Lonesome, the USA may be the most disgusting nation on earth in many different ways, but there's no way you can say that its press has less freedom than the British press. It's the other way around, and by a wide margin. Just ask Harold Evans.But then when you see how a free press behaves, it's time to start wondering whether a free press is that big a deal.

It's the blithe hypocrisy that gets me most about the states. A congressman was asked on TV the other day why the USA still maintained trading sanctions against Cuba. The answer was that "we don't trade with dictators". That's breathtaking. Half the dictators in the world were installed by USA agencies or USA commercial interests and many others - including some of the worst - have been propped up by Washington.Remember Zaire, or the Shah's Iran, Pinochet (installed to replace an elected government)?