Thursday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Camilla Cavendish: BBC Three and Four, your number’s up. Why is the BBC spending £120 million a year to get down and dirty with E4 and ITV2?
• Anatole Kaletsky: Maintaining economic growth is the indispensable condition for Brown's success as Prime Minister
• Matthew Parris: Whom would the great man vindicate, the critics or the fans? Wet blanket that he is, Gordon Brown disappointed everyone
• Peter Riddell: The Government needs to clarify the distinction between popular consultation and decision-making
• Robert Crampton: Tell-tale signs of the Scouse effect. I didn’t see anyone wearing a perm or a shellsuit and no attempt was made to steal my belongings
• Ann Treneman: Gordon Brown managed to make David Cameron look like a heavyweight. Then incredibly, he made Ming look marvellous
• Andrew Ellison: A hero – at last – to save us from estate agents. Mini Coopers and flash offices do not come cheap, but a five year-old could point out that a room with a toilet is a bathroom
• Sandra Parsons: The more you obsess about your children, the more they will confound you. That's how it should be

And from the rest of the papers…

• Khalid Mish'al: (The Guardian) - We cheer the hard-won release of Alan Johnston, who was captured in a chaos imposed from afar
• Timothy Garton Ash: (The Guardian) - An interdependent world faces many challenges. Britain should promote a coalition of democracies to tackle them
• Tony Benn: (The Guardian) - For decades I've fought for constitutional reform. Now at last a leader has begun a proper debate
• Johann Hari: (The Independent) - The future of the Earth depends on China
• Steve Richards: (The Independent) - The Tory right should be patting their leader on the back, not kicking him around
• Janet Street-Porter: (The Independent) - A terrorist by any other name...
• Boris Johnson: (The Daily Telegraph) - Bravo, Sarkozy - from one jogger to another . As one who also makes the pavement echo to the slap of his tread, I salute the new French President's willingness to expose his knobbly knees
• Alice Thompson: (The Daily Telegraph) - If Alan Johnston can put up with four months incarcerated in a cell, it seems churlish to whine about another couple of months of bad weather
• Bryony Gordon: (The Daily Telegraph) - Like Al Gore, the event's organiser, I believe that we should live greener lifestyles. I'm just not so sure that Live Earth is the way to go about it

And from around the world…

• Newt Gingrich: (Washington Post) - France proves change is possible in a country whose special interests are even more entrenched than America’s
• Daniel Henniger: (The Wall Street Journal) - No matter how low George Bush falls, terror remains the No. 1. issue
• Shigeo Katsu and Pradeep Mitra: (International Herald Tribune) - The World Bank warns that a badly handled transition from 'Red to Gray' threatens Eastern Europe's economic success
• Nathan Brown: (International Herald Tribune) - As a long-term solution, there is probably no sounder approach than using democracy to incorporate Islamist movements as normal political actors
• Boris Kagarlitsky: (Moscow Times) - At the Group of Eight summit last month in Germany, world leaders were unable to reach much of an agreement on environmental issues
• Editorial: Martha Stewart, even Paris Hilton, served time. But there's the rule of law - and the rules of Bush - LA Times

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

In the United States the term liberal has generally meant someone who wants the Government to keep an eye on markets and regulate it. Newt Gingrich means by liberalism the 19th-century version of unfettered markets, before the Fedral Reserve System created by Woodrow Wilson in the second decade of the 20th-century and before Keynes, whose thinking informed Roosevelt's New Deal. William Graham Sumner, whose parents had come to America from England, preached Social Darwinism: struggle and competition lead to the survival of the fittest, which is as it should be.
Many Americans now accept FDR as a great President but there are dissenters. In his own time, Roosevelt's neighbour in patrician Hyde Park chose to live outside the country, so violent was his disapproval of the President and his methods. I remember that in 1960 some Republican Americans told me that what got the country out of the Depression was not the New Deal but the economic activity unleashed by the nation's entry into the Second World War.