This is false. In England and Wales it is a complete defence to show that the defamatory imputation is substantially true.

Green parties have been at the forefront of the fight against software patents and for digital rights in Europe since before the first Pirate Party was founded. It's just that they don't think it's the only important issue.

The number of entries for GCSE ICT has halved in the last five years, and not because the course is insufficiently challenging or technical. The reason is that due to the league tables schools have a powerful incentive to push their students into worthless 'vocational' courses that are even easier and duller than GCSE. Making the GCSE more technically challenging will not improve this state of affairs.

In fact the rural poor do significantly worse than the urban poor in England, and the gap is greater the further you get from the big cities. I can think of at least two reasons for this: rural schools are less well funded than urban schools, and access to pre-school and nursery care is worse in rural areas.

English law is at the other end of the exclusionary-inclusionary scale from the US, with Scotland somewhere in the middle. In general English courts will admit improperly obtained evidence so long as it is relevant and doesn't impact too greatly on the fairness of the proceedings.

It's true that Mr Morris is not acting wisely, but I'd have more sympathy for Techdirt if they were not serving up UK ads to UK readers. Profiting from globally publishing antisemitic comments hardly gives them the moral high ground regardless of the legal issues.

Since your core policies are very similar to those of the Green Party on these issues, will you be supporting the Green Party in their target seats?

'Conspiracy to defraud' is a catch-all common law offence that is committed when a third party suffers a loss as a result of an agreement between others. It is not necessary to show that the action agreed to by the conspirators would be unlawful, but there does need to be an element of dishonesty. In this case the co-conspirators were the users of the site and the 'victims' were the copyright holders.

Until very recently Legal Aid and no-win no-fee arrangements were not available for libel, so the libel court was inaccessible to all but the wealthiest individuals. The British press exploited this by regularly defaming people without any fear of legal retribution. The law remained claimant-friendly since those cases that made it to court were almost invariably the strongest cases. Whilst it would be personally bad for Simon Singh if he lost this case such an affront to common sense could provide the momentum for the law to be changed.

I think it's just you. One thing of which the Labour governments since 1997 cannot be accused is not taking LGBT rights seriously -- they have pushed through legislation addressing discrimination despite concerted opposition on several occasions. This petition gives the government the opportunity to say something they are happy to say.

That is an utterly ridiculous claim. The reason why the WTO ruled against the USA is because it is clearly in breach of its obligations under the treaties. The WTO has held that the USA has the right within the treaties to ban remote gambling, but that they haven't completely banned remote gambling, instead they have restrictions that unfairly discriminate in favour of US-based operators. The USA can resolve the problem either by completely banning remote gambling or by ending the discrimination. There are apparently domestic political difficulties that prevent the USA from following either course, but that is irrelevant in determining whether the USA has adhered to the rules it agreed to be bound by.

There's probably about half a dozen sites in my whitelist, and they are those that I value and that have politely requested that I disable ABP on their site. My motivation for blocking by default is that I don't like ads. On the rare occasions that I watch commercial TV, visit the cinema or read a print magazine I find the ads intrusive and irritating, but the amount and type of advertising in these media is predictable in advance and I can make an informed choice about whether I want to expose myself to it. The WWW is different -- it is a mixture of commercial and non-commercial content and generally there is no way of predicting in advance whether a site is saturated with annoying ads, has a few discreet text ads or is ad-free. ABP gives me the same ability to control how much advertising I am exposed to as with other media. If ABP decide to subvert this by adding nag banners or popups at the behest of websites then the first fork that removes this will get my donation.

This already happens - the UN observes US federal elections indirectly through a mandate to the OSCE (http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/14676.html). Each time they report that US elections are generally free and fair, and each time report the same defects that need to be addressed: Lack of transparency in electronic voting, inconsistent registration procedures, disenfranchisement of felons and DC residents, gerrymandering, burdensome ballot access requirements, conflicts of interests for election officials, and that in some areas voters party affiliation is made public.

Firearms have no particular cultural or constitutional significance in Great Britain. US law may be based on English common law, but the reverse isn't true. The right to bear arms in English Law has always been restricted to those weapons that were suitable for the purpose of self-defence. In a society where the probability of encountering a gun-wielding assailant is very small there are few individuals for whom a handgun is a suitable defensive weapon. Gun ownership has never been widespread in Britain and most people would prefer to keep it that way, regardless of constitutional controversies in foreign lands.

So where on Earth did these guys get their agenda from? Why the fuck are they pushing for stuff like that? What's wrong with these people? That's not how being a liberal is supposed to be.

The Labour party isn't a liberal party, it's a populist pro-business centre right (by European standards) party. It's platform since the early 1990s has been "the third way", i.e. the pursuit of egalitarian aims such as reducing poverty and improving education coupled with traditionally right-wing concerns such as the promotion of market capitalism and reduction in crime. Individual liberty is low on their agenda. They promised a fairer and more prosperous society, not a freer society. The UK government's position is easy to understand when you consider that, unlike most EU countries, the UK is a net exporter of cultural goods. The short-term interests of an important sector of the UK economy would be threatened by the introduction of net neutrality.