We already know that cutting down healthy trees makes air pollution worse. But that’s not just because they absorb pollutants. Yesterday I learnt that plane trees have spiky “hairs” (called trichomes) on their leaves which can exacerbate the symptoms of lung conditions, especially when disturbed by pruning or felling.

Today’s Sheffield City Council meeting was pretty dramatic: Green councillor Alison Teal was asked to leave for her “defamatory” remarks about Cllr Bryan Lodge, and then the Lib Dems left in protest at Cllr Teal’s exclusion. The context for this drama, as so often in Sheffield’s council chambers, was a debate about the council’s unnecessary felling of street trees.

I once blogged about the different types of voicemail message. But every voicemail message is essentially the same thing: a chunk of information conveyed in a way that might be convenient or fun for the person communicating that information, but substantially less convenient for the person receiving it. In that sense, they’re a lot like videocasts.

Let’s think about the reasons why someone might not answer their mobile phone.

My website has been transformed from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8! I'm cautiously happy with the site's new incarnation. Thanks to my husband J-P Stacey for carrying out the upgrade. He's put in a lot of work on documentation for Drupal 8, writing a series of blogposts about the Drupal 8 APIs which have already proved useful to many people. Those blogposts are all available on his website: www.jpstacey.info

Five people are tied up on the tram tracks...and there’s a tram heading straight for them! You can pull a lever to divert the course of the tram, but if you do that, it’ll go onto another track that also has someone tied up on it. So you either actively choose to kill one person, or passively allow five people to be killed. What do you do?

No, don’t answer that. I don’t care.

This is a follow-up to my post about my experience with Hootsuite, who stored my credit card details without my consent. We hit a deadlock because they repeatedly refused my requests for some contact details so I could get in touch with them. They kept asking for my contact details, but I was reluctant to engage with them on such one-sided terms, especially when my whole problem is with their misuse of the information I’ve already supplied.

Part of my work, both paid and voluntary, involves running social media accounts for various organisations. I often try out different software for scheduling tweets, measuring social media engagement and so on. A year ago I decided to upgrade my Hootsuite account to a Pro (paid) account so I could access the analytics service.

The Oxford Times recently ran a story about a cyclist who became trapped under a car. A group of passers-by managed to lift the car off her before the paramedics arrived and are rightly praised in the article for their heroic actions.

This is a blog post in my very occasional “not a lawyer” series, about ways that ordinary people can use basic knowledge of the law to achieve certain things.

It started with a simple enough request: I had a mobile phone contract with EE (trading as T-Mobile), and I wanted to switch to a different company. I contacted them asking them to unlock my handset, so I could use it on another network, and provide me with a PAC code so I could port my number. I paid a £20 fee for the unlock and got a PAC code valid for up to a month.