An online Twitter seance kicks off in London on Friday, October 30, the day before Halloween, in an attempt to communicate with the spirits of dead celebrities.

Psychic medium Jayne Wallace will try and contact the stars, and will act as online intermediary between the living and the dead by tweeting any responses she receives.

Tweets for the "tweance" can be sent to the social networking site http://twitter.com/tweance

Which dead celebrity would you tweet?

The last time round when there was such widespread travel chaos in Britain due to snow was quite some time ago....it was in 1991 - the year the "wrong type of snow" was born - British Rail's ill-conceived attempt to explain why the railways had come to a virtual standstill after heavy snowfall.

The "wrong type" of just about anything has since been used to explain why the country's creaking transport system is grinding to a halt ....remember the one about the "wrong type of leaves" on the tracks?

OK, before you read on I should declare that I'm not British and hail from a country that usually copes with bad weather a lot better than Britain.

But I've been here long enough - 20 years to be precise - to think when I heard on the radio in the morning that no London busses were running at all - that didn't even happen during the Blitz, apparently - ..."oh well, it must be bad then ... better log on from home". And so did thousands of employees, many of them actively encouraged by their employers not to travel to work unless it was "critical".

At least I could rest assured, sorry - work from home assured - when the Metropolitan Police declared in a news release that it was maintaining policing despite the bad weather.

But I still couldn't help thinking:  why is this happening, and shouldn't I make a bit more of an effort to get into the office? Why is there hardly any public transport, forcing so many people to stay at home when there is heavy snowfall? Can't the streets of London be gritted, and why is no one shovelling the snow off the pavement outside their houses, an effort common in many countries that experience wintery conditions?

The cost to businesses is huge - an estimated 1 billion pounds a day as about 20 per cent of the country’s workforce is believed to have taken a “snow day” on Monday.

It's not that it never snows heavily in Britain - but in London it's not so common. London Mayor Boris Johnson, facing questions over the inability of the capital's infrastructure to cope with six inches of snow,  conceded the city did not have enough ploughs to keep the roads clear.

"There's no doubt about it, this is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities," Johnson told the BBC.

But local councils said the snow was simply "too heavy" for their gritters to work.  "The problem with this sort of weather is when you grit and it snows heavily, of course, the maximum effect of that gritting is lost," the Local Government Association said.

So, it WAS the "wrong kind of snow" again....

The National Galleries of Scotland and London's National Gallery said on Monday they had raised the 50 million pounds needed to save a key work by Renaissance master Titian before it was put up for sale by the Duke of Sutherland.

Of the 50 million raised for "Diana and Actaeon", the Scottish government pledged 12.5 million pounds, 7.4 million came from public donations, 12.5 million from National Galleries in London and another 10 million pounds came from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

The campaign to save the painting has drawn criticism from politicians who said the money, some of which came from government funds, could have been spent more wisely during a deepening recession.

Should public money have been spent on saving this seminal work of art, one of two Titian paintings being sold by the Duke of Sutherland? And do you think the Scottish public is entirely happy with their money going to a family whose notorious ancestors were involved in the Highland clearances of the 19th century?

The BBC has been roundly condemned at home for its refusal to broadcast an emergency appeal for Gaza on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee, a coalition of 13 aid agencies.

It says it does not want to be seen to be taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and that broadcasting the appeal could jeopardise its carefully cultivated position of impartiality. Sky News has followed suit.

But criticism has been fierce, including from the government and the Church of England.

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, has accused the BBC of "taking sides". He said on Friday: "This is not a row about impartiality but rather about humanity.

Former BBC foreign correspondent Martin Bell said the BBC should admit it had made a mistake. He claimed "a culture of timidity had crept" into the corporation. "I am completely appalled," he said. "It is a grave humanitarian crisis and the people who are suffering are children. They have been caught out on this question of balance."

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said: "Inevitably an appeal would use pictures which are the same or similar to those we would be using in our news programmes but would do so with the objective of encouraging public donations. The danger for the BBC is that this could be interpreted as taking a political stance on an ongoing story."

What do you think? Are Sky and the BBC being too cautious or do they have a point?