Peter Rhodes: Resisting the repulsive

I SUGGESTED last week that the official figures showing about 5.5 million fraud and cyber crimes in Britain was a gross underestimate. By coincidence, AVG yesterday reported that it defeated 227,056 virus attacks last week alone. That's one computer-security company in a single week. As I said, and as we all know, cyber crime is not only out of control but impossible to count.

LABOUR'S Harriet Harman reveals in her memoirs that in the 1970s at university a lecturer offered to increase her exam grades if she had sex with him. She declined. She tells us he was "totally repulsive." This leaves some big unanswered questions. Is there any virtue in resisting the repulsive? Supposing the lecturer hadn't been repulsive. What if the young Harriet had fancied him like mad? I think we should be told.

MARTIN McGuinness has retired from Ulster politics and is being hailed as a man of peace. Lest we forget. McGuinness was no stranger to violence. He was proud to have been a member of the IRA, an organisation which believed that British rule in Ulster was so evil that anyone who defended it deserved to die. The IRA succeeded in turning a genuine civil-rights movement into an unforgivable guerilla war which lasted 30 years and left 3,000 dead. And when it was over, McGuinness and his mates had achieved absolutely nothing which had not been achieved by home-rule activists in Wales and Scotland through civilised discussion and debate.

I SUPPOSE we all assumed that Donald Trump's first war would be against Islamic State, China or possibly Russia. Then we learn that the two oil pipelines he has approved by executive order have been denounced by Native American activists as "attacks on our ancestral homelands as indigenous people." It is 130 years since the last Indian War in America but the Sioux are mighty angry once again. You can't help wondering what Trump's next executive order will be. Break out the Winchesters. Git in the wagon, woman.

WHAT'S going on in the White House today? I bet Trump is discovering how little power he actually has. Foreign nations have the right to object to US policy and the United States long ago created a system which envelopes its presidents in a web of law and democracy, giving them room to breathe but not to run amok. His ban on Muslim migrants is already being overturned by the courts. He will not be allowed to make the Mexicans pay for his long-promised wall. His longed-for state visits with all their pomp and red carpets from London to Sydney, and guest appearances by his photogenic wife Melania, could be withdrawn, one by one. Donald J Trump is beginning to discover why so many US presidents spend so much time playing golf.

THE British Medical Association has urged its staff not to refer to pregnant women as "expectant mothers" in case it offends transgender people. Instead, it suggests calling them "pregnant people." I must have missed an announcement somewhere. It this National Let's Say Something Really Silly Week?