It’s one o’clock in the afternooon in London as I write this — eight in the morning in New York — and a parliamentary vote is expected within hours on the British government’s unprecedented proposal to raise tuition fees at UK universities to as high as £9000 (more than $14000) a year.

The plan has drawn massive protests throughout Britain over the last month, and more are already underway today. The country’s governing coalition, led by the Conservative Party and joined by the Liberal Democrats, has an 80-vote majority in the House of Commons, but announced defections and abstentions have already considerably reduced that margin on this vote.

You can find background on the upcoming vote here, while the Guardian newspaper is liveblogging today’s events here. I’ll be updating this post as the day unfolds.

1:10 pm London Time | Tonight’s Commons vote is scheduled for 5:25 pm — just after noon on the US East Coast.

4:00 pm | Huge protests in London, many reports police violence. Police on horses have rushed crowds, protesters have been beaten. Growing reports of protesters responding with violence of their own. Protesters are being “kettled” — confined to a closed location by police without charges. One officer is said to have been knocked from his horse and injured.

4:05 pm | Twitter hashtags #dayx3 and #demo2010 seem to be being used about equally, often in combination. Check out either or both for breaking news, including reports from the scene of today’s various protests.

5:00 pm | BBC is reporting seven arrests so far, 19 people treated for injuries by medical workers on the scene of the protests. Six of the 19 were taken to hospital.

5:30 pm | Parliament voting now. Results in a few minutes.

5:45 pm | The proposal passed 323-302. With 650 seats in parliament, that means abstentions and no-votes carried the day for the government.

10:30 pm | Police are still kettling protesters — confining them behind barricades and refusing to let them leave the area.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. As I write this, “Yoko Ono” is sixth on Twitter’s global trending topics list, and “Lenon” is fifth.

Neither “Lennon” nor “John Lennon” appears.

Why is this? Is it because more people are misspelling John Lennon’s name than spelling it correctly? No. Far more people are spelling it right than wrong — and a big chunk of those who are spelling it wrong are doing so to criticize it.

But Twitter doesn’t measure raw numbers in calculating trending topics, it uses a complex algorithm that values novelty over frequency. So when “Lennon” goes from a lot of hits to a whole huge humongous lot of hits, it doesn’t trend. But when Lenon goes from almost no hits to a lot of hits, just because a tiny percentage of something really big is bigger than a tiny percentage of something sort of big, it does. And when we start tweeting about how ridiculous it is that “Lenon” is trending at all, it trends bigger and longer.

This is why Twitter’s trending topics are broken. They don’t care that we care about John Lennon. They just care that we’ve noticed that some people are spelling his name wrong.

Last week I argued that some media outlets were publishing stories about the Julian Assange sexual misconduct investigation that seemed to misrepresent both the relevant law and the allegations against him. Despite what you might have read on the web, for instance, consensual sex without a condom isn’t illegal in Sweden.

I didn’t take a position on Assange’s guilt or innocence in that piece, because I don’t have one. I was just trying to make sure that the accusations against him were reported accurately. (For the record, Assange is accused of holding a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, and of failing to comply with her request that he use a condom during sex. He is accused of having sex with another woman without her consent while she slept — again without using a condom.)

When a public figure is accused of misconduct, his supporters are often tempted to minimize the charges against him — to say that the accusations are not merely false, but also unserious. But in this case the accusations are serious. Assange may be guilty or he may be innocent, but he is accused of serious crimes.

Some who read my previous piece on this issue have accused me of taking Assange’s guilt as a given, but the fact is that the question of his guilt or innocence just wasn’t relevant to my post, because what I was trying to say was this: Whether he’s guilty or innocent, his accusers deserve a fair and honest hearing. They deserve justice. Whatever justice winds up meaning, they deserve justice.

And by the same token, guilty or innocent, Assange deserves the same. He deserves a fair and honest hearing. He deserves justice.

Whether Assange is guilty or innocent, justice will not be served if he is charged without sufficient evidence, if he is denied a fair trial, or if, having been convicted at trial, he is denied a fair sentencing process. Whether he is guilty or innocent, justice will not be served if his prosecution is manipulated to serve the interests of his political enemies.

Every student of history knows that innocence is no protection against persecution. But every student of history knows as well that the guilty have also often been persecuted. The guilty may be railroaded. The guilty may be framed. The guilty may be punished unfairly and excessively.

There is already reason to be concerned about whether justice will be served in this case, and whether we believe Assange to be guilty or innocent, that concern is reason for vigilance.

Update | See also Afua Hirsch, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Amanda Marcotte.

Some two hundred students at University College London have been occupying the Wilkins Building on campus for the last two weeks in protest against planned funding cuts and fee hikes at Britain’s universities. On Thursday the university demanded that they leave.

In the US, the university’s next step would have been obvious — call in the cops. In California, student occupations are becoming a regular occurrence, and police evictions accompanied by mass arrests are almost inevitable.

But this isn’t the US.

In the UK, you can’t evict students who are peacefully occupying a campus building without a court order, and the university has in this case so far failed to get one. Lawyers for both sides have faced off in court twice in the last week — first on Friday, and then again this morning — without a decision being reached. The judge’s ruling is now expected tomorrow.

A parliamentary vote on the government’s plan for higher education is scheduled to take place on Thursday evening.

I’ve addressed this before, in connection to the Wikileaks trending topics controversy (and previously in connection to #demo2010), but it’s always been tucked away as part of a longer post, so it’s been easy to miss. And it keeps coming up, so here goes:

Twitter has no policy against allowing usernames to trend on its Trending Topics list. Twitter usernames trend all the time.

Right now, as I write this, seven of Twitter’s global trending topics — dbsk, BEPE, Varanaski, alliwant, lemmeguess,Suyono, and Cassiopeia — are single words. Each of those seven words are also usernames. Some are long-established (@cassiopeia has tweeted more than 3400 times and has nearly 400 followers) and some are brand new (@lemmeguess has never tweeted and is following only four people), but all of them exist.

And if you think about it, this makes sense. If Twitter had a “no usernames as trending topics” policy, any of us could prevent any word from trending just by registering it as a username. The whole system would fall apart.

It’s true that really popular usernames tend not to trend, but that’s a function of Twitter’s trending topics algorithm rather than policy. As I’ve discussed in previous posts on the trending topics phenomenon, Twitter’s trend lists favor novel words and phrases, so even when chatter about Lady Gaga spikes, ladygaga (7,287,164 Twitter followers at last count) is unlikely to hit the trending topic lists. We’re always talking about @ladygaga.