If ever there was a round peg in a Soviet round hole, it was Nikolai Baibakov, who served as commissar for the oil industry under Joseph Stalin and was later in charge of general economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was born in 1911 in Sabunchi, near the Caspian city of Baku, the original source of the oil that has sustained so much of the Russian economy for a century, the place where Alfred Nobel and the Yusupovs became even richer, and Stalin's own proving ground as an apprentice revolutionary in 1905.

Mr Balls is accused of being a Stalinist for enforcing a law supported by the Conservatives

Written by Roy Smiles and directed by Alan Strachan, Year of the Rat depicts a fictional encounter between George Orwell, Cyril Connolly and Sonia Brownell on the Scottish island of Jura. Close friends, Connolly and Brownell were in London working on Horizon magazine (a literary "shop window") during Orwell's self-imposed exile on Jura. His bad health had forced him to convalesce, and writing Nineteen Eighty-Four required time and solitude.

Scores of people, including US military staff, are feared to have died after a Soviet-era munitions dump exploded at an Albanian army base yesterday. The blast injured more than 240 people, including many children – and the country's Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, said he believed the death toll could be considerable.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was re-elected in a landslide last night as Brazilians rewarded their first working class leader for helping ease grinding poverty and improving the economy of Latin America's largest nation.

There have been lamentably few escape routes over the years for the long-suffering World Cup widow. Separate homes is an option for some, but too expensive for most.

Pity the poor people of Liechstenstein. They, along with the Czech Republic, have never submitted an entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, apparently because of a lack of available musical talent. Those who watched the contest this weekend could be forgiven for wondering how bad this paucity of musicianship must be.

Sir: I wonder why it is that when people like Mark Steel (Comment, 21 December) decide to attack the Christian faith they always illustrate their arguments by describing the least Christ-like people they know. If I were proposing to attack atheism I would not take Joseph Stalin as my model. Perhaps they are implicitly acknowledging that Jesus was right after all.

...or at least by Stalin's ideologues. But is it art? The composer Michael Nyman thinks so and has set it to music.

Sir: Thanks to Mark Steel ("The Stalinists who sobered up and focused on Mr Blair", 9 November) I now realise that the over 50 per cent of British people who still support the current government are a bunch of raving Stalinist thugs wedded to the oppression of individual freedom, suppression of dissent and the committing of mass murder whenever the chance arises. I can't for the life of me work out how I managed to miss these obvious truths for so long.

`The only tenable stance was to support those battling against injustice in both East and West'