BBC2 BROADCAST The Colour of Football on 19 August about racism in the game. It's an important issue. Yet they transmitted it late at night in the middle of a month when many are on holiday. There were positive aspects. It allowed ordinary fans to voice their disgust at racism. It featured black players explaining the effect that racist abuse and actions have on them.
Whatever the outcome of the Hutton inquiry, it's clear that the Iraq war is putting not just the Blair government, but also its more powerful partner across the Atlantic increasingly on the defensive.
Diana Mosley, who died last week, was a particularly unpleasant fossil. Fossils are relics of living things that tell us something about the past. Sometimes what they tell us is so deeply upsetting to the conventional wisdom that people make great efforts to hide it.
BURIED AMID the largely vacuous coverage of Tony Blair overtaking Clement Attlee as the longest serving Labour prime minister were a couple of interesting facts. The Independent on Sunday put together a mass of figures to try to establish whether or not we are better off now than we were in 1950, when Attlee was prime minister.
LIKE MOST people, I was shocked by the results of a report published last week into the effects of taking Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). The huge study of over one million women aged between 50 and 65 found that those who took the most common form of HRT, a combined dose of oestrogen and progesterone, were twice as likely to get breast cancer.
THE RECESSION in the US is over, according to the guardian of American economic statistics. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) announced recently that the recession actually ended nearly two years ago, in November 2001. Tell that to the Americans who are still losing their jobs. The US economy shed jobs for the sixth consecutive month in July.
BETWEEN THE peaks of excitement over who won Big Brother and the whys and wherefores of Geoff Hoon's holiday arrangements, you may have missed an unnerving and at times unpleasant TV history of the Baader-Meinhof episode. It told the story of what happened when a group of Germans in what was then West Germany formed the Red Army Faction.
FOR AS long as I can remember, people have been saying that the left needs to organise at a European level to match the development of the European Union. For years, this was just talk. Now, in an absent-minded sort of way, it's happening.
IT'S THAT time of year again when Edinburgh holds its breath and waits for the biggest arts festival in the world to explode across its streets. The Edinburgh Fringe is a highlight of the year for many socialists and radicals across Britain and, indeed, throughout the world. In these days of mindless musicals and trash "reality TV", the Fringe offers an opportunity to escape the mass manufactured garbage which so often dominates our culture.
THE AWARD of a knighthood to outgoing TGWU union general secretary Bill Morris might have caught many people by surprise. He has never been identified as being inside the Blair camp.
