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What impact will piracy have this century? This has been a fortnight in which piracy has seen more news coverage than at any time since Blackbeard. Sadly, for all the romance of the name, piracy is no longer the wooden-legged, eye-patched, be-parroted world of Captain Hook and Long John Silver. In the 21st century, a ‘pirate’ will tend to belong to one of two distinct species: pirata mogadisciensis and pirata suionese (sometimes known as pirata cyberspacensis) The former can be…

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Why are 30% still saying they’ll vote Labour? A couple of rules of engagement first, partly to avoid this being 16 screens long. I’m not going to focus on the past, good or bad, since I interpret Morus’s challenge as “Why should we support Labour now?” rather than “Did you do a good/bad job on the minimum wage/Northern Ireland/Iraq/Lisbon etc.?” Second, I don’t expect anyone to change their allegiance as a result of reading the article. What I’m trying to…

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Wikipedia

Does she think it’ll boost her chances of her survival? Perhaps the most remarkable feature following yesterday’s decision by the DPP not to prosecute Damien Green has been the reaction of Jacqui Smith and her home office team. For in spite of everything she seems to be still fighting the case. We saw it in her TV interviews yesterday and there’s a flavour in some of the coverage this morning. Philip Webster and Francis Elliott write in the Times that..”…

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BBC news online “SmearGate” continues to have traction We are now into a fourth successive news cycle and Downing Street is still finding it hard to move on to other things. The BBC is still leading on the story with Sky continuing to put it high up the bulletins. It’s not helped by the less than convincing letters that Gordon Brown sent yesterday. If these had been unequivocal then that might have stemmed the flood of bad headlines. They weren’t,…

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What are the dangers for the Tories?

SkyNews …or will it just open up more questions? I don’t know whether Paul Staines (Guido) planned it like this but launching his story bang in the middle of a long bank holiday weekend has certainly helped it dominate now three full new cycles. During normal periods when the world is at work other stories are likely to emerge and it can be harder for something like “Smeargate” to maintain the traction. Well the latest development is from Number 10…

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LabourList Is this going to be enough to draw a line under the affair? “But Damian did write and send those emails, I did respond hastily and stupidly and now, thanks – it appears – to someone hacking into my private emails, they are in the public domain. Damian has paid a heavy price for writing them but I have to stress one important point: without the hacking they would never ever have seen the light of day. They were…

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