Keep an eye on this guy’s blog for analysis.

There is a report from Al Jazeera here which seems to my eyes to give a pretty good account of the current situation and forces at work.

Yom Huledet Same’ach.

His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster has called for Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”. We are to be respected and understood, he says, but at the same time Britain must not become “a God-free zone”.

After all he and his fellow clerics have said about the fanaticism of people like me, what with our “secular fundamentalism” and all, I’m really not sure what to make of this latest intervention from England’s leading Roman Catholic.

So how should we respond? Keep it clean and civilised, boys and girls, or I’ll start deleting comments. We keep a respectable house here. Oh yes.

An actor comes to a sticky end.

The Torygraph describes them–barristers, a remnant of feudalism which, despite attempts to diversify the profession remains ‘male, public school and Oxbridge educated’–as ‘work-obsessed stars’. The poor loves:

The Bar, once the most fusty of professions, is being penetrated by young men who look like City traders–and some of whom are increasingly seen to be acting like their whizzkid financial equivalents.

But today it is still a profession shocked by the violent death earlier this week of Mark Saunders, an Oxford-educated barrister in one of London’s leading chambers, but who ended up shot dead by police at the end of a five-hour siege at his home in Chelsea.

[…..]

[C]ould it be that the peculiar stresses and strains of the barrister’s life may have contributed to Saunders’s violent end–what has been described as “suicide by cop”?

Exeunt omnes.