Chinese earthquake
The response of China's rulers highlights the lessons that they have learnt, says Jane Macartney. This time there is little sign of an attempt at a cover-up as there was during the Sars outbreak in 2003, when secrecy triggered rumour and panic. And there has been none of the delay and confusion that drew criticism after the late winter snowstorms brought south China to a halt. This is one type of crisis where China's leadership is not hampered by a lack of experience. No country has suffered natural disasters on the scale of China. Tens of millions died from floods, famine and earthquakes in the 20th century alone. Each year hundreds, sometimes thousands, are killed by flooding along the Yangtze or Yellow rivers or by the typhoons that tear up and down its coast in summer. The military has a proven track record of racing to the rescue. Jane Macartney The Times
News in Pictures: earthquake in China 
Economic miracle is to blame
Intervention in Burma
There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular, says David Aaronovitch. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West's hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks. This is adamantine daftness. The issue isn't whether we have the right to intervene - because the consequences of vicious dictatorships usually catch up with us in time - but whether or not, practically, we can. Everything else is a polite conversation in a sunny church. David Aaronovitch The Times
The latest from Burma
In pictures: cyclone devastation
The pros and cons of intervention in Burma
Blair after Downing Street
This existential crisis for the government, which is so much bigger than Brown's awkward personality, may be flattering to our former prime minister, and awash with the most exquisite schadenfreude, writes Robert Harris. But in the long run the man whose reputation is really going to suffer by the disintegration of the New Labour project is Blair. For despite the great debits racked up under his leadership - the calamity of the Iraq war, the loss of nerve over the Euro - there was always one great historic credit in the account book: his restoration of Labour as a natural party of government. That is what is now under threat, and the fact that Blair isn't around to take part in the fight over Labour's future starts to look less like a gesture of unity and more like a dereliction of duty.
Robert Harris The Guardian
Paying to care for the elderly
The baby-boomer generation have always had it good, says Polly Toynbee. Already, 85 per cent of people between 54 and 70 own their homes as wealth is sucked up the age ladder, leaving the young struggling harder than they ever did. There are now more people over 65 than there are children - and they will live long. Look at this: the over-60s own £932bn in property, and the shortfall for care is just £6bn. With their demands for good care and good pensions, they risk trampling on the impoverished generations that come after, making the employed pay for what baby boomers have failed to fund in their own working lives. They have not paid into insurance schemes but have accumulated privately. They, the grasshopper generation, must not demand that the hardworking young ants pay for their retirement. We need to implement a voluntary, late-in-life or after-death payment scheme.
Polly Toynbee The Times
Political memoirs
Don't go reading modern political memoirs in a heatwave, writes Libby Purves. Your jaw falls open all the time, and mosquitoes fly in. Stick to Jilly Cooper for raunch and emotional dysfunction, and Healey, Jenkins and the big boys for insight into government. The witterings of minor figures - Edwina Currie, Alan Clark - are reasonably entertaining, and Clark indeed threw odd beams of light into the broom cupboards of power. But the current outbreak of Memoir Wars is different: quick on the draw, savagely disloyal, dangerously close to the centre. They gaily splatter mud, blood and vomit over the incumbent leader as he struggles with economic and global tension. Raking in the millions, smirking from the sidelines, they shoot off their slack mouths: a Deputy Prime Minister, a confidant fundraiser and, topping them all, a Caesar's wife. Libby Purves The Times
People: How Alastair 'saved' Cherie from Carole
It's not true that money is the only factor behind political memoirs, says Stephen Pollard. The first insider accounts of the Blair government, after all, came from Jonathan Powell, Blair's former chief of staff, and Lord Levy, his former fundraiser. Powell's advance will not have been huge, and he now has a well-paid job at Morgan Stanley bank. And Lord Levy is already a multimillionaire. Neither needs the money. What they want is a hearing. Cherie Blair, Powell and Levy have had one thing in common for the past 11 years: they were regularly attacked but they kept - mostly - silent. Now Tony Blair is out of office the rules have changed, and they want to put their side. I suspect that they'd each have paid a publisher to produce their books if that had been the only option.
Stephen Pollard The Guardian
