No doubt about it: The World Press Freedom Day is a decent and useful international campaign.

The most recent public exercises of the German politician Gabriele Pauli are intriguing not only from a psychiatrist's point of view but also for journalists: First, Pauli invited Park Avenue magazine to her private home where she posed in Domina style with black latex gloves on and a black eye-mask painted into her face. Then, she started a legal fight about the April issue of Park Avenue when it came out on 28 March.

When John Hooper was still the Guardian's correspondent to Berlin (he is now in Rome) he was very outspoken about one deplorable aspect of the German press. It is known as "the authorisation" of verbatim quotes. John said: "The way journalists are treated in Germany is unique in the Western world. It reminds me of what I have experienced in totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe or in Asia."

To reach maximal disruption with minimal means – this has forever been the objective of terrorism. But it was not before the age of electronic mass communication that this goal could finally be realised.