Some of the more observant (not me, I confess) will have noticed before they read this article by John Keegan in the Telegraph, that there's a difference in the way the Brits handle their war dead. Instead of flying them all home, as the Americans do, they have traditionally buried them, to use some of the well-known words, in a corner of a foreign field that thereby becomes forever British. But things are changing, apparently. Keegan writes: "The delay in holding inquests on British servicemen killed in Iraq or Afghanistan is entirely unprecedented, brought about by the repatriation of remains to this country.

"The practice began during the Falklands and came about because one family insisted on a repatriation. Until then the Commonwealth War Graves Commission had successfully established the principle that British war dead should be buried and commemorated as near the spot where they died as possible. No inquests were held because the cause of death was evident.

"There had been a demand for repatriation and for private commemoration during the First World War, but Fabian Ware, the first director of War Graves, opposed both practices. He was influenced by the enormous number of war deaths - but also by what he discovered of personal and family sentiment.

"Repatriation was, for financial reasons, open only to richer families, and several tried to bring the bodies of dead sons or husbands home. Inquiry revealed, however, that officers, whose families were most likely to demand repatriation, expressed a strong desire to be buried with their men. Chaplains reported a mood of 'the fellowship of death' among fighting soldiers, which pervaded all ranks.

"Thus grew up the principles on which the War Graves Commission policy was founded. It laid down that those who died together should be buried together - though, out of respect for soldierly sacrifice, each casualty should be individually commemorated, in a separate grave or by a separate inscription on a joint memorial if burial were not possible."

I must note that Haaretz is the only news outlet I can find this morning to report on riots in south Beirut yesterday. "Calm returned early Friday to Beirut and other parts of the country after Shiite Muslims rioted overnight, blocking roads and burning tires, to protest a TV satirical program that mocked the leader of the militant Hezbollah group, the newspaper says.

"Several thousand Shiite Muslims enraged by a TV comedy that mocked the leader of Hezbollah took to the streets of southern Beirut on Thursday night, burning car tires and blocking roads - including the highway to Lebanon's international airport, police and witnesses said. Black soot from burned tires and rocks littered some streets and neighborhoods in Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold. Other obstructions were pushed to the side of the road as motorists drove by on Friday, a normal working day."

UPDATE: The story is now being picked up all over the place, so it must be right. Silly thing to lose your temper about.

Turns out that Mrs Beeton (she of The Book of Household Management), didn't write her own stuff. She nicked the recipes from other books. The Guardian reports that Kathryn Hughes, who's just written a biography of her, told the Wye Festival that Mrs Beeton was a plagiarist. Can't blame her for saying that...she's got to sell her book...but I'm not sure that plagiarism, as a legal offence, existed in the 19th Century (and in any event, it's a mistake to see an historical figure through the moral eyes of the 21st Century). The Guardian says "Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? 'The answer is she copied everything,' Hughes said.

"It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

"But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. 'Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.' Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for."

I know I've mentioned before how much I enjoy Nicolai Ouroussoff's articles about architecture in the New York Times. This one is a review of Zaha Hadid: Thirty Years in Architecture, the Iraqi-born woman's first major retrospective in the United States, which opens tomorrow in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's rotunda. It seems a good example of his work - of his ability to enhance his knowledge with a generosity of spirit and a simplicity...an openness, a transparency...which makes him such a pleasure to read.

The show, he says, "spirals through Ms. Hadid's career, from her early enchantment with Soviet Constructivism to the sensuous and fluid cityscapes of her more recent commissions....By the time you reach the rotunda's upper levels, Ms. Hadid's forms look as fluid as mercury. The curving roof of a design for London's Olympic Aquatic Center, composed of a series of parabolic arches, and the molded white Corian form of a prototype kitchen are slightly hedonistic, descendants of the sensual Modernism envisioned by architects like Ponti, Carlo Mollino and Oscar Niemeyer half a century ago but pushed to an extreme that none of them could have imagined.

"And here is where her architectural magic coalesces. For all the apparent radicalism of her forms, Ms. Hadid's work forms a bridge from early Modernism to the digital age. By collecting such disparate strands into one vision, she defiantly embraces a cosmopolitanism that is hard put to assert itself in our dark age.

"It is as close to a manifesto for the future as we have."

Clear?

Boy, do they ever take dog ownership seriously in San Francisco. The Chronicle reports that a woman has been sentenced to probation for failing to groom her Shih Tzu.

As long as they were about it, they should have jailed her for calling the creature Benji, of all the wet, silly names in the universe.

One of Kofi Annan's cronies at the UN, Dileep Nair, has been found guilty by the United Nations internal watchdog agency of showing favouritism in recruiting and promoting two employees. An AP wire report says "The investigation cleared Dileep Nair of sexual misconduct or accepting improper payments when he was chief of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, as the UN Staff Union had claimed. Nair, of Singapore, retired a year ago and denied all the charges against him.

"Yet the two investigators who led the probe said Nair didn't cooperate with them and that his office refused to provide 'potentially relevant' evidence, even long after he stepped down. The UN Staff Union also never provided details of the anonymous sexual allegations it had leveled against Nair." (So perhaps it wasn't surprising that he was cleared of those particular allegations.)

Nair was one of the UN employees singled out by Paul Volcker's investigation for having been involved in misusing Oil-for-Food funds. The Committeee said that he got authorization to use Oil-for-Food funds for a special assistant post, but the person who got that job did virtually no Oil-for-Food related work for the two years the program funded his position; the misuse of funds violated UN regulations.

Under-Secretary-General for Management Catherine Bertini cleared Nair, who was a UN auditor, of a wide range of allegations including corrupt practices and violating Staff Regulations in November, 2004. Nair left the UN in April of last year, maintaining his innocence. Bertini has also left the UN. Canada's Louise Frechette, who was once Annan's second-in-command, is said to have blocked Nair from reporting Oil-for-Food audit irregularities to the UN Security Council. She has also now left the UN.

One of the world's earliest printed documents, Christopher Columbus's account of his first voyage to discover the New World, is to be sold in London this month with a price tag of $930,000. The Telegraph reports that: "The Columbus Letter, or Epistola Christofori Colom, is the explorer's remarkably humane description of his first encounters with the natives of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands early in 1493."

It's being offered for sale by Peter Harrington Antiquarian Books, a firm well known to collectors of modern first editions, especially those who don't mind paying top dollar for the very best quality. The letter, which is described as perhaps the first known example of a "papal press release", will be on offer at the Antiquarian Book Fair in London starting next Thursday.

The Harrington web site is here. It's worth noting that it acquired the old Chelsea Bindery some time ago, and can therefore rebind good books in shaky condition for you.

Scientists are saying that the hole in the earth's ozone layer is repairing itself. In the Christian Science Monitor, one scientist, Elizabeth Weatherhead, a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, said: "we're on the cusp" of recovery. She and colleague Signe Andersen published their review of the data in the May 4 edition of the journal Nature. A second study to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research is thought likely to say the same thing.

"Ozone," says the Monitor, "is an atmospheric Janus. Made up of three oxygen atoms, ozone at ground level can trigger bad air days in urban areas across the planet. But in the stratosphere, ozone intercepts ultraviolet light from the sun, reducing the amount that reaches Earth's surface. Both studies rely on ground-based and satellite measurements of ozone for trends, and to varying degrees on computer models for attributing trends to what the data reveal. The strongest evidence for the protocol's effect comes at altitudes ranging from 11 to 16 miles. There, chlorine has leveled off, and so has ozone decline, Cunnold's team reports."

Al Gore describes himself in a dramatic interview with the Guardian in Britain today as a "recovering politician", but gives every sign of having made a complete recovery from whatever it was, by describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

The Guardian says, a little breathlessly, that in the interview, Gore "launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming. Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: 'If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right.'"

He didn't say, as George Galloway did, that a suicide bomber would be justified in taking out certain members of the administration, but perhaps something of the sort is on next week's agenda.

Meantime, over on the other side of the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal is taking rather a dim view of Gore's We're-All-Doomed movie about the environment: OpinionJournal - It's Your Money: "Mr. Gore's next movie should be about the urge to propitiate the gods with sacrifices, a ritual whose appeal did not go out with the Aztecs. Yes, Al, let us give billions to alternative energy bureaucrats and emissions regulators. This we do as a tribute to your shamanism, although it will make little appreciable difference to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"That said, a valid service is performed in satisfying the eternal human appetite for gloom and doom (and no virgins were sacrificed), distracting people from the reality of life, which is that we all are doomed, while the universe, the Earth and all that environmentalists hold dear will go remorselessly on and on without us."

Posting will be light today, as I'm travelling again.

The Washington Times suggests this morning that Charlotte Bronte offered to rewrite parts of Jane Eyre after a legal threat from the headmaster of the school on which she based the infamous Lowood school. Newly discovered letters, the Times says, "have raised the prospect that somewhere, tucked away in a dusty attic or a pile of musty papers, could lie an amended manuscript of the 19th-century classic, toned down by the British novelist to avoid a libel lawsuit.

"The letters, written by the headmaster's grandson in 1912, will be put up for sale next month by auction house Mullock Madeley, documents expert Richard Westwood-Brookes said on Friday."

Six years ago last week, Israel left Southern Lebanon in accordance with a UN-brokered arrangement. Hezbollah, which was created specifically for the purpose of getting Israel out of Lebanon, agreed to dismantle itself and allow the Israeli/Lebanese border to be manned by the Lebanese Army. But, as is the norm with groups like Hezbollah, which would renege on a deal to call today Tuesday if one were struck, it didn't work that way. Israel left all right, but far from dismantling itself, Hezbollah has grown in numbers and imporance in the Middle East, and has created a series of bases in the south of Lebanon which now bristle with the bling of the Middle East - arms and explosives, especially rockets. Hezbollah is backed by Iran and Syria, which have enlisted Hezbollah as their front-line instrument for making trouble with Isreal.

It's a difficult dilemma for Lebanon, which wants as little as possible to do with all this. It is fairly clear that a majority of Lebanese are embarrassed by the presence of groups like Hezbollah, and think the time has come for them to leave. The May 24 celebration of the anniversary of Israel leaving Lebanon was cancelled this year, ostensibly for economic reasons, but probably because the Lebanese have lost their taste for having radical groups in their country, especially groups backed by Iran and Syria.

When an Islamic Jihad leader was assassinated in Sidon the other day, Hezbollah retaliated by firing a barrage of Katyusha rockets into Israel. But as this Haaretz piece suggests, that wasn't a good idea. "Hassan Nasrallah fell into an Israeli ambush Sunday. For years, senior Israeli officials have admired the Hezbollah head as their most sophisticated and calculated rival, but in the past few days the decision-making process of the organization has led it into high-casualty traps. The organizational deterioration that began with the assassination of Lebanese Islamic Jihad leader Mahmoud Majdub propelled Hezbollah to respond with Katyusha rockets, enabling Israel to take off its metaphoric gloves.

The Israel Defense Forces struck back at Hezbollah positions along the length of the northern border, addressing a long-time threat. The IDF Northern Command was visibly pleased with itself yesterday..."

The toll of dead and injured is said to be quite low, but that may not be correct, since the Lebanese emergency services have only today been allowed into the camps to assess damage. The IDF may be pleased with itself, but in terms of the maintenance of peace in the Middle East, the action in Southern Lebanon is not helpful. The threat to the security of Israel probably isn't that great, but it puts the stability of the Lebanese government under pressure. That body has, in any event, a kind of Alice in Wonderland quality about it, because a great deal of political business has been left unresolved in the wake of the Syrian withdrawal.

British university students adversely affected by the industrial action of lecturers, who won't mark exam papers unless they're paid more money, seem to be thinking of taking legal action against their universities. The Guardian says it's a sign of Britain's growing propensity for solving disputes through litigation. Consensus of opinion in Britain seems to be that the lecturers have already been offered pretty fair increases, and that the continuation of this dispute has more to do with politics than economics.

At the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education yesterday, another sign of growing militancy among those of the lecturers who, shall we say, wear cotton, but aspire to leather: the Guardian says: "Britain's largest lecturers' union yesterday voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli lecturers and academic institutions who do not publicly dissociate themselves from Israel's 'apartheid policies'.

Delegates at the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (Natfhe) in Blackpool narrowly backed the proposal, despite mounting international pressure from those opposed to a boycott, including a petition from more than 5,000 academics and a plea from the Israeli government. The decision was greeted with disappointment and anger by anti-boycott campaigners last night, but Palestinian groups issued declarations of support."

Last year the Association of University Teachers elected to impose an academic boycott on two Israeli universities. But after an international outcry and a revolt by members it reversed the decision. This second cut at the boycott is a kind of shout of defiance, but won't sit well with those who are serious about their profession, and perhaps won't last long.

There is no doubt that Bermuda was seriously diminished by the change of government in the election of 1998. It is not just that the Progressive Labour Party, which had been in Opposition for more than 30 years, turned out not to be intellectually up to the job of governing, but that their accession to power has been the catalyst for the disappearance from the machinery of government of people of character, judgement and ability, no matter what their political stripe.

In the latest demonstration of political stupidity, Public Works employees went in to the Auditor General's office over the weekend and forcibly removed its furniture and fittings to a smaller office in the same building. Bermuda's daily paper, the Royal Gazette reports this morning that: "Bermuda effectively has no functioning Auditor General's Office today after what has been described as 'an outright plan to get at the Auditor General' resulted in the independent office being carted out of its former premises at the weekend and put into a smaller and unprepared office space.

"Political shenanigans have been blamed for leaving the country's financial watchdog resembling a storage warehouse without computer link-ups or telephones. It may take a week or longer before any semblance of a normal working routine can restored, but for the coming days the Office of the Auditor General, whose stated mission is 'to add credibility to Government's financial reporting and to promote improvement in the financial administration of all Government departments and controlled entities' will be in a state of flux."

I suspect (it's a guess) that there has been a disagreement between the Government and the Auditor General over this move, and that he has been playing a little game of brinksmanship with the Works Department in an attempt to make sure that he is moved to quarters as comfortable as the ones he currently occupies. But that counts for almost nothing. The Auditor has had a particularly difficult relationship with the Progressive Labour Party Government since they took office. He has exposed carelessness and dishonesty in their financial dealings. They feel he has no business looking over their shoulders, and have made no bones about their intention to try to rein him in.

In those circumstances, allowing this landlord/tenant disagreement with the Auditor to get out of hand is an act of the grossest political stupidity.

It comes hard on the heels of another serious political misjudgement - the defeat by cowardly trickery of a Government backbencher's bill which had the object of extending human rights protections to homosexuals. The editor of the Royal Gazette, in his editorial, speaks, I'm sure, for the majority of Bermudians: Royal Gazette "...This was a sad day. Not a single Cabinet Minister spoke. The leader of the Opposition remained silent. So did all of the other members of the House. The Island's supposed leaders caught a collective case of laryngitis.

"Worse, when it appeared the amendment had been defeated on a voice vote, Ms Webb could not even find two MPs to stand with her in order to have a roll called, meaning no one will ever be certain how individual MPs would vote...

"Bermuda will now be known as a place that is as intolerant as the deepest parts of the Bible Belt or an Islamic republic, while its democratically elected leaders will be known as the people who were afraid to speak or put their name to their vote when called upon to do so."

I'm ashamed.

She's the perfect person to interview, just as she was the perfect interviewer, because you couldn't ask her what day it was without getting a faceful of controversy in reply. And in advancing years, according to this fine, simpatico piece by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker, Oriana Fallaci is getting bolder. "'You've got to get old, because you have nothing to lose,' she said over lunch that afternoon. 'You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don't give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn't used to say before - you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness - now I open my big mouth. I say, What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself - I say what I want.'"

Fallaci has been vilified in Europe for her views on Muslims, who she thinks are turning Europe into Eurabia. "According to Fallaci," writes Talbot, "Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. 'If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your right of thought and expression. But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination.

"'If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a 'Well done, good for you.' But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched."

"The rhetoric of Fallaci's trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims 'breed like rats'; in the second, she writes that this statement was 'a little brutal' but 'indisputably accurate'. She ascribes behavior to bloodlines - Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because 'too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood' - and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books; at one point in The Rage and the Pride she complains about Somali Muslims leaving 'yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery' in Florence. 'Good Heavens!' she writes. 'They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?' Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day 'shit in the Sistine Chapel'."

A 'non-smoking Olympics' has been done before, but the surprise this time is that it is China, home of fully a third of the world's smokers, aiming at that mark for the Games that will take place at the end of next yeat. People's Daily says: "Zhang Bin, an official with the Ministry of Health, said on Monday that smoking will be banned at all hospitals that will be used specifically for the Games by the end of 2007. The ban will extend to public transport and public buildings, with places that offer services to children the main concern, Zhang said.

"In his meeting with World Health Organization Director-General Lee Jong-Wook in 2004, Premier Wen Jiabao said a non-smoking Games is on top of the agenda for China's preparations for a green Olympics."

The first biodegradable bottle has gone on sale in Britain, reports the Independent, "raising hopes we (and the rest of us) may one day stop adding to the mountain of plastic packaging accumulating in shopping baskets and landfill sites.

"The plastic water bottle - from a new company committed to environmental production, Belu - is made of corn and decomposes in home compost in months. Its launch is an attempt to stem the tide of plastic wrappers, tubs, trays and bottles that threatens to engulf landfill sites in the UK."

The Los Angeles Times is repeating an idea that has been around for a while - Bill Clinton might make a helluva good Secretary-General of the United Nations: "If the Security Council members were truly inspired to pick the right man for the job, and if Hillary Clinton's candidacy were the only obstacle standing between her husband and global leadership (granted, a big if), we'd like to think she'd do the right thing and put her presidential aspirations on hold. The world needs Bill more than the US needs Hillary."

That's not the only such trial balloon in the air at the moment - this is the lead paragraph of a story that appeared in Britain's Independent a couple of days ago: "Call it the ultimate exit strategy. A $400,000 salary plus expenses, a rent-free townhouse on Manhattan's East river instead of a mortgage in Bayswater, and freedom from those troublesome backbenchers. Add world travel and loads of goody bags for Cherie, and Tony Blair could well be tempted by the job of UN secretary general, which just happens to fall vacant at the end of this year."

University lecturers in Britain are threatening not to mark exam papers unless they're paid more and, as if that weren't enough controversy for the week, they're also having another go at a boycott of Israeli universities, according to the the New York Times. This time, the buzz is that they might well succeed with their boycott, not least because this time, their proposal hasn't really caught the public's attention.

"Two days before British academics were to vote on a possible boycott of their Israeli colleagues," says the NYT, "the lines sharpened on Saturday as 600 university teachers from Britain, Canada, the United States and Israel came out in opposition to the move while Palestinian and other academics supported it. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, Britain's biggest union of college teachers, is to vote Monday on a resolution asking its 67,000 members to boycott Israeli colleagues who do not distance themselves from what it calls Israel's 'apartheid policies.'

The ballot, at the union's annual conference in Blackpool, follows a similar move last year by the smaller Association of University Teachers, with 40,000 members, which first supported a boycott of two Israeli universities, then overturned it. The two unions are set to merge on June 1, but the vote on Monday will determine whether the newly merged union will come into being under the shadow of a dispute over the proposed boycott."

In the Telegraph, Niall Ferguson (who has taught on both sides of the Atlantic), says lecturers in Britain are a bit of a shower anyway: "...Busy though I have been in the last week, it would never have occurred to me not to get my final papers marked. My students have worked hard this semester. Some of them are about to graduate and cannot do so if I don't deliver. Even if it means one more cup of coffee and one less hour of sleep, that last paper - all 21 pages of it - is going to get read and rated.

"So I am frankly disgusted by the spectacle of dons downing tools. It's proof that those concerned are not professionals at all, but merely a kind of academic proletariat who conceive of their institutions as nothing more than degree factories. If I were a student, I would be furious. And many are, in a wonderful inversion of the late 1960s, demanding that their protesting professors get back to work.

"This go-slow is more than merely irresponsible, however. It is also absurdly unrealistic. The AUT has been offered 12.5 per cent over the next three years; it is insisting on 23 per cent - at a time, let's not forget, of remarkably low inflation. Where do they think British universities are going to find this money? The fact of the matter is that British higher education is on its uppers, as a direct consequence of a massive expansion that has been systematically under-funded."