Russia is trying to delay a decision on a Lebanese tribunal to try those thought to have been involved in the Rafik Hariri assassination, apparently with the airm of doing Syria a favour, according to the New York Sun: "Diplomats at the United Nations said yesterday that they suspected Russia, which considers Damascus an ally, of waiting for the pro-Syrian forces to gain political power. Those forces could reject the tribunal, which could prosecute major Syrian figures, including members of President Assad's family and his inner circle of advisers who have been implicated by the U.N. investigation.

"Beirut politicians, meanwhile, fell short yesterday of a deal on a unity government that could tip the balance of power in the country. Earlier, the leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened that unless the pro-Syrian factions gain veto power in the 24-member Cabinet by holding at least a third of the seats for his party and its allies, his supporters would stage mass street protests. Christian leader Samir Geagea said he would lead counter-protests."

If Jack Kerouac Were Alive, He Could Hitch a Ride Online. It's a silly headline in the New York Sun this morning, but the story's fascinating - hitchhiking goes internet: "Looking for a ride to Monsey, N.Y., or to make a quick trip to Lansing, Mich., over Thanksgiving break? Hitching a ride on the streets of New York is illegal, so today's hitchhikers are sticking out their thumbs with posts on craigslist.org...The craigslist.org New York ride board gets about 25 posts a day, with about an even number offering and soliciting rides. Most posters are looking to team up for shorter drives to destinations along the Northeast corridor, but some seek cross-country travel companions.

"The ride board generally yields results only for travelers with flexibility when it comes to destinations and departure dates. Often, the going rate for passengers is the ability to cover at least half of gas expenses. They may not have to be gifted conversationalists, but passengers are often vetted by drivers, either in person or on the phone, to make sure they at least are not insane."

The Los Angeles Times singles out three new cookbooks, one of them in particular, as the top of this year's crop: "Chef cookbooks are big this year, with new tomes out from Michael Mina, Daniel Boulud, Marcus Samuelsson, Michel Richard, Francois Payard, Jamie Oliver and more. Most of them offer what we all expect in a chef's cookbook - eye candy. As a group, they're beautiful objects, gorgeously photographed, books you want to have out on your coffee table. It's a good crop."

The British government often hides behind "a figleaf of scientific respectability when spinning unpalatable or controversial policies to make them acceptable to voters, according to a report by MPs critical of the way science is used in policy," according to this Guardian report: "

"The Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee said that scientific evidence was often misused or distorted to justify policy decisions which were really based on ideological or social grounds. The report, the culmination of a nine-month inquiry, calls for a 'radical re-engineering' of the way the government uses science. 'Abuse of the term 'evidence based'...is a form of fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government,' said Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman and a member of the committee. 'It's critical that the currency of an evidence base should not be devalued by false claims.'"

Everybody and his brother seems to have an opinion, all of a sudden, on whether Saddam Hussein ought to be executed or not. The Washington Times gets it right in its editorial this morning, I think: "Calls for postponing Saddam Hussein's execution following this weekend's guilty verdict for crimes against humanity are misplaced. They are over-intellectualized, and they ignore the political reality of Iraq today. The murderous ex-dictator, extremely brutal to Shi'ites and Kurds, was sentenced Sunday to death by hanging.

"The trial in an Iraqi court, imperfect and assassination-plagued, delivered a type of justice for the families of Saddam's victims and for the Iraqi people which a few short years ago they would have had no reason to expect. This is their victory, not ours. It is also theirs to complete. And in that regard, the fact that the verdict also spurred outrage among the remnant Ba'athist insurgency and its sympathizers and could embolden them is the operative factor as far as the politics goes.

"Saddam's sentencing must be executed, as soon as possible, to stamp out the conspiracy-mongering and to confirm that the old order is indeed gone forever. Iraq must be allowed to remove, in plain public sight, the cause of years of agony, the chief symbol of the old regime. In the short term this may even embolden the insurgency, but that makes it no less necessary. All Iraqis must understand that the old order, whatever they think of it, is finished. It is irretrievably gone, and there is no going back."

I posted yesterday about Ken Livingstone's stopover in Cuba on his way for talks with Venezuela's mad leader, Hugo Chavez. The subject was that cheap oil that Chavez promised he'd give Livingstone for London's poor. London's Times reports: "Mr Livingstone said: 'President Chavez and myself have agreed on an oil deal, which will enable us to help poorer people in London. And I might do a bit of electioneering for Mr Chavez. I think he's been a very good president.' (Tells you something, doesn't it?)

"However, the Venezuelan President's opponent in the election was incensed that London would be taking aid from an under developed country with serious social problems. 'For me, it's a crime that there is hunger, unemployment, poor services, hospitals that don't work, roads that are a disaster - and the Government is giving away our wealth,' Senor Rosales said.

"'Both the person giving it away and the person receiving it are sinning. Ethically, [Mr Livingstone] should not accept it. In the name of Venezuela, we would ask him not to ruin the country any more. If London needed [the cheap oil], that would be one thing. But we're talking about London here,' he said."

Meantime, The Globe and Mail is reporting that: "Cuba's foreign minister backed away Monday from his prediction that Fidel Castro will return to power by early December, raising questions about the pace of the communist leader's recovery from intestinal surgery. Felipe Perez Roque also told The Associated Press that there was no guarantee that Mr. Castro would be well enough to attend the postponed celebration of his 80th birthday on Dec. 2. Mr. Castro turned 80 on Aug. 13 but announced delayed festivities when he told Cubans of his surgery in late July."

Simon Hoggart is the Guardian Parliamentary reporter, so cynicism has seeped into his very soul. In this piece, he reports on a press conference Tony Blair held yesterday to follow up on the article he wrote on ID cards (I posted about that yesterday): "As Mr Blair went on about ID cards - apparently they will help us order goods online - I began to ponder. Does he imagine a world in which we will all remember our cards every day? What happens when we go to the doctor with a nasty rash and realise we've left our card in our other jacket? Which is at the dry cleaners, where all that biometric information might be wiped? Or your son used it as a makeshift screwdriver and warped it. Will you no longer exist?

"And take this business of scanning your retina. Mr Blair has one mad staring eye and one sinister hooded one. They change places now and again. Yesterday the left started looking bonkers, then the right. How will they tell which is which? 'Sorry, sir, your eye is far too sane. I'm afraid you can't buy this online patio heater.'"

A reporter for the London Times, Nicholas Blanford, is the first to put out a book about the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a writer and freelance reviewer based in Beirut, reviews Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and its Impact on the Middle East for the Christian Science Monitor. (Not much of a review, really...it's more of a riff.)

"...Blanford resists the temptation to depict Hariri as a saint, pointing out that 'the trademark of the Hariri [prime ministerial] era was the domineering manner in which he ran the country as if it was an extension of his personal business empire.' Overall, the self-made billionaire emerges as a clumsy arriviste with an obdurate yet sincere belief in the redemptive power of money. Hariri honestly thought that he could mollify even his most implacable foes with his checkbook, failing to grasp that some who benefitted from his largess would also sabotage his plans.

"According to Blanford, Hariri worked hard to accommodate Syria's demands, and never openly confronted his powerful neighbor. The author gently reveals the irony of Hariri's posthumous role as the father of Lebanon's newfound independence, pointing out that 'Hariri had always wanted to be Syria's friend and ally, and was even willing to accept a limited Syrian troop presence in eastern Lebanon. Yet his murder had transformed him into the figurehead of the anti-Syrian struggle and the catalyst that had led to [Syria's] withdrawal."

Ken Livingstone's on his way to Venezuela to visit his chum Hugo Chavez. He apparently stopped off in Cuba over the weekend. Didn't get to see Fidel, but he did watch a cricket match for children, and took the opportunity to blast US policy toward the Island. Caribbean Net News quotes him as having said: "What's amazing here is you've got a country that's suffered an illegal economic blockade by the United States for almost half a century and yet it's been able to give its people the best standard of health care, brilliant education. And to do this in the teeth of an almost economic war I think is a tribute to Fidel Castro and his government."

The Caribbean news agency says Livingstone criticised the 2000 US election that gave George W. Bush the presidency on a legal decision..."Given the problems there where you had a judicial coup d'etat imposing a candidate whom the American people rejected, who then launched an evil war (in Iraq), I have to say I'm not sure the Americans should cast the first stone on these things," said the man popularly known as Red Ken for his leftist politics."

Meantime, Cuba's preparing for a December 2 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cuban revolution and the 80th birthday of its leader, Fidel Castro. Will he be able to show up?

I've never understood the arguments, made on both sides of the Atlantic (but perhaps with more fervour in Britain than in the US) in favour of requiring people to have ID cards. There is already a government apparatus in place for producing biometric passports. To me, if you feel people must have biometric ID, it makes a great deal more sense to simply require people to have a passport and enlarge the organisation that issues them, than it does to set up a completely new apparatus. However, no less a man than Tony Blair is the guy at the sharp end of the UK ID cards cheering team. In a Telegraph opinion piece, he's explaining his point of view:

"On any list of public concerns, illegal immigration, crime, terrorism and identity fraud would figure towards the top. In each, identity abuse is a crucial component. It is all part of a changing world: global mass migration; easier travel; new services and new technologies constantly being accessed. The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world. Biometrics give us the chance to have secure identity and the bulk of the ID cards' cost will have to be spent on the new biometric passports in any event.

"I am not claiming ID cards, and the national identity database that will make them effective, are a complete solution to these complex problems. That is the tactic of opponents who suggest that, if their introduction is unable to prevent all illegal immigration or every terrorist outrage, they are somehow worthless. What I do believe strongly is that we can't ignore the advances in biometric technology in a world in which protection and proof of identity are more important than ever."

The Wall Street Journal is re-running an article published by City Journal in its autumn issue, and written by author and professor James Q Wilson. Wilson is lamenting the change that has occurred in the mind-set of journalists who cover war these days, and on the way to making his case on that subject, mentions the legality of monitoring foreign banking transactions:

"People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult. Thus the New York Times ran a front-page story about President Bush's allowing, without court warrants, electronic monitoring of phone calls between overseas terrorists and people inside the U.S. On the heels of this, the Times reported that the FBI had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor radiation levels around U.S. Muslim sites, including mosques. And then both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories about America's effort to monitor foreign banking transactions in order to frustrate terrorist plans. The revelation of this secret effort followed five years after the New York Times urged, in an editorial, that precisely such a program be started.

"Virtually every government official consulted on these matters urged that the press not run the stories because they endangered secret and important tasks. They ran them anyway. The media suggested that the National Security Agency surveillance might be illegal, but since we do not know exactly what kind of surveillance is undertaken, we cannot be clear about its legal basis. No one should assume that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the president to obtain warrants from the special FISA court before he can monitor foreign intelligence contacts. Though the Supreme Court has never decided this issue, the lower federal courts, almost without exception, have held that "the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance."

"Nor is it obvious that FISA defines all of the president's authority. Two assistant attorneys general have argued that when the president believes that a statute unconstitutionally limits his powers, he has the right not to obey it unless the Supreme Court directs him otherwise. This action would be proper even if the president had signed into law the bill limiting his authority. I know, you are thinking, That is just what the current Justice Department would say. In fact, these opinions were written in the Clinton administration by assistant attorneys general Walter Dellinger and Randolph Moss."

Some of the most deceptive things I have ever said in my life were in the cause of getting myself admitted to a UPI conference in the late '60s, just before Richard Nixon was elected president, to listen to a speech by IF Stone. I can't remember a word the man said, and perhaps that's not a surprise, as it turns out. For the New Criterion, author Ron Radosh reviews a couple of new books about the journalist who was considered the Saint of the Sixties, and says Stone was less than he seemed. The two books are a biography, All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, by Myra MacPherson, a retired Washington Post reporter, and The Best of IF Stone, a sampler put together by Peter Osnos, who was one of Stone's young assistants.

Radosh writes: "In an era when The New York Times, considered by Stone during his lifetime to be a right-wing paper, contains a constant barrage against conservatives and centrists from editorial columnists like Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert, along with official editorials that regularly condemn the Bush administration, one must pause to wonder why they think they still need Stone's presence. If anything, an argument can be made that Stone's writings were far more ambiguous and balanced at times than what comes each week in Frank Rich's columns."

When the short-lived New York Daily Compass folded in 1953, Radosh recalls, "Stone started the venture that made him famous and eventually wealthy - a four-page newsletter he wrote and published himself, IF Stone's Weekly, started with $5000 contributed by relatives. By the time he closed it down because of ill health in 1971, he had 70,000 subscribers, a wide following, and a sub list that was bought by the New York Review of Books, in a deal that gave him a great deal of money and brought him on board as an editorial contributor.

"It was in his newsletter that Stone's careful reading and sifting of government documents, his excerpts from stories that received little attention in the regular press, and his pithy editorial voice made him the hero to a new generation of rebelling youth. During the years of the Vietnam War, Stone became the last word for college students who were aghast at the US war in Southeast Asia, and they took Stone's attacks on LBJ and later Nixon as definitive. Today's journalists, many of them among that generation who discovered Stone in the 1960s, understandably eulogize him and have anointed him to a status of journalistic greatness...

"IF Stone was a bundle of contradictions: a good reporter; a naive left-wing ideologue; a fellow-traveler who was embarrassed in later days about his youthful pro-Soviet leanings; a supporter of Israel who turned against it; a man who could speak sense about America's great failure, segregation, but who above all wanted to be part of the anti-anti-Communist Left. To look back at his columns and his career is to recall a sad earlier time. It is hardly a guide for what journalists today should strive towards."

Radosh reveals himself, in that last sentence, as one of those lefties for whom no one else in the world is correctly left enough to be approved. Whatever else he may have been, Stone was a larger-than-life character who was an excellent reporter, a fine writer and a meticulous analyst who never said anything he couldn't prove. What better role model for young journalists?

They're working on a new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the growth of the Internet and other forms of electronic communication seems to have been rather forcing the pace. James Gleick of the New York Times Magazine has a very readable piece about it this morning: "When I got to John Simpson and his band of lexicographers in Oxford earlier this fall, they were working on the Ps. Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot, polyamorous - these words were all new, one way or another. They had been plowing through the Ps for two years but were almost done (except that they'll never be done), and the Qs will be 'just a twinkle of an eye', Simpson said.

"He prizes patience and the long view. A pale, soft-spoken man of middle height and profound intellect, he is chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and sees himself as a steward of tradition dating back a century and a half. 'Basically it's the same work as they used to do in the 19th century,' he said. 'When I started in 1976, we were still working very much on these index cards, everything was done on these index cards.' He picked up a stack of 6-inch-by-4-inch slips and riffled through them. A thousand of these slips were sitting on his desk, and within a stone's throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries, words, words, words.

"But the word slips have gone obsolete now, as Simpson well knows. They are treeware (a word that entered the OED in September as 'computing slang, freq. humorous'). Blog was recognized in 2003, dot-commer in 2004, metrosexual in 2005 and the verb Google last June. Simpson has become a frequent and accomplished Googler himself, and his workstation connects to a vast and interlocking set of searchable databases, a better and better approximation of what might be called All Previous Text. The OED has met the Internet, and however much Simpson loves the OED's roots and legacy, he is leading a revolution, willy-nilly - in what it is, what it knows, what it sees.

"The English language, spoken by as many as two billion people in every country on earth, has entered a period of ferment, and this place may be the best observation platform available. The perspective here is both intimate and sweeping. In its early days, the OED found words almost exclusively in books; it was a record of the formal written language. No longer. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop is larger, wilder and more amorphous; it is a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; and television and radio broadcasts."

Thanks, Brenda.

With that maturity and keen sense of Christian duty we've all come to know and respect recently, the Christian church is adjusting itself to the shape of the new religious reality in the world. The Telegraph reports that Britain's Evangelical Alliance - a mainstream organisation representing 1.2 million Christians - warns that it may use force if anyone encroaches on its religious rights.

And the Times reports that a retired German priest committed suicide by setting himself on fire in a German monastery in protest at the spread of Islam and the Protestant Church's inability to contain it.

In a story which, predictably, has outraged the legions of the politically correct in England, the Observer reports that: "The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

"Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings."

Paul Auster, whose New York Trilogy is one of the classics of contemporary literature, received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters, Spain's premier literary honour, last month. The Observer published his acceptance speech this morning. It contains this really rather nice paragraph: "Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don't count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy."