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"My allegiance is to ‘Jesus Christ, who stood up and died for our sins.’” That was the keynote comment of a victorious Randy Couture, third-time winner of last spring’s heavyweight belt in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In the politically and theologically conservative World magazine (September 29), Mark Bergin calls the UFC “the worlds’ leading purveyor of mixed martial arts, a bloody and brutal sport.” Many teen boys, says Bergin, are so engrossed with the bloody sport that parents are worrying about its ethics and morality.

Each time “someone clicks on a Web page, makes a phone call, uses a credit card, or checks in with a microchipped pass at work, that person leaves a data trail that can later be tracked. Every day, billions of bits of such personal data are stored, sifted, analysed, cross- referenced . . . to build up profiles to predict possible future behaviour” (the Economist, September 29, “Learning to Live with Big Brother”). Can we escape? Never. “America . . . has an estimated 30 m[illion] surveillance cameras. . . .