Six of the Best 212

Though he greatly admires her, Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph, is against the idea of giving Margaret Thatcher a state funeral: "The problem is that talk of a state funeral for Lady Thatcher reflects a troubling failure to understand what such events are about. They are so very rarely awarded because they have been designed for a category of great men and women who have come to represent the nation as a whole, rather than a particular sect or faction."

Voters in the unrecognised state of Transdniestria (a sliver of eastern Moldova) have kicked out not only the strongman who has run the place since the end of the 1992 conflict with Moldova, but also the Kremlin's chosen candidate to replace him, reports From the Heart of Europe.

The American Wright Thompson defends five-day test cricket on ESPN: "The Indians are staring at an English score of 474. The grind is slow. In Test cricket, only bad things happen quickly. Anything good takes time."

"Until 1980 the only way to show a chess game was for a master to stand in front of a demo board and move the magnetic pieces by hand. Then the BBC TV station pioneered a radical new technology: using a glass chess table and chess pieces with symbols stuck to their bases they brought us animated games, commented semi-live by the players." ChessBase News looks back 30 years to the BBC's highly successful Master Game series and provides links to some of the games on Youtube.

IanVisits has some photographs of an empty London on Christmas Day.

The Cat's Meat Shop visits the St Pancras Renaissance - the old Midland Grand Hotel. His photographs look like stills from an alternative London version of Scorsese's Hugo.