Pink Sauce

Today, together with a few thousand people, I attended the "mass photo gathering in defence of street photography" in Tafalgar Square. A protest in response to apparently haphazard way in the which the police apply S44 of the Terrorism Act. Recently there has been several high profile cases of people getting stopped simply because they are taking pictures. Several years ago before this become so obvious, I was also stopped and searched and my details were collected, simply for walking around Whitehall and taking pictures. Months later, it was in London Bridge station that a policeman asked me to delete a picture of a hoarding I had just taken with my mobile phone for the reason that it is not allowed to take pictures of the structure of the station. Strangely nothing was said to the person using his camcorder a few metres away. Recently the European court of human rights ruled that the use of counter-terrorism stop and search powers on photographers and peace protesters was ...

Better late, than never, they say. Well, perhaps not in this case. This week, I finally got round to doing something I have been meaning to do ever since the exhibition opened and which I was very much looking forward to, due to my strong interest in the Aztec civilisation. I went to see Moctezuma, Aztec Ruler at the British Museum (BM). It closes next Saturday, so it was indeed very late but it was also rather disappointing. My first big issue about the exhibition is that, unlike the fabulous Hadrian exhibition of last year that did exactly what it said on the tin, this one is not really about Moctezuma. Despite the fact that a press release by the Museum claims that the exhibition, which is the last in the series "exploring power and empire", "is the first exhibition to examine the semi-mythical status of Moctezuma and his legacy today", it is not really about him. To be fair there is probably so little reliable information about him (ie information that has n...

If you cast your mind to 2008, you may remember that the wife of Northern Ireland's first minister, Iris Robinson, said that homosexuality was "comparable" to paedophilia and a mental illness that could be "cured". Last month, she announced that she was retiring from politics, adding that she indeed knew about mental illness, since she was a sufferer herself. And yesterday, she revealed she tried to kill herself while suffering depression after an extra-marital affair. As Newton Emerson, columnist and satirist for the Irish News, who was discussing this sorry business on Thursday morning (scroll down to 0722) on Radio4's Today, had warned us, there was more to come. The story apparently broke after a BBC investigation on the Robinson couple. The BBC Northern Ireland show, called Spotlight, revealed (iPlayer till 15 january) that Mrs "are you trying to seduce me?" Robinson got sexually involved with a 19 year old man right about the time when sh...