Also, birds.

They aren’t completely random. I took Tabby to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Arundel at the weekend. She loved it.

The naughty tickets

The conductor on the train back from London today didn’t come round to check tickets until just before Hove. Two stops before home. As the train pulled into Hove station, I was still fumbling in my coat pockets trying to find my ticket – always a suspicious sign to an experienced conductor I’m sure.

As he went off to open the doors, the conductor promised to return. And the sideways stare he kept on me as he backed off to the control box was a clear “I’ve  got my eye on you, sonny”. As an example of Great British Officialdom, if he’d pulled off his mask to reveal the round face of the  late, great Arthur Lowe I wouldn’t have been shocked.

Chance would, of course, make a mildly awkward  situation into an all out embarrassment when he returned. My tickets were proudly on display before me, but now I was on the phone – believe it or not because Tamsin had called in a panic to tell me her brakes had just failed pickling Tabitha up from her gym class. Not meeting conductor’s eye, pretending to be involved in a serious conversation… I must have appeared as  cunning as  The Artful Fare Dodger.

I describe the set up because, naturally, there was a problem with my tickets. I’d booked them for the wrong day. A  slip of the mouse on the Southern Rail website booked me a standard class single on the 16.17 from Victoria to Shoreham for Wendes hte 22nd September, not today.

However genuine my “oh my goodness, you must be joking. What a silly mistake’-like response was, of course, the comedy shock expression on my face only confirmed the conductor’s belief that I was a hardened criminal try to ride the £5 fare for free. My pleas of a geniune mistake (true) and “I haven’t got any means of paying for another fare” (false) fell on deaf ears. I even had the difference between a return fare and an advance single less than patiently explained to me.

Fortunately, the train was now fast approaching Shoreham, and there were a lot more tickets to check.

“I’m going to trust you to do this, but when you get to Shoreham, go to the ticket office and sort out paying the full fare”.

Right. Obviously I was going to do that. Once let off the train I’d be out of the station and back to my – rather upset by the brakes failing – wife just as fast as I could without arousing the attention of the railway police. Right?

I’m sure that’s what the conductor thought, and had resigned himslef to letting one get away. But I called his bluff. As much because I was genuinely curious as to what their reaction would be to someone handing themselves in as because I had a guilty conscience about it (and figured that I’ll almost  certainly see that conductor next time I get  on a train).

I did go to the ticket  office. I did the Right Thing. I told the staff there.

I can still hear them laughing from here.

Brilliant piece of filming on Channel 4 new tonight: Living with the Taliban on the Afghan frontline. The incredibly brave, possibly suicidal Norwegian cameraman is one of the only Western journalists to have managed to ‘embed’ themselves with the Taliban, and the resulting piece is one of the most insightful pieces of TV about the whole campaign since it began. Because nothing says there’s two sides to every story like closing a piece on the face of a pre-school ‘insurgent’ killed in a special forces attack.

It is indeed, the anti-Time. Considered, balanced, impartial and remarkably un-sensational.

I can only asume it’s because the cover in question is a famous one showing an Afghan girl from a rural village with piercing green eyes, and Time’s latest issue is led by a dark homage to this image, which show a young Afghan girl from today whose nose has been cut off by the Taliban. The headline reads: What happens if we leave Afghanistan.

It’s an incredibly powerful story: the brutaility of a culture which mutilates teenagers for shaming their family. Have Time researchers been pummelling my bandwidth to find a link to their own magazine in the run up to publication?

Maybe. It’s a controversial issue that they must have been paranoid about putting out. And Aisha’s story is one that neeeds to be told, that the world needs to hear. But it does feel like Time has come out with some some timely (forgive the pun) propaganda for war, just as support for the Afghan campaign is at its lowest.

If only there was a question mark at the end of the coverline, and more of an attempt to grasp the complexity of the Afghan situation, it would have been a potentially stunning journalistic landmark. (See how useful they are in the bad headline at the top of this post – the Time feature may not be propaganda, it may be a genuine and heartfelt plea, but there’s a question to be rasied about it).  The fundamental principle of journalistic impartiality could even demand that at a shot of women and children mutilated or murdered by coalition bombs with a caption ‘This is what happens if we stay’ should be present – sort of like  The Economist’s brilliant treatment of its drug legalisation story recently.

I don’t know much about Afghanistan, but what I do know from the media adn going out and talking to Afghanis living in Britain, is that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ way to look at the country. Like Kyrgyzstan, about which I do know more, it’s not just multi-faceted, it wouldn’t be recognisable as a single entity if it weren’t for the map. Kyrgyzstan was relatively stable, and look at what over-simplification of issues did there.

Look at the last part of this story in the Guardian today, about a female aid worker in Afghanistan. Did you know there are also female priests there? No one image can tell the whole tale.

Coming less than a week after the Wikileaks publication of military reports, which document hundreds of civilian casualties and ‘blue on blue’ incidents, Time’s cover feels like it debases its subject and is nothing more than a heavy handed attempt by CNN to drum up support for the ‘war’.

I’m sure that the truth is more complex, and there’s every likelihood the writer and editor were acting in good faith. But at the very least it feels like Time is jumping the shark, at worst it’s an instrument of government propoganda (as one of the BoingBoing commentators points out, using images of disfigured women to inspire sympathy for the campaign was explicitly suggest in a CIA memo – also publushed on Wikileaks – in 2006).

There’s all kinds of conspiracy that can be read into the fact the US government knew pretty much to the day when the New York Times was going to publish a story about the military reports from Wikileaks. Seen from just slightly distant, it looks almost exactly like the plot from De Niro and Hoffman’s over the top parody of the Balkan war in Wag the Dog.

Local artist, Dan Thompson, asked followers to look for 13-year-old Aaron, who’d been missing since yesterday evening. He posted a description and a photograph from Twitpic.

Dan’s a popular character, with hundreds of followers in the area, and asked Worthing residents to “have one last check of alleyways, back gardens, nearby parks” for Aaron as the sun went down around 9pm. Over the next couple of hours, people updated him with sightings of Aaron, narrowing down his location to Vale Road in Portslade, near where he was found by Dan’s wife.

The police had known that Aaron was missing for 24 hours, but two beat bobbies questioned weren’t aware of any search or circulated description. Unlike the police, Tweeters were actively seeking Aaron, walking, driving and cycling the streets to help find him.

Makes me think there’s an opening for a Foursquare/Ushahidi type app specifcally tailored for this kind of appeal.

Amazingly timely discovery over at Bldgblg: the BP sponsored game Offshore Oil Strike. The whole find is beautifully documented – go read.

It's a microscope, for a cellphone.

Yesterday Engadget carried a link about attaching an SLR-lens to an iPhone 4, but this is even cooler. An internally illuminated microscope that sticks over any cellphone camera.

According to Wireless Design Online, it’s been designed at UCLA with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is being used in field trials somewhere in Africa as we speak. There’s been a lot written about cellphone technology in development recently, from distributing HIV/AIDs test results via SMS to finding people trapped in the rubble of Port-aux-Prince, Haiti. This could be massive for low cost healthcare in hard to reach places.

He’s well known to the British media, and yesterday published a series of letters obtained under the FOI Act that pretty much show the UK government was complicit in the torture terror suspects under his watch in Uzbekistan, and rejected his concerns as not appreciating “the broader picture”.

The letters were picked up by the international press, but not, complains Murray, by the UK media. Which is odd, to say the least.

I’ve always been a little sceptical of the Gates Foundation – even though it blends my favourite themes of technology and international development. Anything of that size, even a charitable fund, scares me a little, but the part of her speech highlighting successes in Malawi and Sri Lanka were quite inspiring. Last week I was invited up to Marie Stopes‘ London HQ to talk about maternal health issues in the developing world and how to get media coverage of them. The latter part remains as difficult as ever, if my inability to get commissioned off the back of the conference is any indicator, but there’s been a lot of progress on the former. A Lancet study last month reckoned that the global maternal mortality rate had declined from 422 per 100,000 live births in 1980 to 251 per 100,000 live births in 2008.

As Prof Jimmy Whitworth of the Wellcome Trust told us, these statistics are probably innacurate, but they’re all we’ve got. While it’s generally good news amd there are lots of success stories like the ones Gates highlighted, only 23 nations are on track to achieve the MDG goal of reducing maternal mortality rate by 75% by 2015. In Afghanistan, for example, Marie Stopes’ country director Farhad Javid – a man who’s incredible story I hope to tell elsewhere soon – the MMR hasn’t changed since the fall of the Taliban, where it remains almost 1600 deaths per 100,000 births.

Gates’ contribution and speech are clearly to be welcomed, with some strong words about contraception and family planning, and an especially strong piece on feedback mechanisms and accountability.The issue of whether or not international aid should fund safe abortion (an area that Canada is now holding the G8 up with, not, as you might imagine, the US) was carefully avoided.