For the last I can't remember how many days Britain's domestic news (and our newspapers - of all sorts, tabloid and otherwise) have been leading with the story of the Conservative Cabinet Minister, Andrew Mitchell, who allegedly lost his temper at a policeman at the gates of 10 Downing Street.

Mitchell was wanting to leave via the main gate on his bicycle. The cop on duty said words to the effect of, 'Sorry, sir. But you and your bike need to go out by that side gate, the one over there, do you see?' To this Mitchell, who'd had a trying day, we're asked not to forget, said something like, 'Don't talk to me like that, you pleb. You should know your effing place!'

Since then, Mitchell has apologised to the police, both in general (good all round chaps, the police, who deserve our respect all the time) and to the slighted individual, who we are assured accepted the apology. When he was pressed over what, exactly, he had said, Mitchell would only say he had not used the words attributed to him, but didn't say which of  those attributed words were the ones he hadn't used.

But it's not good enough. The Police Federation says there has to be an enquiry to look into the details of the Minister's offence, while the Prime Minister is anxiously insisting that surely now there's been an apology that ought to be sufficient.

The trouble isn't the 'effing place' so much as the use of 'pleb'. Andrew Mitchell typifies the toffs that the Conservatives have been so energetically trying to prove they no longer represent (or no longer ONLY represent). But only toffs, it's argued, would dream of calling a serving policeman a pleb...even if the toff in question had had a trying day. And all this in the week when two young policewomen were shot down by a gangland gunman while they were responding to a call-out about a burglary - the police at their unarmed best.

It may be that government cuts to the police are irritating the Police Federation, and there is now anyway a stand-off between the government and the police. His word against the other guy's word. How does it stand? A Minister's word against a policeman's notebook? Who wins? In a court room, what price anyone's word against a policeman's notebook? Added to this, the story has been playing particularly well in the tabloid newspaper The Sun (Rupert Murdoch's favourite print baby), which says it has had a leak of what the Minister really said. But the Sun currently has a number of journalists being arrested for having corrupt links with...the police. So...erm...

And don't forget that although The Sun backed the Conservatives against Labour in the last elections, it was under the Conservatives that the Leveson enquiry into murky dealings at News International (Murdoch's print empire) was set up - an enquiry that has given a kicking to The Sun and the now closed  News of the World. So is the Sun just telling a story, or getting back at the Government at a time when public sympathy lies with the police because of the shooting of the two policewmen last week?

Whatever. None of this explains why the tale of the Minister, his bicycle and the policeman at the gate still sits, motionless, as our top news story, while Syrians are killing one another in large numbers...for example. 

Meanwhile, in China, in the Taiwanese-run factory where Apple have their i-stuff made (under poor conditions, apparently), there's been a riot. Some 79,000 people are employed there. But last night about 2000 of them got into a shindig with the police after a security guard questioned a worker returning late to his dormitory. The worker didn't have the right ID about his person - or some such misdemeanour. Did this worker accuse the security guard of being a pleb who should know his effing place? We don't know. But we do know, which is the most horrible, that production of Apple's iPhone 5 has been halted. Now that IS a world story. Isn't it?

I am prepared to defend to the last semi-colon the right of people to articulate right-wing views, but not if they come out with complete tosh in the process. The US presidential election is providing...well, plenty of tosh. Take Joyce Kauffman, a Miami radio 'host' who is so much against Obama that she can envisage the need for special action if the votes don't deliver. 

To quote her at a recent rally: 'The most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights, was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don't work, bullets will.' (Whoops, cheers etc). 'If the majority of Americans want us to become a Socialist nation then I have a choice: I can live here or not. Because if people are educated about what happens in most nations when they embrace this nanny-state, this Socialist doctrine...it's not good. It's not better for the country. Most people want to come to America. I don't see them getting on rafts to go to Russia or China...'

Hang on a second.  Russia... China...Socialist nanny-states? Did she say, 'if people are educated...?' When did she last compare the welfare provision of Russia or China with America's?

Publishing is in the doldrums (don't I know it!). In the UK publishers are afraid that the one remaining book-selling chain, Waterstone's, may fail as Borders and Books Etc did. And they are, not unreasonably, quailing at the juggernaut of Amazon, glupping down everything in its path, undercutting as it goes. Possibly, although perhaps (I have no idea) Barnes and Noble are more secure, US publishers are just as jittery.

Amazon  reserved to itself the right to offer newly-published books at hugely reduced prices, no matter how much they had paid for them in the first place because, from Amazon's point of view, it's volume sales that count, not the sales of any individual title. At first, one publisher, Macmillan I think, cavilled about this. Amazon responded by refusing to stock Macmillan titles altogether.

When ebooks became all the rage the row really blew up as the Guardian reported.  So then, after some dithering,  publishers got  together and decided to face Amazon down as a cohort (safety in numbers, don't you know), insisting on fixed prices for the sales of their ebooks to match the price of the printed ones, paying Amazon a flat fee. At this point the Department of Justice in the US took them to court under anti-trust legislation, accusing them of collusion. The publishers, along with Apple who were part of the case, have just lost.

The judge said that although her judgement will strengthen Amazon's dominant position in the market - almost to the point of monopoly, price fixing just isn't on. Some of the publishers involved have backed down and given in. But a few others, along with Apple, have determined to go to appeal.

Now. Apple. Well, they presumably have become part of all this because they were slow on the uptake when it came to ebooks. Amazon cornered the market with the Kindle, which is still the favoured electronic device for straight reading. Doubtless, if Apple had been first off the starting blocks, they would have been behaving in exactly the way Amazon is.

Meanwhile, in a quite separate case, Bruce Willis is taking Apple to court. And why? Because he has just discovered that his enormous library of iTunes, which he thought he had bought, he has in fact only leased. When he dies, all his Tunes go with him. He can't pass them onto his kids. This is also true, of course, of ebooks. So let's see what happens there.

I'm not saying these are connected, but it's a news thing.

1. Kate Middleton/Mrs Windsor/Duchess of Cambridge's breasts, as a spread in a French magazine, have sparked outrage at Buck House (well, they would) but also in the patriotic hearts of the British Press. There is talk of boycotting French products, for God's sake! This story has, unbelievably, been leading our news bulletins - even (shame!) on the BBC World Service, which ought to know better.

2  Meanwhile, an unbelievably amateur, totally crap YouTube film with anti-Muslim sentiment dubbed onto it in post-production, put together somewhere in California (I think), possibly by a Coptic Christian (not sure), has so enfuriated touchy Muslims around the world that largely US, but some other western, embassies and businesses have become targets. And as everyone must by now know, the US ambassador to Libya was killed, apparently in revenge - although for what is fuzzy, as there is no suggestion that the US government was in any way involved in the dreadful little film.

Why have so many Muslims of different nationalities got so easily wound up by something as paltry and awful as the film that probably very few of them have seen? It's reminiscent of the fury against Salman Rushdie when The Satanic Verses came out in 1988. (The anger kicked off in Bradford, got reported in Iran and  Ayatollah Khomeini's famous fatwa followed. Khomeini, of course, had not read the book. But nor had the furious of Bradford. They had simply been told it was offensive to Muslims and were duly offended. Apparently - or so Rushdie says, quite a few of the people who joined in the book-burning bonfires of Bradford now wish they hadn't. Some because they judge it to have been a strategic mistake; others because they read the book later and found nothing to be offended by.)

Some people are saying it's lack of education; others that when decades of tyranny are suddenly removed AND there is lack of education, all sorts of things can kick-off at the slightest provocation. Who knows. But the makers of the film perhaps did, and ought to be asking themselves if they are content with the outcome. 

What surprises me is the incredulity of the British press at Muslim outrage while at the same huffing and puffing over the invasion of the Duchess of Cambridge's breast privacy. The Duchess herself, and her husband, are in the South Seas, accepting garlands of flowers from bare-breasted women. It's made the Duchess giggle - as well it might. In some parts of the world you walk about with your breasts uncovered and no one thinks twice. In others, you walk about with your breasts wrapped away but your hair glossy for all to see. In yet others, you cover your head...

I wonder what causes outrage in the South Seas.

Julian Assange, the Australian self-publicist and self-styled martyr, sought asylum in the London embassy of Ecuador last June, and was granted it today. He faces extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual assault but refuses to go on the grounds that if he does he will be sent to the USA where he might be accused of...what we are not quite sure, related to his Wikileaks website, which in 2010 published a mass of leaked, largely US, diplomatic cables. 

Assange has many supporters among people who don't think very long: anything that exposes secret government doings (especially US ones) must be good; most secret government doings (especially US ones) are surely evil and against the rest of us; the more everyone knows about everything the better. 

This is not the moment to go into the idiocy of that view of the world, though I may at another time. The issue today is that the British Government, in a move of spectacular stupidity, has effectively threatened to go in and get Assange out, brandishing an obscure law of 1987 which would revoke an embassy's diplomatic status.

Never mind that this would instantly undermine the status of British embassies around the world. It just as quickly would make Assange look like the persecuted political martyr he has been trying to convince us he is. Could the British Foreign Office have been more clodhopping if it had actually tried?

Mind you, there's nothing charming about Ecuador's treatment of its own people. But maybe Assange isn't too bothered by that.