Tomsk79

Spot the loading in Alex Salmond's proposed referendum question: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? Salmond described this question as "simple, straightforward and clear", somehow forgetting to also mention its not-so-subtle bias in favour of independence. Still, could be worse. Salmond's question is indeed a model of clarity compared to the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence. Presumably he realised he couldn't get away with this world-class level of obfuscation: Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995? There is something in common though. Do you agree that Salmond got his idea for loaded phrasing from the Quebec question?

SOUTH CAROLINA - Jesus Christ became the latest Republican candidate to pull out of the primaries Saturday in the wake of polls showing him trailing behind even Jon Huntsman. Mr Christ's gaffe-prone campaign finally collapsed after a YouTube video surfaced showing him healing sick people with no health insurance. It is thought that he has performed many such treatments across the country without accepting payment, a revelation that has enraged Republican donors from the insurance industry. The video has been played a number of times on Fox News where it was described as "an affront to American values" and "worse then Obamacare". The Son of God entered the race on a wave of popular enthusiasm last year, but like so many of the runners has found the media spotlight unforgiving. In the first Republican debate he was booed by the audience when he said that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdo

It's a longstanding principle of international law that nations have a right to choose their own political status, and therefore Scotland has a right to vote on independence from the UK. But does it also have a right to dictate the terms under which it remains inside the UK? Or to put it another way, if Alex Salmond's "devo max" proposal included a pony for every Scottish resident, should the UK government be obliged to breed them? Unlike full independence, devolution is a concern for the whole UK. For example, if Scotland was given full powers to tax, spend and borrow, but stayed within the pound, we could potentially end up with a "Poundzone" every bit as unstable as the Eurozone. Any change in the devolution settlement within the UK should surely be a result of negotiation between Westminster and the Scottish government, rather than a unilateral decision by a Scottish referendum.

As if the EU hasn't got enough problems to worry about at the moment, the Fidesz government in Hungary is busy removing checks on its rule . It can do this because it achieved a two-thirds majority in parliament in the last election , which allows it to modify the constitution. Hungary's electoral system is, to put it mildly, complex.There is a mixture of first-past-the-post seats and two types of PR, one of region list seats and another of "compensation seats" for runners-up in the first-past-the-post seats. Not to mention the two rounds of voting with three-candidate runoffs in the second round. But have you ever wondered how such a bonkers system came in to being? Of course you have! Who hasn't? Certainly not Kenneth Benoit and John W. Schiemann, who wrote a paper about it: Bargaining Over Hungary's 1989 Electoral Law (PDF). In summary, the major opposition parties sat round a table and hammered out a compromise between their favoured systems, whic

Estimated mass of the Higgs boson = 125 GeV/c^2 1 GeV/c^2 = 1.0735 u Therefore the mass of Higgs boson = 134 u, or roughly the same as a whole atom of caesium. It looks like science may finally be able to answer one of the Big Questions that have fascinated mankind for thousands of years, namely "who ate all the pies?"

BRUSSELS - Triumphant EU negotiators are preparing to announce a resolution to the Eurozone crisis which absolutely won't be revealed to be half-baked within a week or so. The European Debt-Deflation Death Spiral Pact, also known as the "European Suicide Pact", will commit all Eurozone members to a strict austerity regime that will plunge Europe into a deep recession, which will lead to higher borrowing requirements, which will lead to more austerity, which will lead to a deeper recession, and so on until Europe is torn apart by social unrest. Speaking from her coronation as God-Empress of Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the deal. "The horror of 1920's hyperinflation is burned on our nation's collective memory," she said. "So we must act now to replay the even more disastrous but somehow conveniently forgotten 1930's austerity policies of Heinrich Brüning. Yes, it will lead the EU to its doom, but at least we'll get to w

I'm pleased to confirm that Freedom is the masterpiece that everyone says it is, and don't have much to add except "If you like The Corrections ... you'll love this!". Like The Corrections , Freedom is a family saga embedded in world affairs, with the Iraq war and environmentalism taking the place of the biotech bubble and post-communist Europe. The family is again from the midwestern American middle class, and again its centre of gravity moves east during the course of the book. The similarities and echoes might be tiresome if it weren't almost a decade since I read The Corrections . As it is, it feels fresh. All this pigeonholing obscures the fact that the Berglunds are just as much a fully-formed and original a family as the Lamberts. The voices are if anything even more distinctive, though the decision to structure part of the book as an autobiography of one of the characters slightly undermines this. Patty's writing is so close in style to th