Tomsk79

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