Majella Holohan's challenge to the legal system was moving and powerful, but the issues she raised appear to have a reasonable explanation. By Vincent Browne

The guidelines which judges must follows in sentencing persons convicted of manslaughter were laid down clearly in the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeal on 5 July 2004 in a case DPP v Stephen Kelly. Relying on previous Supreme Court judgments, the court held that in deciding on what the appropriate sentence should be in a manslaughter case, the judge should first look at the range of penalties applicable to the offence and locate the appropriate penalty, given the circumstances of the crime in question. Then the judge should take into account mitigating factors.

We can no longer accept the word of Government ministers in relation to dealings with the United States on sensitive defence matters because of the calculated fudge and misrepresentations that have been deployed over Shannon. Now that the Government has been caught secretly entering into two Treaties with America which were not disclosed to the Dáil, as required by the Constitution, we have reason to be even more skeptical over what is going on.

Carcasonne was the nearest airport to Castres, where Munster played the local team in a freezing gale on the late evening of Friday 13 January (kick off at 8.30pm local time and the match not over until close to 10.30pm). Several of the Munster contingent stayed in Carcasonne over the weekend, travelling over the Cevennes mountains to and from Castres.

The preamble to the Irish Constitution is deeply sectarian and should be changed. A Constitution should be capable of attracting the allegiance of all citizens of the country and one which doesn't, essentially, is signaling that some citizens matter less than the others. It does not mean that the ethos and values of the majority should be discarded or devalued, just that only those principles and values to which everyone does or can give allegiance should be expressed in the Constitution.

The media and public were transfixed by the nuclear threat of the second half of the 20th century - so why aren't they more concerned about climate change, the single biggest challenge facing the planet today? Bill McKibben reports on recent evidence for global warming, and why scientists have struggled to convince us that its happening.

These are just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the past three months.

The documents which we publish in this issue of Village from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office disclose the complicity of both the British and American governments in the use of torture in Uzbekistan. The documents reveal a quite cynical disposition on the part of the British authorities, claiming that because the name of the tortured prisoner was not included in the documents related to his/her interrogation, torture could not be proved. The inference is that it was therefore OK to use information obtained under torture.

The questions of fairness and justice persist as the major issues facing Irish society in 2006

The mammoth judgment of Ms Justice Mary Laffoy in the Fyffes v DCC case raises serious questions about corporate governance. • How could information about three months trading not be price sensitive at all and information about four and a half months trading be massively price sensitive? • How, if Jim Flavin of DCC acted unlawfully, as Fyffes claimed, did Fyffes themselves also not act unlawfully?