Ridiculously over-analysing the Hindu myth of Ganesha, the god with the head of an elephant, has won a professor of religion at Emory University death threats from Hindu militants. That's going a bit far, but I do have some sympathy with the militants' point of view.

I'd almost forgotten about Jennings. American readers will probably know nothing about him. He was an English schoolboy created by author Anthony Buckeridge. I think he came to life as a radio serial, but quickly became the star of a series of books, starting with Jennings Goes to School in 1950. There were a couple of dozen of them, all relying on a kind of irrefutable schoolboy logic. That's what the Telegraph uses in this piece to make some points about British education in the 21st Century.

"The good news," announced Jennings, "is that Old Wilko is off sick with the 'flu. The bad news," and he lowered his voice to a whisper, "is that the supply teacher is supposed to be jolly strange."

Even Ingmar Bergman admits that watching his films makes him miserable. Swedish television has just aired an hour-long interview with the reclusive Swedish film director.

You can never quite fathom what story Cy Twombly's trying to tell in his paintings, "but you are involved by it all the same, and moved by the scope of Twombly's emotional waterfalls of colour. His art is tearful, sensual, pessimistic, and on the edge of bad taste. Walking into Twombly's exhibition of 50 years-worth of works on paper - drawings, paintings, collages - the images and words and washes and blotches and smears appear to be fragments of some heroic conception."

The Washington Times seems to speak for the majority when it gives credit to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for a cool and effective performance in front of the September 11 Commission yesterday. Hopefully, it is also speaking for the majority when it regrets the partisan tone of some of the questioning, a tone which begs the question - can this group deliver a balanced report?

Nassim Taleb wrote this New York Times analysis of the Commission's built-in shortcomings before Ms Rice gave evidence, but it is an intelligent and perceptive piece, well worth reading. Of all the flaws that beset the Commission, he says, the most significant "mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible."

American Spectator's editor-in-chief R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr suggests Senator Ted Kennedy might be becoming the Jane Fonda of the Iraq war. "Sen. Kennedy's Vietnam parallel does not exist," he writes. "The Iraqi resistance is supported at best only by the radical mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Islamofascism. They cannot summon the communist protagonists of the Cold War from Moscow and Beijing. Moreover, they have no negotiators to go off to Paris and nothing to negotiate." In the process of making his point, Mr Tyrrell does a little trampling on the UN and John Kerry as well.

A grand total of six protesters gathered to heckle British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he arrived in Bermuda last night. Traditionally, Bermudians have felt such demonstrations were not on, given the Island's role as one of the longest-standing and, perhaps, the most successful host nation in the world of tourism. Once, no Bermudian would have knowingly made a visitor feel uncomfortable, and certainly wouldn't have dreamt of describing a visiting head of state, in effect to his face, as "a dirty rotten scoundrel". Times change, though. People, not just here, but around the world, don't seem to put much stock in having good manners any more, or perhaps they simply no longer understand the concept. The bottom line for Bermuda, though, is that we are no longer able to be as successful as once we were in tourism, no matter how hard we try. And as we keep re-discovering, it is a self-inflicted wound.

What is with this man Scalia? He doesn't behave like a Supreme Court justice at all, he behaves as if he were a little tyrant above, or beyond the law.

A Parliamentary Commission in Britain looking into the likely ramifications of changing the gaming laws in that country, has warned that they will include a greatly-increased incidence of addiction to gambling. John Lomax, a spokesman for the Salvation Army, is quoted in the Telegraph has having said: "We are not surprised that the committee has accepted that problem gambling will rise. We are disappointed that this is seen as an acceptable price to pay for more gambling opportunities, given the lack of public demand for them."

The British are playing these changes with a very straight bat. In Bermuda, though, we apparently do things in a completely different way. Without any official acknowledgement that legislation is on the way to break the ban on gambling, the mayor of Hamilton, our capital, goes off to a gambling town in the US to see how casinos are run there, a company whose business is running lotteries in the Caribbean claims it has a licence to run one here, and now one of Bermuda's lawyers says a local company has been set up to run a casino ship off Bermuda this summer. The company has entered into an agreement with an overseas charter company to bring in a luxury boat and hoped to begin operations by June at the latest. All this, so far, without a peep from the government. Again, I ask, what on earth is going on here?

UPDATE: Bermuda's weekend newspaper, The Mid-Ocean News, dug a little deeper than I did into this story and found that LILHCo itself seems to have caused the confusion by defining the word lottery rather more loosely than I did. LILHCo was owned by, among other people, the American lawyer Johnnie Cochran, so perhaps the company's ability to be creative isn't surprising.

A foreign correspondent for the Al-Jazeera television station has been indicted at a military court in the West Bank for serving as a liaison between Fatah in Lebanon and other Palestinian terrorist organisations. He's also accused of supplying militants with money and weapons he received from Fatah members. Details are still very sketchy, but will no doubt emerge as this story is picked up elsewhere during the day.

Jerry Lewis. The French love him. So do I. And I'm prepared to go out on a limb here. He does Camus better than Camus ever did.

The author David Mamet has a serious and interesting go in the Guardian this morning about the difficulties faced by men trying to write about women. "True depiction of women," he says, "...takes into account two things: the ways in which they are similar to men, and the ways in which they differ. For to say that all people are equal is not to say they are the same; and to confound the political with the practical gave us the enormity of feminist literary theory."

Meanwhile, oblivious to Mamet's headscratching, women in London are flocking to the hall at Olympia, in Kensington, to attend the first of three dynamic three-hour workshops, entitled The Grow Experience. Billed as "a journey of transformation", the sessions promise to empower women in all areas of their lives and reclaim their "inner goddesses".

There's got to be some profound lesson here, but I can't think for the moment what it might be.

I know that metaphors and similes are a great help to people trying to explain complex subjects, but I have to say that likening the mysterious object at the centre of our universe to a rubber ducky, a mysterious object containing the equivalent of four million suns in a space the size of that described by the earth's orbit, is going far too far. What's wrong with dragons? They've had a thoroughly distinguished career in this field for thousands of years, and to usurp their role in this way with a &*%# rubber ducky must be thoroughly insulting to the natural order of things, and a danger to the health and safety of those who get in the way of the retribution the gods will undoubtedly demand.

A French underwater salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane in which Antoine de Saint-Exupery died during World War II. Saint-Exupery was an aristocratic adventurer whose life and books turned him into one of France's most admired sons. I'm just a little surprised, though, that newspapers like the New York Times identify him principally as the author of The Little Prince, which, no matter how charming it is, and no matter how many copies it may have sold, is not his best or most significant work. He wrote two books, Terre des Hommes, which was translated as Wind, Sand and Stars, and Vol de Nuit, or Night Flight, both of which are acknowledged to be masterpieces of the Modern Movement in literature. If you were to define prose as something expressed excellently, and poetry as something expressed perfectly, then these two books must be defined, and admired, as prose poems. They concern the mystique of early aviators, and Vol de Nuit was honoured by critic Cyril Connolly by being given a place on of his list of 100 best books of the period. Oddly, Connolly acknowledges that Terre des Hommes was the better book, despite choosing to list Vol de Nuit.

Anyone old enough to have fallen under her spell in Red Shoes will be sad to learn of the death of Ludmila Tcherina, the ballerina who acted the part of the wayward prima ballerina Irina Boronskaja. Quite apart from her talents as a dancer and an actress, she was striking to the point of leaving very young boys in a state of confused speechlessness.

What a state people are getting themselves into over what's going on in Iraq! It's almost as if they think that American troops having to actually fight is too high a price to pay. Standing back from the smoke and the gunfire for a moment, it seems obvious that it is a grave mistake, under ordinary circumstances, for an insurgent fighter to emerge from the shadows and commit to pitched battles against regular forces until the insurgent is strong enough to stand a chance of winning. That plainly isn't the case, so either these Iraqi insurgents are not competent, and will be dealt with in short order, or they are trying to achieve some political aim. It's a little early to be trying to affect the American election, as some have suggested. Perhaps what they're trying to do is capitalise on the Madrid bombings and simply scare people away from backing the war on terror. They seem to have a very willing audience.

Yasser Arafat has proposed that representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad should take part in a new leadership organisation that would function alongside the Palestinian Authority. The US is apparently concerned because most of the world accepts the view that Hamas is a terrorist organisation. I'm sure Mr Arafat has difficulty keeping that fact in his head, because in truth, the world should face up to the truth and accept that all three are terrorist organisations, with identical aims. My impression is that Arafat is beginning to lose it, and is within an ace of committing some blunder that will once and for all confirm his lack of relevance to the Middle East process.

I don't believe I have ever come across an article that so perfectly expresses the pathetic-ness of liberal thought about the causes of terrorism. People flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre because we failed to listen to their grievances, this former adviser in the British Foreign Office says, and because of that we shouldn't be trying to hurt them. To prove it, he throws in every fashionable kvetch he can think of without regard to whether it is on point or not. To the extent that he has anything practical to say on the subject, it seems to be advice that we should do nothing, because eventually, it will all go away.

The Guardian billed this story as an accusation that Othello is a racist figure. It turned out not to be quite that shallow. It's written by a black playwright who has reservations about the process of acting out a stereotypically black part on stage - reservations, really, as he says at the end, about being a dark-skinned black male in a white man's world. Playwriting wouldn't work without being able to use the shorthand of stereotypes. It's a shame the writer can't get beyond his fear that the stereotype might be harmful to blacks, to understanding that it is simply a device in the service of a larger insight into human behaviour.

Tide's nibbling right at Jean Bertrand Artistide's toes this morning. Don't expect it will be long before those standing with him take a step back.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opens hearings today on the scandal swirling around the UN's Iraqi Oil for Food programme. This WSJ editorial (registration may be required) suggests that without US pressure, the worms will never get out of the can.

Over on the West Coast, the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, seems to be trying to do a little damage control in advance of these hearings. "I have been deeply surprised in the last few days," he writes in the Los Angeles Times, "to see a new campaign of unfounded accusations against my country flourish again in the media. These allegations, being spread by a handful of influential, conservative TV and newspaper journalists in the U.S., have arisen in connection with a recent inquiry into the 'oil for food' program that was run by the United Nations in Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein's government.

"These allegations suggest that the government of France condoned kickbacks - bribes, in effect - from French companies to the Iraqi regime in return for further contracts. They say Paris turned a blind eye to these activities.

"Let me be absolutely clear. These aspersions are completely false and can only have been an effort to discredit France, a longtime friend and ally of the US"

Incredible.

Blogger Roger Simon sings the praises of ballsy journalist Orianna Fallaci, who has just published her latest book, The Strength of Reason, in Italy. It has not yet been translated from its original Italian yet, but you can be sure that won't take long. In it, she calls Europe a province of Islam. Her last book, Rage and Pride, did well in the US when it was published in 2001.

Brendan Conway, managing editor of the influential magazine Public Interest, discusses historian John Lewis Gaddis's new book, Surprise, Security and the American Experience in The Washington Times this morning. George Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive antiterrorism, Mr Gaddis argues, "is intellectually sophisticated, serious of purpose and in keeping with established American foreign policy traditions."

Former US President Bill Clinton has written an article for the Washington Post this morning in which he regrets, again, that the world did not act more quickly to deal with genocide in Rwanda ten years ago. With a remarkable facility for grasping the obvious, he says he hopes the international community will increase the speed with which international intervention can be undertaken, and muster the political will to respond to the threat of genocide in the future. There is absolutely no sign the international community has done any such thing. The United Nations, the body which should have responded to the genocide, but failed to do so properly, suffers from the same malaise that has gripped it since its founding - it is unable to act on its own initiative, no matter how grave the crisis.

In fact about the only thing you can say in the UN's favour in connection with Rwanda is that Kofi Annan, who was responsible for the peace-keeping forces that should have been mobilised in strength and were not, had the decency to apologise for his inability to act recently. When he became Secretary-General, he made a great noise about reform of all kinds, but the achievements of the organisation since then have been largely technical. The so-called "Brahimi Report" on peacekeeping operations - named after panel chairman Lakhdar Brahimi - drew attention to the fact that some peacekeeping operations had been undertaken by the international community largely for the purpose of appearing to take action, even when the will to do the right thing was lacking, or there was no consensus as to what the right course of action should be. The Report called for an end to half-measures, where wishful thinking was substituted for a clear and well-supported plan of action, but has resulted in no reform worth talking about.

Meantime, Rwandan leader Paul Kagame wonders whether it was racism that stayed the UN's hand. "How could the lives of one million Rwandese be considered so insignificant?" he asked. "Do the powerful nations have a hidden agenda? I would hate to believe that this agenda is dictated by racist considerations or the colour of the skin. I hope it is not true," he said. It is, I think, not true, but it is the kind of question that the UN's inability to act properly begs. It is worth recalling that Mr Kagame himself was accused last month by a French judge of having given the go-ahead for the attack that killed the then-president of Rwanda and precipitated the genocidal violence that followed.

This year, the Los Angeles Times has bagged the second-largest number of Pulitzer Prizes ever awarded for excellence in journalism, a feat for which they deserve congratulations. I just wish that in their coverage, the Times (and other newspapers) would link to the articles that were singled out.

A Bill Bratton/Rudy Giuliani-type assault on nuisance crime in Britain? This is going to be interesting in a country whose population often seems to suffer from an almost suicidal inability to blame anyone who is not rich, not privileged, not a policeman and not a member of the government for any act, no matter how anti-social. Except immigrants, of course.

Robert Hughes says Lucian Freud is a genuine British national treasure - the country's greatest living artist. Other depictive artists, he growls in the Guardian this morning, "should look at Freud and either despair or get inspired." He took the opportunity to see some who steer another course right off the premises: "If you wanted perfect demonstrations, on the one hand, of how good contemporary art can get, and on the other of how awful and dumb-arsed it can be, there could be no better place than London right now. At the latter extreme you have the show at the Saatchi Gallery called Fresh Blood, a quaintly vampirical title that signals the presence of a mass of new stuff, almost all of which (except for some pictures by that sturdy and perennially interesting talent Paula Rego) vividly testifies to the patron-dealer-promoter's lack of any kind of connoisseurship at all.

"At the former, there is a smallish gallery in the Wallace Collection, which has been temporarily cleared to make way for recent work, about two years' worth of it, by Britain's Lucian Freud. At 81, Freud is so much younger than any of the Britart dreck installed on the other side of the Thames: younger than Damien Hirst's slowly rotting shark in its tank of murky formalin; weirder than David Falconer's Vermin Death Star, which is composed of thousands of cast-metal rats; and about a hundred times sexier than Tracey Emin's stale icon of sluttish housekeeping, her much-reproduced bed. His work is supremely tough, ruthless even. But it has none of the facile emotional posturing that appeals to the kind of institutional adman's taste, the bratty cynicism and quick-fix sensationalism that pervades the Saatchi collection."

Canadians have been condemning a wave of anti-semitic attacks in that country as having no place in a tolerant society. The latest attack was the fire-bombing of a Jewish elementary school library in Montreal. Mohammed Ashraf, the secretary-general of the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America, urged the Canadian Prime Minister to use Canada's position as a neutral body to tell the insurgents on both sides of religious battles to "stop fighting" and to tell them "come to your senses, the world should be safe for everybody."

Jean Bertrand Aristide left Haiti bankrupt, according to his successor, Gerard Latortue, and the American government is weighing whether to prosecute him on corruption and/or drug trafficking charges. Such a prosecution would be another blow to the members of Caricom, whose badly thought-out refusal to recognise the Latortue government has been an embarrassment to the American government, which had counted on their cooperation for police training and security. During his visit to Haiti yesterday, American Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed that Caricom's call for an international enquiry into the circumstances of M Aristide's departure would not be heeded. "I don't think any purpose would be served by such an inquiry," he said. "We were on the verge of a blood bath and President Aristide found himself in great danger."

Despite the Iraq war, tourism in the Middle East as a whole grew faster than anywhere else in 2003, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. And one of the countries benefitting most is Syria. "To the United States," says the New York Times this morning, "Syria may be a threatening place, where terrorists are welcome and democracy is not. But to Arabs living under more authoritarian governments, it is a nation of relative tolerance, beaches and mountains, good food and cheap shopping. It has become a vacation spot for more and more visitors from elsewhere in the Middle East."

The San Francisco Chronicle's Scott Ostler takes a look at the state of preparations in Greece for this summer's Olympic Games, and feels they may leave something to be desired. "This is the silliest an Olympic host has looked in preparation for the Games since 1936, when word leaked that Adolf Hitler secretly was training to compete in the 400-meter goose-step.

"Greece is frantically preparing to host this summer's (yes, Greece, this summer's) Olympics. To say the Greeks are behind schedule is like saying the Amish space program lags behind Russia's."

"I wouldn't call Mr. Kerry a liar," Mark Steyn says this morning. "But I did get the vague feeling in the following exchange that, if it had gone on a minute or two longer, the candidate's nose would have cracked my TV screen, extended across the coffee table and pinned me to the wall." He thinks the candidate is far too willing to profess liking anything he thinks the public likes.

"All over the planet" Steyn muses, "men in late middle age are pretending to like stuff just 'cause it's what the likes of Maureen Dowd tell them people want to hear. John Kerry pretends to like gangsta rap. Russia pretends it supports the Kyoto Accord. The European Union pretends Yasser Arafat is committed to peace with Israel. The Security Council pretends its resolutions mean something. Kofi Annan pretends the Oil-for-Fraud program is a humanitarian aid effort for the Iraqi people. The International Atomic Energy Authority pretends the mullahs in Tehran are good faith negotiators on the matter of Iranian nukes."

A GTECH press release, announcing its acquisition of the privately-held Leeward Islands Lottery Holding Company, says LILHCo operates a lottery in Bermuda, among other places. It does not. Gambling on that scale has always been opposed fiercely by Bermuda's churches, which have defeated more than one attempt to start a lottery. So what is this all about? A simple mistake? I'd be surprised if GTECH was that careless.

Or has someone in Bermuda entered into some kind of an agreement with LILHCo in anticipation of getting gambling up and running? Last month, completely out of the blue, the mayor of Hamilton went off with a couple of his pals to a gambling town in the US to see how they do it, saying he thought it wouldn't be long before gambling was given official sanction in Bermuda, and he wanted to be prepared. What did he know that the rest of us don't? Is Bermuda still being run as a democracy, or by a bunch of entrepreneurs in some back room somewhere?

Ariel Sharon has begun to distance himself from the notion that Israel will not harm Yasser Arafat and other terrorist leaders. In interviews published or picked up in news outlets around the world, he also said his plan for unilateral withdrawal will wither Palestinian dreams for their own state for many years. He is expected to go to Washington this month to drum up support for his disengagement proposal.

"I don't want you for a day (though I'd sell my toes to see you now my dear, only for a minute, to kiss you once and make a funny face at you): a day is the length of a gnat's life: I want you for the lifetime of a big, mad animal, like an elephant." That's Dylan Thomas writing to Caitlin, the woman who became his wife after they were introduced by Augustus John in a pub. That letter, and others, are on the block at Sotheby's in New York next week.

The Jerusalem Post's Janine Zacharia has been in Tunisia, trying to get a feel for why the Arab League summit, meant to have been held there last week, was cancelled. On the surface, the Tunisians who cancelled the summit because Arab leaders were not being "serious enough about pursuing democratic reform", were being startlingly hypocritical, since Tunisia is virtually a single-party state in which all forms of dissent are supressed. Yet by neighbourhood standards, she says, Tunisia may be the most democratic regime around.

"A recent 'Africa Competitiveness Report' published by the World Economic Forum," says Zacharia, "ranked Tunisia first out of 24 countries in its overall competitive index which took an average of six indices including openness, government, finance, labor, infrastructure and institutions. And among its fellow Arab nations, Tunisia stands at the top in a wide array of areas including education standards, economic growth, and perhaps most strikingly, women's rights.

"In Tunisia women have had the right to vote for half-a-century, can undergo a no-questions-asked state-funded abortion, demand a divorce simply because they feel incompatible with their husbands, and are among the most prominent members of the business and political communities. Polygamy, commonplace elsewhere in the Muslim world, has been prohibited for decades."

One hopes the election just held in the Euphrates marchlands town of Tar is indicative of a trend. There, and in 17 other towns in the area, secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists. Like many professionals, the teacher quoted in the story said he was "worried by the way some religious parties had been throwing their weight around, trying to close shops which sell alcohol and pressing every woman to wear a veil. He saw the vote as a chance to stop this, he said."

Serving on a jury is a complex thing, especially because it requires people to learn how to keep instinct from running ahead of evidence. One expert says that jury pools may have been dumbed down by being drawn, not from among voter rolls or lists of property owners, but simply from residents with driver's licences. "These juries, if they don't get it...really, totally understand...they basically decide on what's fair, as opposed to what's just." Her concerns feature in the Christian Science Monitor this morning.

Hurricane forecaster William Gray of Colorado State University says the 2004 hurricane season will be another active one, with 14 named storms, three of which will become intense hurricanes. Having suffered a full-frontal assault from Fabian last year, Bermudians are kind of hoping they'll all give us a break this year. Doesn't work like that, though, does it?

Chatto & Windus has just published a new biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the British-born author of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden Kate Kellaway's review recalls that the author had had a house in Bermuda at one stage, whose garden contained more than 700 species of rose (sounds a bit of an apocryphal story to me). She visited the Island first with her sister, and liked the place so much she rented an old Bermuda house with a big garden that became a home away from her Long Island home for the rest of her life. She died here, I believe, in the early 1920s. Bermuda's climate is kind to roses, which respond by blooming here beautifully almost all year round. Many old roses survived here, and have been re-exported to rose gardens like the Cranford Rose Garden in Brooklyn in New York.

Disabled rights groups in Britain are getting all bent out of shape over a proposed photographic exhibition that features pictures of characters from freak shows. "It is totally unacceptable for disabled people to be viewed as figures of mockery and ridicule in this way," thundered a spokesman for the charity Scope. "If there was ever any value in freak shows it was as an example of how not to treat disabled people." Someone explain to me the difference between this exhibition and the one Britain plans on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.

No one seems to be happy about Prince Charles's Poundbury, the model town he's building in Dorset. He's cut the trees down, they say, it's an upper-class ghetto, they say, there's no racial or social diversity, they say, the gardens are too small, there's no privacy, it's horrible, it's an eyesore and there's no public transport. But our friend the Prince bought the land for 40,000 quid an acre, and he's now getting more than 12 times that for it. Foxy little devil... maybe all that stuff about nanotechnology was just to lull people into a false sense of security.

They do get themselves into a state over race in Britain, don't they? This story says their race relations supremo, Trevor Phillips, suggests everyone should try to like Shakespeare and Dickens more. Then it says he thought people should be allowed to be a bit different, and quoted one of his predecessors as saying the idea of allowing people to be different was 'a load of nonsense'. Muslims are jumping up and down about it, politicians are jumping up and down about it, and none of them seems to know quite what on earth 'it' is.

Hard to believe a grown-up human being could look into the blogging phenomenon and see there little more than housewives' diaries and students' crushes. Still, Simon Garfield's usual beat is interviewing Beyonce Knowles and thinking up ten good reasons not to get a tattoo, so maybe the questioner you ask determines something or other.