Monday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• William Rees-Mogg: Cameron is an instinctive moderate and intelligent professional with a doctor’s bedside manner
• Melanie Reid: Prolonging life is to prolong death. Today the birth of a premature baby makes a deep ethical and economic imprint upon our society
• Anjana Ahuja: Psychologists have found that, if you want the public to buy an opinion, you should persuade many people to voice it
• Tim Hames: The idea that a news programme can replace Parliament is absurd
• Caitlin Moran: Nearly every way you slice it, human beings don’t come out of the idea of alien contact very well
• Rosemary Righter: Africa’s political heavyweights know what Gaddafi is after. But they will not admit that pan-African unity is make-believe
• Sathnam Sangera: Lawyers despise each other, despise themselves, are despised by their clients and, in return, despise their clients back

And in the rest of the papers…

• Janet Daley: (The Daily Telegraph) - Marriage tax break could heal society.  It is simply a statement of hard fact that children are far less likely to fall into crime and addiction if they are raised by two parents who are married
• Philip Johnston: (The Daily Telegraph) - We are now assailed on all sides with instructions, demands, advice and warnings. It must be a lucrative time for signwriters
• Jim White: (The Daily Telegraph) - I watched live open-heart surgery, and concluded there was nothing like seeing someone save a life to make you challenge your professional pointlessness
• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: (The Independent) - Even in death they cannot leave Diana alone
• Johann Hari: (The Independent) - Free speech must apply even to the odious
• Bruce Anderson: (The Independent) - Duncan Smith has got it right... family breakdown is at the heart of social ills
• Madeleine Bunting: (The Guardian) - Hearts and minds of young Muslims will be won or lost in the mosques
• Jackie Ashley: (The Guardian) - Labour's defeat in the Lords on pensions offers a chance to rescue millions of women from poverty in their old age
• Roy Hattersley: (The Guardian) - The weekly detour into showbiz that is prime minister's questions diminishes politicians

And from around the world…

• Jackson Diehl: (Washington Post) - Hamas and Israel seems to live in a delusional world in which they can ignore each other - except when they are exchanging missiles and bombs
• Sean Wilentz: (New York Times) - Part of Iran-contra’s legacy has now become a legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration
• John Fund: (The Wall Street Journal) - Will nostalgia sweep the Clintons back into the White House?
• Melanie Kirkpatrick: (The Wall Street Journal) - Remember Oil for Food? Here's the story of how the U.N. propped up Pyongyang
• Joe Queenan: (LA Times) - Will the Internet's all-seeing eye keep us all in line? Ask Bin Laden or the Mafia if they're worried about being embarrassed
• Grigory Yavlinsky and Victor Kogan-Yasny: (Japan Times) - How the West lost its nerve with Russia. Some Russians lament Europe's and the U.S.'s eagerness to change their Cold War perspective for one focused just on trade and commerce

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Lawyers have been the subject of as much abuse and the butt of as many jokes as any other profession I can think of.
Plato criticized the sophists of his time for teaching their students to defend any point of view regardless of its truth--and they did so for money: hired eloquence without belief. According to popular perception, lawyers are the sophists of today. Still the lawyer performs a service by defending even what on the face of it seems indefensible. It is the business of judges and juries to arrive at the verdict.
American trial lawyers and medical malpractice suits are much in the news: John Edwards, the Presidential candidate, was a very successful one. And they have taken to joking at their own expense, perhaps in self-defence. A trial lawyer said to a client, "If we lose, neither of us gets anything. If we win, I get 100% of the award and you get nothing."