FactCheck.it » The Guardian

Il Guardian controlla le promesse del governo

Sergio Maistrello — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 06:23:04 +0000

Una volta che la campagna elettorale è chiusa e il governo si è insediato, le chiacchiere dovrebbero stare a zero e il lavoro della maggioranza dovrebbe poter essere misurato coi fatti. Così il Guardian ha preso i quattrocento e passa impegni presi fin qui dalla coalizione di centrodestra che ha preso il potere poche settimane fa e ha avviato un servizio di tracciamento – il Coalition Pledge Tracker – per misurare quanto e come questi impegni verranno mantenuti.

A month or so into the coalition’s life, Simon Hughes, a non-ministerial Liberal Democrat widely seen as on the party’s left, said: “The coalition deal is a deal. There cannot be any unpicking of items in that deal, otherwise the whole thing risks falling apart.”

Today we are releasing a device to track that deal, or at least the pledges in it. We call it a pledge tracker.

The idea is straightforward: it takes 435 pledges from the coalition programme for government (and some earlier agreements) and tells you what stage each one is at

Wait and see
The default starting place for every pledge. We have no reason to think the government won’t act on it, they just haven’t told us how

In progress
A pledge can move to this state if it has fulfilled one of the following criteria: It is in legislation; it will be in legislation announced in the Queen’s speech; the relevant department has made a public announcement it is currently developing proposals; the members of a review or commission have been named

In trouble
The pledge is in progress but has met stiffer than expected opposition and may not make it through in its current form

Kept
Legislation is passed, a department has acted or a commission or review reported its findings

Not kept
The pledge has been dropped – or what we have ended up with is substantially different from where the government started

Broken in spirit
For those times when the coalition has fulfilled the letter of the pledge, but not kept to the policy that a reasonable person would have inferred from it. (An example is the pledge to reduce the child trust fund for high earners. The entire scheme was scrapped – so, yes, while higher earners did see reductions the burden didn’t fall just on them, as the coalition agreement suggested it would.)

Hard to track
When the coalition says Britain will play a “positive” role in Europe there’s not much we can do with it. Luckily there are only a few of these

Leggi l’intera presentazione di Simon Jeffry sul Politics Blog del Guardian. E naviga dentro al Coalition Pledge Tracker.

(Grazie per la segnalazione a Spot Us Italia)

Che cos’è (e cosa non è) WikiLeaks [eng]

Redazione — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:22:33 +0000

WikiLeaks launched publicly in 2007. The site, led by Assange and run by 1,200 international volunteers (as of Jan. 2010, The Guardian writes) and a handful of full-time workers, “is all about opening up secrets,” NPR wrote. Correspondence among the site’s workers is exchanged via encrypted chats and people are identified by initials, not names, The New Yorker wrote. [...] WikiLeaks’ leaks in the past few years vary in importance. They include the Standard Operating Procedures at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Delta; a batch of “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England; and e-mails from Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo account, The New Yorker wrote, calling the site “a media insurgency,” instead of an organization. The site claims to run leaked documents through a forensic analysis. However, it mentions limitations on their vetting practices due to prohibitive cost of forgery detection forensics when attempting to determine if a document is legitimate or not. According to its website, WikiLeaks believes that it hasn’t published any fake documents so far. However, the site’s description creates wiggle room for any liability if they have, by suggesting that it is possible for it to have published a bad document. But it excuses that by publishing it, “the broader community” of people in the world can judge for themselves if any document is authentic. In other words, let others do the verification and pay for it.

Leggi l’intero articolo di Sydney Smith (primo di due approfondimenti) su StinkyJournalism.org.

Ricominciamo dai programmi

Sergio Maistrello — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:02:34 +0000

In Gran Bretagna è in corso la campagna elettorale per le elezioni politiche. Laburisti e conservatori hanno pubblicato i loro programmi. Il Guardian si è messo a fare le pulci, riga per riga.

(via Luisa Carrada)