Millions of giant Pacific crabs are marching south along Norway's coast, devouring everything in their path. Energised by a mysterious population explosion a decade ago, whole armies of the crustaceans - known as the Kamchatka or Red King Crabs - have already advanced about 400 miles along the roof of Europe, overwhelming the ports of northern Norway.

They now number more than 10 million and have reached the Lofoten Islands off north-west Scandinavia, leaving in their wake what one expert described as "an underwater desert". They're expected to ravage the coastal areas of Britain soon, on their way south towards Gibraltar. Couldn't Clare Short be blamed for this?

The pot whose lid Yasser Arafat is sitting on, to keep it from coming off, is coming to a brisk new boil. The mayor of Nablus resigned on Friday, accusing the Palestinian Authority of failing to rein in armed thugs who are terrorising Palestinians in his and other communities. This action, together with the unprecedented rebellion going on inside Arafat's Fatah organisation, is giving fresh meaning to the phrase hot seat.

Nudie suits, richly-detailed costumes often embroidered with rhinestones and other bling, helped John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Elvis Presley, Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers and a host of others to stardom. The man who made them, Nudie Cohn, had a genius for self-promotion. According to the Guardian, "He would drive to poor areas, distributing dollar bills on which his face had been stickered over that of George Washington. 'When you get sick of looking at me,' he'd say, 'just rip it off and spend it.'

"How he drove there was the most prominent display of all - the Nudie Mobile. A series of 18 Cadillac convertibles, these were cars customised in the same overwhelming fashion as his clothes. The classic model incorporated a dashboard studded with silver dollars, pistol door handles and, in the rear, a saddle-style seat. For maximum length, it was extended with the horns of the longhorn steer. It added a whole new meaning to pay and display."

The British John Murray publishing family is selling off a stunning collection of documents and letters, collected over six generations, that comprise a literary archive described as "an outstanding national treasure". The National Library of Scotland is getting first refusal at a special, reduced price of 33 million pounds. A public glimpse of the collection will be given on Monday when John Murray, seventh and last in the publishing dynasty, is expected to explain his intentions more fully.

Two years ago, he was forced to announce a planned takeover of his company by Hodder Headline because, after 234 years of distinguished independence, it could no longer compete against the cheque books of multinational conglomerates such as HarperCollins, owned by the publishing tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Buried in this Washington Times op-ed by a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University is a telling little nugget of information about presidential hopeful John Kerry. He apparently outsourced his Wisconsin campaign's telemarketing effort to Canada. This seems to add weight to the Boston Globe's admirably understated conclusion that he is "no Gandhi".

The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal of yesterday seems to concur, and does so at some length.

As a non-American, I feel a little odd about sticking it to another country's politician, and I wouldn't have got started with Mr Kerry if he hadn't tried to push himself up the political ladder by putting his shoe on the back of Bermuda's neck. But it does seem to me that unless he has a very good explanation for his apparent ignorance of the facts of globalisation and his apparent willingness to do and say different things, then he is a very odd choice, indeed, for public office.

As a Bermudian, I'm embarrassed about this story, published in Mississippi's Sun-Herald this morning. As far as I know, and I think as far as other people here know, there is no official plan to legalise casinos in Bermuda in the near future, there is no reason to think there might be a vote on the legalisation of gambling in Parliament this year, and no reason why any Bermuda official should be touring Biloxi looking for tips on how to build and run casinos. I do hope that whoever these officials are, they're paying for their own little junket.

This is a smart idea. Donna Rosenthal, an award-winning former Israel Radio and TV correspondent, said she wrote her new book, The Israelis, an in-depth look at the many faces of Israeli society during the Palestinian intifada, as a "bible for journalists." It is meant to be used as a kind of desk reference about the Jewish state.

While touring to promote the book, Rosenthal said she was shocked by how deeply ignorance about Israel runs in US broadcast journalists, even in some Jews at major network and cable news stations.

The Chinese say that ceremony is the punctuation of human life. It is something the British are very good at, and Alice Thomson of the Telegraph says the country's first citizenship ceremony was right up to the usual mark. The audience was moved to tears, she said. It affected her so much she even managed to say some nice things about David Blunkett, which for a British journalist is saying something.

The Guardian's reporter, Catherine Bennett, was moved too, although in a different way than was Ms Thomson. As the two newspapers have rather different political views, that seems proper and correct. She was rather less than kind to Mr Blunkett, suggesting that he really wants to force new Britons to dance the hornpipe, answer questions about the plot of EastEnders and recite the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was Prince Charles who aroused her admiration:

"...The prince contrived to be at once so clear that the nationality being conferred was a precious gift and so shyly flattered on the country's behalf that anyone should wish to receive it, that it was immediately obvious that David Blunkett's municipal system should be replaced by large scale affairs in which Prince Charles confers citizenship, Reverend Moon-style, on hundreds of candidates at once. Who else is going to welcome exiles from Afghanistan or Somalia to 'this precious stone, set in a silver sea'?"

Good idea. One hopes there's enough work in it to give him no time to be dipping his nose in matters of architecture and science, in both of which fields he is an embarrassing bungler.

Here we go again. Now Namibia wants to expropriate property owned there by white people.

Even by the standards of the British Labour Party, whose fondness for backbiting is well-known, Clare Short's campaign of vilification against Prime Minister Tony Blair "has plumbed new depths of pure personal animus," according to Nicholas Watts, the political correspondent of the Guardian.

That's one way of looking at her claim yesterday that the British intelligence services spied on UN Chief Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraq war. Another way of looking at it might be this: when, as a former Cabinet Minister, she ignored the oaths of office she took and spoke publicly about the way the Cabinet conducted its business, she committed an act of deliberate betrayal, an act that could and did undermine the British government. She committed treason, in other words. Not so very long ago, she'd have had her head pushed down on a block of wood while someone in a funny uniform had a whack at separating it from the rest of her for that crime. That might be a bit extreme in the 21st Century, but it would be an outrage if the worst thing that happened to Clare Short as a result of her performance was Tony Blair's rather mild suggestion that she might be off her trolley.

In this editorial the Telegraph agrees, saying its legal editor feels there is a case against Ms Short for breach of Britain's Official Secrets Act.

And military analyst John Keegan puts the whole business into some well-mannered perspective, confining himself to observing that Ms Short has a reputation as a "sensationalist", but also making the rather good point that there is a difference between bugging telephones and intercepting telephone calls.

The Tower, perhaps? Why couldn't they lock the woman up in the Tower of London for the rest of her misbegotten life? That's what it's for, isn't it?

The Washington Post has enlarged on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago - where offshore companies are concerned, John Kerry presents two faces to the world - one is that of a man who calls them traitors, the other is of a man who is nonetheless prepared to take their money.

At the risk of annoying one or two of the more liberal readers of this page, I'm linking to what I think is an admirably clear analysis of the legal position of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, written by partners in a Washington law firm. They conclude that the legal basis for their detention is straightforward:

"September 11 was an act of war. The United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda and its allies, including the Taliban militia. Under the laws of war, it may attack, capture and hold al Qaeda and Taliban members as 'enemy combatants' until the conflict is over - regardless of how long that might be."

The Washington Times thinks it is time the agencies involved stopped sending mixed messages on Iraq and its nuclear programme. It is wrong, the paper says, to suggest that Iran is simply guilty of providing incomplete information. The problem is really that Iran has engaged in a systematic campaign of lies.

"It's time for the issue to be referred to the Security Council for further action."

If any Pondblog reader is intending to take a country over in the near future, he or she should pay close attention to the lessons learned from Mr Aristide's experience in Haiti. Disbanding the army once you're in isn't a good idea, because you never know when you might need one. However, if you feel you must be Mr Nice Guy, don't whatever you do let the demobbed soldiers take their weapons home with them.

There are another couple of viruses on the loose at the moment - a MyDoom.F variant and Netsky.C, of which I got a copy last night. It's easy to protect yourself - keep your anti-virus software up to date. If you're silly enough not to have anti-virus software, then just make sure you don't open unexpected email attachments.

A frenzied debate over intellectual David Goodhart's unusually honest recent essay about race and immigration has broken out in Britain. The heat in it surely comes from the difficulty the Brits have in confronting the fact that what they really think about those issues is at wide variance from what they think they ought to think. Expect a lot of pontificating by clever bastards, of which, in that country, there are many. Here and here are two of several views published this morning in the Guardian. I don't mean to sound cynical. It is wonderful that they're talking about racial issues over there - normally it's one of the reasons the British upper lip is as stiff as it is.

How is it possible not to fall a little in love with Louise Bourgeois, the enigmatic grande dame of US art? In this Guardian story, a group of artists, critics and writers asked her questions. One or two of them seemed to have been designed to be scene-stealers, one or two were simply a little silly, but the 92-year old tried to provide interesting answers. Whimsy always appeals to me, so I liked this exchange:

Yinka Shonibare (artist): Do you like flowers, and if you have a favourite what is it and what does it make you think of?

LB: I think flowers are beautiful but I much prefer chocolates.

Another signal from Russia that it will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This Globe and Mail story suggests that criticism of the treaty in Canada "has centred on the notion that billions of dollars will be handed over to countries such as Russia to purchase their unused emissions credits in order to meet the goals laid out under the pact." That seems a little off the point. The real problem with Kyoto is that it rests on a foundation of science that is still pretty murky - it being far from clear that carbon dioxide does to the environment what environmentalists claim it does - and it is a hugely expensive way of making what amounts to a tiny improvement. The targets that were agreed could have had an effect on world temperature in the order of hundredths of a degree of temperature. The cost of that improvement would have been about $100 billion, most of it to be paid by the United States. The Protocol also failed to include developing countries, such as China and India, in its emission-reduction targets.

The Washington-based Cato Institute held a day-long conference in December that featured discussion on the current state of the science, economics, and politics of global climate change. Their four experts reached the conclusion that “while it would be possible to spend the next generation simply studying the potential for global warming, it was preferable to adopt such low-cost measures as could be devised to mitigate it, while continuing the attempts to determine its magnitude and potential timing.”

In particular, they thought that a simple carbon tax, set initially at a low level by international agreement, would provide incentives to discover the “low-hanging fruit” methods of mitigating carbon emissions, while at the same time providing a mechanism that could be made more Draconian should further research prove the worst case-scenario to be a serious threat.

The tax would be paid primarily by those nations already emitting large amounts of carbon - the US, Japan and Europe. Rapidly-growing economies such as China and India would become payers of significant amounts of tax only if they did not adjust their growth patterns to reduce carbon emissions.

Engineers can't reliably make what they can't measure accurately. In the ultra-tiny world of nanotechnology, scientists are coming up with astonishing solutions to the problems of accuracy - a nano-ruler, for example, capable of measuring with an accuracy of less than one billionth of a meter.

Spooner got it only half right. These congs aren't kinkering, they're whimpering.

On her website, Maria Mango describes herself as a gypsy troubador. But these days, anybody in a brown suede jacket with fringe, a red velvet skirt down to her ankles, Birkenstocks and beads around her neck who hangs out strumming a guitar on a Haight Street corner in San Francisco is either Canadian, or a nutcase. Maybe both. Eh?

Well, the blogs were right all along. John Kerry's a bloody Frenchman. And at least one of his countrymen has described him as "nice". Somewhere, I hear a door slamming.

More than two-thirds of the 600 members of the Bacardi family who hold shares in the famous rum company have voted in a meeting at company headquarters in Bermuda to allow new shares to be issued to the public. If the board of directors approves, there might be an IPO sometime after January 1, next year. There is speculation, though, that a merger is what's on Bacardi's mind...possibly a merger of equals with the Spanish-born company Allied Domecq.

Remember that incident last year when a hapless Chicago Cubs fan knocked a ball away from outfielder Moises Alou, probably costing the Cubs their best shot at getting to the World Series since 1945? In most un-, or only partly-civilised countries of the world, that fan's status would have been altered from hapless to lifeless before the sun rose again. But in Chicago, the fans have transferred their fury from the fan to the ball. They're plotting to destroy it to release the Cubs from the curse of failure. Seriously.

They've suggested it be roasted, incinerated, crushed, thrown overboard, given an acid bath, split with an axe, put in front of a firing squad, launched into outer space, shredded, frozen and shattered...anything to get rid of it. Tomorrow they're going to get their wish.

Classical history teacher and author Victor Davis Hanson has become a household name in the last few years, for his clear-headed comments on the parallels between the wars of ancient times and our war on terror. The Los Angeles Times looks at the career of a man whose ability to separate wheat from chaff is admired by the White House, the Pentagon and soldiers all over the West.

"We haven't had enemies this antithetical to the United States in a long, long time," Hanson is quoted as having said of radical Islam recently. "Take your pick of the Western agenda. Women's rights? They want to go back to the Dark Ages. Homosexual rights? They want to kill them. Democracy? They don't believe in it. Religious tolerance? You're dead if you're not a Muslim. Technology? They don't like it."

And President Bush? According to the LAT, "In Hanson's opinion, expressed in his recent military history Ripples of Battle, Bush, despite intellectual shortcomings ('he lacked his predecessor's encyclopedic knowledge of names, places and dates'), was the right leader at the right time in responding to Sept. 11.

"'The terrorist war proved that he [Bush], like the Greek iambic poet Archilochus's hedgehog,' Hanson wrote, 'knew one thing, but a big one: how to galvanize his people and lead them into battle against an evil enemy in the hour of his country's great peril.'"

Hanson is never boring, no matter what your view is.

It may have been correct politically for George Bush to oppose gay marriage, but I don't think his stand is correct ethically. For a simple, direct statement of what must be the right view, Cambodia's Buddhist King Norodom Sihanouk's statement can't be beaten. The Telegraph has put a silly lead on this story, but gets it right in the second paragraph: "In a statement on his website, the king said 'I am not gay, but I respect the rights of gays and lesbians. It's not their fault if God makes them born like that.'"

A judge in Colombia is ruling today on whether military honour should be restored to Col Nicolas Marquez Mejia, who was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's grandfather, and the model for the hero of the novella No One Writes to the Colonel. "Even though the injustice was committed in another century, it is not too late to right the wrong," says one of the Colombians who took the case to court. "I think if we won the case the reaction would be one of jubilation, as it would have total support in Colombia."

David Kusnet, chief speechwriter during the Clinton administration, has begun a new column for The National Review Online (you may need to register). In his first, he suggests that George Bush should have used his new stump speech, delivered to the Republican Governor's Association this week, as his State of the Union address. It was, he said, "a graceful, upbeat presentation of his record, agenda, and governing philosophy that slashed his rivals with a switchblade disguised as a scalpel."

Bacardi, the private, family-owned company that makes the world's best-selling rum, settled its headquarters in Bermuda many years ago when it left Cuba in advance of Mr Castro's revolution. It has spurned outside involvement in its ownership since it was founded over a century ago, but is now thinking of opening itself up...maybe a little, maybe a lot. At a meeting at its corporate headquarters in Bermuda today, shareholders are going to vote on whether to give the company's board of directors authority to issue new shares beyond those held by about 600 family members.

This is a great idea from the San Franciso Chronicle - a column by an unusual taxi driver about his fares...well, in truth, he writes about himself. The fares just give him an excuse.

Here's a pair of articles from the Washington Times that discuss democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's beliefs and political style. The first pokes some holes in his economic beliefs. Dear to hearts in Bermuda is this argument:

"Mr. Kerry has said he will work to ensure U.S. companies neither legally move their corporate headquarters to lower tax jurisdictions nor outsource work to foreign jurisdictions. However, if taxes and wages are lower in other parts of the world, foreign competitors to U.S. companies will have lower costs.

"Over the long run, if a foreign competitor has lower costs than the U.S. company, the foreign competitor will most likely gain world market share and, perhaps, even run the U.S. company out of business. Either way, the U.S. company will shrink relative to its foreign competitor, which means it will lay off U.S. workers. "

How can it be that a presidential candidate in the country leading the globalisation charge fails to grasp its principles?

(American economist Daniel Mitchell, the Washington-based Heritage Foundation's chief expert on tax policy and the economy, enlarges on Mr Kerry's ignorance in Bermuda's daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette this morning.)

The second "searches in vain for a sincere syllable" in his "I'd like to know what it is Republicans who didn't serve in Vietnam have against those of us who did" red herring.

Nushu is a one-off system of communication shared by females in the southwestern valley in China's Hunan province. It was never, ever shared with males, however. Pays 'em back for foot-binding, you might think.

This charming article in the Telegraph describes the invention of a new musical instrument called the octachord, and contains a wonderfully impenetrable diagram of the device. Its inventor, Robert Pravda (born in Novi Sad) copied the idea from Pythagoras, who invented it to demonstrate the connection between musical harmony and the structure of the world...yadda yadda yadda.

Here's what makes Pravda the dada daddy of the decade: "Why eight strings? 'Well, eight is a good number...'" Yes! Alfred Jarry lives!

An essay written by Britain's David Goodhart, liberal intellectual, editor of the magazine Prospect, takes an unusual line about diversity in...well, he says in the welfare state, but it is equally about the tough job diversity has putting down roots in the xenophobic soil of Britain. This is part one of the Goodhart essay, and there is a link on the page to part two.

An article about diversity in another part of the world, written for the Los Angeles Times by historian and author Stanley Karnow, tells a completely different story. Is the difference because Americans, being of that give-me-your-huddled-masses ilk, are more accepting of diversity? Does the welfare state have anything at all to do with British attitudes? And if it does, what does that say about the welfare state?

I do like lists. Sarah Dunant is the author of a novel, The Birth of Venus, set in Renaissance Florence. For the Guardian, she came up with her choice of the top ten books about that period. One of them, The Craftsman's Handbook, which she bills as the ultimate 'how to' book on Renaissance art, suggests that the yolk of country eggs is good for reproducing the skin tones of older people, while that of town eggs is better for younger skin. Got to be some kind of lesson in that...

Of these finalists in this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards, I know only one, Carolyn Forche. I came to know her through a praiseworthy British programme of displaying poems, and some basic information about the writer, in subway cars in London. This was years ago, and I have no idea whether the programme still exists. The Visitor was the Forche poem that caught my eye, taken from a collection of poems (The Country Between Us) about El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights activist. It's quite extraordinary:

In Spanish, he whispers there is no time left.
It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,
the ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison, cautious
as Francisco's hands on the inside, touching
the walls as he walks, it is his wife's breath
slipping into his cell each night while he
imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.

There is nothing one man will not do to another.

Albert Einstein was a genius about where he went on holiday, in addition to all that other stuff. My personal hunch is that this trip occurred just after he came to the conclusion that "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

The logic of historian and author Christopher Browning's approach to studying the causes of the Holocaust is so compelling that one wonders why it hasn't been standard operating procedure for historians. He looks at Nazi Jewish policy as having developed over a period of time, beginning with a programme to expel, not exterminate, Germany's Jews. "Too often," he says, "these policies and this period have been seen through a perspective influenced, indeed distorted and overwhelmed, by the catastrophe that followed. The policy of Jewish expulsion ... was for many years not taken as seriously by historians as it had been by the Nazis themselves." This review of his book, The Origins of the Final Solution, appears in the The Atlantic Online.

Curtailing fishing in the North Sea to preserve fish stocks has caused birds to turn on each other as their food supplies dwindle. It's causing a significant readjustment of bird populations in the area. National Geographic says a study shows that a five percent shift in the diet of the Great Skua (which has a wingspan of 4.5 feet) from fish to birds, results in a 33 percent decrease in the population of the black-legged kittiwake of Britain's northeast coast.

Islamic scholars attending a conference in Indonesia have heard that country's president Megawati Sukarnoputri describe the war in Iraq as an "exceptional injustice" against a Muslim country. The conference is aimed at promoting dialogue between the Islamic world and the West to defuse tensions resulting from the US-led global war on terror, seen by many in Muslim countries as targeting Islam. Doesn't sound as if there's any risk of that aim being achieved.

What was with those "vibrations" that Iranian officials said were to blame for that extraordinary explosion on a train 400 miles east of Tehran last week?

A cover story for something rather more sinister, says DEBKAfile. The train was sabotaged, they suggest, and what went up in smoke was not just gasoline, but also hundreds of tons of explosive material being smuggled by Iran into Afghanistan to be used in the fight against US troops there.

Mark Steyn says he just can't work up a lot of enthusiasm about that John Kerry-defined presidential election battlefield with George Bush. "I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaeda down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust off their suits and said, 'But, Mr President, critics point out that National Guard pay stubs from the '70s are notoriously easy to forge...'"

Daniel Libeskind might have had a tough time in New York, fighting to save as much as he could of his design for buildings to replace the Twin Towers, but his design for the Post Graduate Centre of the Metropolitan University in London seems to have been well-received there. Johnathan Glancey of the Guardian says Libeskind uses the powers of destruction and reconciliantion in all his designs. In the case of the Metropolitan University building, there was no tragedy to inform its design, but Libeskind, Glancey says, is not the architect simply of tragedy, memory and the Holocaust. He is also the architect of wandering souls and immigrants.

"London Metropolitan University, a home to students from all over the world, has an address on Jewry Street and a home in Calcutta House on Whitechapel Road in the East End. Various departments inhabit a ramshackle collection of buildings up and down Holloway Road, ranging through arts and crafts, neo-Georgian, brutalism and postmodernist junk. Holloway Road itself is a vast, ferociously busy thoroughfare big enough to swallow up the drama of even the most ambitious architecture. When you visit the area, you immediately realise that Libeskind's explosive building acts not only as a junction box for the university but as a landmark for the entire street."

World War Two's resistance heroine, The White Mouse, sold her many medals to pay her hotel bill. "There was no point in keeping them," she said. "When I die, I'll probably go to hell and they'd melt anyway. My only condition is when I die, I want my ashes scattered over the hills where I fought alongside all those men." Nancy Wake's life redefines the meaning of the phrase tough broad.