I am very worried by the report of a heavy handed police raid on Tallbloke, a blogger in Norfolk. According to this account, he was raided due to a link to leaked documents posted in a comments thread. We have become far too blase about the rapid erosion of civil liberties in this country. Norfolk is not devoid of serious crimes which these six detectives should be better employed in investigating.

I had not heard of Tallbloke and know nothing beyond the report to which I have linked. His blog discusses climate change at scientific levels well above my understanding, but scarcely seems a subject for the police. I do not share Tallboy’s views – in particular, I think man-made climate change is a fact we are not tackling with nearly sufficient seriousness. But whether or not I agree is irrelevant. What is important is the free speech issue. It is astonishing our media are criticising government handling of protest in Russia, when we have police raidng dissident bloggers in Norfolk which goes unnoticed.

Not even in Ghana can you escape the US propaganda surrounding the final pull-out of troops (but not oil companies) from Iraq. They leave Iraq “sovereign and free”, a variety of thuggish looking and dull Americans have just told us.

But being in Ghana I probably see rather more balance on TV than I would in the UK. For example, while there is still no official body count from the war, there is an official count of those wounded. The Iraqi Ministry of Health states, officially, that over 3 million were maimed.

Even though the Iraqi healthcare system was damaged by a decade of sanctions before the invastion, on the eve of the attack there were still over twice as many functioning healthcare clinics and hospitals as there are today, and nearly five times as many doctors working in them.

You won’t see that on BBC or Sky.