The Bitter Pill - run by the formidable duo of editrix Ma Pepinster and her loveable deputy, Elena Curti - has pondered the causes of the world recession and come to a firm conclusion. It's all the fault of men! Because, you see, greed is a MALE sin, and the recession was caused by greed and, well, it stands to reason, doesn't it?

Women are not greedy, says The Tablet (photo: emdot)

This ingenious thesis is advanced in the latest issue of The Tablet by "Dr Tina Beattie PhD", as she is described on the website of Roehampton University, where she specialises in "theologies and theories of gender, symbolism and ethics". (PhDs who insist on calling themselves "doctor" are no rarity, but book-ending your name like that seems a bit de trop.)

Anyway, Dr Beattie PhD begins by spinning

Giftgate threatens to take another twist and turn. Alex Massie at Coffee House  flags up a vital and hitherto unconsidered aspect of the row, via one of Mark Hemingway's readers.

"It would be funny if the DVDs Mr Obama gave Mr Brown were Region 1 NTSC and therefore not compatible with the UK where DVDs are region 2 and video format is PAL."

This is quite a serious question. I have a vision of the Browns, Gordon and Sarah, settling down at the PM's country retreat (Chequers) this weekend. The children have been put to bed and Mr Brown heads in the direction of the DVD player:

GB: "The Obamas bought us some films on DVD. That was very thoughtful."

SB: "Not that thoughtful..."

GB: "What shall we watch? ET? Star Wars? Psycho, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia?

SB: sighs...

Now comes the grimmest news of the recession so far: retailers and fashion commentators report that men's ties are becoming extravagantly narrow in response to these straitened times. They report the growing popularity of ties as narrow as one inch. That is not a tie - that is a shoelace.

Over the past six months, one retailer reported that 15 per cent of ties sold were just 2.5 inches wide; the remainder were 3.5 inches or wider - which is too broad. But one of the best-selling ties at the clothes chain Topman is evidently only one inch wide. Experts claim there are precedents for this: during the recessions of the 1930s and 1980s one-inch ties were similarly worn. No wonder it took so long to recover. In corollary, it is claimed that the 1960s (that loathsome decade!) produced ties as

Congratulations to Kevin Storr, our winner this week. I love the perspective of this shot, which dwarfs the viewer underneath a vast expanse of sky. The parting cloud seems to draw you into the picture, framing the beautiful shapes of the silhouetted foliage in the foreground.

In fact, Kevin sent two pictures and I really wanted to include them both to illustrate just what a difference colour makes to the mood of a picture. You can almost feel the evening closing in around you in the first shot, while the second has a much starker, even sinister feel. The sky dominates both, of course, but it is astonishing how different the sky looks in the two shots.

I also loved this dramatic photograph of the clouds that accompany a severe weather warning by Coldwaterjohn. Sadly the I cannot run

The Prime Minister is on his home turf today, speaking to the Scottish Labour party conference in Dundee. When the PM is back in his homeland he likes to catch up with Labour party folk, journalists and assorted hangers on. It's a time when he can kick back a bit, relax and talk at length about his favourite subjects, namely: Raith Rovers, Raith Rovers and Raith Rovers. He doesn't like to talk about Glasgow Rangers, although he (secretly) supports them.

What has his opening conversational gambit about Raith Rovers been this year?

"Hullo... what people have to understand is that the problems of Raith Rovers are global. They started in America and then spread to Fife."

Hmm.  I've just listened to that silly lady from Plane Stupid on Radio Four wittering on about Heathrow and democratic debate.  Not sure how chucking custard at someone then running away constitutes a contribution to debate, but I'm sure the silly lady and her chums will think it was all very clever and effective.  

Anyway, among her plummy burbling, she came up with this gem: "Peter Mandelson is the same person who bullied Ed Miliband and the rest of the Cabinet to accept a third runway that nobody wants."

What a lovely idea, the Cabinet all quaking in fear of the old Prince of Darkness.

More importantly, note that reference to Ed Miliband.  The climate change secretary played a very canny game over Heathrow, "letting it be known" that he had grave doubts, and in

Here is a surprisingly Michael Jackson-free roundup of the day's transatlantic must-reads:

1. Tim Reid, The Times' Washington correspondent, thinks Obama is gambling $4trillion with his grand economic plans. At least he's getting his room comped.

2. Worrying news from Adam Haigh in Bloomberg: Morgan Stanley says UK profits will fall more than they did during the Great Depression.

3. Time's Michael Scherer thinks Eagle Eye's own Iain Martin might be overreacting a wee bit to the White House's treatment of Gordon Brown.

4. AP's David Stringer reports that British spies are getting older. MI6's age-reversal experiments were a resounding failure.

5. Sky News' Adam Boulton in Washington looks at Obama's pledge to tackle heath care and thinks "He has too many special interests to take on,

Let's say the easy part first. Filling up a vast administration team is a difficult, costly and time-consuming process. Prospective candidates are vetted in so many different ways there isn't a second of their past untouched, not a letter or email ignored while searching for hidden meaning.

There are always candidates who have to pull out of the running, and often many. That said, I bet the Obama team wishes it had done its homework better on all these people who are dropping out faster than hopped-up Timothy Leary acolytes. It looks shoddy, and makes a mockery of the assertion that the handover would be smooth, fast and painless.

Sanjay Gupta was an absurd choice for surgeon general anyway - a highly-paid television celebrity. We don't know why he has withdrawn but some

A nostalgia fest has begun in France for its best-loved schoolboy, Le Petit Nicolas, a cheeky little nine-year old, and his classroom pals dreamed up by Asterix co-inventor René Goscinny and genius illustrator, Jean-Jacques Sempé.

Le Petit Nicolas turns 50 this year, although he has barely aged and every effort is being undertaken to try and conquer another generation of young readers with his endearing escapades.

Whether confusing the photographer hired to take the class picture, dealing with having to wear glasses for the first time, or trying desperately to help the teacher when the school inspector pays a visit, Nicolas always manages to turn a classroom drama into a crisis.

To mark the 50^th anniversary, Anne Goscinny, the writer's daughter, has unearthed 10 texts penned

I guess the question of whether people are still interested in seeing Michael Jackson has been comprehensively answered by news that the dedicated Jackson O2 website has been creaking under the strain of 16,000 fans visiting every second.


Michael Jackson and Dermot O'Leary    Photo: PA

Which must be a relief for all concerned, cause the public wasn't looking quite so interested at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon. His carefully stage-managed appearance at the O2 arena seems to have done the trick, by putting Jackson on our screens and in our inboxes, with a luxurious red backdrop, flashing lights and a big crowd of noisy fans. Even though, from the perspective of someone actually standing in the cavernous, cold O2 lobby, it was all smoke and mirrors.

The majority of those

Paramount is tampering with the natural order of things. Not content with one fabulous Star Trek movie in 1996, they are now, it seems, giving us another. Here's the full theatrical trailer for Star Trek XI.

Now, I've always been a closet Voyager fan, but mostly for the so-bad-it's-hilarious scriptwriting and acting (exception: the magnificent Kate Mulgrew). Everything about this new movie, however, looks incredible.

J J Abrams has served up a thrilling reboot of the franchise. I wouldn't be surprised if Star Trek gains a whole new generation of fans as a result. Put aside your shame: this is a film you should be queuing up to watch.

And the decision is to cut spending and start paying down the debt... What do you cut?

I'll accept costed efficiencies... But generally, given the Shadow chancellor has indicated that says the Conservatives are now driving the reform agenda, and that the fiscal crisis has created a "new imperative" for reform, let's hear how you would reform government?

Wireless Storage
Is it possible to set up a stand-alone hard-drive to a wireless network? This is so that we can store tunes and photos on the hard-drive and then access them from anywhere in the house.
Tom Dingwall, by email

Yes it is and you are spoilt for choice. What you want is a NAS or Network Attached Storage device and they come in a variety of flavours. Basically a NAS box contains one or more hard drives, some electronics and a wired or wireless Ethernet connection. A wired NAS device connects directly to a spare LAN socket on your wireless router/modem and the drives will be accessible to any PC on the network. A wireless NAS works in the same way, except there are no wires, so it can be sited anywhere within range of your wireless router.

Some NAS devices have extra bells and

The decision to arraign Omar al-Bashir before the International Criminal Court is bad for international law, bad for the Sudanese people - and bad for America.

I have blogged before about why it is wrong, in principle, for the ICC to indict heads of state - even when, like Bashir, they are unutterable swine. (See here for the full argument.)

But the real significance of this case is that Sudan is not a signatory to the ICC treaty. By applying an accord to a country that has not ratified it, the court is overturning 300 years of jurisprudence, trampling over the notion of territorial jurisdiction and introducing the hugely dangerous idea that contracts can be enforced against legal persons who have declined to sign them.

You will doubtless have spotted the implications. The US has (quite

Twitter reports Verbier tragedy
29-year-old London entrepreneur Rob Williams, co-founder of Dolphin Music, died in Verbier this week. Twitter was the main source of news about the tragedy.

All change at Twitter.com
Twitter.com was updated with new search and trending tools. Check out my blog for more details.

Facebook imitating Twitter?
Facebook was mocked in the blogosphere for bringing in a raft of new features seemingly inspired by Twitter's real-time update stream.

Ryanair turns even nastier... or maybe not
The big question this week: was Ryanair behind the @RyanAirOnline Twitter account, insulting Ryanair passengers and critics? (Answer: apparently not.)

Skittles takes a chance on Twitter... but regrets it
Skittles replaced their entire website with a Twitter seach page showing

Ahead of last week's announcement of a new, global 'Diamond League' series for athletics, Sebastian Coe offered his solution to restore the sport's popularity: more head-to-head battles between the world's top athletes.

"The big attraction, and it was the real talking point last year, is head-to-head challenges," said Coe, who is a vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations as well as chairman of the London 2012 organising committee.

"If tennis can have Federer and Nadal going up against each other several times a year, we need to have Usain Bolt running against Asafa Powell more than twice a year."

Yet this is the same Sebastian Coe whose head-to-head battles of the Seventies and Eighties with his great middle-distance rival, Steve Ovett, amounted to just

The latest selfish and demeaning death-on-demand spectacle of British "suicide tourists", in this case wine tycoon Peter Duff and his wife Penelope, travelling to Switzerland to dispose of themselves exposes  the (literally) breathtaking flippancy of the organisations involved. Dignitas, the Zurich-based organisation that assists suicides, must be one of the most disgusting enterprises on the planet. But the British-based Dignity in Dying lobby group gives it a run for its money.

Sometimes the circumstances of a Dignitas suicide are so tragic that they preclude critical intrusion. The death of the paralysed 23-year-old rugby player Daniel James last year is a case in point. But the Duffs, aged 80 and 70, were suffering from terminal cancer and there is little evidence that the couple

Jason Leonard didn't budge. As you might expect. Seven hours he was there, on top of the terrace steps in Hong Kong's national stadium. Greeting all-comers, beer in hand, smile on face. Now that's a tour of duty.

Jase was on a social trip to HK many years ago. I was there on journalistic business. Not a drop passed my lips.

Fun and Sevens have always been bed-fellows. That's part of the appeal.

And the appeal as a game in itself ? Tricky. I watched some of the action from the World  Sevens in Dubai on TV. It didn't take long for my attention to drift. It's sport's fast-food diet. Good in short bursts. Preferably washed down with something cooling.

The end stages of a competiton can be  dramatic. I can still see David Campese give the Prince

Alexander Tvardovsky is arguably Russia's most famous war poet.

His best loved creation was the peasant trooper Vasili Tyorkin. Vasili was a soldier's soldier. Big hearted, quick witted and effervescently cheerful, he swam icy rivers to save his wounded friends, shot down German fighter planes with his rifle and performed all manner of heroic deeds in the name of the Soviet motherland.

Tvadrovsky also wrote another poem, less well known, titled I was Killed near Rzhev. Slightly more downbeat, it tells the story of a soldier wounded in the Rzhev campaign of 1942-3 who makes a miraculous recovery after being convinced that he was dead.

It is a staggering fact, but the Battles of Rzhev are, like the poem, little known in modern Russia. Staggering because the name Rzhev should resound in

President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn't granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.

 
A bit of regal glamour is quick to woo Barack Obama (Photo: PA)

This was coupled with Michelle Obama's

John MacCain, after running a creditable but underwhelming online campaign for his presidential candidacy, has taken heed of Barack Obama's success and is sending out some very long-winded emails to support his run for Senate re-election.

John McCain: see you in cyberspace

He had a social network for his supporters (McCainSpace) and presences on a wide range of sites including Twitter, but he never achieved the juggernaut-like quality of the Obama web domination. The new president has been rather lax in his tweeting since election, but McCain has now taken to it like a hungry baby starling.

Great floods of updates on the senator's every move rush into his followers' streams, listing appointments, meetings, appearances and lunches, where he is and who he's talking to. In the last few

And another thing. Labour is pushing ahead with its Zimbabwe-style banknote splurge without even asking Parliament. Opposition MPs (hat-tip, ConservativeHome) are left plaintively asking why no one has consulted them.

We went through a Civil War to establish the principle that the House of Commons alone might raise revenue through taxation. Yet every bail-out, every nationalisation, every stimulus package - every cack-handed measure taken since the crisis began, in fact - has been decreed without reference to MPs.

Understand this and you understand why Britain is institutionally biased towards high spending. Budgets are set by representatives of the Executive (who stand to gain from government expenditure) rather than representatives of the Legislature (who represent taxpayers). We won't

I'm at the Crufts dog show today. Shock! Horror! Have I completely compromised my principles giving my tacit support to such a shocking, controversial event?

The funny thing is that it's hard to imagine how anyone passionately interested in dogs could NOT attend Crufts. It may be useful for organisations like the BBC, RSPCA and Dogs Trust to make political points, and to apply pressure by withdrawing support, but I'm quite sure that they'll all have representatives here, quietly observing what's going on.

Crufts remains the biggest dog show in the world, and it's about much more than the highly publicised "best of breed" type of judging in the showring. Today there's a range of events going on, most of which have nothing to do with the controversy stirred up by the "Pedigree

The long (20 years) awaited, much anticipated (by the loyal readers) cinema adaption of the graphic novel Watchmen is released today. 

I have reviewed it here, but read this! The always brilliant Anthony Lane of the New Yorker has written one of his best reviews I can remember. Scathing, incredulous, angry, witty, hilarious and most importantly, beautifully written. 

Not that I agree with it. 

Well done George Osborne.  In a speech about the recession and the credit squeeze today, the Shadow Chancellor is going to do something rather brave: blame the voters.

In a speech today, Mr Osborne says :

"Our banking system is not separate from our economy, it is a reflection of it. Our banks hold a mirror up to the worst excesses of our society.  And the unsustainable debts in our banks are a reflection of unsustainable debts in our households, our companies and our Government."

It's nice to hear a politician willing to air the uncomfortable truth about the way a lot of people have behaved in recent years.   Of course, ministers, bankers and regulators all deserve much of the blame for the spend-spend-spend culture that led us to disaster.  But individuals

I�™m not sure to what extent �" if at all �" the AZF trial that got under way last week, is being followed in the UK, but it is certainly being closely watched here.

On 21 September 2001, 300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser stored at the Toulouse site of chemical company AZF (a subsidiary of oil giant Total) exploded, killing 30 people, injuring more than 2,000, damaging 10,000 buildings and completely destroying the manufacturing plant. A crater some 30m deep by 200m wide was left and steel girders from the buildings were found two miles away from their original location.

The cause of the explosion is still a matter of considerable speculation, in particular as to whether or not the pile of fertiliser was detonated deliberately.

I admit to more than a passing interest in the

A fault line has emerged within the Cabinet over an attempt to change the law to make MPs' addresses secret.

On Mar 2, MPs voted by 235 to 177 to scrap a century-old law which states that general election ballot papers must carry the home address of each Parliamentary candidate. (The amendment to the Political Parties and Elections Bill was proposed by Tory MP Julian Lewis, a man who is so obsessed with his own personal security that he has admitted signing the electoral roll under a nom de plume.)

Labour MPs were given a free vote and it is intriguing to see how senior ministers divided. Harriet Harman, the Commons Leader, voted in favour of secrecy and was backed by the "old guard" of Nick Brown, Geoff Hoon and Margaret Beckett. But Jack Straw, who as Justice

They are feeling good just now at The Hague, as the judges and pen-pushers of the International Criminal Court (ICC) adjourn to smart restaurants to celebrate the latest gesture-politics flexing of their muscles by issuing an arrest warrant for Omar al Bashir, the President of Sudan. They are feeling less good in Darfur, from which 10 international aid agencies were expelled in retaliation within four hours of the ICC initiative, cutting food supplies and closing clinics. One man's ego trip is another man's starvation.

But the people who should be feeling really nervous about this development are the citizens of the United States and more especially their armed forces. The signs are that the grandstanding Barack Obama is preparing to subject the United States to the jurisdiction of the

The Big Match Revisited, the hidden away nostalgic football show screened on ITV4, will be comforted this weekend by a tribute to Reg Gutteridge, who died in January aged 84.

Big Fight Review will look back on Gutteridge's colouful career as a boxing commentator and journalist. It will no doubt screen many of the fights involving one Muhammad Ali, including one memorable bout (clip above) when the ageing pro ushered Gutteridge ringside to conduct a short interview between rounds.

Can anyone better that for a sporting interview? Perhaps John Fashanu falling off a wall during an interview with Match of the Day in the 80s is a slightly different alternative, but I can't find a clip of that.

Gutteridge was all set for a career in the ring until he lost a leg jumping from a

What would Mahatma Gandhi have made of the tug of war over his last few possessions?

I was thinking about this after reading this morning's Indian press coverage, which reported how the American �˜owner' had offered to give India his trademark spectacles and other personal effects if its government agreed to triple its spending on healthcare or if it committed five per cent of its GDP to poverty reduction.

Is it possible that Gandhiji might have despaired a little? First, that the very few possessions he had, the bare essentials of sandals, spectacles, food bowl and watch, had been passed to a commercial collector by his own descendants. Second, that an American collector was seeking to use them to bully free India to address the poverty he hoped independence itself would eliminate.