Moazzam Begg was imprisoned for three years in Bagram and Guantanamo Bay, spending most of his time in solitary confinement. He was never charged with any crime. Fionola Meredith attended his Belfast lecture last month

Edward O'Hare rounds up the week's book news.

The Bishop of Cloyne has said that Greencore's failure to implement a redundancy package for its former sugar workers “cannot be morally justified” and Siptu's general secretary accused the company of having “a voracious appetite for greed”. Justine McCarthy profiles Greencore's chief executive, David Dilger

The substance of Brian Cowen's pre-election budget had been almost universally predicted by media commentators. As the Independent put it, it was “carefully crafted” so that “each interest group emerged better off”. The thinking was simple – give everybody an appreciable rise in their take-home pay and they are more likely to re-elect the current government.

It is grimly ironic that the long-running debates in the media about university fees, school league tables and the relative merits of private education have been conducted through interpretations of statistical evidence which are riddled with the most elementary errors. On Monday 4 December, the Irish Independent published the figures for university enrolment in 2006, which revealed, once again, the class divide in education. Although only about 10 per cent of pupils attended fee-paying schools, they made up 25 per cent of university admissions.

When Ann Louise Gilligan, a former postulant nun, met Katherine Zappone over 25 years ago, she had never heard the word ‘lesbian'. Now the two await a decision in their law suit against the Revenue Commissioners for failing to recognise their marriage. By Justine McCarthy

Memories of the Misunderstood, Little Wonders and The Road to Nowhere reviewed by Edward O'Hare.

Representative Charles Rangel, a member of the US Congress, has over the past few years made a number of high-profile calls for the military draft to be reinstated. It sounds at first like a right-wing rant. Conscript all the boys and girls of America. Suit them up in camouflage. Ship them into army camps, knock off their edges, trim them up. Send them off to fight for freedom... whatever the hell that means. 

RIVERSIDE: SPRING FEVER, reviewed by Peter Regan

In the last session of talks between the two governments and Sinn Féin at St Andrews, I proposed to Tony Blair that an Irish-language act be brought forward at Westminster by his government. That last session was a very stormy one – it was about putting together a programme to get the DUP into the powersharing arrangements, as laid out in the Good Friday Agreement.