Kirsty Bosley: Heat, happy places and fighting for justice, another week in news

I feel an intense guilt about her current situation. Not the fact that she's heavily pregnant, that fault lies with herself and her husband, the hilarious comedian Jim Smallman.

Instead I have to apologise that she's spent the week feeling very uncomfortable. I have to make a confession you see – I wished for the super hot weather that has led to her taking regular unnecessary trips to Tesco's cheese aisle just to try and cool herself off.

I asked for heat, sat there and tried to make it happen so desperately, like Noel Edmonds drawing symbols on his hands. I really hoped for it, and wished for it, but I'll be honest – I didn't expect THIS level of heat. And now we're in this clammy, chafing mess. I'm really sorry, Stace. I'll post you some talc, and wish for us to win the lottery instead.

In jollier news, the 10 happiest countries in the world have been named by the Happy Planet Index report.

All of them, strangely enough, are hot. Perhaps they didn't ask how happy the people were who get regular chub rub on the tops of their thighs, or sweaty under-boobs. I demand a recount.

But seriously, they didn't judge the happiness based on how chuffed (or chafed) the people that live there are. Instead, the report, published by the New Economics Foundation, ranks countries by how much happiness they get from the amount of environmental resources it uses.

It's hard for me to understand this – someone that takes a lot more pleasure from watching people devour pizza than watching them check their solar powered roof panels. But it is what it is.

You'd think that we were one of the happiest places in the world – we have 33 branches of Toby Carvery in the Midlands alone, for heavens sake – but we're absolutely not. Instead, countries in Latin America and the Asia Pacific 'lead the way by achieving high life expectancy and wellbeing with much smaller Ecological Footprints'.

I wonder, if I move to one of the top five happy countries (Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Vanuatu or Vietnam) will I stop being a miserable little goth that prefers reading my Kindle to talking to other human beings?

I doubt it – I hadn't even heard of Vanuatu until I read this report. I wouldn't know happy if it got all up in my face and started playing the maracas.

In other national news, South African prosecutors have said that they're to take court action to secure a longer prison sentence for murderer Oscar Pistorius.

I'd say 'Olympic athlete' Pistorius, but I think he gave up any right to be associated with anything positive when he shot Reeva Steencamp to death. He was jailed for just six years earlier this month for taking a human life.

Six years! Isn't that the length of the average smartphone contract these days?! You'll be on the council flat waiting list for longer than that. Six years? A joke. Prosecutors agree.

They have said that the killer's sentence is 'shockingly too lenient'. They're damn right – six years for a life? I feel so very sorry for Reeva's family, and hope they get the justice their child deserves.

Despite believing that six years is an absolute joke, I'm not an advocate of corporal punishment.

I at least believe that those who have committed terrible crimes should be made to live with their actions.

So when Dudley councillor and West Midlands MEP and Ukip leadership candidate Bill Etheridge this week called for the reintroduction of the death penalty, I had to shake my head.

He said: "Time and time again, in recent years, terrible crimes have been committed and the public left with no real sense of justice."

What is this, Bill? North Korea? Let's focus on moving forward instead of reverting to some backwards ethos that the death penalty might actually deter crime. It doesn't.

So what will it achieve? Emptier prisons? I doubt it. Let's look at the prison sentences handed out in our region in the last month: A man who was convicted of growing cannabis – a drug that at worst leaves people covered in Wotsit crumbs on the sofa – was told to expect jail for cultivating it.

Last week, a man who found out that he'd bought a stun gun (though doesn't appear to have ever used it) was sent down for a mandatory sentence of five years for what the judge herself described as a 'lapse of judgement'.

And a 50-year-old bachelor who distributed child pornography to other paedophiles was locked up for eight short months.

Maybe we need to stop suggesting more severe punishments and instead start reevaluating the ones that we already have.

Talking about extreme action, this week another black man was shot by police in America despite posing no threat. Charles Kinsey, who takes care of patients at a mental heath centre in Florida, had gone out into the street to retrieve a patient when he was shot.

The patient, a 23-year-old man with autism, had wandered from the facility and into the road to play with a toy truck.

Charles did his duty by going to collect the man from harm, but things quickly went bad. According to the Miami Herald, Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said that officers had received a 911call indicating that a man was in the street with a gun threatening to kill himself.

The mix-up led to an officer shooting Charles, who had obeyed their orders to lie down on the ground with his hands in the air, in the leg.

In a prepared statement, North Miami police spokeswoman Natalie Buissereth said: "Arriving officers attempted to negotiate with the two men on the scene, one of whom was later identified as suffering from autism. At some point during the on-scene negotiation, one of the responding officers discharged his weapon."

No weapons were found on the scene, and the officer who shot Charles is on administrative leave for a week.

Funnily enough, the USA isn't on that list of the 10 happiest countries either.