The privatised Post Office
What with the endless billions being thrown at the banks, even if Royal Mail needed a few hundred million to assist its development, would that be so unthinkable, asks John Harris? And why, after all that stuff about Britishness, are we ready to sell a share of such a totemic national institution - with a history dating back to 1516 - to a big foreign conglomerate? There are some more topical worries too. Given that recent wildcat strikes highlighted the anger surrounding contracting out and undercutting the going rate, bringing in TNT may not be the most sensible move. Take note: the company has just spent a year contesting the German government's introduction of a minimum wage for all postal workers, prompting accusations that it aims to use the deregulation of postal services as the cover for an archetypal race to the bottom. John Harris The Guardian
Full article: Ditch this dreary sell-off: let creativity deliver Royal Mail 
Will Self: The Post Office we hanker after no longer exists
Protectionism is certain to engulf the global economy
Our postal system has a special place thanks to its historical role in pioneering a universal postal service. This was the heroic age of Sir Rowland Hill's introduction of the penny post and Anthony Trollope's development of the pillar box, two of the three great 19th century advances in postal communication. (The third was the invention of the letter box, tricky as it meant persuading people to cut slots in their expensive front doors, but essential as it saved the postman having to wait for an answer when delivering mail.)
Hamish McRae The Independent
Full article: If we can't run the Royal Mail, we'd better let the Dutch try
Movies are for children
I would contend that even the worst of big-hitting US telly - Brothers and Sisters, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City - has a maturity, a degree of courage, an iconoclasm, that equivalently mainstream cinema would balk at. And it's straight demographics. The average age of the American cinemagoer is 19; in the UK it's 17. These are the top grossing films of this century: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the first Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Shrek 2, Star Wars 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man 3, The Dark Knight. Female role models and political complexity seem irrelevant from this angle.This is no longer an adult's medium, and that's why it disappoints. Zoe Williams The Guardian
Full article: I give up on the movies
Film makers adopt a softer touch to attract a new audience
Film Talk
Save the Russian dissidents
Umar Israilov was a 27-year-old bodyguard to Ramzan Kadyrov, the thug appointed by Putin to run Chechnya today, who describes the province as a "zoo" filled with "animals" and brags: "I will be killing as long as I live." Israilov was horrified, writes Johann Hari, so he fled to Austria, to speak out. He begged the Viennese police for protection, but they refused. On 13 Jaunary this year, he was chased through the streets of Vienna by a gang of hit men – and shot twice in the head. This is only going to get worse. Dissent in Russia was relatively low as the economy boomed, built on a swelling oil price. But now Russia's stock market has fallen by 75 percent since last summer, the biggest drop in the world. To prepare, Putin has restored the Soviet-era criminalisation of dissent.
Johann Hari The Independent
Full article: Russia's dissidents deserve our help
Moscow murders are a new blow against press freedom in Russia
Symbolic sanctions
Sanctions may have scant effect on their targets, says a Times leader. It was military action, not the sanctions applied to them, that overthrew Saddam and the Taleban, and that stopped the genocidal designs of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. But the importance of symbols in politics should not be underestimated. Vice-President Joyce Mujuru's outburst is suggestive. The Zimbabwe regime defies civilised standards, while its leaders enjoy the material spoils of gross misrule. It matters to them, even if it does not directly alleviate the plight of their victims, that the EU and United Nations maintain economic pressure. Tyrants may not thereby fall, but they can at least be denied the fruits of avarice and the means of opulent retirement. Leader The Times
Full article: Material Deprivation
All the latest from the First Post's man in Harare
In Brief
24 hours in Docklands
The prime minister has long dreamed that the London gathering might birth a second Bretton Woods, allowing him to be present at the creation of a new global financial architecture, with himself in the role of master builder. The notion that 24 hours in Docklands could complete such a task is clearly absurd: Bretton Woods was the fruit of more than three years' work.
Jonathan Freedland The Guardian
Full article: The sagging Brown image can only benefit from a shot of Obama botox
Restaurants in recession
The days of the £17 lamb shank are over. What we need are places that can cook and serve competently, which cost between £12 and £25 a head. Many restaurants have forgotten basic principles, the most important of which is that the customer doesn't have to be there – putting up with bad lighting, tables too close together, awful background music, incomprehensible menus, and patronising (or uninterested) staff.
Janet Street-Porter The Independent
Full article: Why can't I get a decent meal out these days?
Restaurant decline may stimulate fine wine
Gucci capitalism
I have named the past era of capitalism Gucci capitalism. It was born in the mid 1980s - the love child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with Milton Friedman its fairy godfather and Bernard Madoff its poster boy. It was an era in which the fundamental assumptions were that markets could self-regulate, governments should be laissez faire and human beings are nothing more than rational utility maximisers.
Noreena Hertz The Times
Full article: Goodbye Gucci. It's the age of co-op capitalism
Moral grey issues
Teenagers have little empathy for moral grey issues. Their ethical universe, like that of a child, still tends to be black and white, and never more so than when it comes to sex. Whereas long and hard experience instructs adults that the laws of sexual attraction are complex and that sometimes people fall out of love, or fall in love with people they shouldn't, teenagers can be suffused with self-righteous fury by a classmate snogging another classmate's beau.
Rowan Pelling Daily Telegraph
Full article: Oh, the joy of sex education: is there a right way to tell them?
Welcoming Britain
The pit in which Britain, more than any other Western nation, finds itself stuck is that our courts and the human rights industry reject removal from our shores of anybody to their own nation if it lacks 'acceptable' standards of justice and freedom. That means most of the world. The less civilised a country from which somebody arrives here, the less likely it is that any legal means can be found of sending them home again.
Max Hastings Daily Mail
Full article: Torture is wrong but why, in the name of sanity, should we allow those who hate us to live here?
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