In 1979, John Taylor was the first Canadian convicted of "hate speech" offences under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Taylor, a kooky Nazi sympathizer, set up a phone answering machine with anti-Semitic messages on it, and handed out pamphlets telling people to call. He was convicted, and when he refused to change his answering machine message, he was sentenced to a year in jail. Tayl...

Baroness Ashton to call on CND experience in EU role. Phone call for Mr. Putin, phone call for Mr. Putin. Some bird on the line asking about whether there’s any more of that Moscow gold?

I was surprised today to take a phone call from Radio 4’s The World at One asking for Ellie Reeves’ phone number. It’s not every day that the media try to hunt down members of Labour’s national executive committee. But they did rather find themselves at the centre of a...

I've had a brilliant idea for solving the frustration of phoning call centres to sort out extremely mundane details of life. Here it is: I set up a call centre in India. You need to query your gas bill, or phone your mobile phone company, or complain about a delayed train, or order a takeaway. Instead of phoning yourself, you instead pay my company a small fee to make the call for you. You supply ...

I've had a brilliant idea for solving the frustration of phoning call centres to sort out extremely mundane details of life. Here it is: I set up a call centre in India. You need to query your gas bill, or phone your mobile phone company, or complain about a delayed train, or order a takeaway. Instead of phoning yourself, you instead pay my company a small fee to make the call for you. You su...

A comprehensive win for Ed Miliband today, I thought. He came to the Commons with a three point plan concerning the phone hacking scandal: 1. Hold a public inquiry under a senior figure, with the power to call witnesses on oath, to look in general at the culture and practices of the media in this

Tomorrow sees the implementation of a surveillance system that the Stasi could only ever dream of. Under direction from someone in Brussels I never had the chance to vote for, the Labour State machine will record every phone call, every internet site I visit and keep a copy of every email I read. Our 646 corrupt politicians, who have simply abandoned the idea of ever representing us, the voters in...

Honey, it's John McCain on the phone and he wants to know if we're a pizza place... Slate provides us with another great toy to pass the time with until election day. Generate your own crank phone call from the...

Deputy PM has proposed new rules on media plurality and cross-media ownership in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal

Bef0re I dive int0 this, I must explain that I do not know a massive amount about the railways. I know a fair bit, as generations of my family worked for British Rail/National Rail, and you invariably pick things up. But I might make some factual errors in this post, and if so, I apologise, and I hope you still get the point I am trying to make. I got a phone call today, from someone who knows I w...