligent design” teaching packs that the god-botherers are sending out to our schools. I hope the government makes them compulsory. They will be incredibly useful in teaching kids the single most important lesson that anyone learns in school.

That lesson is, obviously, that adults in positions of power and responsibility often talk the most extraordinary bullshit.

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“Rights and responsibilities” is a current catchphrase of Blair’s government. The problem lies in its preferred distribution of each: rights accrue to the government, and responsibilities to citizens. That’s a dotted line we should refuse to sign on.

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From Wembley Stadium to the Scottish Parliament building - oh, and did I mention the Millennium Dome? - Britain has a miserable record at bringing in big infrastructure projects on time and on budget. The crucial difference with the Olympics is that they can’t be postponed which means they are even more likely to inflate in cost. When Wembley wasn’t ready, at least the FA Cup Final could be moved to Cardiff. The deadline for the Olympics is an iron one. You can’t tell the world that you’re a bit behind and would they kindly come back in 2013.

The Olympic contracts are not fixed-price contracts. Every landowner, developer, contractor and builder, from the corporate suits to the sparks installing the lighting has been handed a loaded revolver to put to the head of the government. Pay up - or the Games get it. Whatever figure anyone is giving you at the moment, the real cost is going to be even more stratospheric. £8bn? Do I hear £10bn? The man who designed the Montreal Olympic park reckons we will eventually be landed with a bill of not less than £15bn for an event to which only the very wealthy and the very well-connected will get a ticket.

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…unless you happen to read through pages 43-44 of the Postwatch Annual Report 2005/6, you’ll have no idea that the self-appointed (but certainly not self-financing) consumer champion spent £200,000 obtaining a judicial review of a Postcomm (that’s the regulator, by the way) decision; or that during this financial year they anticipate a potential £700,000 bill from legal action involving Royal Mail. Corporate lawyers get distastefully rich while different parts of the sclerotic state sue the arse off each other. Nor would you know that since Postwatch is funded on a fee per complaint basis, a shortfall of £870,000 caused by a drop in customer complaints is expected to be made up by the DTI. When service improves, it costs us more…

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What Blair is proposing, in forcing a literal, physical contract between the state and individual citizens, is a destruction of this collective obligation between citizens. He is proposing the destruction of society itself.

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So I turn my back for five minutes and suddenly we’re executing Saddam?

I’m almost afraid to go on holiday, there would be nothing worse than getting home to discover everyone had spent the whole time I was away holding Kim Jong Il’s head down the toilet and pulling the flush.

Still, I see that the news has gone over well with those whose fierce commitment to universal human rights flops like a stiffy in a scissor factory the moment we, the Americans or the Israelis rev up our war machines to unleash some kick-ass whizz-bang upon lunatics and civilians alike.

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New Labour has been running the health service for nearly ten years now. They must therefore take responsiblity for its current state. Whatever your party politics or your doctrinal beliefs there is no other sustainable position.

And what is the current state of the NHS? Health care in this country is worse than it has ever been.

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Three reports in two days make it utterly clear that Britain is about to become the Twenty First Century’s first surveillance society. It is not being melodramatic to say that each one of us stands on the threshold between a world in which individual liberty and privacy are taken for granted - and appear to the majority to be unthreatened - and a dystopia of total and unwavering scrutiny by big corporations and the state.

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One of the clearest messages to come out of this astonishingly long and convoluted document, is that no one in Mr Brown’s department gave a toss whether a lay person could make sense of it or not.

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Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.

Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added. The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

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The British parliament is God’s gift to dictatorship. If I were an absolute ruler I would get one immediately. Last night Britons were offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigour of the debate, they were still humiliated by the government’s supporters. While British soldiers ram democracy down others’ throats at the point of a gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy’s simplest ritual, challenging the executive.

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Clearly, blogs are something that writers must engage with. The Internet is changing the nature of writing – especially journalistic writing. Aspiring and established journalists should seek to understand the implications of this 21st Century medium… even if they have no intention of writing anything online themselves.

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Many will be saddened to hear of the death of Faith School Quotas, killed whilst travelling in a government vehicle last night.

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Mr Cheney was responding to a conservative radio interviewer who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a “no-brainer” if the information it yielded would save American lives. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” Mr Cheney replied.

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(link from Tim)

The greatest inequality of power between those who impose costs and those who have to bear them is the one that exists between those who are alive now, and those who will inhabit the world we have created. The basic iniquity of the Government’s latest round of support for nuclear power lies in its willingness to exploit this power gap rather than to face it with a sense of responsibility.

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Here, it seems, is more proof that the supposed arrival of the classless society is less a matter of conditions on the ground than a culture that blithely ignores them. Just before this year’s local elections, I spent time in Stoke-on-Trent - omitted from Phil and Sofie’s top 10, but probably bubbling under - where the BNP were snapping at the heels of a broken-down Labour party, sending round leaflets that read less like the Potteries’ take on Mein Kampf than something put out by the Socialist Workers’ party (”Labour betray the working man and woman - potteries, mining steel … all destroyed”). The regenerated urban wonders of Manchester were less than an hour away, yet here were scenes that are actually more common than some people would like to believe: walled-up factories, Poundstretcher shops, low-paid service-sector jobs, and the abiding sense that the good life was happening somewhere else. A couple of days later I ended up discussing all this with a former editor of a tabloid newspaper, who looked at me as if I was slightly mad. His counterargument was based on the usual mirage of limitless affluence and what used to be known as embourgeoisement: “Britain is booming,” he snapped back.

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My favourite quotation from the eminently quotable George Bush is a remark he made last year about the constant attacks on US troops in Iraq: “The insurgents are being defeated; that’s why they’re continuing to fight.” It’s a stunning reversal of all logic. Measuring success in terms of how far you are from success. An even stranger utterance came from Tony Blair at Labour’s 2004 Conference when he defended his actions by saying: “Judgments aren’t the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe.”

I only know what I believe. I find that one of the most chilling statements uttered by a seemingly rational politician. Apart from the fact that it overturns about 16 centuries of western philosophy and questions the entire principle of scientific inquiry, it’s also, surely, how the Taliban get through their day.

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According to the BBC, it appears that at least two of the 16 people who are currently under these Control Orders are on the run.

One of them, appears to have been “missing” for “some months” !

Section 14 of the Act provides that, every 3 months, the Secretary of State must

(a) prepare a report about his exercise of the control order powers during that period; and

(b) lay a copy of that report before Parliament.

Such a report was made by Tony McNulty, the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety on the 11th September 2006 i.e. when the Home Office must have known that one of the, supposedly most dangerous people, in the UK was missing.

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Christopher Hitchens’s response to the Lancet study is ingenious. First he smears it as fantasy – because the Lancet apparently has “a reputation for conjuring bloodbaths”. But then, “for the sake of argument”, he assumes that the figures are correct. What then?

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