This piece from this morning's Guardian is something special. Read it.

Gravity Probe B, a NASA project that will have taken 44 years to get off the ground, when it does, is finally set for a takeoff on April 17. Its goal is to test Einstein's suggestion that massive objects cause gravitational force by stretching the fabric of space/time, in the same way that a book might depress a tight sheet. The project's design and engineering are said to be brilliant.

Charles Krauthammer is right on the money in his characterisation of Richard Clark's much-publicised apology to the families of those killed in the 9/11 attack as cynical playing to the gallery. He said the most telling answer Clark gave to a Commission question was this one.

Former senator Slade Gorton: "Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001 . . . had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?"

Clarke: "No."

This Los Angeles Times editorial makes the point that Caricom's refusal to recognise the legitimacy of Haitian Prime Minister Gerald Latortue's rule is not making a tough problem any easier. Haiti is now in such a mess that the United Nations has pledged not to set foot there until it is more stable. The Caribbean leaders' point is that Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the democratically elected leader of Haiti, no matter what his faults might have been, and should have been assisted, not rejected, by the international community. They ignore the fact that whatever Aristide's claim to be the democratic ruler might have been, his faults were sufficient to have started a bloodbath in Haiti which was obviously going to get worse, and which foreign intervention might have delayed, but would not have stopped. In international politics, it's the same as driving a small car on a busy highway full of very large trucks. Being in the right often doesn't amount to much.

Bermuda's Premier was at the recent Caricom meeting which reaffirmed the organisation's refusal to help sort Haiti's problems out. Although Bermuda is an associate, non-voting member of Caricom, when he returned to Bermuda, the Premier made a point of saying that he agreed with what Caricom had done, and felt a position which sought to honour the principles of democracy could not be wrong. Technically, he has no business commenting on foreign affairs, which are the responsibility of our British Governor. He isn't making much of a secret, though, of his wish to pick whatever fights he can with the Governor, and the British Government, in order to bolster his case for taking the Island to independence, so his comments may have been designed to have that effect.

However, it is another of a series of worrying signs that our present Government might not be capable, independence or no independence, of choosing nuanced positions in international affairs that will, above all things, protect Bermuda's relationship with its major trading partner, the US. This relationship has suddenly become frayed recently as a result of the government's wish to make friends with Cuba, of all places. There seems to be very little in it for Bermuda, but it is obviously a coup for Mr Castro to have won over a country that once guarded its relationship with the US with infinite care. The US government, feeling with some reason that Bermuda's determination to forge ties with Cuba, despite the US having expressed its discomfort, must have some element of cocking a snook, has made it known that it is not amused. Local politicians and supporters of the government have reacted childishly and foolishly, saying, in effect, that the US has no right to tell Bermuda what to do. I know I'm not alone in the dismay I feel at learning that a country that was once guided with such good business sense now seems to be run by people who are shallow and amateurish.

UPDATE: My friend Don Grearson has added a comment too long to go in a comment box. It's here.

Now that Britain's Immigration Minister, Beverly Hughes, has resigned over allegations that her department turned a blind eye to organised scams perverting the award of visas to Eastern European immigrants, attention is now turning to her boss, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett. Tony Blair, ever the spinner, has let it be known that he has been so exasperated by Blunkett's mishandling of the affair that he has now "seized control" of the Home Office. But, as this Telegraph editorial points out, Blair himself doesn't come out of it very well, either. "This crisis brings into focus everything that is wrong with his Government: its obsession with statistics and targets, leading to dishonest attempts to massage the figures; its contempt for Parliament and the public, with evasive ministers having the truth dragged out of them, often by their own civil servants or colleagues; and its sanctimonious assumption of moral superiority over its critics."

The Director of Admissions at the University of Michigan's Law School, Sarah Zearfoss, has written about the way she and her staff are trying to balance the legally-mandated necessity to give places at the school to minorities with the need to keep standards high. "Admissions is an art and not a science," she says. "The bounds of diversity are endless. But the concept is real; it is not narrowly limited to race; and it has far-reaching effect in our admissions decisions. We are committed to matriculating an extraordinary group of students to the Law School every year, and we know that 'extraordinary' is not a term we can narrowly define." I do wish she'd lose those stupid semi-colons, but apart from that, this is obviously a thoroughly competent young woman making a fine art of the School's admissions policy.

An American magistrate has ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its governmental entity, the Palestinian Authority, to pay more than $116 million each for their roles in the murder of two Jewish settlers near the West Bank eight years ago. The case is a long way from being settled finally, but the ruling is a shot across the bow of the world's most notorious sponsor of terrorism.

The only thing I can say for sure about this very strange story is that it makes those kidnapped, travelling gnomes and their postcards look anaemic. The Guardian is now demanding registration for some parts of its site, so you may need to do that.

American investigators are taking a hard look at some of the accounts handled by the Riggs National Bank in Washington, including some held by citizens of Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman, to see whether they have been used for cash transactions involving terrorist groups or money-laundering activities.

In addition to the Middle Eastern accounts, a corporate account controlled by the president of the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago, is also being examined. Millions of dollars in money that regulators and the bank have identified as questionable have flowed through that account. It was opened under the name of a corporation called Otong, and money began moving through it as early as 1999, according to a regulatory report that Riggs filed with federal regulators.

It is a bit of a puzzle that this important and interesting British measure should be covered by an American newspaper, in this case, the New York Times (registration required) and not, as far as I know, in the homegrown variety. It does seem that this "antisocial behaviour order" is a useful addition to the powers of the authorities to curtail anti-social behaviour. According to the Times, it has been made possible by one of an array of measures enacted by Prime Minister Tony Blair's government since 1999 to confront what is widely seen as an erosion of civilized norms in that once polite country. Some of the other measures now available include the ability to fine or jail the parents of children who chronically skip school, impose on-the-spot fines for things like drunkenness and defacing public property and evict "neighbors from hell" from public housing. Recipients of the antisocial orders, perhaps the most extreme of the new measures, can be banned from entering certain neighborhoods or hanging out with a particular group of people - even from wearing certain clothes or visiting members of their own families.

Sorry - unable to post today. Back tomorrow.

I have two small complaints about this otherwise charming story in the New York Times (registration required) this morning. First, it's written as if the reporter learned of its outcome just before he left the office to go home, so did nothing more than tag on a couple of paragraphs at the end. That was a shame, I thought, because he obviously had the ability to do a much better job. Second, I think six foot, four inches is not a suitable height for a forest monk. Three feet, two inches would have been better.

You know, if the war in Iraq really had been all about oil, as some simple-minded nitwits keep urging us to believe, this wouldn't be happening.

The Los Angeles Times pays tribute this morning to a British writer without whose vision "culinary history would still be in the dark ages." Alan Davidson was a diplomat who got into the business more or less by accident, making some notes for his wife about the fish on sale in the markets in Tunisia. He was good at it, and enjoyed what he was doing. And on the strength of his subsequent public writing, Oxford asked him to write the Oxford Companion to Food which, at one time, outsold the Fannie Farmer Cookbook on Amazon. The Government of the Netherlands awarded him the Erasmus Prize for "single-handedly elevating the study of food history to respectability." This piece contains a recipe from the pamphlet of his work that was handed out at his funeral in London.

What makes this British scandal over eastern European immigrants to Britain so depressing is that those responsible had no political or criminal motive - it seems simply to have been inefficiency and stupidity that closed official eyes to a major abuse of the visa system. And as far as blame is concerned, it is an old and rather sad story. The civil servants involved blame politicians, the politicians blame the civil servants.

As this finely furious Telegraph editorial says, many people in Britain, who have to live next door to the consequences of illegal immigration, are confused and angry. On the other hand, the Telegraph seems not to be confused at all. After several spectacular claps of verbal thunder, it says the blame should rest on the heads of David Blunkett and Beverley Hughes.

An Israeli Minister, Natan Sharansky, has sent a furious letter to the BBC suggesting its coverage of the little bomber boy last week showed that it has a "gross double standard" where the Jewish state is concerned. What got his goat was Orla Guerin's coverage of the event, which focused, not on the moral depravity of those who would use a 16-year old as a living bomb, but on Israel's "cynical attempts" to gain some advantage by focusing a media spotlight on the event. The BBC won't comment, of course, but its anti-Israel bias is so obvious, so well known and has been so well documented that, in frustration, the Israeli government banned any official contact with the organisation for a time some months ago.

It is too bad that Baron Frederic Rolin died before he realized his ambition to prove that the little painting he found at a London dealer's shop in 1960 was a Vermeer. But experts now acknowledge, after testing the pigments used, that it is genuine. It is to be sold at Sotheby's in July, and will be the first by that artist to come on the market since the 1920s.

The Brits continue treating companies producing biogenetically engineered crops as if they were engaged in a game of wits with a coven of witches. The Government couldn't argue with the science of it, so they gave Bayer Cropscience a licence to produce a new strain of maize. But Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, afraid of the influence of the anti-GM crops crowd, attached such conditions to the licence that Bayer is now abandoning its plans.

Nonetheless, the country sees no contradiction in embracing genetically-engineered elm trees to replace the ones they lost to disease some years ago.

A book being published in England right around now says that chances are, God exists. British bookmakers are still giving 1,000 to 1 odds against a second coming, though.

Here's a word I hadn't heard before - terraforming. It means transforming the atmospheres of other planets so that they are capable of supporting human life. Think that's something new? Scientists have been beavering away at it quietly for years. Now, it has become such a vigorous concept that they're talking about a book to examine what's involved in such a way as to get humans used to such concepts. Heady stuff! In my next life, I think I'm going to be a terraformer.

A symposium held in Turkey last week to discuss Iraq's interim constitution has concluded that the document is pretty much a disaster, and that the Bush administration has committed staggering blunders in administering post-Saddam Iraq. The writer of this opinion piece in the Washington Times is Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration. He is a syndicated columnist at the Times, a founding partner of the law firm Fein and Fein, and practises international and constitutional law.

Historian Carolyn Gilman set out, in 1997, to try to find out what happened to the inventory of supplies that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took with them when they set out on their journey from St Louis to the Pacific Ocean. What she discovered was that the "authentic relics" of their journey in museums around the world, if put together, would sink a much bigger boat than they were on. She puts it more politely than that, but that's what she means.

The impact of British culture on the rest of the world has been dulled very considerably by the deaths in the last couple of days of Alistair Cooke, whose Letters from America provided a sophisticated and sympathetic window on American culture to millions of people around the world, and Peter Ustinov, whose extraordinary ability to do almost anything brilliantly made him one of the most admired men in the world. It was Kofi Annan, perhaps, who paid him the ultimate tribute by saying "he would not only make a first-rate secretary-general of the UN, he could double as permanent representative of all the member states."

The classic explanation of the word chutzpah is that it is the quality possessed by a man who, having killed his parents, claims mercy from the court because he's an orphan. Haaretz claims that the chutzpah record in the Middle East, which used to belong to Yasser Arafat for his condemnations of terror, has now been broken. The new record-holders are "the associates, spokesmen and lawyers of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Without a shred of knowledge, proof or a trace of evidence, they hurried to accuse the State Prosecutor's Office - and personally attack its head, Edna Arbel - of leaking the completion of the draft indictment against Sharon, claiming she wanted to pressure Attorney General Meni Mazuz into adopting the indict recommendation.

"That is chutzpah with three levels. First, Sharon doesn't have a competitor when it comes to the welcome sphere of leaking - for decades he has given plenty of journalists plenty of work. More than anything else, there was Sharon, as agriculture minister on his way to the defense ministry, who would attack Prime Minister Menachem Begin in cabinet meetings and, amazingly, before his hot breath had cooled off, he would be quoted, more or less in full, on the radio. Second, they're using the well-known tactic of a robber who complains about police brutality. And third, the most vocal of those saying he should not be charged unless conviction is absolutely guaranteed beforehand, are scattering their own baseless charges."

Ann Clwyd, MP is a special envoy to prime minister Tony Blair on human rights in Iraq. There has never been any doubt in her mind about the rights and wrongs of invasion. "The regime," she writes in the Guardian this morning, "cost the lives of at least 2 million people through its wars and internal oppression, and 4 million Iraqis were forced to become refugees. According to estimates from USAID, more than 270 mass graves have been found in Iraq. These alone should vindicate the war. That the world should have acted sooner, I have no doubt."

Blistering Barnacles! The Haddocks really do exist! Long after he created Tintin's boozy travelling companion, Captain Haddock, the Belgian cartoonist George Remi, who called himself Herge, discovered that in Leigh-on-Sea, of all places, among the beetle-browed winkle-pickers and shrieking fishwives, there existed a long line of noble, seafaring Haddocks (a veritable shoal of them, as this article puts it), and one of them an Admiral. What was it Oscar Wilde said about life imitating art?

I wonder if it is Michael Foot's sense of humour that has led him to donate his primo collection of works by William Hazlitt to the Wordsworth museum in Cumbria. He explained the gift by saying, a little unhelpfully, "it is the very best place to put it." But as the one of the most knowledgeable Hazlitt scholars in the world, he would know better than anyone that Wordsworth, himself an aristocrat, loathed Hazlitt with a passion. Since Foot is himself something of an outsider in the ranks of Britain's cultural elite, he might feel that foisting Hazlitt off on Wordsworth for eternity is as much his own revenge on the aristocracy as Hazlitt's.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's decision to fire one official and reassign another in the wake of a scathing report on security failures in Iraq is impressive and somehow comforting in an organisation that has a history of slithering around trouble, in preference to confronting it. In addition, two other officials have been charged with misconduct and each head of a UN fund or programme that had staff in Iraq from the date of the UN's return to the country has been sent a rocket, critical of their management and lack of respect for staff ceilings and the security clearances applicable in Iraq.

Perhaps a part of the reason for this tough action is the knowledge that another critical report, this one on the conduct of the UN Oil for Food programme, is due in a few months. To give the impression now of unwillingness to be appropriately severe would invite a magnified reaction to any action taken in the wake of that report.

That methane they found on Mars could only have come from two sources - active volcanoes or microbes, and we'd apparently have noticed the heat signatures of active volcanoes by now if they existed. So some form of life looks the most likely culprit. But with our unerring human instinct for destruction, we are already looking at doing things to Mars that could wipe that life out forever. On the other hand, they would improve the view.

Well, just when we thought Saddam's family had appointed Klaus Barbie's old lawyer to defend him, up pops a Jordanian lawyer who says Saddam's family had appointed him, not M Verges. Where's Johnnie Cochrane when he's needed?

AlJazeera's weekend feature on the failures of the media in Iraq is particularly timely in the light of the American closure after it was published of Al Hawza, a radical Shiite weekly newspaper. Iraq's new media offer more in the way of quantity than quality, AlJazeera says, "And the political bias and amateurism that is so manifest in its pages and across its airwaves tends to leave the public cold."

Mark Steyn marks the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a look back at what he calls the global naysayers' Top 10 Quagmires Of The Week.

"If it seems cruel to dredge them up, I do so because, the current ballyhoo from Democrats would make you think the administration policy in this area has been a disaster. It hasn't. Indeed, for 2 1/2 years now, the naysayers to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice approach to the war on terror have been close to 100 percent wrong on everything."

The reason for the postponement of the Arab League summit in Tunis, scheduled to begin today, is that Arab nations are roiled by inability to agree on a common response to the Bush adminisation's policy of promoting democracy in the region. Some of them would like to tell the US to mind its own business, but some can sense the pent-up anger and impatience of their people, and realise their survival depends on appeasing them. "The most underreported and encouraging story in the Middle East in the past year," says Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, "has been the emergence in public of homegrown civic movements demanding political change. Two years ago they were nonexistent or in jail. Now they are out in the open even in the most politically backward places in the region: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. They are made up not only of intellectuals but of businessmen, women, students, teachers and journalists. Unlike their governments - and the old school of U.S. and European Arabists - they don't believe that change should be gradual, and they reject the dictators' claim that democracy would only empower Islamic extremists. It is the delay of change, they say, that is increasingly dangerous."

AlJazeera acknowledges differences over the democratisation push, but says the killing of Sheik Yassin was also a factor. In its story, Tunis was the villain of the piece, and Egypt's Prime Minister, Hosni Mubarek, speaks for those who feel the meeting must be rescheduled as quickly as possible.

For both sides, the 25-year old Egypt-Israel treaty is a godsend. Israel's security has been dramatically enhanced by the confidence that it will not have to fight another war with Egypt, the Arab world's largest, most powerful country. For Cairo, peace with Israel has meant greatly increased economic and military aid from the West, and a favored if occasionally frayed relationship with Washington. Egypt also doesn't have to worry about another war with Israel. With all their current troubles, both Israel and Egypt would be far worse off today if their treaty were to collapse. This is interesting analysis from the Los Angeles Times, written by Steven Spiegel, professor of political science and director of the Middle East Regional Security Program at the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA.

The experience of the Independent is fuelling a move among broadsheet newspapers in London to switch to tabloid format. Terry Grote, the managing director of the Independent, says its circulation figures went nuts when the format was changed. "We turned around 10 years of declines in 10 weeks," Mr. Grote said. "I'm not exaggerating to say that we have publishing groups from around the world visiting us three of four times a week, to study what we've done."

This New York Times story suggests that the smaller format is handier for commuters, but there is also something else at work. Stories in tabloid newspapers tend to run shorter, and therefore dumber than stories in broadsheets. So this trend is disturbing in a country like Britain, where the connection between newspapers and the truth is already more tenuous than elsewhere. One of these days someone is going to do some research on the connection between the quality of a reader's opinions and the quality of the newspapers he reads. My money's on a direct connection.

Looks as if the idea of electric cars is dying a death. Hopes are being pinned on newer technologies, like hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles or, better still, fuel cell generation of hydrogen.

What effect will the death of Shiek Ahmed Yassin have on the terrorist organisation Hamas? Aljazeera seems to think...perhaps hope is a better word...that it is unlikely his removal will considerably weaken the organisation. They quote Salih Naami, a Gaza journalist who they say has written extensively on Hamas (but about whom I can find no mention on the Internet), as saying he believes that Hamas's strength lies in its ability to combine the "purity of Islam with national patriotism...Hamas represents both Islamic dignity and honour on the one hand, and patriotic nationalism on the other. It also embodies the Islamic ideals of charity, honesty and self-abnegation. And it is almost completely corruption free. This is why people join it and love it."

On the other hand, Israeli intelligence says Yassin's death will have made Hamas now so weak that it has lost its power to affect Prime Minister Sharon's plans to withdraw from Gaza. The Shin Bet says that the army's unrelenting pursuit of high- and mid-level Hamas commanders has greatly weakened the organisation's ability to launch attacks. What Hamas lacks now are the expert bomb makers and planners who have been picked off in West Bank cities in the past months. The Shin Bet says that the higher proportion of attacks run jointly by Hamas and Islamic Jihad or the Al-Aqsa martyrs brigades is evidence of each organisation's diminishing capacity to launch operations on its own.

The Israeli Defence Force calls the wave of warnings about unprecedented retaliatory attacks by Hamas as "unnecessary panic." They say an analysis of the Ashdod attack showed that despite the symbolism of the target, the bombers were far from conducting a "strategic attack."

I think the Israelis are right. Yassin was a leader who stood head and shoulders above the men he commanded in terms of the quality of his leadership. Without him, Hamas is like the French without Napoleon. His successor, Abdel-Aziz-al-Rantissi, is not seen as a strong or a unifying figure, no matter how tough his talk. If he is not a wise man, then the strength of his hatred for his enemy is a weakness, not a strength.

From such little acorns as this, sometimes stories the size of oaks grow.

Eight of their soldiers have been found executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some of those supposedly trapped in their cordon appear to have escaped through some tunnels. Now the Pakistani Army seems to have made a deal to let the terrorists they were surrounding in South Waziristan go free, in exchange for a dozen hostages. The operation started to look like a disaster almost the moment it started, and will be a major embarrassment for Pakistan's Prime Minister, Pervez Musharraf. He had a hand in turning it sour when he himself announced that a senior al Qaeda official had been among those trapped by the operation, then did little to discourage speculation - false, as it turned out - that it might have been Osama bin Laden's deputy.

All that can really be derived from this story, which claims that nearly half the recruits in the British Army read and write at the level of 11 year-old children, is that it demonstrates graphically how poorly the British education system is doing its job.

A bizarre story is making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic this morning, concerning some illegal construction in a park some 15 miles south of Miami. The culprits are said to be members of a worldwide religious sect known as the Suma Ching Hai International Association, which teaches a form of meditation, inspired by Christianity and Buddhism, called quan yin. Its leader's minions, as far as anyone can tell, are responsible for building an odd little complex in some mangroves in the park, and an articificial island nearby.

To the great frustration of the Park Service, there is no finding Ms Celestia De Lamour (I'll bet her mama didn't call her that), who is none other than the Supreme Master of the Suma Ching Hai. Based in Taiwan, the movement boasts two million members in 50 countries, including Britain, and has several websites, most notably www.godsdirectcontact.org. It also advocates vegetarianism and has a string of vegetarian restaurants. According to records, she owned two luxury homes in the Miami area. The Independent says they're both now empty.

The Miami Herald provides a picture and some more detail about the elusive...and very suitably striking...Ms Lamour.

A little light is being shed on Yasser Arafat's involvement in terror by a confession by a member of Fatah's armed wing in Nablus. Raaf Mansur headed a wing of Fatah's military branch, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. He got a monthly cheque from Arafat that he used to purchase weapons, and to carry out shooting attacks on the West Bank. Mansur explained that the money was delivered via Abed al-Fatah Hameil, who serves as a financial adviser to the PA chairman. Mansur and Hameil met several times in Nablus. Mansur presented a list of his cell members and, after reviewing the names, Arafat's assistant delivered the funds. Hameil would confirm the militants belonged to Fatah and that they were dealing with "military activity." In a few instances, Hameil helped find work for Mansur's men in the PA apparatus.

A senior Israeli intelligence official confirms that although Arafat does not give specific orders, he "Yes, yes, yes, for sure" - directed and financed terrorism. He said: "Arafat does not tell them what to do every morning but the terrorists understand his direction. They understand the message behind the words, the goal, and they act accordingly. His compound on the West Bank, intelligence sources say, is a nerve centre for martyr attacks, and also a refuge for many of the Palestinian terror apparatus's most wanted fuguitives.