This is Lance Orton, the New York City T-shirt vendor who spotted smoke coming from an SUV abandoned near Times Square and alerted the police; the police then discovered an (amateurish) carbomb inside it, and were able to carry out a controlled detonation. It's hard not to find his attitude to the fawning media badgering him for quotes refreshing:

Many people are frustrated by their lack of substance, or worried by the (additional) importance they bestow on personality, but I've always enjoyed set-piece debates between political parties. Primarily as a form of entertainment, to be sure, but also for the light they shed on the candidates participating. They may not be the best place to learn about party policy, but forcing politicians to respond to the same questions and to one another's talking points can be revealing in other ways.

...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

I'm editing the openDemocracy front page this week, and alongside the regular articles I've featured a video from contributor Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School who was until recently also a professor here at Oxford. It's a presentation on 'The Historical Record in the Digital Age' in which he discusses the effect of the web on the preservation of information for future generations, and the politics thereof:

I've just discovered this screenshot of what Twitter used to look like (Creative Commons, from prolific flickr screenshot-uploader factoryjoe):

Recently - which in the context of this avowedly 'occasional' blog means last month - I posted on Merseyside police's ill-fated use of an aerial drone to track down a teenage car thief. They ran into legal troubles, for the relatively trivial reason that the Civil Aviation Authority, which is concerned about the threat these devices pose to other air traffic, had not granted the appropriate license.

Towards the end of January, I quoted from a Guardian report on police plans to use aerial drones - more famous as flying assassins for the US military - to monitor the British population. As I commented at the time, "sometimes it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the powers that be are just trying to see how many elements of the repressive dystopias of recent science fiction they can imitate without anyone complaining". A story in today's Guardian suggests the complaints are likely to come sooner rather than later:

For Merseyside police, the "eye in the sky" arrest was a landmark moment in policing history. The force had managed to track down and apprehend a teenager who had fled from a presumed stolen Renault Clio, senior officers revealed, by using a remote-controlled flying robot equipped with thermal imaging cameras.

But the attempt to claim credit for the UK's first arrest using a surveillance drone backfired tonight after it emerged the force itself could face prosecution because officers flew the surveillance aircraft without permission – a criminal offence.

You may recall the 'climategate' scandal that erupted last November after a hacker broke into servers at the University of East Anglia and leaked e-mails and data from its influential Climate Research Unit.

Whatever your opinion of Prime Minister's Questions, it at least provides an opportunity for the opposition parties to put the government on the spot and require its leader to defend his or her policies. Conversely, it allows the Prime Minister to respond to these criticisms, so that if they are themselves dishonest in some way they will be less effective than if they had simply been distributed through an uncritical media.

Tomorrow, at 10:23 a.m., I will overdose on pharmaceuticals, taking forty two times the recommended dose - so if you do not see me in OurKingdom thereafter, you will know why. However, those of you who have been immunised against pseudo-science can take comfort in the fact that the 'pharmaceuticals' are homeopathic: the very canister of Boots own brand sulphur that you can see to the left. They come with an injunction to take no more than two 'pillules' every two hours, but a more appropriate warning would be "may not contain sulphur". As with all homeopathic medicines, the chance of this product containing any of the substance it is advertised as containing (in the large, unmistakable letters you can see in the picture) is vanishingly small - less than the chance of winning the lottery. The '30C' on the label indicates that you would expect on average one atom of sulphur for every 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of sucrose in the canister, far more than it contains. (That's sixty zeroes.)