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A quick look at the Sunday Times this morn - full of good stories.

Turns out Mr Tube-bomber's local imam in Leeds isn't quite such a moderate off-camera.

“What they [the bombers] did was good. They have warned that we are here, we Muslims. People have taken notice that we are here. They died so that people would take notice . . . big meetings and conferences make no change at all. With this, at least people’s ears have pricked up.”

Sad news that Charlotte Wyatt's parents have split. Not that it alters in the slightest the principle that parents, not judges or doctors, should have the final word on pulling the plug on a sick child.

And Rod Liddle seems to have completed the transition from right-on leftie to hard-on rightie.

"For if the right won the economic argument and the cold war, the left won everything else. The followers of Lady Plowden and Shirley Williams still control our education system; children are ill-disciplined and the educational emphasis is on interpretation rather than learning facts.

The left has complete hegemony within our social services. The criminal justice system has moved gradually leftwards, with crimes against property considered to be less serious than “hate crimes”; prison tariffs are shorter. The left has won the argument over immigration (ie, unlimited and in perpetuity). The damaging creed of multiculturalism is only now being challenged by a few brave souls.

Homosexuals may not only legally pleasure one another, but do so in a state of virtual marriage; divorced women, meanwhile, have been the recipients of the second most important redistribution of wealth in the last century, through alimony. Women have equal rights — or slightly more than equal rights — in the workplace.

There has never been a better time to be disabled, either — and you might be disabled without even knowing it: the disabled lobby groups suggest that one in three of us suffers — or lives with — a disability.

Popular culture, too. Find me a right-wing Hollywood film, if you can. Or a right-wing play in the West End. Or a pop star who wishes to give less money to Africa and thinks the war against Iraq was just fine and dandy. Or a right-of-centre novelist up for the Booker prize.

Or, indeed, a programme on the BBC that presents a right-wing point of view without irony or downright condemnation. One suspects that over there in Wood Lane they were all, like me, lefties themselves. And maybe still are."

Out in blogland there's some terrific stuff at The Last Ditch, of which this is a fine example.

"I became a Maoist. I was suspended from school for selling revolutionary magazines; the high point in a period of teenage father-baiting.

Working during school holidays on a building site, I had a "road to Damascus" experience; an encounter with the Shrewsbury Pickets. They were not a rock group, but a foul, violent gang of Communist scumbags. An older fellow-Communist at school patiently explained that the violent intimidation I had witnessed was a perfect example of "the dictatorship of the proletariat"; my friends on the receiving end being, as mere construction workers, the "lumpenproletariat". I may have been an impressionable youth, but I knew that giving an evil thing a fancy name could make it worse, but could never make it better."

But all I've heard on the BBC all day has been this story.

"Video footage of soldiers apparently headbutting detainees and kicking a blood-covered body lying on the ground is being studied by the Royal Military Police (RMP). It is understood that the incident is alleged to have occurred two years ago. The film is believed to have been shot from a rooftop overhead, and it is understood that it is not possible to identify the location, the soldiers or their regiment"

So many questions. Who took it ? Why now if it's two years old ? Why no action at the time ?

The one thing I know is that by publishing the video rather than passing to the Army for action, the News of the World has put our troops in danger, as the Mirror did with photos that turned out to be fakes. While Rupert Murdoch's agenda may sometimes coincide with UK interests, he's no friend of Britain.

But as you can imagine, it's meat and drink to the BBC.