Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary... Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.

She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

A spokesman for Asda said: "As far I am aware all our fish - including the sharks which we used to sell but do not sell any longer - are from a sustainable source. In terms of them being endangered, I don't know where Greenpeace are coming from."

Given that there are no common/desirable fish available from 'sustainable' sources, it's hard to tell where ASDA is coming from. Given that most of the desirable fish stocks are somewhere between overfished, extremely rare, and all but extinct, it's surprising that fish is still on the menu.

Which is all very bizarre, because the side of Princes Street that suffers from congestion is the side that cars were already banned from driving down.

But hey, since when has the council let facts get in the way of a stupid decision??

Because it's so very simple and easy to administer and requires almost no effort on the part of the council [as it will invariably be collected by the Inland Revenue], not to mention much more efficient [remember Edinburgh's just sent out nastygrams to a third of households who haven't paid last year's council tax yet...] the Council is against it.

Once again, the flat earthers win.

It is beginning to look like the integrity of the UK's voting system is about to come under sustained attack from the UK's main political parties. Given that the postal vote system is a recipe for abuse, this does not bode well for the accuracy/honesty of the upcoming election. Methinks that there may be a number of constituencies with rather unexpected results.

Such pithy but completely wrong comments are of course the raison d'etre of Donald Anderson, Edinburgh's erstwhile Council Leader, who is guaranteed to be habitually wrong about just about everything.

While not as crowded as London, Edinburgh's not bloody empty, property is already immensely over-priced, the education system is pretty shocking, and journey times are much higher [you're not going as far in Edinburgh, but you're going slower]. I know, details, details.

I could be cynical but no, literacy is the key to most social policy, and literacy is a much bigger problem in the UK than many admit.

There is the grisly spectacle of the corpse of an old man dressed and displayed to be venerated... Then there is the approaching marriage of a lugubrious middle-aged man and his mistress, a pleasant-looking if rather posh lady. Both have been married before, have grown-up children, seem to dislike publicity and have nothing special to say. Yet this humdrum event is being elevated into a moment of national significance, requiring TV crews, solemn-looking presenters and castellated backdrops. It is even delaying the Grand National

This is a reasonable, secular, undeferential, inherently democratic country... We have our ups and downs, but this is still a relatively friendly and comfortable place to live.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, old Adam comes stalking back, and we are expected to fall into line ... an ancient Britain of bloodlines, the throne of St Peter and the bellowing of Westminster man. Underneath the diverse day-to-day world, the old skeleton of power and belief is still there. A death, a marriage and a vote only need to combine, like planets, to bring it to life.

stops on length of office better suit a presidential than a parliamentary system. While many countries with the latter system do have a constitutional definition of enough, term limits under such arrangements can increase the risk of coalition governments and prime ministers being chosen by MPs rather than the electorate - unless, as in the US, a separation between party and national leadership can be achieved.

And while term limits for leaders may be problematic (the second half of the second term inevitably becomes a waiting-room phase), an increasingly powerful moral and pragmatic argument for them exists.

There are days when the punditocracy makes you despair. Prime Ministers aren't chosen by the electorate - the electorate has bugger all to do with it. Prime Ministers are chosen by political parties, who sometimes even let their members have a say, albeit for completely different reasons - Labour needs to ask their members to try and counteract the votes of the various Unions in their bizarre electoral system[1], while the Tories don't want to ask their members in case they unearth another Ian Duncan Smith.

You can only have term-limits in a parliamentary system if you divorce the election of the Prime Minister from the parliamentary party system, i.e. implement some process where the Prime Minister is directly elected through a State-sanctioned system rather than appointed by a political party.

[1] Yes, I know there are historical reasons for doing things the way they do. This doesn't make it any less bizarre.

With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome. Even this august organ [i.e. The Guardian], which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing.

The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost.

Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.

His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting 'pseudo-events'.

Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment.