An end to kiss-and-tell?

Rejoice oh ye faithful, for Lord Justice Eady’s ruling on privacy law has been upheld.

Let me briefly explain: Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennitt sought an injunction against a book by her ‘friend’ Neima Ash, revealing private details about her emotional state, her sexual relationships and her home, amongst other things.

Lord Justice Eady, the David Beckham of media law, ruled for McKennitt, a decision which has now been upheld by the court of appeal. This effectively spells the end for the unauthorised ‘kiss-and-tll’ story, cutting off the supply lines of many a gossip column or hastily penned salacious biography.

So why would a journalist applaud the tightening of privacy law? Doesn’t this snatch the bread from our mouths and strip the pen of its power?

If anything, the reverse is true. For years, journalists have suffered from a reputation somewhere between that of Nicolai Ceaucescu and the Ebola virus. We are never trusted, rarely believed and seldom praised.

This is partly because of the festering cess-pool of celebrity-chasing and waistline-watching that goes on at one end of the industry (i.e. the one that sells).

What the McKennitt v. Ash ruling may have achieved is an end to the least attractive, least valuable part of our trade. Not only will the efforts of talented journalists be channelled into more worthy causes, but ‘real news’ will at last have an opportunity to step out from the shadow of it’s wealthier, more successful cousin, ‘celebrity news.’

Of course, this doesn’t mean the death of gossip columns or of tabloid rumour-mongering, and nor should it. Such journalism responds to an obvious demand and I cannot argue with that type of logic. Many celebrities will continue to benefit from the Faustian pact which allows them free advertising in return for having their privacy ‘invaded’. This ruling does not seek to end that tradition.

But it does offer protection to those who do not court publicity, or at least appreciate some discretion in how they choose to do so. In short, everybody wins – people in the public eye have their private lives protected, the quality of the press can only improve, and the public…well, that’s a tricky one.

Should the public get what the public wants, to quote The Jam? That’s a different debate for a different time. In the meantime, I raise my glass to Lord Justice Eady and the future of journalism.

Silly season sacrifice

The maintenance staff at Turkish Airlines certainly know how to celebrate.

Delighted at having sent a batch of aircraft back to the supplier ahead of schedule, they celebrated in the time-honoured fashion of the aviation industry – by slaughtering a camel on the runway.

Like footballers with their goal celebrations, other airlines will surely seek to top each other in the festive ceremony stakes. Below is a list of events to watch out for in the lead-up to Christmas. A sort of gory advent, if you will.

Dec. 14, Tokyo Airport - Nippon Airways plans to eviscerate an adult whale in the departure lounge. Chunks of blubber will then be distributed among particularly industrious schoolchildren. Nintendo Wii is to launch ‘Whale Hacker’ to coincide with the event, a computer game in which players must hack a fully-grown humpback into bite-sized pieces within the allotted time.

Dec. 18, JFK Airport – Continental Airlines will be chucking a live turkey into a jet engine to celebrate Thanksgiving, the festival of gratitude towards American Indians for allowing themselves to be slaughtered by religious zealots from across the sea.

Dec. 20, Moscow International – Aeroflot is to celebrate Christmas (and at least six weeks without a fatal crash) by issuing Christmas tree shaped lumps of Polonium-210 to all of its stewardesses. A spokesman said: ‘This will cut down on uniform costs. You’ll now be able to see our girls coming from a distance because they’ll be glowing an irridescent green and leaving a trail of teeth and hair everywhere they go.’

Dec. 23, Beijing Airport – To mark the festive season, Chinese Airlines is offering a round-China flight. The flight path will circumnavigate the country in a clockwise direction, with all the windows on the outside boarded up. ‘This is your captain speaking. There’s nothing to see out there folks, now shut up and watch the film.’

Dec. 25, London Heathrow – British Airways Captain of the Year will be strangling a pigeon in a ceremony to mark the completion of Terminal 5. The pigeon will then be diced, fried, and rebranded as ‘Pheasant a la Strangulation’, in BA’s Club Class lounge.

Any more seasonal sacrifices? Answers on a postcard…or in a comment.

Crying over spilt beans

There are few things quite as absurd as the outrage created by the enunciation of a fact that has long been well known to all, but never acknowledged

Like the existence of a homosexual in a conservative family, Israel’s nuclear capability has been more or less common knowledge for decades, and yet the authorities have remained tight-lipped, maintaining 'strategic ambiguity'. If we don’t answer the question, maybe they’ll stop asking.

Now Ehud Olmert has let slip in a German television interview that Israel too is a nuclear power, naming his country in a list of nuclear powers which included the US, France and Russia. The cat was well and truly out of the bag . Or rather, the cat had long since escaped from said bag, raised a family of kittens and made a fortune in the dairy industry before anyone actually admitted to having left the bag open.

Olmert has since made a heroic attempt to backtrack (“I said Israel? Sorry I meant Russia is-really big on nuclear weapons”), and failed miserably. The world and his wife had heard it and there was no denying it, even by reverting to the time-honoured claim that "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the region."

Rumours abound that this was one of those accidentally-on-purpose gaffes, designed to give a covert warning to Iran, which appears bent on acquiring its own nuclear arsenal. But it is highly unlikely that Olmert would choose to make such a veiled (no pun intended) threat towards Iran, which is all too aware of the glistening, pointy-tipped firecrackers lurking just the other side of Iraq and Jordan.

It is more likely to be a symptom of the supreme arrogance with which the Israeli government has acted in recent years, riding roughshod over international law and basking in the privileged position of being the favourite protégé of the world’s only superpower.

Olmert and co have become so used to acting with impunity that they’ve forgotten to watch their mouths before filling them with foot.

But what will come of this? Well, the US is obliged to withhold funding from any country which breaches the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

So that’ll be $2bn a year redirected into the US education system/world AIDS prevention/renewable energy then, won’t it? Will it f***.