Despatches from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious

The University of East Anglia broke the law. Everybody knew it, and now the obvious has a redundant seal of approval. By not answering Freedom of Information requests, the UEA contravened the FOI act and could have been prosecuted. Since the cover-up was exposed only a few months ago and no complaint was officially lodged, everything is now under a statute of limitations.

Lesson to everyone: if you want it, you have to pester. If pestering doesn't work, get an official paper trail going. My Russian experience teaches that a stamped paper speaks for a thousand words. It could have meant jail bars for a few UEA bigwigs.

To add insult to injury hardly anyone has lost their job, their reputation, their grants or their zealous self-righteous arrogance. The mere deletion of raw data is grounds for invalidating a thesis; why can't the same stringency be applied to policy-forming documents?