Six of the best

Lunch break - which means I have the chance to do a quick round up of some odds and sods I've spotted over the last week. Not too many sods obviously.

1. Can we take a step back please? A photographer writes about the coverage of the Ian Tomlinson memorial service. Great quote "It is our job as journalists to document events, not orchestrate them."
   
   
2. More on who Jesus would vote for from Scotland on Sunday. great quote from Patrick Harvie, Green MSP. "Politicians shouldn't interfere with people's private faith, and nor should bishops try to distort people's political decisions. Christianity was supposedly founded on peace and social justice, yet the priorities here are the usual culture war obsessions of the wingnut American religious right: anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia."
   
   
3. Glorious bit of campaigning in Manchester for an Ian Curtis memorial bridge. This must succeed! Gayle O'Donovan, whose standing for Parliament in the area said "Renaming the bridge gives Joy Division fans their own part of Manchester."
   
   
4. Rupert Read reacts to the calling of the election. He rightly notes that all the mainstream parties have suddenly forgotten that they all claim the mantle of the being the parties who are best on climate change. "There is an unprecedented ecological crisis gripping our planet, our civilisation: and yet there was simply hardly any talk, in the constant media chatter and interviews yesterday, of this. Our democracy seems incapable of facing up to this, the greatest crisis of all."
   
   
5. I thought Liberal Democrat blogger Max Ink has done a great job highlighting the difference between Joan Ruddock's recent letter to residents claiming to be a vociferous anti-war campaigner and the actual voting record of this minor government minister. "So, I don’t think she’s being straight at all by saying that she voted against the government going to war in Iraq. She didn’t do a Robin Cook or even a Diane Abbott, at the crucial moment she wasn’t in the room."
   
   
6. Ben Goldacre had a really interesting piece on patenting genes in The Guardian last week where he argues "such patents can have a chilling effect on research".