In the first, Murdoch continues to eat away at community relations and the rest of the media, not to mention the Met, slavishly follow suit, even though it was clearly a welfare issue. The officer had family affected by it and if he couldn’t banish that then he couldn’t have done his job. No need for an inquiry, just a simple statement of fact: a Lebanese wife and a Syrian father worried about potential association is reason enough. This makes the Sun coverage so ridiculous that its slant can be called into question. Funny that the only others who were worried about this ‘making an exception’ were white police officers who crave uniformity, while it may have rung false in the rest of our ears because obviously the prospect of any Briton now holding principles is outrageous.

Adding to Reid’s sterling interventions of late, then Straw went one louder in hurling a hot potato onto the table toploaded with Eastern spice. How nice of him to ‘launch a debate’ about ditching the veil.

This pretty much sums up the deeply confused and damaging messages that the UK gives out to immigrants. Come! Live the multicultural dream! Be yourself without being shot (we are a haven not like those rogue states where you came from). Er hang on, British society has atomisation embedded into its fabric in such a way that ghettoisation is unavoidable, even if you’re 2nd and 3rd-generation Pakistani muslims. In rundown Victorian slums you will naturally become more like your old ethnic self, until problems our policies, particularly foreign policies, create make you all a suspect and in a volte-face we demand secularism from you. Fantastic.

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All-rounder consultants and outsourcers Accenture have messed up again, cutting their losses and running away. The firm, which changed from Andersen Consulting at about the same time as the widespread corporate crime around Enron unraveled, claiming Arthur Andersen, has missed its own target of ‘high performance delivered' on the nationwide rollout of the GP/hospital connectivity programme, a pillar of health service modernisation, but, not surprisingly, attracting headlines for exorbitant cost and crap implementation.

Nice one Akstenchure, it just makes practical business sense to walk away (from a massive public sector contract once you realise you're going to start losing money). No problem when you can go on creaming off work in business and political centres around the world. But bookmark their blogs in the folder marked BORING.

US firm Computer Sciences Corporation took on the job. Expect theses guys to make profits on producing an error-strewn system, because the technology does not exist to produce an infallible one on the wide scale demanded by IT and all-round expert Tony Blair.

In today's managerialist culture, it is not surprising that the distortion of the terms of engagement and the setting of unrealistic demands pervade even at government-level. Indeed, from civil service departments right through to front-line services, the accent has been on matching the presumed-efficient culture of the corporate workplace.

Cull decided to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the US’ declaration of war on itself by ignoring it, but, as at the time, the accumulative noise about the events was more difficult to avoid. For those whose minds like Bush’s might have relapsed during those fateful early millennial minutes, here was the reminisci package, with added grief and chutzpah. Only a few Manhattan blocks really felt the terror anyway, so this was always a mediated experience – most people will never watch the news more than they did that day. In his memorial speech, Michael Bloomberg was all of a twist over absence and memory. "We come back to this place to remember the heartbreaking anniversary – and each person who died here – those known and unknown to us, whose absence is always with us."

The displacement of the towers themselves is something we’ll never miss. Headlines like ‘Brits remember 9/11’ were particularly vacuous because the "apocalyptic 9/11 imagery” is one spectacle we’re never likely to forget.

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What a vast cack station William is. Expecting better treatment of Palestinians in no way excuses what he sees as Islamofascism. In fact it places Israel on an ‘arc of extremism’ that differs from Blair and Whorecross’s version because it is not restricted to the ‘evils’ committed by Muslims.

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