Motoring show Top Gear has been criticised by the BBC Trust after viewers complained about “highly irresponsible” footage.

The Polar Special featured hosts Jeremy Clarkson and James May drinking while driving as they tried to reach the Magnetic North Pole last year.

The trust said the scene “could be seen to glamorise the misuse of alcohol”.

The show’s executive producer said they were beyond the jurisdiction of drink driving laws in international waters.

‘Editorial purpose’

The trust was also told that neither presenter was shown “drunk or out of control of the vehicle”.

The BBC Trust said the scene “was not editorially justified in the context of a family show pre-watershed”.

However, it added that at present in the UK, “it is legal to drink a small amount of alcohol and still drive”.

In the same show complaints were also made about scenes showing frostbitten genitalia.

The trust said there was “a clear editorial purpose for the inclusion of an image of a frostbitten penis, which had been shown for “a medical rather than a sexual purpose”.

Source: BBC News

I’m am so amused by this story on the BBC. That episode was ages ago, and yet people are complaining now? Big deal, James and Jeremy had a wee drink while in the car in the Arctic while Jeremy was driving. It’s not like the downed a bottle of Buckfast and got behind the wheel of a car on a motorway and raced each other at 6pm. Nor did the say “Everybody should drink gin when driving, it’s the thing to do”, or glorify drink driving in any way.

Seriously, Britain. Get a grip.

A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris.

The net’s regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called “top-level” domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.

“We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated,” said Roberto Gaetano, a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)

The organisation said it had already been contacted about setting up domains in the Cyrillic script - used in many Eastern European countries.

“This is a huge step forward in the development of the internet - it will unblock something that has prevented a lot of people getting online,” said Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy at Nominet, the national registry for .uk domain names.

“At the moment, there are one-and-a-half billion people online and four-and-a-half billion people for whom the Roman script just means nothing.”

Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, described passing the resolution as a “historic moment”.

Continue reading at BBC News website…

So, finally the internet will be filled with witty .xxx and .blog domains, as well as ‘funky’ domains such as firstname.surname/ Something which I’m not looking forward to. As far as I’m aware TLD’s such as .biz and .me.uk never really took off. I personally wouldn’t want one, rather sticking to .com and .co.uk - and the latter only because of the uk part.

The only thing that I can see myself doing would be having a .scot just because I’m so proud of my nationality - but it doesn’t make for a sexy looking domain name - ashesfromstars.scot, anyone? google.rocks? msn.sucks? Novelty, that’s all. It (hopefully) will get old quickly.

But out of interest, what would you want to register and why?