• Emotionally charged issue demands media sensitivity

How should newspapers handle stories which have at their heart highly emotional belief systems held by two seemingly irreconcilable parties?

• Why Chantelle should take good look at herself

How ugly were those close-up pictures of Chantelle Houghton's post-baby bulging belly this week? Because the photos - in which Chantelle's lumpy midriff was repeatedly exposed as it slipped out from under her tiny vest while she exercised in the park - usually only mean one of two things.

• Holding a border poll in Northern Ireland would be good for stability

As soon as Alex Salmond and David Cameron agreed on a Scottish independence referendum Sinn Fein was out of the traps demanding a border poll in Ireland.

• Rich firms’ cup overflowing but poor people must pay up

You won’t find Charlie Johnston sipping a latte in Starbucks on Saturday as the ICTU’s march against austerity passes along Royal Avenue. The 20-year-old was jailed for a month at Belfast Magistrates Court last week for defrauding the taxpayer.

• I don’t usually get stirred up, but tax scheme has me frothing

Never took to Starbucks. When friends force me to go, I just have water. It’s the Scotsman in me. Thrawn, d’you see? Suspicious of artifice.

• Jimmy Savile scandal: only the complete abolition of the BBC will do

The genius of Jimmy Savile is that each day the revelations manage to get worse. By tomorrow, it will turn out he was a commander in the Provisional IRA, and on Saturday that in 1997 he used to drive a Fiat Uno haphazardly round the underpasses of Paris.