Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has defended jailed killer "Carlos the Jackal" and several world leaders he says are wrongly considered "bad guys".

In a speech to international socialist politicians, Mr Chavez said "Carlos", a Venezuelan, was not a terrorist but a key "revolutionary fighter". He is serving a life sentence in France for murders committed in 1975.

Mr Chavez also hailed Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. [BBC]

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

David Curry, the MP who heads the committee responsible for policing Commons expenses, has claimed almost £30,000 for a second home that his wife has banned him from staying in.

After learning of the Telegraph investigation, David Curry resigned as chairman of the Parliamentary Standards and Privileges Committee and now faces a formal inquiry into his claims.

The Conservative MP is accused of having an affair with a headmistress in his Yorkshire constituency and using a taxpayer-funded cottage to meet his lover.

Sales of extra-large condoms in Tesco are higher in Glasgow than anywhere else in Britain.

22 per cent of men “regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates.”

Joining the Green party was a quiet, private moment.

It was unusual for quite a loud politico like me, habituated to citizenship as a way of intervening, a mission to make a difference. It was a rather innocent gesture. Signing up. Some meetings maybe, some leafleting, some learning – as a non-geek,

Green stuff carried the allure of rocket science and the promise of new enlightenment.

I'd voted Green, probably in the way that many activists of my generation, who'd felt so busy and alert in the last quarter of the 20th century, had voted Liberal Democrat, Green, Respect sometimes, always to dissent from New Labour's combination of abject and authoritarian populism.

My friends and family are typically left of centre

[...] some vote Labour because they hate the Tories, some don't vote because they don't see the point, most sign up to something.

The communist states of the 20th century did for socialism. I was a dynastic communist –

my parents were British Bolsheviks

[...] they were good citizens, and became better when Khrushchev gave permission to criticise Stalinism.

I remained a communist until 1989, when it was all over.

I was part of the anti-Stalinist, Euro-communist wing. We were clever, caused trouble, caught the imagination, but we lost. Or maybe we failed.

But it was feminism that clarified the unsustainability of state communism. Macho, manic productionism relies on force, it valorises conquest of nature and other humans. It marginalises the means of reproduction – how societies sustain themselves, breathe, give birth, grow and rest, clean up; how people take care, give pleasure and co-operate. [...] Green ideology represents the reconciliation of production and reproduction – that is what yields sustainability.

I’d like to see Americans get together and make sure that every state in the union has a referendum by 2012 that forces federal politicians to display their sponsorships. [...] The corporation or lobbyist or PAC that contributes the most to a politician is forced to put the biggest logo on the politician’s uniform. The smaller the contribution, the smaller the logo.

The politicians will be forced to wear the new uniforms whenever they’re are acting in an official capacity. So, they’d wear the uniforms on the floor of the Senate, House and inside the West Wing. They’d wear the uniform when appearing on television, on the campaign trail, at fund raising events and even state visits.

I want to see all the Senators who rail against health care reform do so with insurance company logos all over their expensive suits. I want to see the damned-near-monocled politicians who make the decisions about banking regulations do so with Goldman Sachs embroidered across their backs. And i damned sure want to see the names of the defense contractors on the wardrobes of all the soft-handed sons-of-bitches who send good men off to die without a damned good reason.

Dress them all up like the clowns that they’ve proven themselves — over and over — to be.

[...] we would suggest that before your even consider turning your attention to our activities, you should direct your energies towards putting your own house in proper order. Should you succeed in raising the ethical standards and practices of the majority of the national press, particularly the tabloids, to our level then we may be inclined to reconsider our position. Until that happens, any attempt by the Press Complaints Commission to regulate the activities of bloggers will be strenuously resisted at every possible turn.

"New resources will be necessary for the financing of the welfare state. Green tax instruments are a possibility, but they are ambiguous: This type of tax will eventually be extinguished.

But the possibilities of financial levies at European level must be seriously examined and for the first time the large countries in the union are open to that."

- Herman Van Rompuy, front-runner for the new job of EU President, November 12th

Via Don Paskini, I'm delighted to see that the Daily Mail Headline Generator has received a 2009 refit. Literally minutes of fun...

I was outed as a sex blogger three years ago.

There is something deeply disturbing about this hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating desire to proffer sanctimonious apologies for the sins of previous generations. Grow up and grow a spine.

How old was Gordon Brown then? Was he in government? The answers being that he was a teenager when this finished and he was not in government. Therefore, he has no right to apologise and neither has Kevin Rudd as neither of them was involved in the offence. An apology, to mean anything at all, must be proffered by the person or people who caused the original harm. You cannot apologise by proxy.

"had to do something to express the particularity of the commemoration at the ghetto monument. On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them."

It often seemed that Ken Livingstone had taken office in order to be controversial. Such was the level of controversy he continuously maintained that when he was replaced by Boris Johnson the new mayor's personality, which on any objective scale is like a hunt ball held in a cricket pavilion, has been experienced as a centre of calm.

Right there, of course, is the catch in freedom. If you're born free you're free to think that freedom is a natural state, and free to think that your own freedom owes nothing to some gung-ho old dead guy with a rack of initials after his name.

But if Keith Park had never done what he did, our journalist might have had to compose her column in German, and you can bet that if she was writing about a statue of a Luftwaffe hero to go on the fourth plinth, her tone would have been lot more reverent.