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Hugh Muir
The law is all that stands between order and anarchy. Someone has to draw the line
Wed 18 Mar 2009 20.01 EDT

The law is a funny thing and we hesitate to talk too much about specific incidents, especially when someone has been charged; but on a point of information you might like to know of Paul Saville, a 23-year-old student from the University of the West of England, who was arrested in Bristol the other day - an operation involving four police officers, it is said - allegedly because he wrote in chalk on the pavement. In the first instance he allegedly wrote: "Liberty. The right to question it. The right to ask: 'Are we free?' The right to speak to and ask your neighbours: 'Are we free?'" In a second, he wrote, allegedly: "As the buildings go up, the wages go down." He was ferried to the police station, fingerprinted, had his DNA taken and is due to appear before magistrates next month having been charged with criminal damage "under £5,000". We make no comment on this, for society must be protected and miscreants identified; and his fate lies, as it should, in the wise hands of the judiciary, there to protect and represent society. We just thought you'd like to know what's going on.

So unemployment has passed the 2 million mark and everyone is looking to employment and welfare reform minister Tony McNulty to address the issue. Where to start? What to do? At times like this, ministers sit in their offices and think things through, but who wants to stare at a painting called Misery and Remorse in times of crisis. Better to get out there, do some TV. It can't get much worse.

More signs that Ken Livingstone has reflected and mellowed. "The civil service is filled with crap," he tells Total Politics magazine. "I met a government minister every week for eight years. There were a handful who were in charge." Ed Balls was one, he says, because Gordon or "Mr Big" stood behind him, but alas, he was exceptional. On one occasion he told a minister, "Your civil servants are lying to you" - and demonstrated why. "They didn't have an answer," says Ken. He is too canny these days to name the hapless minister concerned and most of all he would like to be a Labour mayoral candidate, so the interview runs without it. David Miliband should be grateful.

Though these have been difficult times for the FBI, there is good news at last, for the agency has won the National Security Archive's fifth annual Rosemary award - as the federal agency that was worst in answering Freedom of Information Act queries. It's a high honour, named after Rose Mary Woods, President Richard Nixon's secretary who tried unsuccessfully to explain away the 18 minutes missing from one of the damning Oval Office Watergate recordings. She died in 2005, but her spirit lives on in some of the reasons forwarded by an FBI keen to hold on to its information. Researchers who submitted a request about the killing in Pakistan of US reporter Daniel Pearl were rebuffed because they did not submit privacy waivers signed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 architect, and Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. The logistics were tricky in both cases. Both would have been willing to help.

Pause here for a commercial break and to sample a delicious and topical new product going down a storm in Germany - Obama Fingers. "Tender, juicy pieces of chicken breast, coated and fried", complete with a curry sauce dip. "We noticed that American products and the American way of eating are trendy at the moment," said a spokeswoman. And the Dubya meatballs just weren't selling.

By contrast, the book now being prepared by the former president is bound to sell. It will be exciting, revealing, confounding the many haters. "I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," he told Canadians yesterday. The presidential gaffes we saw as part of the job. This is extra.