free speech

the guardian reports that an edinburgh blogger has been sacked for occasionally mentioning his employers (a well known bookmongers) in his weblog:

waterstone's is, after all, a bookseller, whose stock in trade is the purveying of opinion, not all of it palatable to those concerned. the action that has been taken so far bears more resemblance to the behaviour of an american fast-food chain than a company who deal in intellectual freedoms and the concerns of a pluralist liberal society.