Can anyone help ... ?

The ubiquitous West Bank water butts

I don't do conspiracies.
But what's been happening to Google searches via Chrome on my trusty Macbook since I came back from Palestine a few weeks ago is genuinely puzzling.
And I wonder if it, or anything like it, has happened to anyone else.
Relaxed in Ramallah
Back at the end of March, just before Easter, I spent a while in Ramallah designing a new diploma and postgraduate course on Strategic Communications at Birzeit University.
Ramallah is, incidentally, one of the most sophisticated and relaxed cities I've ever stayed in.
Once I'd finished there, I spent Easter/Passover in Jerusalem ... and noticed that some of the internet "issues" I'd experienced in Palestine were still happening.
Mostly, Google searches timing out. Or error messages telling me that websites - the site for the Ramallah hotel I'd stayed in, for instance - didn't exist,  though I knew they did.
I put it down to bad WiFi. Just one of those things.
But ...
Back in London last night, I picked up some of the threads of the work I'd been doing in Palestine.
I needed to search for Hanan Ashrawi, the veteran Palestinian spokesperson.
So, on the Mac that had been with me on the trip and using Chrome, I put Hanan's second name into Google. And got this:

OK ... glitch. Try "Palestine:

Hmm ... I had a vague memory of 'stuff' like this happening in Ramallah and Jerusalem. OK ... try "Ramallah":

Same for "Erekat", "Abbas", "Fatah", "Hamas", "Birzeit", "Gaza" and "intifada".
Must be a broken browser ... so, to check, tried "Jerusalem":

Lucky shot. What about "Netanyahu":

Right. Must be working now. Glitch sorted.
Except ... no. Still, Palestinian search terms gave no results and crashed Chrome.
Switched to Safari and Firefox ... which both worked just fine. And Chrome working fine on my PC, using my Google account.
Odder and odder
Oddly, "city of Ramallah" produced no browser crash and the usual hundreds of search results. Ditto "palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat".
But still, even today (after numerous cache clears and that old standby 'turning it off and on again) the one or two word terms that crashed Chrome in Palestine and did so again last night are still, eventually, returning 'Page(s) unresponsive'.
Like I say, I don't do conspiracies. I'm happy to believe this is all my fault and I'd done something weird.
But two questions.
Has anyone else had anything like this? And how can I fix it?

Leopards and spots and stuff ...

I don't follow Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret - 214,999 followers) on Twitter.
But the other day, a friend told me I'd (@kjmarsh - 2,040 followers) been mentioned in one of his tweets ... so naturally, curiosity got the better of discrimination.
The last time I was aware of being on his radar was way back in 1997 and 1998.
First, when he tried to poison the waters around a job - editor of Today - that I hadn't even applied for. And then, at various parliamentary lobby briefings when he railed against me and the programme I was editing at the time, The World at One. 
You can read all about all of that in Stumbling Over Truth, incidentally.
Anyway, this time it was all about Nick Robinson's excellent Battle for the Airwaves - his short series on Radio Four about the scuffles between the BBC and governments over the past 90 years. The edition that looked at the row over the 'sexed up' September 2002 dossier, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (sic).
Unsurprisingly, both Alastair Campbell and I featured in the programme. Unsurprisingly, too, our respective stances haven't changed much over the intervening decade.
But I had to smile when I read his tweet. It's not just our respective stances that haven't changed.
Campbell's uniquely polytropic verbal habits haven't, either.
F'rinstance, he tells his followers that I called Andrew Gilligan "journalistically criminal" in the programme.
Old tricks
That's not quite true. Though, unsurprisingly, it's close enough to confound all but the most attentive. An old trick. Leopards. Spots. Etc.
What I actually said was that "to misquote" and "misattribute ... one of the key claims" of "a single, anonymous source" was "journalistically criminal".
Gilligan's story, however, that Downing Street had "sexed up" the September 2002 dossier and that it made some in intelligence unhappy, was, as we now know for certain, wholly correct. Nothing criminal there ... well, not in putting the story on air.
We now know for certain, too, the truth of Dr Kelly's central allegation; that the notorious 45 minute claim was included in the dossier even though the best analytical brains in the intelligence community had warned it was almost certainly wrong. A warning that was over-ruled using intelligence from an untested source. Intelligence that was subsequently withdrawn.
Those brains were right and Downing Street was wrong ... unless I missed the haul of WMD finds from Saddam's "continuing" and "accelerating" production lines back in the day.
The journalistic criminality was Gilligan failure to report Dr Kelly's allegations accurately in one broadcast out of some dozen and a half on that one day in May 2003. The allegations themselves, however, were true.
As I wrote at the time, it was a case of "good journalism marred by flawed reporting".
In denial
Someone who does follow @campbellclaret is Mike Anson (@MikeAnson). He tweeted a response that "what Gilligan alleged was essentially correct".
Now, I've never been fond of that defence. As I said to Nick Robinson, "essentially correct" or "mostly right" isn't good enough. Not for the BBC and not when you have only a single, anonymous source.
The fact is, though, that but for one idiotic moment, Gilligan did report Dr Kelly accurately. And had he had the nous to report the allegations as he'd set them out and worded them in the script he'd written a few hours earlier, as he was meant to, he'd have spared us that idiotic moment and much else besides.
But Campbell remains in denial. "Wrong in every regard", he tweets.
Every regard?
Well, that's for others to judge. By and large those who care at all any more have made up their minds. Drilling down to what was actually said would bore even those with a PhD in Hutton Studies. And anyway, if you're minded to you can read it all in Stumbling Over Truth.
Suffice it to say, while all of the words in @campbellclaret's tweet were used by someone at some point in the whole affair, it wasn't necessarily in that order, all at the same time or all by the same person.
Pedants note, for instance, the word "agencies".
Bizarre
Most bizarre of all, though, is this little extract from the exchange with a politely persistent @MikeAnson.
Mr Anson correctly reminds Alastair Campbell that Downing Street did "sex up" the case for war, the September 2002 dossier. Even Lord Hutton acknowledged that ... though you have to have a degree in interlinear reading to spot it. And so, of course, did Lord Butler ... rather more bluntly.
Does @campbellclaret?
Not quite.
Ten years late?
One thing, though, I would agree on.
It would have been better had I been able, ten years ago, to tell Lord Hutton how and why Gilligan had screwed up in one broadcast - but that his story was sound. The story I passed, the story written in his script, the story that time has shown to be spot on.
Only Lord Hutton knows why he didn't feel he needed to hear from the programme editor who put the allegations on air. Only the BBC knows why it didn't shove me into the witness box - but if you care at all, you can read why I believe they felt it better to silence me here.
It's baffling how @campbellclaret is still trying to persuade us, perhaps still believes himself, that if the BBC had apologised for the witless wording of one broadcast, it would have had to concede the story and Dr Kelly's allegations were wrong.
That would never have happened. And if anyone still believes the 'sexed up' dossier allegations were wrong ... well, they really are "10yrs too late".

Knots and nots

When I added my signature to a short letter to The Times a while back, it was to make one very narrow, simple but important point in the post-Leveson debate.
A debate that’s been absurdly protracted by the newspaper industry’s passive-aggressive foot-dragging. Promising us, the public, something Leveson-compliant while, somehow, never quite producing it.
Simple
That very narrow, simple but important point was this: that there’s nothing in even the strictest form of media regulation, the regulation of broadcasting, that’s “inevitably anathema to free speech”.
Nothing in that strictest of regulatory regimes that “automatically places us under the thumb of politicians”.
Simple enough, huh?
The point was to introduce a bit of reality to counter this particular diversion. Not to argue that broadcasting-style regulation should be extended to the press. Nor to put Ofcom in charge of our newspapers. No-one sane wants either.
Disappointment
But that didn't stop some getting tangled in knots over it - and that was disappointing.
Steve Hewlett in his interview with Peter Kosminsky on The Media Show, for example. Or his piece in The Guardian – I tweeted, probably a tad harshly, that it was a “stonking exercise in missing the point”.
Peter Preston took a different tack in the Observer though he arrived at a similarly disappointing, nodular destination.
He asked me whether I remembered the “catastrophe of Andrew Gilligan, David Kelly and the Hutton report” and the “Downing Street waves that lapped around (me)”. And whether Greg Dyke – who also signed the Times letter – “remembers the vote by the BBC governors – chaired then by a former chief whip – that swept him out of office?”
Book plug
Simple answer. Yes – and you can read all about both in my book Stumbling Over Truth.
But Peter's message was clear. Broadcasters are in "chains"; our journalism isn't somehow as "free"or, by implication, as 'good' as that of the press. Less good at holding power to account, calling its deceptions and standing up to its pressure.
Proof, he goes on, is that when we rattle our chains, the seen and unseen hands of power clamp us tight again and show who's boss.
It’s fantasy, of course. And, as we said in the letter, frankly insulting.
Waves
But as a pedant, I'm kinda obliged to point out he's not got the before, during and after of the dossier row quite right. The facts don't serve his argument in the way he thinks.
Those Downing Street waves (and before that, Millbank ripples) didn't lap around me only during the dossier business. They threatened daily to break over me and my programmes for a decade before Gilligan shambled on air on that May morning in 2003.
Why? Because The World at One - the programme I was editing most of that time - made a point of shining a light day in, day out on New Labour's sleights of hand intended to “create the truth”.
It meant endless bloody rows with Downing Street - and, naturally, they tried to put the squeeze on. But there was never a sniff of “back off” from my bosses. Nor so much as a raised eyebrow from our “regulators”, the BBC Governors in those days.
All the suits took an interest in was whether our stories were well-founded, well-sourced and accurate. They were, we got on with it.
Dossiers and defenestration
The 2003/4 dossier affair was no different - except for one thing.
Gilligan's story was well-founded and well-sourced ... but in one broadcast, that notorious 6.07 two-way, it wasn't accurate. And it was that inaccuracy that let the sea in (to continue Peter’s wave metaphor) not the allegations themselves.
As to Greg’s defenestration … well, he's spoken for himself on that. Short version - it’s a bit simple minded to reduce it to Downing Street’s revenge or Governors second guessing what Downing Street wanted or expected and flexing regulatory muscles.
Chains
Peter suggests it would be better if “lovers of editorial freedom” – like me, I suppose – “rattled the chains that tie them down rather than demanded more chains for everyone”.
See above for my view on whether I was ever "chained".
But the idea that I or anyone else who signed that Times letter did so to demand "chains" for everyone is bunk.
Canard
Unsurprisingly, the old phone-hacking/MPs’ expenses canard waddles on stage, too ... though once again, Peter’s memory is slightly at fault.
Chris Patten didn’t quite tell the Society of Editors at the back end of 2011 that the BBC “couldn't have broken either the MPs' expenses story or the phone-hacking scandal”.
What he did say was that the BBC couldn't have “paid for the information on MPs' expenses as the Daily Telegraph did, nor pursued the hacking story at News International as remorselessly as the Guardian campaign did” (my emphasis).
As it happens, I don’t think the good Lord is right on either count. I can’t think of anything in the BBC’s regulatory framework or editorial guidelines that would have stopped me pursuing phone-hacking back in the day if I or one of my reporters had got a sniff of it.
Nor, if we'd got our facts right, can I imagine anyone of my then bosses trying to stop me.
Teeth
And while it would undoubtedly have made for an interesting discussion in the higher echelons of BBC News, I’m not as certain as Lord P is that a whistleblower offering the MP's expenses data would have been turned peremptorily away. Certainly not if one of my former colleagues had been offered it and had really got his or her teeth into it.
Sure, the BBC almost certainly wouldn't have handed over a six figure sized wad of the public’s cash just like that. But there are ways and ways and I don't find it impossible to imagine that one could have been found.
Plus, there would have been little difficulty in a genuine ex post facto public interest justification - the acid test. 
Called to account
But in the end, tying the post-Leveson debate in these kinds of knot is all about trying to delay the inevitable.
It won't.
We know there's overwhelming public support for Leveson's proposals or something very close to them - not to "chain" the press nor impose broadcasting style regulation.
But to do something very simple and very overdue.
To place the last remaining unaccountable power in the land - the press - in the same position it insists on for all other powerful institutions.
To make it accountable to the public.