Press it, Principal Skinner!

Press the Independent Thought Alert button, Principal Skinner! Reviewing the papers on Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning, political journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer stepped out of line. Fellow guest, former BBC weatherman Michael Fish, bemoaned the descent of the Copenhagen protests into violence, saying that he had been on a similar march himself, with no trouble. He warned that global warming will cause millions of children to die of preventable diseases such as malaria, to which she responded that 40,000 children die every day of preventable diseases already:

"So why," she said dryly, "aren't people marching in protest about that?"

For anyone dozing at the back there, it's because dead African children aren't currently fashionable, there being too many of them to fit into a photo shoot.

And one of the reasons there are quite a lot of dead African children is that you can't get a patent for salt, sugar and water so there's no money in selling the rehydrating powders that would save the lives of the thousands who perish from diarrhoea.

Another reason is that DDT, the one thing that would have prevented the spread of malaria across equatorial Africa by killing the mosquitoes which spread it, was banned after it was found to kill most of the plants as well. But you know, boys and girls, being grown ups involves making difficult choices, some or all of which are politically unpopular. In fact, that's entirely what being grown up is about, and we clearly have rather a long way to go.

Whom should you fear, children? Vampires or priests?

How appropriate that the report into the festering sore at the heart of the Irish Catholic church as a whole, and the Archdiocese of Dublin in particular, comes just before Christmas. Just think, children, of all those priests going on about Jesus meek and mild, always with that emphasis on purity and innocence. There's nothing to add, really, except that they've taken a moment out of their busy schedule of covering up abuse to condemn the new Twilight film.

'Dangerous and morally empty' was the phrase.

Give me the vampires every time.

To love them is not to know them

The protestations of Amanda Knox's parents that their Jesuit educated daughter is not only innocent of murder but a model citizen are not so surprising. Knox, sentenced last night to 26 years for the killing of Meredith Kercher, had a rather different reputation in Perugia from her squeaky clean image back in Seattle. Similarly, her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, described by his father as 'an innocent', turns out to have been a keen collector of swords who boasted on the net that he could be wild and 'totally crazy'.

And here in the UK, missing chef Claudia Lawrence is alleged to have had a number of men in her life, some married, of whom her family knew nothing. Finally, this year Ron Smith gave up his thirty-year battle to prove that his daughter Helen was murdered. No evidence was found that she died of anything more conspiratorial than a fall from a balcony at a party in Saudi while - probably - drunk.

Did you tell your parents about all the sex, drugs and alcohol you had?

Do you know anyone who did?

If you want to know how someone really lived, ask anyone but their family.