Snowmail: Obama on the threshold

The idiosyncratic mechanisms of US presidential handovers mean that for another 70-odd days he remains president-elect.

But this is an important moment because it'll be the first opportunity he has to work out with George Bush precisely how they're going to handle this period.



The president shows every sign of trying to shove through some of his more ideological measures on such issues as stem cell research - which he wants to curtail.

Obama has already been robust in saying he will either resist or veto this stuff.

Additional to all this, Michelle Obama will be off to talk to Laura Bush. Of this encounter we are promised only a still photograph. I guess the White House doesn't want us catching them measuring the drapes...

As is going to be the case so often, this is going to be a seminal cultural moment in America for African Americans.

Taxing ideas

Here, all parties are now talking tax cuts. David Cameron is out trying to pre-empt the government's pre-budget statement of next week by setting out some ideas of his own. The Liberal Democrats breathe easy as they recall that they have been the only party of tax cuts - well, for the past month or two, anyway.

A story that was headlined in purely banking terms - that two seasoned Scottish bankers were challenging the HBOS-Lloyds tie-up - turns out to be a little bit more political than we were at first led to believe.

It now appears that the ScotNats, for whom the dream of independence hangs on a strong financial sector, met as long ago as 22 September to try to hatch a plan for preventing HBOS, both figuratively and literally, from "going south".

Indeed, it may not be too fanciful to suggest that there is a Glenrothes factor here, because it is strange that all these weeks after the HBOS-Lloyds deal was hatched, the great bankers in question remained silent, only to surface the moment the by-election had been lost. Sir George Mathewson, former chief executive of RBS (eight years ago), is a prominent ScotNat backer.

Miriam Makeba

The death was announced today of the great Miriam Makeba, identified for all time with the great liberation struggle in southern Africa.

How poignant that she should leave the stage at the very moment when the dream kindled by the ANC is in such bad disrepair. Lindsey Hilsum is on the case.

More Maldives

Finally, the president of the Maldives has announced that he's setting aside money to buy land for a new Maldives, in the event that the present one succumbs to the floodwaters of climate change. I know of a couple of Scottish islands...

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