Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.

I want to see far more decisions taken far closer to the patients the passengers and the pupils. Far more power for locally and regionally elected politicians who understand best the needs of their areas. And far more say too for the dedicated staff at all levels in health and education.

With Michigan's economic future on the line we can't afford to have our 500 local school districts marching in different directions. Instead we need a high standards mandatory curriculum to get all our students on the road to higher education and a good paying job.

All provisions of federal state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.

One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy our health care our health care our education systems our national security and also our local criminality.

He was a manager one of the singers I guess talent coordinator for the local talent in Harlem. His name was Lover Patterson. He was living right across the street from where my dad had his restaurant. I guess he saw a lot of kids come in a lot of my buddies.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

You don't have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger - where they can't afford to be second to strike - the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high.

I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

I think it true that you know sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and actually I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

Married couples who work together to build and maintain a business assume broad responsibilities. Not only is their work important to our local and national economies but their success is central to the well-being of their families.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York ' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning there was no rose.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

It's not always possible to sit down and eat at home in this day and age of fast-paced living but if you are going to eat out do so as a family and support all the great local places in your areas. I'll still eat at the same diner I did as a kid with my parents.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.