Interesting what you say about Welsh - its number of speakers is actually increasing now having been declining under pressure from English (and the English) for many years.

But they had to fight every step of the way and it wasn't until they succeeded in their aim of getting official institutions to use Welsh, followed by devolution from the UK, did the language start to recover.

Today, there's a Welsh language TV channel, official forms are bilingual, road signs are in English and Welsh (with Welsh first) even in areas of Wales with few Welsh speakers, all Welsh kids learn Welsh at school, etc.

I imagine that's what Israel got right in establishing Hebrew as the national language - right from the outset, it would be the language of government and its institutions, an option not open to pre-devolution Wales as part of a heavily anglo-centric UK.

I think you're right when you say that in Wales the cause of the Welsh language became the nationalist struggle. It was a clear difference between peoples who were otherwise so similar in most obvious respects. The English of course knew this well and right into the 20th century made great efforts to stamp out the speaking of Welsh in public life; all official business would be in English, children caught speaking Welsh in school were humiliated and punished, and so on.

I'm not a historian but I think you could argue that the violent nationalist struggle between Britain and Ireland in recent years had a parallel in the struggle between England and Wales that took place much earlier; England finally conquered Wales in the 13th century and there was intermittent bloody violence right up till the 15th century when Wales was even briefly independent again. In those days the option of emigration to America didn't exist.

I don't think the story's over, but at least Ireland finally achieved independence, with Northern Ireland devolved and relatively violence-free, whereas Wales is still largely governed from Britain (read England), devolution notwithstanding. So I guess the motivation to retain your own language as a way of asserting your difference is maybe not as strong in Ireland as it is - has to be - in Wales.

China does need to critically examine its past.

But for the US (or Russia, or Burma, or Rwanda, etc, etc) to tell China this is laughable. The US no longer has the moral authority to berate any other country for its abuses. That's GWB's legacy, which Obama has yet to defuse.

Sotomayor needs to "ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences".

She's an experienced Appeals Court judge. I think she'd understand very well what a jurist's role is, don't you?

Last para of Tapper's account:

As for Boumediene's allegations of abuse, the Pentagon said, "Any abuse of detainees is unacceptable. It is against our values, endangers our security and is not tolerated. All credible allegations of abuse are thoroughly investigated and, when substantiated, individuals are held accountable for their actions."

How stupid do they think we are? And are they right?

Many people have been alienated by some of the European centre-left governments for all sorts of reasons, but one reason, paradoxically, is that they haven't been 'left' enough.

Here in the UK, many people are asking what the Labour party is for. It's adopted the economic policies of the libertarian right, followed the most right-wing US president for years into a disastrous war in Iraq, and is pouring billions of pounds into the pockets of the banks who, along with over-lax government regulation, caused this economic mess we're in and has saddled us with high and rising unemployment. And all this was done under a Labour government?

And now we're seeing the rise of the hard right and ugly nationalism. It's not a failure of centre-left politics: centre-left politics has barely been tried.

I see on the BBC that Nick Griffin of the BNP has just had to abandon a press conference outside Parliament because demonstrators pelted him with eggs. Good for them.

Have you ever tried parking in Rome? The Cinquecento's ideal.

The release of more torture photos presumably would make people angry, and not just in the Arab world. Increased anger could well translate into increased terrorism.

But that is not a reason to withhold the photos.

Until the US really and truly shows that it rejects the human rights outrages of the Bush years - by exposing them - then terrorism will always be a significant threat.

The same thing has struck me many times. You often hear Serious American commentators talk about imprisonment, abduction, torture, bombing - whatever - as if it were just some abstraction.

It's as if these things that happen to strangers far away aren't actually happening to real people in the real world. You can imagine the outrage if anything like the punishment meted out by Americans to nasty foreign people were to happen to Americans (and quite right too). But that's different. Apparently.

Why this attitude? Is it a terminal lack of empathy or what?

The American neocons don't care one iota about the Iranian people except when it suits their agenda to pretend to do so.

When they're exhorting the US to bomb Iran, the effect on the Iranian people is irrelevant; when the Iranian people are demonstrating against the despised Ahmadinejad, then of course they're just thinking about what's best for the Iranian people (well, some of them anyway - Ahmadinejad supporters should still be bombed).

It's transparently clear that it's not about the Iranian people at all but about some warped geopolitical idea about what shape the Middle East should be and the willingness to use American force, short of nothing, to bring it about.

You probably want to correct that.

Because this article is a worthless exercise in evasion and obfuscation that anybody could better.