"Grammy-award winning comedian George Carlin, best known for his Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV routine, has died of heart failure aged 71.The star was admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles on Sunday with chest pains and died later that day." (BBC).

One of the most important satirists of our time, he'll be greatly missed. Here's my favourite piece of his work: "Religion is Bullshit".

Never one to let petty little details like facts get in the way of a good bit of spluttering rage, Britain's favourite (formerly) Nazi-supporting newspaper, The Daily Mail, has flooded the front page of its website with what can only be described as purple-faced ranting in response to the death-by-knife of a minor cast-member in the next Harry Potter film. To people like the Mail's creationist, anti-vaccination journalist Melanie Phillips, it probably seems like babies are now emerging from the womb, knife-in-hand, looking for their next alcohol-fix.