Six of the Best 204

"The one thing missing from today's housing strategy will be an outright acknowledgment that lower house prices would be a good thing. It's still too much of a political taboo. But ministers know that it's exactly what the younger generation need." Good sense from Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent.

Index on Censorship examines government plans to ban demonstrations during the 2012 London Olympics.

A Dutch MEP claims European politicians have been gagged over the sharing of passenger information with the USA, reports Computer World UK.

"Tea drinking fills the public house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel… the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea kettle, and assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her." Ms B-d's School of Venus reminds us that William Cobbett had no high opinion of tea as a beverage.

The Daily draws together some of the tributes paid to Shelagh Delaney, who died on Sunday.

"Two archaeologists ... collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: 'Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads'." BLDGBLOG speculates on they uses of plants in archaeology.