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As English is used as the international language, maybe it should be used properly wherever it is employed. This not always the case. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/signlanguage/9536443/Sign-Language-week-221.html...

In Britain, when two unarmed women police officers are killed on duty, it is the main headline in all the newspapers. In Syria, scores, if not hundreds of people die every day anonymously, civilians, police and soldiers. Should we be living in a world where things such as these are so relative?

Has anybody noticed that the countries in North Africa, plus Iran, where there was a knee-jerk reaction to the film clip are all undemocratic countries with high unemployment and where the proportion of young people under the age of 25 is too large? And now there are demonstrations in China...

You will have noticed the decline in quality of the surname "James" over the past century or so for authors: Henry James: pretty sophisticated stylist. P D James: crime novelist. E L James: chick lit soft porn merchant. I rest my case.

Interesting. An Egyptian Arab Coptic Christian with a reputation for fraud makes a B-film in the USA, tricking the actors, so that they don't know the film is about Mohammed and against him. Then riots break out in several Muslim countries. The American ambassador in Libya is killed and the USA...

When I was young, it took some effort to get a place at university. Is it still so hard? See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9542312/Third-of-Britains-elite-universities-still-looking-for-students.html Do school qualifications still mean anything, or should everyone...

Just reading a book called, intriguingly, "The New Cold War" (2008). It is somewhat sceptical about the progress that Russia has made under Putin. While the economy has been boosted by fits and starts, freedom of speech (not perhaps what workers in small towns are most concerned about) is not...

I read just now that two leading British newspapers are in financial straits and are merging what are termed the business "desks" and sports "desks". Now they may merge the news "desks". "Desk" in this context means the group of editors working on the same subjects. The newspapers in question...

During the course of their studies, U.S. or UK students doing a a PhD at university in literary theory or philosophy can read, for example, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Unamuno, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva...

Electronic wars: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9498541/Apple-wins-1.05bn-from-arch-rival-Samsung-in-patent-case.html How much does this affect you?

Could one of the moderators tell us what codes you have to use to produce the underlined red word "here" which shortens a link to just that one word?

Your turn to comment.

You read some strange things in the summer, but a women-only city takes the biscuit: http://in.news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-planning-women-only-city-boost-female-082327585.html...

For those who are interested in finding things written by authors that write in other alphabets, have a look at two Wikipedia articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_(linguistics) This isn't all fancy head-in-the-clouds theory. The two...

Raoul Wallenberg would have been one hundred years old on August 4th 2012. If you haven't heard of him, get learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg If you've heard of Schindler and his list, you should learn a bit about Wallenberg too.

Author Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9443042/Author-and-playwright-Gore-Vidal-dies-aged-86.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/gore-vidal?newsfeed=true

Eugen Ruge's novel "In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts" (In the Time of Fading Light) looks interesting. If I've got my facts right, it deals with the nomenklatura in what was then the GDR, rather like the novel "Der Turm" by Uwe Tellkamp (which I haven't read either!). I'm rather hoping that...

I see that the Irish author Maeve Binchy has died: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0731/breaking6.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9440604/Maeve-Binchy.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeve_Binchy...

This cartoon's a bit morbid. But why should they portray Bashar al-Assad peering at an eye chart?

Who are these fools who are so deprived of originality that they have to prop their stories up on Great Works of Literature? Here is the latest derivative product: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/19/jane-austen-northanger-abbey-val-mcdermid?INTCMP=SRCH The suave lady in the article...