No country in the world, that I know of, produces "characters" in the way the United States does. Lee Baca is such a man. He's the sheriff of LA County, and he's just back from Pakistan, where he was discussing terrorism. Why? Good question. Because it was there, I think.

This edited extract from a book called A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 is the day's best read, I think. The book is by Rachel Cohen and is being published next month in Britain by Jonathan Cape. It has already been published in the US by Random House. The article, in two parts, covers encounters between Charlie Chaplin and Hart Crane, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Henry James and Matthew Brady.

Rachel Cohen is an American author who has written for The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, McSweeney's, and other publications. Her essays appeared in Best American Essays 2003 and the 2003 Pushcart Anthology. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for the manuscript of A Chance Meeting. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

The British parliamentarian George Galloway filed lawsuits against both the Telegraph in England and the Christian Science Monitor in the US over coverage of documents found in Iraq that seemed to show him taking payments from Saddam Hussein. With this statement, the Monitor acnowledges that the documents it used as the basis for its story were forgeries, and the allegations it published, therefore, were unfounded. Statements like this one are normally agreed by lawyers for the two sides and, having lost the lawsuit, lawyers for the newspaper often agree some wretched, grovelling form of words that exaggerates the offence it committed. This statement is a refreshing change. It deals with the Monitor's offence succinctly, and makes it quite clear that there are other allegations against Galloway still outstanding.

The Guardian tells the story in a less formal way.

The Christian Science Monitor paints a simplistic picture, certainly of the significance of the current struggle in the tribal lands of Pakistan. It does seem possible that the battle will be a clearcut sign that the area is no longer a secure redoubt in which terrorists can hide. But it is more likely that it will end in a victory for no one.

Pakistani officials are no longer claiming that al Qaeda's number two is in the area. There has been some talk, instead, of Chechen terrorist leaders being there, though it isn't clear why. There has also been some suggestion that the head of the area's tribal groups is fighting with the terrorists, and it has been confirmed that they are holding Pakistani troops, possibly special forces, as hostages. I doubt there is going to be anything clearcut about the outcome of this battle - it is much more likely to be messy and painful for Pakistan.

Just in case any reader of this website has forgotten to file his or her application to take part in the Newport-Bermuda race this year, I am pleased to be able to include this explanation of how to do it online. See how switched on we are?

The Washington Post has a short and sweet take on Justice Antonin Scalia's 21-page justification for sitting in judgement on a Supreme Court case involving a duck-hunting buddy. In summary, it says Mr. Scalia "deserves credit for a detailed, public explanation of his choice, an explanation that he was under no obligation to provide. But we'd guess that many reasonable people will remain, like we are, unpersuaded."

The head of the union representing Hollywood film and TV scribes has resigned over concerns that he embellished his past. This LA Times story notes in passing that Hollywood screenwriter Roger L Simon had called for Holland to resign, and made his website "a sounding board for the controversy." That seems a little miserly with the truth. If Simon hadn't highlighted the case on his blogsite, chances are the LA Times wouldn't have been in a position to run its story. But journalists don't like giving credit to bloggers, who are quicker to understand and better at chasing some stories than they are.

"La Santa Muerte is a kind of equal-opportunity icon. It is said that she makes no distinction between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. Whatever your wish or grievance, you need only say a prayer or purchase the appropriate color-coded candle and offer it to La Santa Muerte.

"An orange candle is for all-around good luck. Blue is for help with work-related matters. White signifies thanks for a favor granted. Green is for protection against legal authorities. Red is for passion - to make someone fall in love with you, perhaps, or when you need courage to settle a score. And black is to neutralize 'malas vibres', and to make undesirable persons simply disappear - no questions asked."

I guess these 25-word plot summaries are the haikus of the literary world. Here's a sample: "The Bible: Good opening chapter. Main character arrives halfway through but gets killed off early. Some decent (if dated) commandments. Cracking ending. Slightly too open to interpretation."

On the website, one man says he had a professor in college who liked to summarize all of Soviet Social Realism this way: "Boy meets tractor. Boy and tractor fall in love. Boy and tractor live happily ever after."

I hadn't realised she was that much taller than he is.

A pan-African parliament whose purpose is to spread democracy, prosperity and peace across the continent? Can hope triumph over a reality as harsh as Africa's past record in the democracy, prosperity and peace department?

Faced with furious opposition to its half-baked plans to expel the last 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords before the next election, Britain's ruling Labour Government has backed down...for now. "At last it has dawned on them how complicated this is," crowed Conservative Party spokesman Alan Duncan, MP. "It would be far too perilous to try and ram this through at the fag-end of a parliament. If the decision to take a grown-up look at it and make proposals which are fair for all and good for government, then fair enough." That view's a bit laid back for the Liberals, though, who are having a fully-fledged hissy fit about it.

Here's another list - that of all contestants for the British Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Reluctantly, I have to admit that I haven't read a single one of them.

This reviewer obiously isn't familiar with the more than two dozen Zatoichi films that star the Japanese actor Shintaro Katsu as the legendary blind masseur who lives by the Yakuza code and deals with his foes with a deadly sword disguised as a blind man's cane. They do have a large cult following in the US (and a very small one in Bermuda). They are derived from a character in a book written by Kan Shimozawa, and now have the kind of place in Japanese culture that the Lone Ranger, say, has in ours. These are not the kind of samurai films that directors like Akira Kuroswawa or Horoshi Inagaki have made. Zatoichi is swordfighting without tears, down at the lower-brow end of things, where the fun is. The version being reviewed is directed and acted by Takeshi Kitano, who's a piece of work in his own right.

Nat Hentoff, taking a break from excoriating the American Library Association for not standing up for their colleagues jailed in Cuba for dissent, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal (registration may be required) this morning about the Jazz Museum that is being planned for Harlem, where you would have thought one should have been built ages ago.

Neville Chamberlain and others proved long ago that appeasement always fails, according to the Washington Times this morning. "Chamberlain's efforts to let Adolf Hitler have a little slice of Czechoslovakia in the hopes it would satisfy his lust for power and bring Great Britain 'peace in our time' ended with Germany's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II.

"Spain's withdrawal of its 1,300 troops from Iraq will not end al Qaeda's thirst for blood. It will only embolden the terrorists to step up their attacks elsewhere, where the death toll will be much higher than the 201 lives snuffed out in Madrid. "

And the Times wonders about the significance of the new relationship between Mr Zapatero and presidential candidate John Kerry. "Mr Zapatero, who declared during his campaign that he hoped Sen. John Kerry would win the U.S. presidency," the newspaper recalled "recently repeated his preference. 'We're aligning ourselves with Kerry,' Mr Zapatero said, according to the International Herald Tribune. 'Our allegiance will be for peace, against war, no more deaths for oil, and for a dialogue between the government of Spain and the new Kerry administration.'"

Meantime, the suggestion is being made that one of the leaders of the group responsible for the Madrid bombings lives in the UK. "Mohammed al-Gerbouzi," says the Guardian, "has shaken off repeated requests from Moroccan authorities who want to extradite him to face charges related to the 44 deaths caused by the Casablanca bombings. He has been based in Britain for 16 years. Mr al-Gerbouzi, now a British citizen, is widely reported to be one of the leaders of the Group of Islamic Combatants of Morocco, one of the main suspects in the Madrid bombings, according to the newspaper El País yesterday."

The Washington Post and other newspapers are reporting this morning that there is danger from a new hacker attack on the internet at the moment. Phatbot is not itself a virus or a worm, it uses infection by internet worms like Mydoom and Bagle to gain control of computers, especially computers using broadband connections. As always, the best defence against this sort of problem is to keep your virus protection software up to date. If you don't have virus protection software, get some before men in white coats come and take you away.

At long last, Max Boot has put it all on paper - the Gospel according to the Left. Didn't Dubya's grandfather, Prescott, make his loot in shady deals with the Nazis? And didn't Dubya's father, George H.W. Bush, win the vice presidency by making a backroom deal with the Iranians to avoid releasing the U.S. hostages until after the 1980 election? And didn't Dubya himself go AWOL in the National Guard and lie about it? Look into this picture and tell me that's not the biggest jackass in creation looking back at you!

If you've never tried Mexico's national speciality, mole, then you have not taken life up on its offer of a major experience. It's a rich, spicy sauce made of dried chiles, almonds, peanuts, chocolate and many more ingredients ground into a paste, thinned with broth and served with meat. Chocolate and meat? Trust me.

Austria's justice minister is under pressure to resign after he organised a training exercise in which 70 armed police stormed a women's prison and strip-searched the inmates in the prison chapel. This article in the Telegraph describes him as far-right, as if his politics were somehow to blame for his lapse in judgement. That doesn't seem to me to work too well as a general rule. Is violence the exclusive playground of the right?

A series of dazzling daguerreotypes, by a French amateur recognised half a century after his death as a master of the earliest days of photography, will be auctioned in May, a year after another of his plates set a world record.

The war on terror is changing the way the military works. But there's a little confusion about just what the salient lessons are. "Rumsfeld's notion that you can fight wars with smaller forces I think is for the most part proving out," says Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. "But what you can't do is occupy countries with smaller forces. So all the defense transformation and technology in the world is not going to help you when it comes to having to occupy a country."

Space artists draw things that no one has ever seen - they give us a God's Eye View of Space. This article is littered with really breathtaking examples.

Imagine being able to clear impurities from your household's wastewater, and generate electricity at the same time. It may well be on the cards. I know this story is just begging for an amusing little quip to round it out, but the amusing sector of my brain seems to be on strike this morning. Anybody got an idea?

This is DEBKAfile again:: "According to DEBKAfile's exclusive counter-terror sources, the Madrid train bombings in which 201 Spanish commuters were murdered and 1,400 injured, were not the work of an al Qaeda offshoot or affiliate. Like the attacks in the United States, they were conceived, planned, orchestrated and directed by Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zuwahiri, in person, and aimed at a Western Achilles heel. The terrorist chiefs were convinced that a change of government in Madrid would engender the pullout of the Spanish 1,300-man troop contingent from Iraq, thereby weakening the solidarity of the US-led coalition and hurting President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election.

"Bin Laden's 'success' owes less to his superior craft than to the laxness of US and European counter-terror authorities. The names and descriptions of all the members of the Moroccan network which perpetrated the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11 were in their possession, handed over by Ramzi bin al Shaiba after he reached US custody in September 2002. All that time, none of the Moroccan terrorists named were detained, although their network is directly controlled by bin Laden himself and despite the fact that they lived mostly in Madrid or Tangiers. This intelligence failure is further magnified by the ease with which the terrorists were able to carry out their attack. They had no need of aircraft, suicide bombers, wads of cash or even box-cutters - only very simply to buy Spanish-manufactured explosives, stuff them into ten ordinary bags and leave them on the targeted trains."

There are no indications that voting Republican will become the norm among blacks any time soon, according to the excellent American columnist and scholar, John H McWhorter, but more and more, American blacks are moving towards the centre politically, as they realise that change is possible. "Increasingly," he says, "the African American grimly convinced that the only difference in American race relations between 1964 and 2004 is in window dressing and etiquette is less an archetype than a personality type." He figures nowadays it's OK to look back, as long as you don't stare.

For each of the last 11 years, Sir Terence Conran has sent someone from the world of design on a 30,000 pound ($54,000) shopping spree, in search of "things you'd like to live with" as part of the Conran Foundation Collection. When the popular 33-year-old English designer, sculptor and architect Thomas Heatherwick got the call this year, he decided to put a little extra legwork into the assignment. The things he bought are extraordinary - Iranian cola whose bottle bears the words "Liberate your Taste", a plaster-of-Paris kit allowing wannabe rock musicians to make models of their genitals, a wine rifle...but no mention of the Mosque-shaped alarm clock, featuring a muezzin's calls to prayer, that sits on my desk. What an omission!

One million wills from the last millennium have been placed online for the benefit of historians, genealogists, and the merely curious. The documents, dating from 1384 to 1858, provide a fascinating glimpse into the lives and deaths of historical figures...Shakespeare and Napoleon among them... as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. There's a link to the appropriate website at the end of this Independent story.

Who Owns This Bag? Boy, is that ever the catchphrase of the culture of this moment!

The French? Complicit in the genocide in Rwanda? Surely not, they have such finely-honed moral judgement and wouldn't dream of getting involved in anything that wasn't...well, strictly kosher.

Blogger Roger L Simon yesterday posted a link to a website that claims an uprising of a sort is under way in Iran against the conservative clerics who recently tightened their grip on rule in the country. "The night will be very long for the regime forces which have tried to get ready for avoiding popular demos and riots at the occasion of such night and thousands of freedom lovers are intending to create another nightmare for the ruling clerics," the site proclaims. Mainstream media don't seem to be covering the events this site talks about. Whether that means they're behind the 8-Ball, or that the site is making more than it should of what is going on, isn't clear. Roger Simon's blogsite, by the way, is one of the best, and well worth a visit.

An extensive public opinion poll conducted in Iraq on behalf of the BBC and other international news organisations has shown that a majority of those surveyed feel their lives have improved since the war. Even more were optimistic that there would be further improvements. Just over half of those questioned opposed the presence of coalition troops. When they were asked what Iraq now most needs, a large majority said a democratic government, and, asked about future needs, a large majority said a unified country with a central government in Baghdad. Full marks to the BBC for commissioning the study, and thanks to Alastair for the link.

The Cubans really have a nerve. Having had their human rights record panned in reports published by the US State Department, by Human Rights Watch and by Amnesty International in the last few weeks, they announce that they're launching a counterstrike in the UN's Human Rights Commission. According to GRANMA, they feel that "a small but powerful group has converted this UN mechanism into a court where only the poor nations and the Third World are judged." What they mean is that the UN is the only organisation in the world in which a dictatorship with an appalling human rights record has a good chance of undermining common sense and justice sufficiently to make it appear it is in the right, and those nations and organisations in the world that respect human rights are in the wrong.

What on earth is going on here? First the French demonstrate that they're just wild for John Kerry, then they send their navy over to China to take part in exercises there in the waters north of Taiwan...four days before that country holds elections. China's Xinhua news agency says it is the "biggest in scale and the most substantial in content of any exercise between the Chinese Navy and a foreign navy." Sounds as if Inspector Clouseau's been made head of the Foreign Ministry, doesn't it? Thanks to Phillip for the tip about the Chinese exercise.

Mark Steyn writes with his usual eloquence about the dismay that has been created by the new Spanish leader's apparent decision to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq, and the feeling that despite everyone's best intentions, bullets and bombs have won out over good sense and courage.

"Last Friday, for a brief moment," he writes in the Telegraph this morning, "it looked as if a few brave editorialists on the Continent finally grasped that global terrorism is a real threat to Europe, and not just a Bush racket. But even then they weren't proposing that the Continent should rise up and prosecute the war, only that they be less snippy in their carping from the sidelines as America gets on with it. Spain was Washington's principal Continental ally, and what does that boil down to in practice? 1,300 troops. That's fewer than what the New Hampshire National Guard is contributing."

But Europeans are not completely without brains. They can read the handwriting on the wall as easily as Mark Steyn can, and are taking steps to make sure they protect themselves as best they can. I suspect that once the euphoria of his victory dies down a little, Spain's new Prime Minister might well show that he can read that handwriting as well, and moderate his tone a little.

Political correctness has triumphed over common sense before, but never on this scale. Ken Livingstone would be locked up in the Tower of London with the quisling Clare Short for committing an act of atrocity against art, if there were any justice in the world.

The Palestinian gangster, Yasser Arafat, is again standing in the way of moderate Palestinians' desires to take action against Fatah and Hamas in the wake of the Ashdod Port bombing over the weekend. Prime Minister Sharon has cancelled peace talks that were to have taken place with Palestinian premier Ahmed Qureia, and it is expected that he will order harsh measures against the militant groups in retaliation. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who returned yesterday from a trip to the United States, instructed security chiefs to "step up the offensive against Hamas." The word in Israel is that targeted assassinations against Hamas leaders are likely to be increased.

Jean Bertrand Aristide's security chief may be extradicted from Canada, where Immigration officials have been holding him since he tried to enter the country last week, to the US, where he is wanted on drug trafficking charges. As I understand it, the Canadian authorities are particularly upset with Oriel Jean because he managed to elude them the last time he was in Canada, last year, when they issued an order barring him from leaving the country at the request of the US. He is said to have managed to escape with the complicity of the Haitian Consulate in Montreal, from which he obtained a travel warrant under a false name and escaped from Canada before American officials arrived.

Since Mr. Aristide was returned to his palace in Port-au-Prince ten years ago, Haiti has become a major transshipment point for cocaine bound for the US. Last week the New York Times reported that 25%, or 80 tons, of cocaine entering America per year, came through Haiti. In a 20-minute tirade before he was sentenced by a court in Miami recently for drug trafficking, one prominent Haitian smuggler said that Mr. Aristide controlled 85% of the drug traffic, and that Oriel Jean was his bagman.

Meantime, Haiti has suspended diplomatic relations with Jamaica over its naive and misguided decision to allow Mr Aristide to stay there until he finds a more permanent home elsewhere.

Some operational progress seems to have been made in the fight against terrorism. On Sunday, US forces captured eight suspected Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Yesterday, they killed three and captured another 13 at the start of Operation Mountain Storm, designed to complement the Pakistani push across the border in the tribal areas. In Pakistan, Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are fleeing Pakistani troops into the mountains on the Afghan border. The hope is that the terrorists will be trapped between the two forces in a massive killing ground in the border area.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, one of two men killed in a shootout with Saudi forces turns out to have been the al Qaeda leader responsible for operations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, and is suspected of having ordered the attacks in Riyadh in May and November of last year.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has published the first of what it hopes will be annual studies of the state of journalism. According to Newsday, the report suggests that journalism is in the midst of "an opochal transformation that is complicated by cost-cutting and a public mistrust of the media.

I haven't read the whole thing, but I did skim through parts of the Overview. Blogs don't seem to come in for prominent discussion, which makes me think that the Project, which is linked to New York's Columbia University, doesn't understand the state of journalism in 2004 nearly as well as it should.

The Tech sector of the American economy, having melted down into a dirty little puddle of misplaced hope in the '90s, is showing signs of a comeback. It's going to be a slow climb, perhaps, but it does seem to have begun.

But many tech firms don't look the same as they once did. Silicon Valley now stretches into places like Bombay, India and Bucharest. It's a truly global marketplace now, whether people like John Kerry, who the Washington Times this morning describes as the great French hope in the US presidential race, know it or not.

Black Americans trying to track their origins back to an African motherland faced a pretty daunting task - until a company called African Ancestry was formed by one of the country's leading black geneticists. It compares DNA with a database of 21,000 genetic lineages, classified into 100 ethnic groups. I'd be willing to bet it won't be long before this firm goes international. I don't think it's a publicly-traded company yet, but if it decides to become one, I'd say it would be eminently flutterable.

O forwards and backs you have all
Shown us wonderful ways to walk tall
And together with Clive
You will help us survive
Our losses with other-shaped balls.

That's Andrew Motion, proving once again that Poets Laureate are a funny lot. I'd have made it O forwards, O backs, personally.

It's been such a long time, I can't remember if I shouted for Tinkerbell or not. But it's good to get a second chance to strike that kind of blow. In case you don't notice it, this is a link to the deserving little fantasy that's being threatened by reality.

In the wake of the bombings in Spain a few days ago, there has been a great wave of analysis of what it all means by pundits on both sides of the Atlantic. Most have come to the easy conclusion that Europe, having been forced to face terrorism on a mass scale on its own shores, will start coming to some new, rather more realistic conclusions about how to deal with terrorists. I've found two articles that go a little farther than that. In the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and author of The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad asks whether it matters whether ETA or al Qaeda was responsible, since for terrorists, violence has become an end in itself. He quotes Friederich Engels as having said "Terror is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened people to reassure themselves."

And in this editorial, the Telegraph focuses on some of the more unpleasant realities of this kind of war: "The bombs in Madrid have produced a persuasive argument that the balance between liberty and security in our laws should be altered with the aim of achieving greater security. "Let justice be done though the world perish" is not a slogan that commends itself to people who know they might be the ones to perish if justice continues to be done in its present form.

"The Americans have been criticised for detaining several hundred people without trial at Guantanamo Bay. Yet the criminal law is clearly the wrong instrument with which to deal with people who believe themselves to be at war with your country, wish to destroy as many of your people as they can, and are prepared to commit suicide to achieve their aims."

People now need to ask themselves, the newspaper says, "if, in order to increase the chances of preventing the next episode of mass murder, it is worth restricting some of the protections which the law extends to those suspected of involvement in terrorism. It is difficult to believe that the answer to that question must always be No."

The United Nations appears to have given in to pressure to hold an investigation of its Iraqi oil-for-food programme, and will formally announce the probe this week. Iraq's new governing council has already asked the accountants KPMG and an international law firm to investigate claims that large sums of money, which should have been spent on food and medicine for ordinary Iraqis, were diverted to line the pockets of people outside Iraq. The Telegraph reports that the interim council has complained to Kofi Annan that the UN appeared to have allowed the programme to become "one of the world's most disgraceful scams, and an example of inadequate control, responsibility and transparency, providing an opportune vehicle for Saddam Hussein to operate under the UN aegis to continue his reign of terror and oppression."

Terrific story! Tom, Dick and Harry were three tunnels dug to allow escapers to get out of Stalag-Luft 3. In one of the most audacious episodes of the Second World War, immortalised in the movie The Great Escape, 70 Allied prisoners toiled for months to get out of the German camp, but only three made it to freedom and 50 were executed as punishment for trying.

Tom and Harry, through which the escapers wriggled to their short-lived freedom, were collapsed when they were discovered by the Germans. But now, the remaining tunnel has been found and excavated by archaeologists after lying undisturbed for six decades. On the 60th anniversary of the escape on 24 March 1944, two archaeologists, Peter Doyle from Britain and Larry Babits from the US, accompanied by three of the few surviving prisoners who worked on the tunnel, have rediscovered Dick at the abandoned and overgrown site of the camp near Zagan in modern-day Poland.

The Guardian and the Observer have been trying to fill in some of the blanks in that strange story about mercenaries in Africa. They think the men arrested in Zimbabwe were involved in an attempt to kidnap (if you'll believe that, you'll believe anything) Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang, and replace him with a man who tried, and failed to stage a coup in 1997, and now calls himself the president of the country's government-in-exile.

The man financing this operation, they think, is a Lebanese-born British tycoon who lives in Chelsea and made his fortune in oil trading with Nigeria. The cast of characters includes an Eton-educated former SAS man, a South African special forces turncoat, the president's dangerously unstable son and a bribed Zimbabwean colonel. It's a little this side of Frederick Forsyth, a little that side of Agatha Christie, with blundering by Inspector Clouseau.

We all love Google. That's a given for the net generation. But how many of us realised Google-worship had gone this far? The NY Times says that with an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users. The paper quotes Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester, as saying: "A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis on where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google."

The Times says that "The Web site that has become a verb is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much: a dictionary, a detective service, a matchmaker, a recipe generator, an ego massager, a spiffy new add-on for the brain. Behind the rainbow logo, Google is changing culture and consciousness. Or maybe not - maybe it's the world's biggest time-waster, a vacuous rabbit hole where, in January, 60 million Americans, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, foraged for long-lost prom dates and the theme from 'Doogie Howser, MD'."