Journalists have often risked their lives and their jobs to get the story out, although, according to veteran scribe Helen Thomas, the media is now much less interested in the facts and the reality. The again, at 82, she has much less to lose than the up-and-comers.

But those who do take the risk can find themselves on the wrong end of a very nasty pineapple indeed.

Twenty months ago Tarun Tejpal, editor in chief of tehelka.com, an investigative website, was the most feted journalist in India. He had just broken one of the biggest stories in the country's history - an exposÀ of corruption at the highest levels of government. Now there is not much left - a few dusty chairs, three computers and a forlorn air- conditioning unit. "We have sold virtually everything. I've even flogged the air conditioner," he says dolefully.

In the meantime the Indian Government has imprisoned two of his staff and harassed him out of business, while the corrupt Minister of Defence George Fernandes is back in power.

Of course, it could never happen in the west, could it? Not with its protection of the public's right to know, freedom of speech etc. Think again.

From Salon.com The Greatest Vendetta on Earth

Why would the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey hire a former top CIA honcho to torment a hapless freelance writer for eight years?

Normative Shift by Coral Bell This fascinating document discusses the way actions and assumptions about the way the world works can make sudden, and hitherto unpredictable shifts. She considers the processes that contribute to changes in "what is expected and required", in other words, our norms of behaviour. She looks at the way..

a confluence of developments that reached "critical mass" only in the last decade of the 20th century has induced a rapid shift from one more or less logically inclusive set of international norms to another. Note that I do not say that this shift is from old norms to new, for some of those norms now most vital to understanding world politics date back to the just war doctrine of the 5th century, and are to be found in Hugo Grotius. The shift is rather from "realist/nationalist" norms to alternatives that may in part be called "cosmopolitan" (as opposed to "internationalist"). But the shift toward cosmopolitan norms, which we will examine below, though rapid, is tentative and incomplete because it is related both to technologies and power structures that are still evolving. It may never be universal, and it is still potentially reversible.

First of these in time, but not in importance, has been the institutionalization of diplomacy. That must be dated from 1945 (with 1919 as a "false dawn"), but it has only reached critical mass in the past decade or two. Second, and much more recent, is the end of the Cold War and the advent of the unipolar world, which dates from the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. I will return to these two factors in due course, but for now we dwell on the third and most fundamental factor: the information/ communications revolution.