Any excuse to show this painting, Turner's "Slave Ship":
Telegraph: The Iraq war was not “legitimate” because Britain and the US failed to win international support for the 2003 invasion, Sir Jeremy Greenstock has told the official inquiry into the war.
Times Online: Gordon Brown today sparked controversy on the eve of the Commonwealth summit by suggesting he backs the sweeping away of 300-year-old laws that prevent Roman Catholics ascending to the Throne.
The new Supreme Court has ruled on its first 'big' case. This should have been a landmark in UK law, the first time the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, that cost a staggering £56.9 million, had been forced to step up to make a big decision.
BBC News: The UK government has announced a list of new powers it wants to transfer from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament, under its response to the Calman Commission review of devolution.
Today, we learned that "Irish republican terrorists tried to blow up a police building in Belfast and murder police officers in an ambush in Fermanagh last night", both attacks part of what police say is "growing terrorist activity".
There were some commentators earlier this week who, when it was announced that Van Rompuy was to be the President "of Europe", said that this was a victory for the European Commission. And so it is. The Council of Ministers is powerless as well as the European Parliament, and now the new executive figure is, to all intents and purposes, the EC's puppet.
Last week, I was unfortunate enough to have to listen to Carol Ann Duffy's The Last Post as I watched the Armistice Day service at Westminster Abbey. It was like throwing up and seeing the pizza you'd eaten six hours previous wallowing in the vomit, for I had to endure the cliche-filled whining of this enter-button crazed cantankerous cretin for three years prior to this.
Cranmer writes today again on the Pope's invitation for Anglo-Catholics to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury's rebuke and converse invitation for more reformist Catholics to defect to the Anglican Communion. However, Cranmer does note that he feels too much "fuss" is being made of it, and, in a previous post, "wonders if the arrival of the Catholic-Anglicans might not be a Trojan horse of unintended reformation within the Roman Catholic Church".
"They died in vain", says Dr North today. A similar point is made in a few papers, including The Telegraph. As much as today we want to be able to forget about such things as the EU Constitution, and focus solely on remembrance, how can we?
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