Three separate items of interest today.

Firstly, David Aaronovitch cuts through the knives debate to reminds us how little we know about the statistics. (We are all stabbing blindly at knife crime)

Secondly, anyone who has read CentreForum's work on population (see 'From boom to bust? fertility, aging and demographic change' or 'Does Britain need a population policy') will enjoy Dominic Lawson's piece in The Independent today - 'The hypocrisy of the population zealots'.  Lawson's stimulus is a report from the Optimum Population Trust, a group that says the Government should set targets to reduce UK population to less than half of today.   of procreation and the work it is based on:

[The author] argues: "If the intrinsic value of procreating is the self-fulfilment of the procreator ... then we can presume this experiential value, this fulfilment, is achieved after the first birth – and merely replicated thereafter." I suppose the same argument could be used at the other end of the process. Wife to husband, after consummation of marriage: "That's the last time we're doing that." Husband: "Why?" Wife: "This experiential value, this fulfilment, has now been achieved. To do it again would be mere replication."

Finally, regular readers who follow the ups and downs of the commentariat will find Gideon Rachman's piece in today's FT a stimulating read.  His main argument, that American journalists treat their role more seriously than the UK, is summed up in the title to the piece 'American journalism, still a model'.

He concludes with an interesting observation about the UK opinion writers:

British journalists are often curiously unwilling to acknowledge their power. A recent Reuters Institute report on the “Power of the Commentariat” is in no doubt that opinion writers shape politics. But the authors, John Lloyd of this newspaper and Julia Hobsbawm, note that: “No commentator to whom we spoke said s/he was powerful. It doesn’t figure on the permissible responses of British commentators.”

Despite the growth of the blogosphere, and the decline of newspaper sales, one only has to look at recent Guardian debates about Gordon Brown's premiership to understand that commentators are still exerting a powerful influence on the political world.