The news is full of stories of mankind’s inhumanity to its own species. This has led to calls for the restoration of capital punishment - quite understandable but also unthinkable in terms of its effect on the people who would have to carry it out and, we know now, the difficulty of finding adequate safeguards against more inhumanity or miscarriages of justice.

So many explanations of such behaviour but, especially reading the stories of murders and planned murders, no real explanation except the, maybe old-fashioned, concept of evil. Those who maintain evil does not exist might read the witness statements at the trials of those recently sentenced and, desperately sadly, those who up until now have been denied the trial of their tormentors and are only now able to tell us about their sufferings. Think of them and pray for them.