Six of the Best 395

Jonathan Fryer questions Malcolm Rifkind about the political oversight of the secret services.

Richard Horsman writes for the Guardian on the unwillingness of some local councillors to allow the filming of meetings: "The proposal has exposed a generation gap between those more mature active citizens on the comfy chairs in the council chamber who know things must be done in 'the proper way', and empowered upstarts with electric everything in the public gallery tweeting and liveblogging proceedings to online audiences."

Liberal Burblings says that electing monarchs is an ancient British tradition.

"It’s just after 8pm on the evening of the 30th October 1883 and the London Underground is busier than normal as people are hurrying home from a big exhibition in Earl’s Court — when two large explosions take place, sending smoke billowing into nearby stations." IanVisits on the first terrorist attack on the London Undergound.

We all know the story of how Orson Welles's radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds led to mass panic in America, but is it true? Media Myth Alert suggests not.

"The stretch of canal where Owen died is not remarkable; it curves gently in a slow bend, behind is a drainage ditch and low fields stretching back to the village; across the other side of the water, flat dairy fields and a couple of farm cottages, much the same as the scene which would have loomed intermittently out of the mist and above the spatter of machine gun fire in that early dawn in November 1918." SeanMcP Blogfeast follows the footsteps of the poet Wilfred Owen.