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In many ways this is a beautiful picture of a mother and child, taken by a besotted father. In other ways it's highly disturbing.

For a start, you can't see the baby. I can understand why they don't want to show its face, but just having a couple of fingers peeking out looks really odd. You start worrying: how is it breathing? Is it being smothered? Is there something really wrong with the rest of it?

But the main issue seems to be whether or not this is an amateur or a professional photo. It's being billed as amateur – "Brad Pitt's private photos" – but it's being featured on the front of an art issue of a magazine, one that's also featuring great photographers like William Egglestone. Are they saying Brad Pitt is a great photographer too?

He really isn't. The composition isn't terribly arty – it makes the magazine look like a bad issue of Woman's Realm. That pose is just so coy and twee.

You can imagine turning the pages to find there's a feature in which Angelina is taught how to make a maternity dress.

Yet it doesn't seem entirely like a spontaneous shot by a doting dad. It's in black and white, for a start – and generally this kind of moment is one you'd want to record in colour. But I suppose black and white is obviously more flattering for someone who's just given birth.

And it's just SO personal. You can see her breast. Which does make it strange he'd then show the world the photos: it's like saying – this is my wife, and I'm the only one allowed to photograph her like that.

Personally I hate looking at other people's family snaps – another picture of little Johnny, or 900 shots of Corfu. I'm not interested in their domestic lives.

The difference here is that millions of people are interested in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's domestic life. And her face on the cover of a magazine sells copies; just like Princess Diana's used to, and Jordan's still does.

It's interesting that all three are mothers - maybe they shift copies because they appeal to women as well as men.

Personally speaking, I find this picture just a bit too personal to enjoy. It's shallow, and creepy, and hypocritical, too.

These celebrities say they don't want to be photographed in private, then they themselves shoot and then circulate snaps like these.

Brad Pitt might well punch a photographer he thought was being intrusive. And now here he is, sticking a picture he took of his wife with her boob out on the front of a magazine. Film stars are weird!
Check out the New Trailer for Oliver Stone's W
Early word on Oliver Stone's George W Bush biopic is that it's an entertaining enough ride, if a little hurriedly thrown together. The same certainly can't be said about this latest, extended, trailer, which has to be one of the finest examples I've seen this year.
Set to the tune of Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime, this is probably the best look we'll get at the film before it debuts at the London film festival on October 23. November 7 is the date when the movie hits cinemas across the UK.
I'm struggling to think of a trailer where the combination of music and images works so perfectly, but here are two of my all-time favourites, for Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb and Clockwork Orange. Can you top them?
Obama Attempts to Buy the Presidency
Barack Obama will use his financial superiority over John McCain to dominate the airwaves in the final days of the election with a half-hour, primetime special.
Campaign officials said yesterday that they were negotiating with CBS, NBC and Fox television for a half-hour broadcast on October 29, six days before Americans go to the polls.
The media blitz represents the most ambitious - and by far the costliest - use of media in a presidential election.
"Strategically, this is about as big a megaphone as money will buy at this point," said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group.
"Obama, as a former lawyer, will probably make a fairly well articulated closing argument with the production value of a Steven Spielberg movie." He estimated the cost of airtime would be at least $1m (£590,000) for each network.
Short political ads have been the traditional way for politicians to communicate with voters. But a primetime, sitcom-length commercial would provide Obama an opportunity to make a closing argument to the entire country.
"It's a luxury to be able to afford that kind of communication," said Tad Devine, a Democratic media consultant who was a senior adviser to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.
Former candidates have departed from the traditional advertising format to buy blocks of airtime. In 1992, Ross Perot bought time on network television and Hillary Clinton paid for an hour-long town hall special on Lifetime television, a cable network aimed at women, during the Democratic primary.
McCain, who took public financing, is on an $84m budget for these elections. Obama has no such constraints. He increased his spending on television advertising to $3m a day this week, and is expected to spend more as the election approaches. The McCain camp, in contrast, spent about $1.6m a day.
Worst Week for Global Markets Since 1929
World stock markets plummeted Friday, ending a week that saw the biggest collapse in share values since 1929.
The looming threat of a world depression provided the backdrop for a meeting of finance ministers from the G7 industrialized countries, who gathered in Washington for emergency talks with US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.
After a day of panic selling on markets from Asia to Europe and Latin America, and wild swings on the US stock market, the G7 issued a statement that pledged to place the resources of their respective countries at the disposal of the most powerful banks, but failed to outline any specific coordinated actions to stem the slide to economic disaster.
Paulson issued a statement and held a press conference following the meeting to announce that the US government would use the virtually unlimited authority granted it under the $700 billion Wall Street bailout passed one week before by the Democratic Congress to begin directly buying stock in banks and financial firms, an expansion of the government transfer of taxpayer funds to the most powerful sections of the financial aristocracy.
Major stock exchanges in Asia and Europe registered losses on Friday even greater than the 7.3 percent drop in Wall Street’s Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday.
Japan’s Nikkei index fell 9.6 percent to its lowest level in five years. Since the start of the week, it has lost 24 percent of its value. Toyota shares dropped by 6.2 percent and a major Japanese insurance firm filed for bankruptcy.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index plunged 7.2 percent. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 index fell 8.3 percent and the broader All Ordinaries was down 8.2 percent.
The Shanghai Composite Index declined 3.6 percent, leaving it 12.8 percent lower than it was a week earlier. The Indonesian stock exchange, which closed earlier in the week because of panic selling, remained suspended.
In Europe, the pan-European Dow Jones Stoxx 600 index fell 7.5 percent, which ranks among the worst one-day performances on record for the index.
London’s FTSE finished Friday down 8.9 percent. Since its last peak in June 2007, it has declined 43 percent. Friday marked the British index’s fifth consecutive losing day, during which it lost 20 percent of its value.
Robbing the Poor to Help the Rich
The free-market system that caused the financial crisis is organized to make sure that some people stay rich and get richer, while the rest of us pay the price.
Because capitalism is built around the principle that a few people deserve to be rich beyond anyone else's wildest dreams, while for most of us, our lives and dreams don't count.
That may be the obscene truth about the system we live under, but it isn't an excuse for accepting such a world. This unjust society needs to be changed fundamentally.
Right now, at a fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bailout, the U.S. government could undertake measures that would help millions of people.
Starting with restoring unemployment benefits that have been whittled down across the country, and continuing with a program to create good-paying jobs through public works infrastructure projects that could rebuild schools and housing in run-down cities.
Moreover, the U.S. now controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest mortgage companies in the world--which between them own or back nearly half the home loans in the U.S.
There should not be a single foreclosure on any home where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control the loan--and every loan should be renegotiated on terms that borrowers can tolerate.
Ultimately, such solutions would only stop the worst of the suffering. The cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is nothing less than the chaos and irrationality of a system driven by blind competition and greed.
The only way to prevent such economic cataclysms from taking place is to get rid of the capitalist free market--and replace it with a different system entirely, based on the vast majority of working people democratically using all the resources of society to make better lives for themselves and everyone else in it.
Extraordinary Move: America to Nationalize Banks
The government will take equity ownership in financial institutions for the first time since the Great Depression.
In an extraordinary response to the escalating financial crisis, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson said Friday that the government would buy direct stakes in banks and other financial institutions for the first time since the Great Depression.
Paulson had initially dismissed the idea of taking equity stakes in crippled banks, and his change of heart may reflect a growing conviction that the severity of the credit crisis warrants a more direct approach.
The Treasury plan aims to help banks rapidly shore up their dwindling capital so that they are more willing to lend to businesses, individuals and one another.
The announcement followed Wall Street's most tumultuous week ever, including a volatile session Friday that saw the Dow Jones industrial average whipsaw over a range of 1,000 points. The Dow fell for an eighth straight day and posted the biggest weekly loss in its 112-year history.
"We're in this together and we'll come through this together," a somber Bush said in a Rose Garden statement. He warned that "anxiety can feed on anxiety" -- echoing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-era declaration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Paulson said the Treasury Department was working on a plan to buy equity in "a broad array of financial institutions," using some of the $700 billion in the financial rescue package approved by Congress last week.