Retired Marine Lt Col James G Zumwalt says the enemy's assessments of its progress are as important as our own. In The Washington Times, he writes: "An old joke tells of an opposing team failing to show up for a football game against an ethnic team that is so bad, even without an opponent on the field, it takes several plays to cross the goal. A similar situation seems to exist in the Middle East: Even if Israel disappeared, the Arab and Muslim populations would still be driven by the hatred, distrust and intolerance of the past, making the goal of peace impossible.

"More Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims than by Israelis. Thus, few problems of the Arab world realistically are linked to Israel. Just look to Sudan, the Iran-Iraq war, the massacres in Algeria, the invasion of Kuwait, the murder of thousands of Syrians by Hafez Assad (father of the current Syrian leader) at El Hamma, use of gas against Yemen by Egypt in the 1960s, the brutality of the Taliban against the people of Afghanistan, etc.

"The CIA is to report on a simulated exercise to determine how the Iraq war will affect the global jihadist movement. That report will warn that a US defeat will embolden al Qaeda to expand its terrorist ranks and pick new strategic targets in its global war effort. Clearly, any option short of victory, while bringing short-term benefit, will bring long-term disaster.

"In deciding whether to move forward in Iraq, we must listen to the right voices to determine how the war is really going. Ironically, this may be one of the rare times we should listen to the voice of al Qaeda."

Have the Israelis and Hamas struck a deal on the release of one of the Israeli soldiers held hostage? Haaretz reports that the Palestinians say they have.

Foreign Policy lists The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006 - significant stories overlooked because they lacked a kind of news flash point.

Germans do an odd thing on New Year's Eve - all over the country, they sit down to watch their favourite British film comedy, Dinner for One. It's odd that they should want to ring in the New Year by watching the same film year in, year out, odder that it should be a British film, and the oddest thing of all is that no one in Britain's ever heard of it. The Los Angeles Times says: "The two 'stars' of the film, Freddie Frinton and May Warden, were British entertainers who had been performing this sketch at seaside resorts for years. It was written in the 1920s and Frinton bought the rights in the 1950s. During one performance in Brighton in 1963, German TV presenter Peter Frankenfeld happened to be in the audience and liked the sketch so much he invited Frinton and Warden to perform on his show.

"It was such a roaring success that the sketch was then performed in front of a live audience in Hamburg and filmed by the local station NDR - and it is this version that is shown on German screens to this day. The tradition of showing the skit on New Year's Eve took off in 1972 and it is shown repeatedly across most of the channels - making it virtually impossible to avoid. In fact, Dinner for One holds the Guinness Record for the most-aired TV program in history."

Good tip, Brenda.

I've had experience of the gob-smacking inefficiency of British Airways luggage handlers at Heathrow on a quiet day. What must have happened during those busy days of fog delays and cancellations I can only guess. The Telegraph reports: "Tens of thousands of families travelling abroad for Christmas and the New Year have been left without their luggage following a series of administrative fiascos by British Airways handlers at Heathrow.

"A 'baggage mountain' is building up outside Terminal Four, and families are being advised that they may have to wait weeks for their items to be located and returned to them. It is the latest embarrassing episode for BA, which had to cancel hundreds of flights over the Christmas period due to fog. The airline last night apologised to the estimated 20,000 passengers affected by the baggage incident, and promised they would be compensated."

The only foreigner teaching philosophy at a Chinese university, Montrealer Daniel Bell, is recommending regime change - to a Confucian form of government. The Chinese don't seem to know quite how to react. The Globe and Mail explains that Professor Bell "is convinced that China's political institutions will change dramatically in the coming decades.

"'One reason I like to be in China is that the political future is open,' he says. “Nobody thinks the political status quo will remain the same in 20 or 30 years. It's a stimulating time for political theorists to be here."

Bell believes that "a future China should be ruled by a 'modern Confucian democracy', with a democratic lower house and an elitist upper house whose members would be selected on merit, based on exam results - just like the traditional method of choosing civil servants in East Asia.

"'The country would have a group of talented and disinterested individuals ready to act for the common good,' he writes in his book, Beyond Liberal Democracy. A system based on meritocracy 'would resonate with traditional political culture, it could be supported by interest groups at a constitutional convention, and it could be readily adapted from an existing political institution,' he says in the book. 'It would be Chinese-style democracy: rule by the people, with Confucian characteristics.'"

Thomas Sowell follows up his column of yesterday on disparities in income and wealth. In another National Review piece, he writes: "People in the media, in academia, and among the intelligentsia in general who are obsessed with 'disparities' in income and wealth usually show not the slightest interest in how that income and wealth were produced in the first place.

"They are hot to redistribute the existing income and wealth but seem wholly unaware that how you do that today can affect how much income and wealth will be produced tomorrow. Any number of schemes for redistributing wealth have ended up redistributing poverty in a number of countries.

"'Progressives' in the media and among academics and intellectuals claim to be interested in ending poverty but the production of more output is the only way to end poverty for millions of people.

"It not only can be done, it has already been done in many countries, for all countries were once very poor by today's standards. But most self-styled progressives show virtually zero interest in economic history or in economics in general."

Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblat has for the first time publicly accused Hizbullah of being involved with the Syrian regime in "some assassinations if not...all."

Naharnet reports that "In an interview with the Al Arabiya television network Thursday evening, Jumblat said the question of assassinations targeting anti-Syrian Lebanese figures became intolerable the day MP-journalist Gebran Tueini was murdered in a massive car bomb December 12, 2005.

"'I said enough,' added Jumblat, a legislator and a key figure in the anti-Syrian majority coalition. 'There is a political, security and intelligence linkage (between Hizbullah and the Syrian regime). The tools, operations and results are all the same,' Jumblat said. 'Ever since that time I have been accusing them somewhere of standing behind some assassinations if not say all.'"

If I understand Lebanese politics correctly, this is not simply a politician offering his opinion, but the leader of a small (about 5% of the Lebanese population these days), but politically important Muslim sect, the Druze, confirming at what he feels is an important moment, his alliance with the country's government and anti-Syrian elements.

Sitting in his comfy New York chair, a New York Times editorial writer, reflecting on Saddam Hussein's fate, demonstrates how genuinely silly liberals can be when they chase pretty thoughts, like butterflies: "What really mattered was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in an Iraq long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions.

"It could have, but it didn't. After a flawed, politicized and divisive trial, Mr. Hussein was handed his sentence: death by hanging. This week, in a cursory 15-minute proceeding, an appeals court upheld that sentence and ordered that it be carried out posthaste. Most Iraqis are now so preoccupied with shielding their families from looming civil war that they seem to have little emotion left to spend on Mr. Hussein or, more important, on their own fading dreams of a new and better Iraq."

It's not worth arguing, really, because all that's well off the point. Saddam is an evil man, a genuine monster who is responsible for crimes that have anguished and will continue to anguish his countrymen for generations. No claim is being made that his execution will solve problems in Iraq. It is a simple ceremony. His execution is humanity's way of symbolically settling accounts with this man who has disgraced us - not just Iraqis, but all of us. Alive, he is an affront to what, so far in our journey, we've learned to stand for. When he is dead, we can move on.

So let's cut the bleeding heart breast-beating and get on with it.

The economic disparity between whites and blacks is a political issue in Bermuda these days, our Government pledging to shift some of the wealth in the hands of rich whites into the hands of poor blacks, on the grounds that slavery and segregation made them what they are today and they deserve better. It's sort of an updated and refined take on reparations for slavery, an idea which has gone precisely nowhere, for obvious reasons.

Here, there really has been no practical bar to people climbing the economic ladder on the grounds of race for a couple of generations, and Bermuda is one of, if not the wealthiest country in the world on the basis of per capita income. Our statistical department, nonetheless, claims that Bermuda has twice the number of poor people the US has, with a very large majority of them being black. The reason for that seems primarily statistical, in that we make no adjustment to account for disparities in the makeup of households, as all other countries do. Apples, therefore, are being compared to oranges. In the circumstances, it's easy to think that someone wants to be able to cast the widest net possible in the event of any transfer of wealth.

This National Review column by Thomas Sowell is about economic disparity, albeit on a larger scale, but some of the arguments he makes hold true reagardless of scale: "The media and academic obsessions with economic 'disparities' have gone international. Recent news stories proclaim that most of 'the world's wealth' belongs to a small fraction of the world's people.

"Who are these minority of the world's population who own a majority of the world's wealth? They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and a few other affluent countries.

"How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than other people? They did it the old-fashioned way. They produced the wealth that they own. You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures...Human beings own wealth. Once we put aside lofty poetic nonsense about 'the world's wealth', we at least have a fighting chance of talking sense about realities."

The New Yorker gives a little end-of-the-year treat to its readers this week - a portfolio of covers from all 47 issues of 2006, including the full set of four Thanksgiving covers by Chris Ware that I posted about back in November. I don't know about anyone else, but I think New Yorker covers would be a powerful reason for choosing to live in the 20th Century, if one were given a choice.

The Los Angeles Times has published its best 10 recipes of 2006. They seem a little contrived, on the whole, but only the tongue can tell with recipes. Burrata, by the way, is a cheese, a kind of combination of mozarella and cream.

I'm not quite sure what prompted the London Times to write this particular editorial - I hope it wasn't simply the noise arising from that little diplomatic contretemps over Tony Blair's recent remarks about Iran.

"Oil money buys off dissent, but President Ahmedinejad's popularity is shrinking even faster than oil revenues. In recent municipal elections, his supporters were trounced by moderate conservatives and reformers. Voters were promised a war on corruption and a campaign for economic revival. They got, instead, an escalation of confrontation with the West, and they do not like it. Technically, financially and politically, the regime is thus more vulnerable than it pretends. Bombastic nationalism may have seen Mr Ahmedinejad through 2006 but, at home if not abroad, it has run its course. The world's strongest weapon in 2007 may be the hunger for change within Iran itself."

I guess this barb from Beirut's Daily Star is both accurate and deserved: "Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the fundamental problem in the Middle East is not intervention by the West. On the contrary, the real problem is that, for all their dabbling, the Western powers seem capable of neither war nor dialogue. This leaves everyone in the region at the mercy of the Middle East's oppressive regimes and proliferating terrorists.

"Advocates of the Iraq war lacked an understanding of the complexities on the ground to wage an effective war of liberation and democratization. As a result, their policies merely ended up eliminating Iran's two major regional rivals: the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's regime. This presented Iran with a golden opportunity to project itself as a regional hegemon, and Iran's leaders are unlikely to let this opportunity slip away.

"Advocates of dialogue with the Iranians and their Syrian allies, like former US Secretary of State James Baker, labor under the delusion that they can actually reach an understanding that would enable a graceful US exit from Iraq and help stabilize that wounded country. The delusion is based on two false assumptions: that the Iranians and the Syrians can succeed in Iraq where the US has failed; and that the international community can afford to pay the price of ensuring their cooperation.

"True, Syria and Iran are playing a major role in supporting Iraqi insurgents, and Syria is still encouraging the trafficking of jihadists and weapons across its borders with Iraq. But the idea that these activities can be halted at will is naive."

I know the NY Times is using him as a hook for a travel story, but it does give me an excuse to draw attention to the fact that Peter Matthiessen is one of the most underrated, underappreciated authors writing in English today. He's perhaps best known for Snow Leopard. This article, about Florida, couldn't fail to make much of his Florida trilogy, but for me, Far Tortuga is his masterpiece. It's classified as a novel, but it's really a poem from start to finish. Part of the reason it has never been much noticed, I think, is that people in the US don't understand their ties with the Caribbean, and think the area's culture begins and ends with Coppertone and rum swizzles. Matthiessen, on the other hand, understands that Florida and the Caribbean are contiguous - not at all what their borders suggest.

Anyway, this piece is worth reading. The Times writer says: "This is not exactly the kind of romantic literary image one might expect would draw travelers to this oozy corner of Florida, where the great and endangered River of Grass that is the world's only everglades gives way to the Gulf of Mexico in a maze of mangrove islands and mysterious shallow bays. Not the way, say, Tender Is the Night might lure you to the South of France, or even, for that matter, the way Mr. Matthiessen's own masterful Snow Leopard has inspired pilgrims to the Himalayas. Still, there is something about his telling and retelling, and finally re-retelling of the Watson story in the three books - Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone - that makes some fans want to drive on past Fort Myers to the end of the road and then get into a small boat and go on even a bit farther."

China is to publish a set of Agatha Christie mysteries to mark the 30th anniversary of her death, according to People's Daily. Sun Shunlin, director of the project department of the People's Literature Publishing House says they will be the first legally translated copies of her stories in China. Dozens of print versions of the author's masterpieces available in underground markets in China, but they are all pirated versions.

According to Sun, a first collection of 14 stories by Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, will include famous tales such as Death on the Nile, Murder in the Calais Coach and Hercule Poirot. Another 32 works of Agatha Christie, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express, will be translated into Chinese and published by PLPH in 2007.

Author Theo Hobson says Britain's Anglicans will never get back the ground they've lost in the country's religious life. In London's Times, he writes: "What defined British, and especially English, religious culture was reticence. Religion was a part of life that kept its voice down. The Church of England knew that keeping quiet was the key to remaining powerful. It wanted to keep religion in the background, in order to keep it in the picture. The Church was meant to unite the English people in one faith. Some chance. So it evolved a more realistic aim: to keep religious division at bay, by means of an official religious culture in which the extremes were proscribed. The English people chose to sustain the fiction of national religious unity under the Crown, for it led to stability. It also led to a high degree of liberalism: a powerful state church was the means to a society free of religious and political extremism.

"Anglicanism could only sustain its established status by being a place of reason, compromise, moderation. And because the established Church has to assume the role of representing the religious character of nation, it has to remain in tune with prevailing social attitudes. Even as church attendance declined over the past 40 years, it could still be claimed that the majority wanted the Church to be there, to marry and bury them, and to stage lovely royal pageantry every few years. That we are still an officially Christian nation is due to the Church's uniquely liberal form of Christianity.

"All has changed, changed utterly. The established Church has become incapable of keeping religion quiet. The primary cause is not Islam. It is the rise of Christianity as a distinct identity. This is mainly due to Evangelicalism, which encourages the Christian to see himself as different, set apart from society. The Church of England has traditionally been hostile to this form of theology, but in the 1990s it began to value its ability to put bums on pews. As a result the Church of England is now a contradiction: an established Church that is largely kept afloat by a sectarian form of theology."

It's quiet out there this morning. Which makes a welcome change from the rest of 2006, doesn't it?

Pondblog wants to wish all its readers, especially that little band of commenters who keep this journal on the straight and narrow, a most excellent Christmas.

In keeping with the spirit of both the season and the year, I offer a little constructive revisionism.

Ebenezer Scrooge. Was he really so bad?

I mean, what possessed Cratchit to so neglect his education that he had to take a minimum wage clerk's job? And what possessed him to try to raise a child on his salary? Wasn't Marley just bent on revenge? And wasn't the whole saga all about a low journalist, a sensationalist of the worst kind, taking Scrooge's perfectly correct instincts about money out of context?

The Independent thinks Scrooge is "the most neglected economic prophet of our age".

"...His real importance is as an economic influence. It is not going too far to say that without the benefit of the commercial maxims pithily formulated by him at a very early stage in his career ("It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's") the whole concept of supply-side economics would have been very different. What might be called the Scrooge principles, though abused by opponents, constitute a model of social responsibility, promoting industry and frugality, offering an example to the underclass of how to escape poverty and, through the employer's hard work, providing jobs for others. As a macro-economic model designed to lessen the overbearing influence of the state this could hardly be bettered. While Keynesians have attacked his stance as a root cause of unemployment and changes in the business cycle, Scrooge's trademark business technique - hoarding - is a virtue, contributing to capital formation, job creation and economic health."

Steven Landsburg of Slate Magazine agrees, though for slightly different reasons. "In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser - the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.

"If you build a house and refuse to buy a house, the rest of the world is one house richer. If you earn a dollar and refuse to spend a dollar, the rest of the world is one dollar richer — because you produced a dollar's worth of goods and didn't consume them.

"Who exactly gets those goods? That depends on how you save. Put a dollar in the bank and you'll bid down the interest rate by just enough so someone somewhere can afford an extra dollar's worth of vacation or home improvement. Put a dollar in your mattress and (by effectively reducing the money supply) you'll drive down prices by just enough so someone somewhere can have an extra dollar's worth of coffee with his dinner. Scrooge, no doubt a canny investor, lent his money at interest. His less conventional namesake Scrooge McDuck filled a vault with dollar bills to roll around in. No matter. Ebenezer Scrooge lowered interest rates. Scrooge McDuck lowered prices. Each Scrooge enriched his neighbors as much as any Lord Mayor who invited the town in for a Christmas meal."

So you see, those who reject that Merry Christmas, Everyone blarney, scrimp on Christmas presents and heat and other indulgences of the season are really doing the world a favour...giving a helping hand to the poor, and so on and so fashionably forth. (If you want to take this thought a little further, think of joining SCROOGE - the Society to Curtail Ridiculous Outrageous & Ostentatious Gift Exchanges. It may be the best two bucks you ever spent.)

Furthermore, economic genius though he was, Scrooge was a sick man. He concealed it, but he knew that in that day and age, what he had couldn't be treated. It was incurable. He selflessly blamed his eccentric symptoms on a bit of undigested beef, if you remember.

The Times confirms that Scrooge 'was a victim of brain disease'.

"A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.

"Robert Chance Algar, a Californian neurologist, and his aunt Lisa Saunders, a medical writer and physician, believe that the affliction that made Scrooge a byword for miserliness and redemption was Lewy body dementia (LBD), a disease so complex that doctors did not include it in the medical lexicon until 1996...

"Algar thought at first that Scrooge was in the grip of depression or a bipolar disorder, yet neither would explain his ghostly visitors. 'All the events described in the story fit a person suffering from the early stages of LBD,' he said."

So you see, Ebenezer Scrooge was both more and less than we thought. The perfect man for 2006, a year in which many erred grievously in the name of being exactly what they made themselves out to be. At any rate, he's a lot better than YOU, whoever that might be. (What a ridiculous misdemeanour that was for intelligent people to commit. But that's another story.)

Let's give the last word to Mr Landsburg, who ends his piece on a note of miraculous clarity: "If Christmas is the season of selflessness, then surely one of the great symbols of Christmas should be Ebenezer Scrooge - the old Scrooge, not the reformed one.

"It's taxes, not misers, that need reforming."

It's not a particular surprise, I think, that many people in Britain think religion does more harm than good. What is a surprise is that they think it overwhelmingly - 82% of them support that proposition. It was a Guardian/ICM poll that demonstrated the number: "It shows that an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension - greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.

"The poll also reveals that non-believers outnumber believers in Britain by almost two to one. It paints a picture of a sceptical nation with massive doubts about the effect religion has on society: 82% of those questioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people. Only 16% disagree. The findings are at odds with attempts by some religious leaders to define the country as one made up of many faith communities."

It would be interesting to probe the extent to which the actions of radical Islamists have swelled the figure.

Here's another list, but not, thank heavens, of books or DVDs or CDs - of which we are all becoming rather tired, are we not? This is Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year issue, in which the editors and news staff review some of the big science stories of the past 12 months, and dub one of them the Breakthrough of the Year for 2007. The special section to which the link will take you showcases the Breakthrough and nine runners up, as well as shining the spotlight on the less auspicious Breakdown of the Year and taking a look at what might lie ahead in 2007.

You'll need to register to read it, but hey, that's painless and if anybody ever catches you reading Reader's Digest, you can trot Science out and claim catholic tastes.

Science says: "Last year, evolution was the breakthrough of the year; We found it full of new developments in understanding how new species originate. But we did get a complaint or two that perhaps we were just paying extra attention to the lively political/religious debate that was taking place over the issue, particularly in the United States.

"Perish the thought! Our readers can relax this year: Religion and politics are off the table, and n-dimensional geometry is on instead. This year's Breakthrough salutes the work of a lone, publicity-shy Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman, who was at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences until 2005. The work is very technical but has received unusual public attention because Perelman appears to have proven the Poincaré Conjecture, a problem in topology whose solution will earn a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. That's only if Perelman survives what's left of a two-year gauntlet of critical attack required by the Clay rules, but most mathematicians think he will."

Victor Davis Hansen asks, So what is Annanism? In the National Review, he answers. "First, it is the reification of Western subliminal guilt. American and European elites feel bad about their wealth, bad about their leisure, bad about their history - but usually not bad enough to do anything that might jeopardize their present privileged positions. And so into this psychological disconnect steps an articulate handsome totem from abroad, in requisite stylish dress and aristocratic mellifluousness, to lecture Westerners with moral pieties - as they smile and snore.

"In contrast, who wants a ruddy, uncouth, Walrus-mustached John Bolton railing about the sort of UN inaction that allows millions to perish and thugs to operate freely?

"Such embarrassments might actually cause the UN to do something that would require sacrifices in lives and treasure for the greater good. How much better to be charmed into somnolence than awakened by horrific reality. How much better for the soul to be gently chided with moral platitudes about Western insensitivity than electro-shocked about Middle Eastern, African, or Asian genocide that will go on until someone does something very messy to stop it.

"Second, Annanism represents the triumph of moral obtuseness: talk about threats to the rule of law or the need for transparency and honesty in global communications and commerce, while ignoring scandal and fraud on a monumental scale that not only enriches cronies and relatives, but contributes to the deaths of innocents in Iraq.

"Third, Annanism reflects petty hypocrisy. There is a reason why Annan, like the thousands of hangers-on in the UN, enjoys New York; there is a reason why he and his equally critical spouse prefer Western culture in places like Manhattan. He knows that the unique social, economic, and cultural life of the United States can subsidize lavish salaries at the UN, and that with life in an affluent and safe West comes pricey luxury cars and tony apartments.

"Annan also knows that one way to keep enjoying them is to keep reminding his hosts of their sins, in the fashion of the medieval court jester sans the loud stripes, cap, and bells. So there is something very creepy about the moral poseur remonstrating from Manhattan about the lapses of the United States in general, and in particular the neglect of the world’s poor. Both can be addressed more effectively and more honestly from a Rwanda, Kosovo, Kabul, or Ghana.

"With Annanism we are witnessing the triumph of the therapeutic over the tragic. We live in a time when morality is defined by wrinkled brows, not action, and a moral sense is found in barking at a benevolent host while purring to dangerous carnivores.

"In a society that values style over substance, rhetoric over action, and sanitized platitudes over grisly details, if Kofi Annan were not secretary-general of the United Nations we would have had to invent something very much like him."

An interesting development in Lebanon, with news that police have raided houses in the north of the country, discovering large quantities of weapons, explosives, fuses and timers. They've also arrested seven members of the Syrian Social National Party. Naharnet reports that "SSNP leader Ali Qanso condemned the police action, telling a press conference hours after the raids on Thursday, that it was unjustified and that the party had kept the cache since the early 1980s when it took part in fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.

"'Stop your campaigns against us. We are not a militia and we are not a party of murderers,' Qanso said, referring to the mysterious campaign of bombings and assassinations conducted in Lebanon during the past two years. Nobody has been charged with the attacks, which are being investigated by the UN team looking into the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

"It could not be determined whether the raid and arrests were related to the Nov. 21 assassination of Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel in Beirut's northern suburb of Metn, an SSNP traditional stronghold."

CARICOM is assuring cricket fans that it's working to fix the glitch which is preventing hundreds of cricket fans in Australia from getting visas to attend the Cricket World Cup early next year. The CARICOM official responsible (and also Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados), Mia Mottley, is quoted in Caribbean Net News as having said: "Yes, we have hit a snag with the issuing of the CARICOM Special Visa in Australia but we are seeking to resolve the issue as soon as possible. I wish to assure our friends in Australia that this will be ironed out. We took the decision to establish a temporary physical consular presence in Australia to reduce the inconvenience to Australians and New Zealanders. We believe that this is a gesture of good faith on our part in spite of the expense which we are incurring."

But then she says this: "This is especially since Caribbean people are unable to obtain a visa to enter Australia without sending their passports to Canada."

Silly thing to say. I suppose she means it as a way of telling people not to take it so seriously, but it does raise the notion that this 'glitch' might be a bizarre form of revenge on the Australians for invonveniences to which they've put CARICOM citizens in the past, doesn't it?

The Washington Post reports that "A businessman representing an Indian state-owned company pleaded guilty to bribing a former senior UN official with an unspecified amount of cash, a cellphone and a discounted Manhattan apartment, in exchange for more than $50 million worth of business contracts, federal authorities announced Thursday.

"Michael Garcia, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that Nishan Kohli, 30, admitted making the illicit payments to Sanjay Bahel, then a high-ranking UN purchasing official, as compensation for steering business to Kohli from 1998 to 2003. Kohli faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. Bahel last month pleaded not guilty to related charges.

"Kohli's attorney, Jacob Laufer, declined to discuss his client's role in the scheme. But he said Kohli signed an agreement with federal authorities on Thursday to cooperate in their ongoing investigation into corruption at the United Nations. 'He has made a mistake, and he's contrite about it,' he said."

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr is praising New York mayor (and Bermuda resident on weekends and holidays) Micheal Bloomberg for taking some innovative steps to tackle poverty in New York. He quotes Bloomberg as having told a news conference: "When you do things with public money, you really are required to do things that have some proven track record and to focus on more conventional approaches. But conventional approaches, as we know, have kept us in this vicious cycle...of too many people not being able to work themselves out of poverty.'"

Dionne comments "Those who think Bloomberg is too liberal to be an honest-to-goodness Republican might notice that he also promised to 'carefully monitor these new programs and hold them accountable for producing results - just as a business would. And if we find that a certain program isn't making the grade, we will terminate its funding.'

"There is no better way to win public support for government programs that work than to be serious about shutting down the ones that don't. Bloomberg has not launched a Great Society experiment, and the importance of his initiative should not be exaggerated...

"But both parties would do well to embrace the spirit of Bloomberg's initiative. Republicans desperately need to show that they take growing inequalities seriously and recognize that the new economy is leaving millions of Americans behind."

Nice sort of story (obit, actually) in the LA Times, about a blues fan who helped blues artists: "Tina Mayfield was a guardian of the blues, a patron who treated its performers as if they were family and the music as if it were a precious heirloom. Through her work as a promoter she helped keep the blues alive and accessible to audiences in Southern California.

"But it was her efforts on behalf of artists themselves, some of whom knew her as 'Mama Tina', that may prove most enduring. She fought for their royalties, provided them money in lean times, offered them opportunities to perform, visited them when they were sick and aging."

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, says Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, in a Washington Times op-ed, you need to look at his early links to Arab business.

"...The Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, 'poorly managed' and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

"At that time, Mr. Lance's mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank 'which would bribe God,' came to Mr. Lance's rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: 'we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president.' Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance's $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.

"Mr. Anderson wrote: "Of course, the Saudis remained discretely silent...kept quiet about Carter's irregularities...[and] renegotiated the loan to Carter's advantage."

"There is no evidence that the former president received direct payment from the Saudis. But "according to...the bank files, [it] renegotiated the repayment terms...savings...$60,000 for the Carter family...The President owned 62% of the business and therefore was the largest beneficiary." Pharaon later contributed generously to the former president's library and center."

The Telegraph's business section has published an extraordinary attack by a London fund manager on the chairman of HSBC, Stephen Green.

"Michael Taylor, head of equities at Threadneedle Investments, criticised the effectiveness of Mr Green, who moved up from his role as chief executive to take over from Sir John Bond at the end of May. As part of a wider interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Taylor, who has been at the centre of bid battles for the London Stock Exchange and BAA, relayed his views based on a recent investor meeting with the HSBC chairman: 'We had Stephen Green in here two weeks ago, and, cor, he was asleep on the job is how I would describe it. He's just not up for it.'"

Amazing how much people like lists...had a call yesterday from a friend who made a thinly-disguised complaint about the lack of them on Pondblog this year. I have to plead guilty...they seemed a little stale, somehow. Here's one that isn't - the Guardian's list of 100 new Internet sites includes some really useful links. This Infobel World site seems to contain a good share of the world's telephone directories, for example. (Please forgive Bermuda's white pages. They're an unsearchable, visual disaster...in Firefox, anyway.) And Reevoo.com, which has user-generated reviews of consumer products, would be a good way of double-checking what the professional reviewers (who sometimes get it wrong) say.

Betty and Veronica have had a makeover - the Globe and Mail reports that "those on-again, off-again rivals for the affections of Archie Andrews, will stop looking so cherubic, at least for a spell. Their cheeks won't be so rounded, their eyes so beaming or their noses quite so pert.

"Four issues of Betty & Veronica Double Digest, starting with issue No. 151 due on newsstands May 14, will each feature a serialized story of 26 pages or so drawn in the new style. The running story, Bad Boy Trouble about a rebel who motorcycles into town and comes between the two girls, will be longer than the usual six-to-seven-page Betty and Veronica story. The rest of the 192-page issues, however, will feature the two girls and the Archie gang drawn in the old style, beaming eyes and all."

There's a picture on the Globe's site. I think they now look anonymous...robbed of any individuality. I wonder what they've done with Archie's hair.

Bit of a brouhaha brewing down under, in Australia and New Zealand, over one of those little administrative oversights the Caribbean is famous for among those who've been there. CARICOM decided, for some reason, that visitors to the cricket World Cup in the spring from either of those two countries, together with Pakistan and India, would have to buy visas. But then they neglected to organise places from which travellers could obtain them.

A fairly liberal supply of indignation seems to have built up. The Sidney Morning Herald says: "The travel plans of up to 7000 cricket fans hoping to visit the Caribbean in April for the World Cup have been thrown into disarray after it was announced that they must pay $US100 ($128) for a visa that appears impossible to get in Australia.

"Australians and New Zealanders have been singled out for the visa, but the British, South Africans and even people from non-cricketing nations such as Japan and Italy do not need one.

"The furore over the visa stipulation, announced two weeks ago by the organisation that represents the Caribbean community, CARICOM, caused the honorary consul-general to Trinidad and Tobago in Australia, Mike Agostini, to resign in disgust."

Mr Agostini, who resigned last Friday after 25 years' service, said the head of the (CARICOM World Cup) delegation to Australia, Gail Guy, had enlisted his help to secure CBD office space in Pitt Street, but had not repaid him the bill for the lease.

"'The delegation in my estimation were poorly led, poorly informed and attempting to do impossible things in a city like Sydney, for example trying to get CBD offices on a six-month lease,' he said. 'I got it for them, then they couldn't or wouldn't pay.'"

In his last press conference as UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan pleaded with capitals and critics not to judge the United Nations by the oil-for-food inquiry, but instead to appreciate its unique role as a voice for the weak, a caretaker for the helpless, and a force for peace. The Washington Times reports that "Mr. Annan said he regretted the way the oil-for-food program was 'exploited to undermine the organization.'

"'I think when historians look at the records, they will draw the conclusion that 'yes, there was mismanagement and there were some UN staff members engaged, but the scandal, if any, was in the capitals and the 2,200 companies that made a deal with Saddam behind our backs,' ' he said.

"'And I hope historians realize the UN is more than oil for food. The UN is a UN that coordinates tsunami, a UN that deals with the Kashmir earthquake, a UN that is pushing for equality and...a UN that is fighting for human dignity.'

"Over the course of an hourlong press conference that touched on Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and UN administration, Mr. Annan, 68, betrayed traces of frustration and indignation, as well as wistfulness and pride."

Heartwarming. But when it came to the question of how his brother managed to 'inherit' a much sought-after rent-controlled New York apartment from him, he ducked. The New York Sun, which broke the story yesterday, says: "State and city legislators have expressed outrage over the Annan family's use of the Roosevelt Island apartment - which Mr. Annan lived in before becoming UN secretary-general 10 years ago - calling it 'corrupt' and 'unreal'.

"Although much of Roosevelt Island is dedicated to low- and middle-income housing, many of its current residents are U.N. employees or foreign diplomats. Among them is a recent influx of North Korean diplomats, who have been seen on the island in cars bearing official emblems of the communist state.

"Mr. Annan indicated yesterday that since he no longer lives in the Roosevelt Island apartment, he has nothing to do with it. He did, however, confirm that his brother lives there. The brother, Kobina Annan, is Ghana's ambassador to Morocco."

One does wonder what on earth Ghana's ambassador to Morocco is doing living in New York, doesn't one?

Max Boot, in his Los Angeles Times column reminds us that Muslims really ought to know about the Holocaust - some of them took part in it: "Pointless though it may be to argue with a madman, it is worth noting that Muslims were not as blameless in the genocide of the Jews as Ahmadinejad and his ilk would have it. Arabs were, on a small scale, cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution. The most famous example was Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat), who took refuge in Berlin in World War II. A rabid Nazi, he personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible and even helped out by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS.

"Robert Satloff, one of the world's smartest Arabists, reveals other links between the Arabs and the Holocaust in his groundbreaking new book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands. He shows how the Nazis set up the machinery of death in North Africa. Although 'only' 4,000 to 5,000 Jews died before the Allies liberated the area in 1943, many more were consigned to forced labor camps in hellish conditions.

"'Arabs played a role at every level,' Satloff wrote. 'Some went door to door with the Germans, pointing out Jews for arrest. Others led Jewish workers on forced marches or served as overseers at labor camps.'

"The picture is not entirely one-sided because, although most Arabs were either apathetic or sympathetic to the Nazis, a small number helped their Jewish neighbors. Satloff uncovered lost tales of 'righteous Gentiles,' such as the wartime rulers of Morocco and Tunisia. And on the whole, he found that Arabs behaved no worse under German occupation than did Europeans.

"But that isn't saying much because almost every country on the Continent was heavily complicit in the extermination of their Jewish populations. Satloff's research makes a mockery of Ahmadinejad's protestations that the Holocaust - if it occurred! - was someone else's responsibility. Individual Muslims were complicit in the horrors of the 1940s, even if, under foreign rule, they were not the primary culprits.

"Even worse, while Europe has disowned its terrible history, the Nazis continue to be glorified in the Middle East. (Mein Kampf is a perennial bestseller in the region.) Nowhere else in the world is Holocaust denial so prevalent. Ahmadinejad deserves thanks for calling the world's attention to this pervasive sickness."

"As Secretary-General Annan prepares to leave his post at the United Nations, a mystery is surfacing surrounding his apartment on Roosevelt Island, subsidized by New York taxpayers, which is still in use by the family of his brother, Kobina Annan, says the New York Sun.

"The apartment was where Mr. Annan and his wife lived before 1997, when he became secretary-general. The Roosevelt Island home is part of an estate of low-rent state-regulated housing. For years, the Annans saved considerable sums by occupying an apartment meant to help financially strapped low- to moderate-income New York families.

"One question Mr. Annan has never addressed is why he and his wife felt comfortable availing themselves of this generous arrangement.

"Another is how it is that, since Mr. Annan and his wife left that Roosevelt Island apartment 10 years ago to move into the rent-free residence on Sutton Place supplied to the secretary-general, their former low-rent apartment was handed over to be occupied by the family of Mr. Annan's brother."

The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum thinks the Baker report on Iraq may be forcing European countries to face up to some uncomfortable facts of life: "On the day James Baker's Iraq report was published, I gritted my teeth and waited for the well-earned, long-awaited, Franco-German 'Old Europe' gloat to begin. I didn't wait long. 'America Faces Up to the Iraq Disaster' read a headline in Der Spiegel. In the patronizing tones of a senior doctor, Le Monde diagnosed the 'political feverishness' gripping Washington in Baker's wake. Suddeutsche Zeitung said the report 'stripped Bush of his authority,' although Le Figaro opined that nothing Baker proposed could improve the 'catastrophic state' of Iraq anyway.

"And then, for two weeks...silence. If there are politicians, academics or journalists anywhere in Germany and France who have better ideas about how to improve the catastrophic state of Iraq, they aren't speaking very loudly. There is no question that America's credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in 'Old Europe' as everywhere else. There is no question that America's reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn't mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us...

"With some exceptions, the weird reality is that most European governments, whatever their original views on the war, are either officially or unofficially opposed to an immediate US withdrawal: Chaos might ensue. And the chaos would be a lot closer to Europe than to North America. Most European governments, officially or unofficially, are also now worried that the next American president will retreat from world politics or become 'isolationist'...

"Maybe now the Germans, and even the French, will finally come to realize that there is no alternative to the transatlantic partnership, no better international military organization than NATO, no real 'role' for any of us outside the Western alliance -- even if only because all the alternatives are worse. Maybe the Old Europeans will find inspiration to support and contribute further to the alliance, diplomatically and ideologically if not militarily."

The White House seems to have found a way of guaranteeing that a writer, himself a former White House official, finds an audience for his thoughts on Iran beyond his wildest dreams. The Washington Post says "Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst who became a senior director for Middle East policy for the National Security Council before leaving the administration in 2003, said the White House decided that substantial passages of an opinion article he had written for the New York Times involved classified information. Leverett said the article was only a summary of a longer paper he had written a few weeks earlier - which had been cleared by the CIA as containing no classified information...

"Leverett said the CIA ordered two sections concerning U.S. dealings with Iran in his article to be heavily redacted, even though the material had appeared in news reports or had been discussed publicly by administration officials.

"One section described Iran's cooperation in helping create a new government in Afghanistan, which Leverett said in his Century Foundation paper led Iranian officials to believe the two countries were on the cusp of a diplomatic opening. But that ended when Bush named Iran as part of the 'axis of evil', he said.

"The other section concerned his description of an offer the Iranian foreign ministry sent the administration in 2003, through Swiss diplomatic channels, to resolve outstanding bilateral issues with the United States. The White House rejected the approach, which has been widely described in news reports since then.

"'The administration's handling of Iran policy has been the strategic equivalent of medical malpractice,' Leverett said."

The New York Sun, in its coverage, says: "The White House does not want the public to know that in May 2003, the Iranian Foreign Ministry floated the prospect of a wide-ranging dialogue with America on everything from uranium enrichment to anti-Israel terrorism."

You can read the longer Leverett article here, at the Century Foundation's website.

Another expert, this one atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer, who is professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and a former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, weighs in on the fashionable lock-step hysteria about global warming. In a Washington Times op-ed, Singer says: "The U.S. Supreme Court is currently addressing a question of crucial importance to the U.S. economy: Is carbon dioxide, from fossil-fuel burning for energy production a 'pollutant' that requires regulation? The petitioners, led by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, demand regulation - interpreting the Clean Air Act differently than the respondent, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"CO2 is non-toxic and naturally present in the atmosphere - but also a greenhouse (GH) gas and therefore a potential cause of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

"The oral arguments and scientific amicus curiae briefs, pro and con, never addressed the basic issue: Is CO2 the principal cause of current warming? The plaintiff's amici included two Nobelists in chemistry - although this tactic may backfire when law clerks discover that the two have little demonstrated competence in disciplines relevant to the issue."

Singer says he thinks that "the drive to regulate CO2 - and effectively control energy - appears to be based on ideology rather than science or any real concern about climate. Quoting Lenin: 'The establishment of socialism in capitalist nations requires only targeting their supply of energy.'" That's a bit of a stretch. It's much more likely to be the kind of intellectual laziness that leads people to ignore the facts, and choose sides on the basis of the personalities involved - especially on the basis of who they're too timid to be associated with.

Susan Mazur seems to be making a career of interviewing former colleagues of John Deuss's. This one concerns Max Bernegger, a fashion executive who became an oil trader in Deuss's business. New Zealand's Scoop is carrying the story.

Suzan Mazur: Can you tell me about the controversial Soviet deal in which Deuss was slow to pay for shipped Soviet oil because the Soviets failed to provide sufficient signatures on the contract?

Max Bernegger: I knew John Deuss owed money to the Soviets. He went to Moscow basically to negotiate and they took his passport away from him. And he called me from Moscow and I was working on another deal and didn't know about this.

Deuss said, 'Max, I don't know what's going to happen.'

Suzan Mazur: That was in what year?

Max Bernegger: I think it was 1975. And he said, 'I'm not sure what's going to happen here.' But somehow he went to the Dutch Consulate and got his passport back and he got out of the Soviet Union.

The only reason I think they let him go was that there were too many people in the Soviet oil company who would lose their heads if the government found out how stupid they were in their dealings with Deuss. They made some major mistakes with Letter of Credit that went beyond the date.

While the Soviets delayed the presentation of the L/C, they increased their crude oil prices - breaking the agreed upon contract - as fully-loaded ships were en route to the US. John could really have told them, I don't owe you anything.

Of course he intended to pay the Soviets. But at the time he was in real trouble. We were happy that he made it back.

Suzan Mazur: You said you don't agree that he was one of the catalysts in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I mean he'd been an early player in the Soviet Union trading oil and also in the Arabian Gulf.

Max Bernegger: He had the connections to people in the Soviet government who make very important decisions and who were the ones in charge. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, of course, those were the guys who made the money, who were the people you talked to and tried to make deals with. That was the normal thing.

Deuss had less influence and connections in Russia than Marc Rich. Deuss had this strength because Oman was behind him."

Worthwhile piece in the Guardian about the 16th Century winters that made the people of that day worry, as we do, about climate change. "The year 1565 saw the coldest winter anyone could remember. The world turned white, birds froze, fruit trees died, the old and young faded away. It was a shock - and a foreboding. This seemed to be more than just a cold winter. The climate was perceptibly changing, and that is what (Pieter, the Elder) Bruegel's snow scenes eerily record. All of them - from Hunters in the Snow painted in 1565, to Census in Bethlehem in 1566, to The Adoration of the Magi in 1567 - were made in response to that year and what it presaged. The key to their prophetic quality is right there in the mountains in Hunters in the Snow.

"Those mountains are Alps. In 1552, Bruegel crossed the Alps on an artistic pilgrimage from his native Netherlands to Italy. His experience of western Europe's highest and coldest mountain range, which he recorded at the time in drawings that survive, stayed with him all his life, sharpening his mind's landscape, yet never as tellingly as in Hunters in the Snow. Here he seems to say that all the world is turning Alpine - in a new Ice Age.

"He's right. Once, when the first painters made their marks on cave walls, all Europe was crushed and churned by glaciers that only survive now in the high Alps. In the 1500s and 1600s, these European glaciers were on the move, swallowing up pastures and devastating communities. The villagers of Chamonix, as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie discovered, petitioned their lords to do something about climate change: 'We are terrified of the glaciers...which are moving forward all the time and have just buried two of our villages and destroyed a third."

British author David Crystal has written a book called How Language Works which sounds like a must-have on the well-accoutred reference shelf. As the New York Times explains, "This is not a book meant to be read as a narrative. The author himself advises that this book should not necessarily be read 'from left to right'. He compares it to a car manual in which the section on tires can be read independently from the one on lights. The book takes us through the intricacies of spoken, written and signed language. He covers topics like lexicography, grammar, comparative linguistics, with meaty sections on dialects, dyslexia, discourse, multilingualism and more...

"Have you ever wondered: 'How languages are born?' This chapter is a fine example of how he deftly explains an arcane topic. The chapter concentrates on 'contact languages', those that spring up when two cultures come in contact and need a quick common language, often for reasons of commerce. As he points out, these are known as pidgins, and when a pidgin becomes the preferred language for a community, it becomes a creole.

"The established view has been that these languages evolve independently and each is unique, whether they are based on English or Danish. But Mr. Crystal says that modern research strongly suggests that all these languages derive from a 15th-century Portuguese pidgin. As the Portuguese explored Asia, Africa and the Americas, this prototypical pidgin spread, and the syntax remained in place as words changed to adapt to other languages. But there is still evidence of that old Portuguese pidgin. In English-based pidgins and creoles, for example, a few Portuguese words remain, like 'savi' for know and 'palava' for trouble."

London's Sunday Telegraph ran a story yesterday that is being picked up around the world today, an expose of another UN financial outrage, albeit on a smaller scale than oil-for-food.

Figures uncovered last week, the paper said, revealed that the newly published official history of the UN Development Programme, a vanity press book authorised by Kofi Annan's former right-hand man, Mark Malloch Brown, cost a staggering $567,379 to produce.

"Despite being offered for sale to the general public, the catchily-titled The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way (online price $29.99) is unlikely to challenge the latest Dan Brown or Patricia Cornwell in the bestseller lists. It is languishing at 577,233 in the sales rankings of Amazon.com, the internet bookseller.

"But what has provoked outrage are the huge costs incurred in producing the book, which was published through the Cambridge University Press. They include a salary of $252,000 paid to the author, Professor Craig Murphy, for about two years' work. Prof Murphy was also given $37,299 in travel expenses for interviews, while an unnamed 'project co-ordinator' was given $87,639."

It was inevitable, I suppose - a book has been written (by someone called Shelp, which doesn't augur well with us serendipidistas) about Hank Greenberg, the former head of the American International Group. It's called Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of A.I.G.. No surprise there. The New York Times headlines the story 'The Foundation, and the Flaws, of an Empire'. No surprise there.

But here's a clue about what kind of book this is: The Times notes that AIG was founded by a man called Cornelius Vander Starr, who it describes as "a gadabout soda-fountain operator in Fort Bragg, Calif., who switched to real estate, then insurance."

Then there's this: "It was Starr who started the 'revolution' in the way Bermuda regulated insurance companies, meaning that he arranged for the island to write rules that insurers found convenient."

Does he sound like a cheap fixer? Does it sound as if Bermuda was cheap enough to be fixed?

That's a bunch of crap. CV Starr founded American International in Bermuda in 1947. The legislation of the day did not allow such a company to be incorporated here. But our legislators were smart enough to see that a company of the type Starr wanted to set up might just benefit the country. So they passed a law allowing AIG to operate.

The enormous success Bermuda has had, in that line of business, since that very smart move, is envied and emulated around the world. To call it a fix is stupid, inaccurate, mousy-sized weasel talk.

If that's the kind of information Shelp is peddling, buy a comic book instead. They're a lot cheaper.

Britain's cash for honours scandal seems to be lurching towards some kind of climax, with stories in a number of newspapers this morning suggesting that Tony Blair is fitting up his friend, (well, former friend) Lord Levy, to take the fall. The Telegraph reports that: "The Prime Minister is refusing to offer any public, or even private, backing to the man who helped secure 14 million pounds in secret loans for Labour before the 2005 election. On a peacemaking trip to the Middle East yesterday, Mr Blair conspicuously declined to offer his fund-raiser, known as 'Lord Cashpoint', any support. Lord Levy is one of only three people to have been arrested over the loans affair.

"The row follows increasing suggestions from allies of the Prime Minister that, while Mr Blair is 'in the clear', Lord Levy remains of great interest to the police and may be questioned for a third time. He is understood to be trying to throw all the heat and responsibility for the scandal back on the Prime Minister. Friends claim that his role was only secondary and that Mr Blair had primary responsibility for the offer of peerages to four businessmen who made loans to Labour."

The Times is not amused. In an editorial this morning, it is wagging its beefy finger: "It is slippery and it stinks to high heaven. It may be that after all this no charges will be brought. If in doubt, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, can be relied upon to do the right thing and conclude that a prosecution would not be in the public interest. Nobody should be tempted to draw the wrong conclusions from that. The cash for honours affair has exposed the murky morality at the heart of our political system. It must change and that change should not involve taxpayers funding political parties that cannot keep their own houses in order. Will history treat Mr Blair any more kindly than his contemporaries do? On present evidence, no."

The Observer's got another list ('tis the season, innit?), and it's not a bad idea. They've listed 50 lost (under-appreciated is probably a better description) films. I've seen a very small bunch of them, and of the bunch, The Front Page is the standout.

This is a nicely-observed little article in the Guardian, by Kathryn Hughes, on the blurry magic of the season: "Somehow Christmas never achieves the sharp magic that it does in books. Instead of the tingling anticipation of Christmas in literature, what we actually have is the slumped inevitability of Christmas in real life. You could set your watch by what the popular press calls 'the countdown to Christmas'. Even before we reach what the church still quaintly refers to as Advent, the newspapers are crammed full of presents to give and receive and sparkly outfits for every conceivable Christmas occasion from the office party to lunch with the in-laws. From early December, we're taught all about how Nigel and Nigella are planning to manage not simply the Big Day but all the various permutations that hedge it round on either side (mulled wine for the carol singers, tasty turkey rissoles for Boxing Day, perhaps even galettes for Twelfth Night).

"No wonder, then, that by the time we actually get to December 25 we are hollow-eyed with the relentlessness of it all. Having stepped on to a moving staircase sometime around November 14 we are propelled along in a sullen dream until, on January 3 or thereabouts, we are thrown out once again into the everyday world. It is like being a laboratory rat scurrying through a maze in pursuit of slightly stale snacks."

Brad Leithauser is a poet (his new book of poems, Curves and Angles, has just appeared, and the New York Times included his Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse, in its list of notable books for 2002), who teaches English at Mount Holyoke College. He is also a very professional critic, as this New York Times review will demonstrate. It concerns Robert Fagles' new translation of the Aeneid, and it is head and shoulders better than any other review I've looked at - a pleasure to read.

I confess I didn't at first look at this piece because I thought there was a possibility I would admire it. I looked because I figured no one reviewing this book for the New York Times would get away without mentioning that Virgil's epic about Empire serves as a metaphor for current US foreign policy in the Middle East (tissue-thin though that assertion might be), and I wanted to see how Leithauser had done it. The answer is that he did it at the very end of his review, and so gracefully that the absence of apt-ness is almost not noticeable.

"The Aeneid contains two significant passages of prophetic outreach, when the present vanishes away and neighboring centuries reveal themselves like sunlit valleys in a clearing fog. The first arises when Aeneas, visiting his father in the Underworld, beholds the ramifying glories of Rome's coming empire. The second occurs when Vulcan forges him a shield on which centuries of triumph are chronicled:

He knows nothing of these events but takes
delight
in their likeness, lifting onto his shoulders
now
the fame and fates of all his children's
children.

"Virgil also looks backward, reminding us how the Trojans and their city, gleaming on the dawn-struck outskirts of Asia, eventually came to dust. And how even the victorious Greeks came to dust. But Rome - he assures his readers - will never fade.

"Virgil was wrong, and it's one of the most gorgeous ironies of the Aeneid that while it celebrates the political - the founding of an empire, by the young and potent and brave - as the summit of human achievement, its greater and more durable feat lies elsewhere. The triumph is ultimately literary, of course, and also collective - since it belongs in part to those white-haired translators who have brought such well-seasoned judgments to a timeless tale. Theirs is the prevailing army, among whose ranks Robert Fagles emerges as a new and noble standard-bearer."

It's an odd choice for an article running a week or so before Christmas, but I guess the New York Times figures it has fish to fry. It asked a number of writers to recommend books about war.

It's thin on Brits. Basil Liddell Hart isn't mentioned, and neither is John Keegan. On the other hand, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is recommended.

Interesting observation from Victor Davis Hansen, writing about the Middle East in National Review: "The surprise is no longer that the cretin Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls for the destruction of Israel, but only that his serial threats have still not become banal. In any language, there can be only so many synonyms and idioms for 'wipe out' and 'vanish', yet Ahmadinejad always finds some fresh way to express his fundamental desire."

And on the reasons for the kind of ugly hostility towards Israel that Ahmadinejad personifies, Hansen says "It is not 'stolen' land, or 'Zionist' killings, or Jewish 'aggression' that gnaws at the Arab Street. And the solution is therefore not to be found in short-term Israeli land-concessions, but only in the now caricatured and apparently waning policy of supporting democratic reform inside the Middle East.

"Why?

"The real problem is that Israeli success ,and the resulting sense of failure in the surrounding Arab world, fuels much of the rabid hatred. Many of us have been writing exactly that for years and have been dubbed novices - and worse - who don't understand the complex undercurrents of the Middle East. In January 2004, for example, I suggested in passing the following on these pages:

"Instead, [Israel] stoked the fury arising from Arabs' sense of weakness and self-contempt. In the world of the Palestinian lobster bucket, Israel's great sin is not bellicosity or aggression, but succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of its neighbors. How humiliating it must be to be incapable of even muttering the word 'Israel' (hence the need for 'Zionist entity'), but nevertheless preferring an Israeli to a Palestinian ID card."

That may apply to people of Ahmadinejad's age, but a young Muslim emigrant has a slightly different take on why a younger generation in the Middle East seems so open to the moonbatty Ahmadinejad gospel. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he says: "Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to (this reality:) For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it."

And (it was inevitable) Bret Stephens says, in the Wall Street Journal, that society is to blame: "Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do - what they must do - when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades."

Ten US lawmakers, believed to be the largest legislative group to visit communist-ruled Cuba, were to depart for Havana today for weekend talks with Cuban officials, according to Caribbean Net News."

"Raul Castro has reached out to the United States more actively than his brother in the past four months, calling for negotiations." This unofficial delegation is in response to those calls. But officially, the United States so far has said it is not interested in negotiating until there is a political opening.

"Wednesday, the top US diplomat for Latin America indicated that the United States had yet to find a reformer in the communist Cuban government, but did not flatly rule out dialogue with Havana in a context of political opening. 'We have not been able to detect there the emergence of any political figure that could be reformist,' said Tom Shannon, the State Department's top diplomat for Latin America.

"'Once (Fidel Castro) goes, the successor government is going to have to chart out some kind of path into the future. There are no clear signals of what that path is going to be,' Shannon added, noting: 'We don't see any significant possibility of change of any kind until Fidel is gone.'"

In Britain, where the Prime Minister has just been interviewed by the Police in Downing Street, one gets the sense that this honours for cash scandal, no matter how it turns out, is just about to descend into a slough of low farce. In the Times this morning, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who is president of the International Political Science Association research committee on political finance and political corruption, says the real villain of the piece is Britain's Electoral Commission, which he describes as incompetent.

"It has neglected vital problems of defective voter registration and electoral fraud. It has inadequately inspected campaign accounts of parliamentary candidates. It has been forced to admit that it even does not know the overall incomes and expenditures of the main parties. Above all, its leaders have allowed the political parties to bear all the blame for its failings.

"The 'loans for lordships' saga has led to parties, politicians and donors pilloried and threatened with prosecution. Yet, there is compelling evidence that one of the two potential charges is groundless. If the police uncover any explicit deal to promise peerages for party donations, this deserves to be charged under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.

"However, if the charge - as some insiders predict as more likely - is that parties have not declared loans at below-commercial terms as required by the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, it would be wrong to prosecute. The main parties merely followed the woolly non-advice about the requirements of the new Act given before the 2005 general election by the Electoral Commission."

There's nothing quite like a hoax on a grand scale...it's like hitting a kind of existential reload button. In Belgium, where the national consciousness has desperately needed updating for some time, perhaps since they got involved in a nascent EU, the Telegraph reports there has been a furore over a fake television broadcast that the king and queen had fled the country and an independent Flanders had been declared.

The Guardian is burbling in admiration: "The consternation in Belgium is great. On Wednesday, a French-language TV channel interrupted a programme about the future of the country to announce that the Flemish parliament had declared independence from the rest of Belgium. There were, it was reported, joyful scenes in the Flemish city of Antwerp. A Brussels tram, it said, had been blocked as it tried to enter the newly independent state of Flanders. King Albert II had fled, possibly to Kinshasa...

"The Flanders spoof joins a mostly distinguished line of hoaxes perpetrated by the media: Father Ronald Knox's BBC report in 1926 that rioters had toppled Big Ben and lynched a minister, the New York Sun's discovery of life on the moon, and Brass Eye's 'cake' documentary. A good hoax is too precious a thing to be thrown away on April 1, and the outraged should bear in mind that a successful one reveals more about the hoaxed than the perpetrator. RTBF, which has apologised, wanted to shake up the debate about Belgium's fragile unity.

"It was a memorable piece of impertinence."

An inventor named Philip Kithil thinks he's going to be able to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, almost universally blamed for global warming, with some plankton and lengths of plastic tubing. And next year, he's going to be testing his idea in the sea off Bermuda.

According to the Guardian, "Mr Kithil, an economist by training, hit on the idea of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by exploiting the behaviour of a barrel-shaped type of plankton called salps, which feed on algae and excrete dense pellets of carbon that sink to the ocean floor.

"His invention is a 1,000 metre long, 1.5 metre wide plastic tube that sits near the surface of the ocean, pumping cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep to the surface. The nutrients encourage algae to bloom in the shallower parts of the water, using up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When there is a plentiful source of this food, salp numbers can grow quickly, locking up the carbon in their excretions.

"The pumps, which are still at the experimental stage, will face their biggest test off the coast of Bermuda next year when 25 will be tethered together and scientists will measure their biological and chemical impacts."

Think Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's reference to an Israeli nuclear weapon was a slip of the tongue, as many people would have it? Think again. The Washington Times carries an intelligent article explaining why Israel is dumping its long-time policy of ambiguity over its nuclear capability: "Israel's strategic doctrine must aim at strengthening nuclear deterrence. It can meet this objective only by convincing enemy states that a first-strike upon Israel will always be irrational. This means communicating to enemy states that the costs of such a strike will always exceed the benefits. Hence, Israel's strategic doctrine must always convince prospective attackers that their intended victim has both the willingness and the capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons.

"If an enemy state considering an attack upon Israel were unconvinced about either or both of these components of nuclear deterrence, it could choose to strike first. This would depend in part upon the particular value it placed upon the expected consequences of such an attack.

"Regarding capacity: Even if Israel were to maintain a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons, it is necessary that enemy states believe these weapons to be distinctly usable. This means that if a first-strike attack were believed capable of sufficiently destroying Israel's atomic arsenal and pertinent infrastructures, that country's nuclear deterrent could be immobilized. Even if Israel's nuclear weapons could not be destroyed by an enemy first-strike, enemy misperceptions or misjudgments about Israeli vulnerability could still bring about the catastrophic failure of Israeli nuclear deterrence.

"To the extent that Israel's doctrine actually identifies nuanced and graduated forms of reprisal, more disclosure could contribute to Israeli nuclear deterrence. Without such disclosure, Israel's enemies will be kept guessing about the Jewish state's probable responses, a condition of protracted uncertainty that could serve Israel's survival for a while longer, but - at one time or another - could come apart.

"Prime Minister Olmert's public comment on Israel's nuclear capacity was a good first-step to enhanced nuclear deterrence. But it was only a good beginning."

Kofi Annan, reacting to the article in The Washington Times that Pondblog linked to yesterday, has asked UN investigators to look into its claims of fraud, favoritism and intimidation inside the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The Times reports that: "The DESA division, responsible for promoting accountability and good governance in member states, has used contributions from the Italian government to fund duplicative programs and unnecessary consultants, many of which benefit Italy or its nationals...

"The story also said the department had made unusual use of contractors and taken relevant information off its Web site after reporters began asking questions. It said DESA staffers have complained about intimidation.

"'The secretary-general's office has asked [the Office of Internal Oversight Services] to look into allegations raised this morning in the press,' said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for Mr. Annan. He refused to specify which areas Mr. Annan is concerned about.

"On Monday evening, the US Mission to the United Nations transmitted a letter to the UN's chief internal inspector, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, asking OIOS to look into contracting improprieties and reports that staff had been intimidated in an effort to halt leaks. US officials also have received information that officials within DESA's in-house human resources department have been destroying documents related to contracts issued by the department in recent years."

The New York Times would have us believe that the furore over ex-President Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, is chiefly over the use of that word 'apartheid' in its title. That's not true, what people are objecting to is that a man who once led the most powerful nation in the world has so distorted the facts in order to make his point that he has put himself on the level of a cheap propagandist like filmmaker Michael Moore. As this San Francisco Chronicle article explains, the book is so skewed that lawyer and writer Alan Dershowitz, in a scathing review, wrote that "Mr. Carter's book is so filled with simple mistakes of fact and deliberate omissions that were it a brief filed in a court of law, it would be struck and its author sanctioned for misleading the court."

Carter's friend and colleague Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, a well-known Middle East scholar, and until recently a fellow of Emory University's Carter Center, resigned his position because of strenuous objections to the content of Carter's book. "In an e-mail message regarding his resignation, Stein described the book as 'replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.'

"The copied materials involve two maps from former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross's book The Missing Peace. In an appearance on Fox News, Ross confirmed that the maps originated with his book, and he objected not only to the lack of attribution but also to Carter's inaccurate presentation of the historical facts involved...

"Top-ranking Democrats have also disavowed Carter's work. Both Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi issued statements on Carter's book, distancing themselves and the Democratic Party from his divisive rhetoric...

"The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up when he said of Carter in 1980, 'Unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has essentially adopted our enemies' view of the world.'"

Martin Nodell, creator of the original Green Lantern, died on December 9. My New York artist friend, Colin Kerr, who keeps me and Pondblog readers current on matters concerning comic books and superheros, put together this little piece about Green Lantern:

"He is not to be confused with the hero's more recent science fiction-oriented incarnation; the original Green Lantern's powers were mystical in origin. Nodedll was inspired by Greek mythology and Wagner's Ring Cycle as well as a mysterious sight he happened to see on a subway ride from Manhattan to his Brooklyn home in 1940, someone waving a lantern in the darkness of the tunnel.

"'I picked out the name from the train man on the tracks who was waving a lantern, going from red to green...Green meant go and I decided that was it...'

"Nodell's hero was a survivor of a train wreck who finds in the debris an ancient Chinese Lantern forged from the metal of a green meteorite. From this, he creates a ring that gives him strange powers. The only catch is that he must recharge his ring in the flames of the lantern every 24 hours to maintain them.

"By contrast, the Green Lantern more familiar to baby boomers was a product of the early 1960s and the Space Race. His ring was a creation of alien technology; its only weakness the color yellow.

"Nodell left comic books in 1950 to go into advertising and was later part of the design team that came up with the Pillsbury Doughboy."

The LA Times has more about Martin Nodell's life.

Is the US on the verge of loosening (albeit only slightly) its restrictions on contact with Cuba? Caribbean Net News is reporting that "The US Congress will pass legislation next year to ease restrictions on family travel and financial transfers to Cuba." They're quoting Representative William Delahunt, co-chair of a congressional group seeking to loosen the US embargo.

"Rules limiting US residents with Cuban relatives to one visit every three years are 'cruel' and will be overturned next year, Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Tuesday at the New York-based Council of the Americas, a policy research organisation. Delahunt, a member of the House International Relations Committee, said Congress will also loosen restrictions on remittances to the island. Remittances are generally limited to $300 per Cuban household in a three-month period, according to rules listed on the US State Department's Web site. The money must be sent through State Department-certified institutions."

Claudia Rosett imagines the farewell speech Kofi Annan should have given, in another fine National Review piece. Sample: "We all know it is laughable that I, of all people, should lecture anyone on good governance and accountability. I apologize. Before I try that stunt again, I will release, immediately, the personal financial 'disclosure' form that for months I refused even to file in-house, and have flatly refused to disclose to the public. I also concede that it was a gross conflict of interest that I accepted a $500,000 personal prize this past February from the ruler of Dubai, via a jury stacked with my own UN colleagues and appointees. Belatedly, I have finally understood that it is not solely a matter of giving up the purse when the press finally discovers I have given a fancy job to one of the prize jurors. There is also the principle that a sitting UN secretary-general should not be open to accepting large sums of cash."

In the same publication, UN critic Anne Bayevsky wonders when the US is going to realise how far out-of-control the UN has spun. "The only immediate question to be asked after the secretary-general vented his spleen upon leaving office Monday is: Do Americans, and the Bush administration, finally get it? After all, this White House was directly responsible for keeping Kofi Annan in office after the gigantic Oil-for-Food scandal could easily have taken him down. It was similarly responsible for allowing Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency - the other high-ranking UN official fighting vociferously against sanctions on Iran - a third term.

"What will it take for this administration to recognize the UN has become the enemy of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law? And every minute wasted there pretending the Security Council is serious about stopping the gravest threat to humankind today - an Iranian nuclear weapon - takes us a step closer to the permanent destruction of our way of life."

Meantime, the Washington Times reports that "A UN office charged with promoting accountability has for years been steering millions of dollars in contributions from the Italian government toward projects that enrich Italian nationals but offer little of real value, according to former and current staff members.

"The contributions have been used to hire unneeded consultants and establish international programs, often in Italy, say the staffers employed in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

"The US Mission to the United Nations has asked the UN watchdog agency to investigate the awarding of contracts by DESA and reports of retaliation against staff members. It is also seeking to have documents seized before they can be destroyed, according to internal US communications. Some sensitive financial data disappeared from the DESA web site last week after a reporter began making inquiries."