OFFEND ON SOCIAL MEDIA MUNIRA MIRZA ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH ONLINE As prosecutors consider new guidelines on abusive tweeting, we have to act to protect freedom of speech, says London Deputy Mayor of Education and Culture Munira Mirza in the London Evening Standard . Until recently, optimists believed that social media would promote free expression. "With millions of messages texted, tweeted and emailed every day, we could reasonably expect the state to intervene only to prevent the gravest of transgressions" -- incitements to violence or terrorism. "That is how it should be in a mature democracy." Perversely, the opposite has happened. Hardly a month goes by without the arrest and even imprisonment of people who have expressed views deemed offensive to the majority in tweets or YouTube recordings. Even a bad joke can end in prosecution. But a free society has many ways of shaming or ignoring offenders. We don't need courts and authorities "to cover our ears as if we were children". FANTASY HISTORY IS FUN BUT DANGEROUS SIMON JENKINS ON HISTORICAL MYTHS The recent discovery of a papyrus fragment suggesting Jesus had a wife is certainly a good story, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian , but was soon dismissed as no more than that. Then up pops Richard III's corpse in a Leicester car park to reopen "the oldest can of medieval worms". Was he a good king or a bad king? Did he kill children? Was the Leicester find, as some Ricardian apologists suggested, the apotheosis