Friday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Amir Taheri: No way forward while the Hamas hydra lives
• Gerard Baker: Wanted: a superhero to save America
• Melanie McDonagh: Rachida Dati has rejected all the pieties of giving birth
• Alex Renton: Forget thrift chic. If we want to eat well, we must pay for it
• Camilla Cavendish: This blind faith in experts fails family justice
• Hugo Rifkind: How can you be so cruel after all we did?
• Joan Bakewall: Women will win equality only when pay is dragged out of the closet
• Ann Treneman: Sea dog Gordon Brown is upstaged by a local hero in Liverpool
• Leading Article: The pound in your pocket
• Leading Article: In Victory, Disgrace
• Leading Article: Parlour Games

And from the rest of the papers...

• George Pitcher: (The Telegraph) - Does Tony Blair deserve a medal?
• Edmund Conway: (The Telegraph) - Recession rescue measures might just be working
• Eka Tkeshelashvili: (The Telegraph) - Georgia will not be deterred from democracy
• Leading Article: (The Telegraph) - Government must act to prevent deeper recession
• Simon Jenkins: (The Guardian) - For all the wild apocalyptic punditry, recessions pass. This one will, too
• Martin Kettle: (The Guardian) - He wants to, yet he doesn't. Will Brown do a Callaghan?
• Carlo Strenger: (The Guardian) - Why Israel is united
• Editorial: (The Guardian) - French lessons
• Mary Dejevsky: (The Independent) - Oxfam is there to help people – not to dabble in politics
• Andreas Whittam Smith: (The Independent) - Amid the gloom and doom, I've a small piece of advice to offer
• Steve Richards: (The Independent) - Mr Darling's blank-cheque dilemma
• Leading Article: (The Independent) - Interest rate cuts alone will not save our economy
• James Chapman: (The Daily Mail) - Is Cameron scared of Bob Geldof?
• Philip Stephens: (Financial Times) - The peace has been lost to Israel’s military victories

And from around the world...

• David Brooks: (The New York Times) - The confidence surplus
• Paul Krugman: (The New York Times) - The Obama gap
• E.J.Dionne Jr: (The Washington Post) - Obama's Big-Tent Stimulus
• Peggy Noonan: (The Wall Street Journal) - Mere Presidents
• Rashid Khalidi: (International Herald Tribune) - What you don't know about Gaza
• Mark H. Teeter: (The Moscow Times) - A Moscow State of Mind

Comments

[ally g]

Funny how you missed the best article in today's papers by Johann Hari in the Independent. But I suppose that would have got in the way of your usual self indulgent victimhood - crying while shooting mantra.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Peggy Noonan on American presidents. Britain has a prime Minister and a monarch. The first can be denigrated and even abused, because the Queen is above the fray. Ministers come and go but the monarch remains. The American president is both Prime Minister (who is not a part of the legislature) and symbolic head of the nation. The arrangement can create problems, which have been thrown into special relief by George W., an unpopular president in recent years, whose presence in the White House and elsewhere, however, many Americans (by no means all) have grown up to regard with reverence.