I was just wondering where the little thumbnail to the past libel threat vs. Craig Murray, Ex-ambassador of Britain to Uzbekistan was disappearing to, when I followed up the past reporting and found out that there is another and new libel threat by Shillings lawyers towards Craig Murray to prevent the publication of a new book. This time the debate is about the methods of Tim Spicer, who is running one of the private, publically unaccountable mercenary armies in Iraq. How lucky that I’ll be back in Edinburgh to follow the next episode of the Shillings libel drama live: “We note from your website http://www.

Internationally the pressure on Germany has been mounting to send more troops to conflict zones. Lately, Barack Obama called for more German troops to Afghanistan and also for these to be sent to the fighting zones in the Southern provinces. Gordon Brown is also fighting for his political survival. Since he became Prime Minister, Labour has lost every election possible. One of Gordon Browns strongest promises was to withdraw the troops before Christmas 2007 from Iraq in particular, but an end to the military intervention in Afghanistan has also been expected [ BBC Forum: Should British troops be in Afghanistan ?

There is quite a discussion going on between the National Union of Journalists and the Climate Camp facilitation group about the media policy and thereby restrictions of journalists on the camp site: see Indymedia.

For the last weeks, I have been visiting friends and relatives in Nuremberg in Germany. I am having a fantastic time and am really busy. In fact, I am having one of the best times of my life – though I seem to repeat this every year by now. Reviewing the Edinburgh Festival for Three Weeks was also a brilliant experience, as was reporting the G8 summit in Germany last year. At the moment I am very happy doing little internet video clips for a local media outlet in Nuremberg; it is good fun as I have a very funny colleague and lots of interesting topics to engage with – we got sent to the huge music festival Rock im Park to do pictures and we could listen to bands like Against Me!

Indymedia London just announced that they’ll be moving to a new technical CMS and thereby plan to leave the MIR site. As York Indymedia and our little Scotland site also did before, and Bristol also reconfirmed its technical autonomy some years ago, but partly because of different reasons. Reasons are that the site is just getting too big now, and also there seem to be difficulties maintaining it as there are too few voluntary programmers willing and able to cope with the huge workload and able to code with Java; the original system has also been modified a lot so it would be a difficult task for new people to get involved with it.