Jennifer Lawrence has been househunting in Islington and has told estate agents that she's eager to find a "cosy pad" with Chris Martin. 
She apparently loves England and can't wait to put down roots. She's also cleared all her stuff out of her former boyfriend's flat when she was in London earlier this month "to symbolise the start of her new life with Chris.  Buying a house together in London is the icing on the cake."
Awww, sweet. After the heartbreak of the conscious uncoupling with Gwyneth Paltrow, it's all going to turn out all right for Chris. 
Or so the Star told us in its showbiz lead yesterday.

But the Mail and Sun had different ideas. They spoilt the fun with news that the couple had split after a four-month romance.  Jen dumped Chris "a few days ago", after he had been out to a family dinner with Gwynnie, according to the Sun. They've gone their separate ways, said the Mail, attributing the report to the website E! News.
Today the Mirror's US Editor weighs in with a page 3 lead that adds flesh to yesterday's Mail and Sun stories.
He reports that Jen was fed up with Chris's continued closeness to Paltrow, who was apparently spotted tenderly stroking his face at that dinner, "while a glum Jennifer was pictured elsewhere in Los Angeles having dinner with a friend".
Sources close to the Hunger Games star said: "Jen felt there were three of them in the relationship and didn't feel comfortable..She is one of the most desirable women in Hollywood and quite rightly deserves to be leading lady for any man and not play second fiddle."
So what we'd really like to know now is...
How long had that estate agent story been sitting in the Star reporter's notebook? If only they had got it into print a day or two earlier...

The Mirror and Express made rare common cause yesterday with puffs predicting a Hallowe'en heatwave. 
A couple of days of warm weather and we can't help but start comparing ourselves with Benidorm or Benin. At this time of the year, it also means the arboretums are full of photographers competing for the half-page slots that will doubtless be devoted to trees with light streaming through golden foliage.

Sure enough, here's the Express's effort on page 11: a couple of children climbing a tree at Westonbirt,  sunrise over Tower Bridge and a 14-par weather forecast.
But what's that little single squeezed between the ads? 
A new £97m Met Office computer will be able to do 16,000 trillion calculations a second and give better warning of extreme weather. This will, the Express says, give a £2bn boost to the economy.
Here we have a development that is likely to influence the paper's newslist for years to come and it is written off in three pars.
And three not very meaningful pars. What does that number of calculations mean? It certainly sounds a lot, but how does it compare with other computers? What sort of calculations? Is it that special or so last century?
How will the economy benefit to the tune of £2bn - and will that be an annual boost or a one-off? 

The Telegraph was more enthusiastic about the story - to the extent of making it the splash - and so came up with a little more detail. The new computer would be able to carve the country into 300-metre chunks so that local variations in the weather could be predicted more accurately, a great help when councils need to know which roads to grit or where snow ploughs are going to be needed. 
The Met Office should also be able to predict the weather for the next 24 hours with 90% accuracy. Apparently at the moment it can do so only for the coming 12 hours and to be honest, most of us can do that by looking out of the window.
The Telegraph also tells us about those 16,000 trillion calculations, which seem to suggest that our supercomputer - which has mysteriously not been given an affectionate name yet -  it is going to do a lot of pondering, cross-checking and going through the files, since it is to be fed a mere 106 million observations a day.
The Telegraph also contributes to our collection of pointless comparisons by noting that the computer would weigh as much as 11 double-decker buses. Aren't double-decker buses supposed to be used for height comparison? Have you ever lifted one? No, neither have I. The only person in the country who might have half an idea of what this means is Geoff Capes. So where is he when you need him? Apparently breeding budgies in Lincolnshire.
The Times was also enthused by the October warmth as a source of pretty pictures and it cross-reffed from its Westonbirt picture on 19 to "Met Office supercomputer, page 57". 
Here, on the weather map page, we have a little gem from  Paul Simons. He gets the 16 trillion calculations fact into the first sentence and makes it a little more relevant in the next, saying that this is 13 times as many as the existing computer, making it one of the most powerful in the world. 
I'd still like to know who's at the top of the league. Nasa? Apple? Something in China?
But then comes the hidden treasure: the Met Office got its taste for computer forecasting from the old Lyons Corner House business:

The Met Office showed an interest and Lyons let its forecasters use Leo. They liked it so much that in 1959 they bought their own, which was named Meteor. 
Given our new knowledge about how many trillions of calculations a computer should be expected to do today, we obviously want to know Meteor measured up. According to Simons it could do 30,000 a second.
Five lovely pars and fair play to Simons for keeping this material for his Weather Eye column - but did this story really belong tucked away on page 57?

The Guardian thought not, and gave the story the best show, combining its pretty autumn pictures (including the obligatory snap from Westonbirt) with a page lead that turned the 11 double-deckers into 14 tonnes. There's a nice little panel labelled "Cloud computing" that charts the history of Met Office computers, although it doesn't mention the Lyons Corner House connection. The Guardian also came up with the cutest heading, but it still didn't tell us its name. For that we had to turn to the Independent. 
And the answer is....
Cray@XC40.
I think that needs some work.

Renee Zellwegger was back on the Mail front page this morning with the heading "Another new look for fresh-faced Renee". 
Good to know that the sarcasm machine is still well-oiled.
Obediently following the instruction to "See page 7", we found three more pictures of the actress and a story from the "Mail Foreign Service". 
Good to know that it wasn't too busy with ebola or Isis.

What is that first paragraph trying to say? Well, we're supposed to infer that she must have had surgery. But if Ms Z were to protest, the paper could argue that it was simply saying that last week's chiselled look was more than foundation, powder and blusher deep.
Headline-grabbing transformation? Ouch. Transformation, that is, from the "puffy rounded cheeks and pout" for which she was previously known. Double ouch.
The Express also ran into the actress out and about during breaks in filming a new movie, which both papers dutifully name. But Laura Holland saw her through differently tinted spectacles:

So far so good...suggestions of surgery were silly, says Zellwegger. "Perhaps I look different. Who doesn't when they get older. I'm happy."
Is Holland convinced?

Ouch, ouch, ouch! So when the Express says she looks more like her normal self, it didn't mean that she looked like her normal self, just less unlike her normal self than last week? And while she was much more recognisable, she was still almost unrecognisable - so was she completely unrecognisable last week? 
Confused? You bet. So were the subs. The contradictory headlines play nicely against each other - but not with the copy underneath. And that's the general idea.

The Telegraph press room in Fleet Street, 1882


Telegraph journalists have been told that 55 of their number are about to lose their jobs. That is a tenth of the editorial strength and if the cuts are achieved, it will mean that the papers' journalistic staff will have been halved in nine years.
News of the redundancies comes less than a week after the announcement that Jason Seiken was to focus on strategy and finance, leaving the real business of editing to Chris Evans and his weekend sidekick Ian MacGregor. 
Seiken, who has not relinquished his titles chief content officer and editor in chief, has sent a letter to staff that begins:

SubScribe would like to ask one question: why?
Why is it inevitable that there will be an impact on staff numbers - a euphemism for cuts - as part of an "ongoing editorial transformation"?
Journalists are known as a cynical bunch and they/we have come to recognise that any change is accompanied by staff cuts. But why is it inevitable? Why do proprietors and their senior lieutenants regard piling more work onto fewer people as an essential element in any reorganisation?
The one thing that traditional news organisations have to their advantage in this era of citizen journalism, blogging and tweeting is trust. The trust that has been built up through editorial expertise. Readers know where the information is coming from and have, over the years, drawn their own conclusions about whether a particular journalist knows what he or she is writing about.
Look at all the material that is shared on Facebook by people who have no idea of its provenance - from security hoaxes to spurious world records and apparently innocuous comments about British life from racist and extremist organisations. How many of us bother to check back on where this stuff comes from? We glance at the post, it's come from a "friend" we trust and if it seems reasonable, we click "like" or "share" to please the friend. 
When we share a link to the Telegraph, the Independent or the Mirror, we have a greater confidence than we do when we pass on a blogpost - even one by SubScribe. And so we should.
But how long will that be the case if experienced journalists are to be replaced by "digital" staff of indeterminate qualifications beyond a knowledge of SEO and social media. It's a dangerous strategy. How refreshing it would be if just one of these revolutions involved investment in journalism rather than in the nebulous "digital".
One thing's for sure, Will Lewis's revolutionary newsroom is going to look a lot emptier.

Returning to Seiken's letter, he continues:

A week to bring down the curtain on the careers of journalists who may have spent years with the paper. Yes, that should be fair and sufficient.
If only the Telegraph were a one-off case

The trial, partial conviction and eventual sentencing of Oscar Pistorius have used up a lot of the international supply of newsprint and ink. And the vast majority of it has been expended on Pistorius rather than the woman he killed. 
Would we in Britain have known or cared about Reeva Steenkamp if she had been shot by someone else? Given those front-page photographs immediately after her death, she might have made a candy shot somewhere, but there would never have been this international interest.
But when it came to the court case, shouldn't that have been about Steenkamp? How did we allow Pistorius to make it all about him, his histrionics, his vomiting in court, how he was a broken man? It was theatre.
And now that it's all over, bar the appeals, some commentators are seeking to draw conclusions from a single case about violence against women in South Africa and about the country's justice system.
What nonsense. 
Do we look at our own court cases and make such generalisations? Do we have any real notion of the levels of violence, particularly against women, in this country?
I was struck today by a small single-column photograph of a woman with a bandaged head at the foot of today's Daily Mirror. 
Inside was a first-person account of how a Liverpool taxi driver had attacked his wife with an axe and a Stanley knife last September, imprisoning her for three days before driving her to hospital and torching their family home. He admitted a number of offences, including causing grievous bodily harm, when he appeared in court by video link this week  and will be sentenced in December. The judge has told him that it is almost inevitable that he will go to jail for a long time.
The story, by John Stiggle, is told in detail on pages 6 and 7. It also appears on pages 4 and 5 of today's Liverpool Echo, which is part of the Trinity Mirror stable.

The troubling thing is that June Churchill's ordeal has reached the national press chiefly because of the link between the two newspapers. No other paper picked it up from the court hearing. 
June Churchill is not a frail old lady or a pretty teenager, so she isn't marketable. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a weak, cowed woman: even after the battering she suffered at the hands of her husband she was strong enough to see off raiders who went into her florists' shop and threatened her with a gun last December
The three-day siege may have been unusual, but there is sadly nothing unusual about women suffering this sort of treatment. The Churchills are a middle-aged white couple, but injuries inflicted on Asian women in particular in the name of family honour are equally - and often more -  horrendous.
Individual cases tend not to be reported because they are so common, and when something is common it isn't news - until someone comes along, as Andrew Norfolk of the Times did with the Rotherham sex abuse scandal - and starts joining the dots and produces statistics that appal.
Karen Ingala Smith has been joining dots on women murdered by men over the past three years. On average a woman is killed by a man every three days. 
Smith is a strident feminist who gives no quarter to those who say "what about 
men killed by men, men killed by women or women killed by women". 
Her beef is that male violence is so routine that it needs shouting from the rooftops. SubScribe has noted her work in the past, but the cases of Reeva Steenkamp and June Churchill make it feel timely to point it up again. 
Please look at her blog Counting Dead Women.

So, Mr Newmark joined us again for Sunday breakfast and Sir Alan Moses found plenty more on his plate to chew on.
The picture we have today of the MP for Braintree is rather different from that of two weeks ago. Then, courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, we were aware that he had sent a photograph of himself  not quite in his paisley pyjamas to a Twitter follower he believed to be a young, female party worker. 'Sophie', as he now knows to his cost, did not exist but was actually the Guido Fawkes reporter Alex Wickham.
The story was published on the first day of the Conservative conference, Newmark resigned as charities minister and the "scandal" almost completely overshadowed the defection of Mark Reckless to Ukip.
Over the following 24 hours it was reported that "Sophie" had sent flirtatious tweets to half a dozen Tory MPs, but that only Newmark had responded. The Sunday Mirror editor Alison Phillips and her boss Lloyd Embley both insisted the story was in the public interest, but declined to name the undercover freelance reporter who had brought them the story or to elaborate on the methods used. 
SubScribe, in common with some other commentators - but not this website's Style Counsel blogger Richard Dixon - felt that the sting had been a malicious fishing expedition, with the line cast into the Tory pond in the hope that someone, anyone, would bite. The justification for the enterprise had been reports that "MPs were using social media to meet women", which did not seem a particularly heinous crime. Lots of people do - and one of the "targets" was unmarried.
As the days went by, further details of the operation emerged - including Wickham's identity and the fact that "Sophie" had followed about a hundred Conservatives to make her Twitter account seem genuine. This was not, Guido insisted, a fishing expedition, but a carefully targeted operation with an agreed strategy. Newmark was apparently regarded as "a bit of a creep" by some Tory women. Was this enough to justify setting him up for a sting? Were the other MPS who had been mentioned also potential targets or were they just the only ones to come forward out of the 100 or so followed by Sophie? 
If Brooks Newmark had always been the target, was it luck that he took the bait? Or were the morsels on his hook tastier than those offered to others? Or was Wickham's information about the MP so accurate that there was never any doubt that he would succumb? Other MPs responded to "Sophie's" flattery in a professional manner but, as Susie Boniface pointed out on Question Time, Newmark took the conversation out of the public arena, swapping mobile numbers and "takiing things to the next level". 
By this time I was contemplating a "second thoughts" blog, but still felt some sympathy for my former MP. "Sophie" was supposed to be in her twenties, that's grown-up. "She" had made the running. Newmark was foolish, but not a criminal or corrupt.
Yesterday's Sun changed all that. Its splash seemed to confirm that he did, indeed, have form and that he had performed a selfie striptease for another woman he had "seduced" via Facebook. Newmark announced that he would not contest the next election and that he would be seeking residential psychiatric help. This last was reported in the Mirror and the Mail on Sunday, which ran a full-page mea culpa that talked about demons, anorexia, depression and the need to remove the stigma attached to mental health problems.
The Mirror's coverage was a combination of the Mail and Sun's, but does not - from a distance - appear to have been self-generated. (Having misinterpreted the earlier story, I am aware that this may not be the case.)
This is where it becomes interesting, particularly for Sir Alan. The Sun and the Mail on Sunday both rejected the Wickham story. It has been surmised that this is because they were concerned about the subterfuge used to obtain it. The enthusiasm with which they have followed it up this weekend suggests that Wickham judged his market right, but got the sale pitch wrong. 
Could it be that the Sun was already working along the same lines? Perhaps it didn't want to publish on Tory conference weekend - both it and the Mail were gushing about Cameron's speech later in the week. Perhaps it hadn't quite joined up the dots of its own inquiries. Or perhaps its position as market leader brought in the "single mum" who has now put the cap on Newmark's career.
This is relevant. The emergence of the second woman, Newmark's departure from political life and his admission that he needs psychiatric help probably confirm the public interest. But if the Sun had been on the same trail without the subterfuge, the Mirror would find it hard to argue that that was the only way to get the story.
This morning's further revelations about a "two-year affair" with the Facebook mum don't really take the ethical/public interest arguments much further. MPs do have affairs and people tend not to take much notice these days unless they involve Chelsea football shirts, airport phone calls from Alastair Campbell or Glenn Mulcaire's hacking skills.
One element of today's story troubles me, though. The woman at the centre of it told the Sun that she did not regard herself as having an affair, but that she was in a "full-on" relationship. She says she had no idea that Newmark was married and didn't question him because "I thought 'he's an MP, he's not going to lie'." Right.
But if you were embarking on a relationship with someone you knew to be in public life wouldn't you google them? Not in a sneaky, checking-up-on-them sort of way, but to find out what they'd achieved, to learn more about their interests, to see what other people said about them. 
Mistresses have argued through the ages that they didn't know their lovers were married, but to have a two-year "full-on relationship" with an MP and remain in ignorance? I think not.
Malicious and misconceived: SubScribe's earlier thoughts on the subject

SubScribe is not a fan of Hacked Off. This website does not believe that the Leveson inquiry was a good idea, that statutory involvement in Press regulation was desirable or necessary, or that people who believe themselves to be aggrieved should have any role in determining the fate of those they perceive to be at fault - in either the civil or criminal courts.
SubScribe is even less of a fan of newspapers with entrenched ideas. An open mind is an essential part of a journalist's make-up. Approaching any subject with preconceived ideas is likely to lead to important nuances being missed or overlooked.
The Daily Mail has ranted loud and long about Leveson, the royal charter, the Guardian's role in unearthing the hacking scandal and about Hacked Off.
On Sunday, its sister paper splashed on the fact that Kent Police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to trawl through phone records and uncover the identity of the source of the Chris Huhne speeding ticket story. This was even though a judge had ordered that the source should remain anonymous.
Press Gazette has for more than a month been seeking signatures on a petition to stop police using this act to spy on journalists. The Save Our Sources campaign began after the disclosure that the Met had gone through the Sun political editor's phone records to discover whose leak started the Plebgate scandal.

Today Richard Littlejohn jumps on the bandwagon with a blast at both forces, a quick jibe at Leveson and a reminder that many journalists have been arrested since the phone hacking scandal broke in 2011 and that some are still "languishing" on police bail after three years. The headline on the piece is reproduced above.
SubScribe would hazard a guess that Littlejohn is no supporter of Hacked Off. But he doesn't mention the organisation in this column. It's appearance in the heading is hardly likely to have been the work of a lowly sub, rather to have been dictated from above. As it happens, Hacked Off is standing four square alongside the Mail on this. 
Dr Evan Harris, associate director of the organisation, stood up at the Liberal Democrats' conference in Glasgow yesterday and persuaded his party to adopt a policy of creating public interest defences in law to protect responsible journalism.
Harris, a former LibDem MP, said that his party's ministers should do more to enhance, improve and protect press freedom, particularly in relation to investigative and public interest journalism. He pointed to various examples where this might work:

Harris endorsed Press Gazette's SOS campaign and even went on to suggest that hacking by journalists might be acceptable in the right circumstances:

The Sun, which has made a formal complaint about the Met's use of Ripa to track Tom Newton Dunn's phone calls, reported Harris's speech, but not his association with Hacked Off. A deliberate omission?
This is not the first time Harris's addresses to conference have attracted the Sun's attention. Three years ago it wrote:

It's good to know that at least one paper doesn't hold grudges.
Or maybe it's a case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend"?