Guardian

Let's face facts.

Kelvin MacKenzie has called for disciplinary action against teh Guardian's Nick Davies and Alan Rusbridger in this Spectator column. Normally with Kelvin he seems to over exaggerate things so he can get attention (although I have no idea if they are actually his views or not). This time though, considering his nickname for the Guardian is the "World's Worst", I think he might be deadly serious...

Reading the Riots is a fascinating investigation into the UK summer riots, led by the Guardian and the London School of Economics. I stumbled upon it via Twitter and after looking at various pieces on the website, it left me with a great sense of pride.

The Crown Prosescution Service has persuaded the Met Police not to use the Official Secrets Act to pursue Amelia Hill, the newspaper's reporter who disclosed that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked. It is not yet clear that the Met will abandon its pursuit of Hill entirely. Readers will remember that police investigating phone hacking were  seeking an order under the Official Secrets Act to oblige Guardian journalists to disclose the identity of  sources who gave them information about the scandal. Geoffrey Robertson QC said  "If the journalists are jailed, it will be an ironic tribute to the stupidity of Scotland Yard: a police service that fails to investigate criminal hackers and puts in jail the journalists who exposed them."  The press has been unanimous in its condemnation of the Met's approach with ideological rivals including the Daily Mail wading in to support the Guardian. But this may not be over yet. Continue to watch, read and debate.

Today's report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has provoked much debate about those complex concepts 'fairness' and 'equality'. It will provoke a lot more. In modern political parlance 'fairness' has the definition of a failed blancmange and is used with all the deliberate lack of precision previously reserved for that now meaningless term  'progressive'. 'Equality' is assumed to be a virtue despite the political regimes that champion it (China, North Korea, Cuba...)  This excellent piece by Julian Glover lays a crucial foundation for understanding. Glover argues that fairness has become meaningless largely because it is widely assumed - not least by the EHRC -  to mean the same thing as equality. Plainly it doesn't. He goes on to suggest that sincere left-wingers should embrace inequality as the inevitable and desirable consequence of any version of fairness worth aspiring to. Discuss, please.     

That's the verdict of the Guardian's Hadley Freeman on Daybreak, ITV1's new breakfast programme.

What a strange thing Daybreak is looking set to be," she writes.

On Monday Wikileaks released a mountain of documents on the war in Afghanistan through the Guardian, the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel.

The picture painted is chaotic: failed attempts to win the 'hearts and minds' of the Afghan people, numerous incidences of civilian casualties and evidence that both Iran and Pakistan are helping the Taliban.

 Luke Harding's piece on the front page of today's Guardian is public service journalism at its best. It does not attempt to justify the suicide bombings in Moscow last week that killed 40 people and injured 70. That would be monstrous.  Rather, by diligently explaining the murder by Russian security forces of four garlic pickers on the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia (including 17 year old Movsar Dakaev, pictured), it begins to reveal a small part of the cycle of savagery, repression and revenge by which the seeds of violent separatism are so often nurtured.

Please tell me this isn't a redesign...