With the Premiership closed down, our Olympic ambitions in tatters and music stations struggling to fill airtime, the Last Night of the Proms could again make a play as the nation's signature cultural event. With most pharmacies abandoned and the NHS collapsed, we would once again be the sick man of Europe.

Carson Smith, the sheriff of Pender county, told Deborah Hobbs, 40, that her decision to cohabit was a moral and a legal issue.

The New York Times, America's most venerated newspaper, is responding to growing pressure by pledging to increase its coverage of religion and the rural areas in the US, while also recruiting journalists who have military experience.

Donald Herbert, 43, went into a 10-week coma in 1995 after a burning roof buried him under debris and left him without air for several minutes. Since then he has been nearly blind and displayed little, if any, memory, ability to communicate or awareness of his surroundings.

First to the barricades is Peter Hain, who defines the rich not by what they earn or own but what they drink. "There's now a kind of dinner party critic who quaffs shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly says, 'You are no different from the Tories'," he said recently. "Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off; it's not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It's not a luxury." Other advocates for New Labour have slammed Labour defectors for their "bruschetta orthodoxies" and lambasted anyone who refuses to vote Labour as a result of the war as "decadent" and "self-indulgent".

Ms England, 22, was photographed dragging a naked Iraqi detainee around the floor by a leash and giving a thumbs up and a grin over a pile of naked detainees. The resultant furore over the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay sparked both congressional hearings and Pentagon investigations.