The Turks and Caicos Islands are looking for a replacement for their former Chief Justice, Richard Ground, who is now Chief Justice of Bermuda. Mr Ground, the last Chief Justice to be employed by the British, as opposed to the Turks, government, admits to a slight envy of his successor, whose salary and allowances, as a local, will be tax-free. "I found it a wonderful and interesting job and I enjoyed living on the Turks and Caicos very much indeed," he told the Telegraph. "There is a bit of everything: Provo is booming and Grand Turk, where the Supreme Court is, has its own pace of life." Candidates for the Turks and Caicos job, by the way, should have been practising barristers or solicitors for 10 years. They should possess "absolute personal integrity . . . and be independent of all outside influences".

President Bush on Friday accused Fidel Castro of exploiting Cuba's children by encouraging a sex-tourism industry designed to draw cash to the impoverished nation, comments certain to resonate with Cuban-American voters in the swing state of Florida. Cuba has become a popular destination with many Bermudians of late, and it has been suggested that many of them go because they are able to have easy and inexpensive access to any brand of sex that exists.

This is a perceptive Jerusalem Post op ed piece on the International Court of Justice's decision to declare the fence in Israel illegal. It was written by Yehudah Mirsky, who served in the US State Department's human rights bureau during the Clinton administration. He now lives in Jerusalem and is a fellow in religion at Harvard. "Israel and its citizens were not the only losers at The Hague's International Court of Justice," he writes. "Last week's decision has also dealt a staggering blow to the complicated, quixotic, and ultimately noble enterprise that goes by the name of 'human rights'. It is, of course, tempting to see the court's near-unanimous opinion as nothing more than reflexive Israel-bashing, and the judges made it easy to do so. How else to explain, for instance, the Orwellian idea that the UN Charter's right of self-defense is not available to Israel against terror?"

Buju Banton, the Jamaican dancehall singer whose song Boom Boom Bye Bye threatens gay men with "a gunshot in the head" is wanted by police in Jamaica in connection with a homophobic attack on a group of gay men. Banton is said to have been one of a group of about a dozen armed men who forced their way into a house in Kingston on the morning of June 24 and beat up the occupants while shouting homophobic insults, according to the victims. At least two people were taken to the hospital. He was almost stopped from performing in Bermuda some years ago, but was eventually allowed in, I believe, when he said his songs did not mean what people thought they meant. If this alleged attack turns out to be a reality, he should be put on the stop list of any civilised country in the world.

Art critic Robert Hughes calls Portuguese artist Paula Rego the "best painter of women's experience alive today." According to her biographer, art critic John McEwen, her paintings go for up to half a million pounds. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, which is holding an exhibition of her work in the autumn, describes her as a major figure, who has "taken her own childhood experiences, memories, fantasies and fears, and given them universal significance." Germaine Greer, whose 1995 portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, says her work is both feminist and subversive. "It is not often given to women," she wrote "to recognise themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly, with such depth and colour."

A new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, apparently shows that children who took piano or voice lessons for an entire school year had an additional gain of almost three points more on IQ tests than the average increase a child not taking music lessons would experience. "Music lessons, taught individually or in small groups, may provide additional boosts in IQ because they are like school but still enjoyable," said Glenn Schellenberg, the author of the study and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto at the Mississauga campus. I suppose you might put it like that - but you could also say that lessons taught at school cause a drop in IQ because they are not enjoyable.

The Saudis have been accused of turning a blind eye to systematic abuses against foreign workers in the country. The charges are made by Human Rights Watch in a report published yesterday. The report documents four cases of women who were victims of forced confinement and sexual abuse, including rape. In none of the four cases did the perpetrators face criminal investigation or prosecution. The report (the full text is here) also has information about women whom Human Rights Watch found in a prison in Riyadh who were serving sentences for "illegal pregnancies". The executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division says, "The abuses we found against foreign workers demonstrate appalling flaws in the kingdom's criminal justice system as a whole. If the Saudi government is serious about reform, this would be a good place to start."

Out at the very edge of the solar system, the space craft Voyager I normally doesn't have a lot to report when it phones home. That's about to change, maybe in a big way, as blast waves from the solar storms of nine months ago near its location.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has let Ruud Lubbers off with a warning, after receiving an internal report on the circumstances in which the High Commissioner for Refugees had been accused of sexually harrassing one of his staff. Lubbers described grabbing the woman's behind as "a friendly gesture", and made the situation worse, after the harassment charge emerged in May, by sending a letter to the home of the complainant asking that she drop the case and promising to protect her from any consequences to her career. Late in May, Lubbers also circulated an e-mail message among staff members criticizing the way the investigation was being conducted and admitting to an incident in which he had made another female staff member feel "very uncomfortable", saying that he had apologized to her in writing. I'd say he was incredibly lucky to keep his job.

A former Riggs Bank manager yesterday invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions from a Senate panel investigating his handling of hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious transactions for a West African dictator, including why he lugged a 60-pound suitcase stuffed with $3 million in plastic-wrapped cash to Riggs's Dupont Circle branch. Pretty hard to think of a believable excuse for that kind of stuff, I guess.

That British High Commissioner who talked about Kenyan government gluttons for corruption is in hot water this morning...and it turns out this isn't the first time he's used un-diplomatic langage. When he was High Commissioner in Cyprus, he called a Cypriot MP who was demonstrating against the presence of British radio masts on the island "a medical monkey up a stick", when the MP climbed up an antenna in protest. While that remark is said to have inflamed local opinion, Kenyans not involved in the Government think he's telling the truth in this latest affair.

The proposed Spanish space mission, called Don Quixote, involves two spacecraft. One will head for a target asteroid 500 metres (1,540ft) in diameter and go into orbit around it for at least seven months. It will drop detectors to measure the asteroid's internal structure. The second spacecraft will be launched at the same time, although on a longer orbit, and smash into the asteroid at more than 22,000 mph, while the first spacecraft watches the fireworks. The collision wouldn't stop the asteroid in its tracks, but it might slow it or deflect a collision course with the Earth.

When George Orwell wrote 1984, he imagined Big Brother to be sinister and malign. It's too bad he didn't live to find out how reality did him one better, by making Big Brother well-meaning...more awful by far. Thanks, Phil.

Al Jazeera has adopted a code of ethics by which it will abide as it gathers news. Viewers will be treated "with due respect", company officials said, and the channel will "address every issue or story with due attention to present a clear, factual and accurate picture." But they'll continue to air the bloody material they've been criticised for. "If we don't report the ugly face of war," a spokeman asked, "would we be embellishing the face of the war?" Actually, no you wouldn't, but who am I to spoil a good story?

It's hard to believe that with a war on and every terrorist in the Western Hemisphere drooling about the possibility of being able to blow up some politicians in New York during the Republican convention, some ragged damn protester has the nerve to try to back the New York Police Commissioner into a corner over what route through the city her march is going to take. "We call on the mayor and the police commissioner and the parks commissioner to turn the corner and come to negotiations in a good faith manner," she says, "and not give us ultimatums." Raymond Kelly should give her an ultimatum that requires surgical removal.

Single malt whiskies being used in cocktails? "The people who make and market what is arguably the most complex connoisseur's spirit are beginning to encourage us to mix scotch with other ingredients. Campbell Evans, public affairs director for the Scotch Whisky Association, smiles wide when he describes his favorite scotch-based mixed drink, a Scotch Royale, made with a combination of whisky, ginger ale and apple schnapps." Barbarian. Philistine. Disneylander.

In Victorian times, Egyptian mummies were unwrapped at public spectacles, a technique which ultimately damaged the mummy. British scientists are taking a little more care with mummy Nesperennub, who they are running through a CT-scan machine, similar to those used in hospitals. Then they're using a $600,000 Silicon Graphics Inc computer system to put together 3-D images based on the 1,500 scanned images of the Egyptian's corpse. Unlike ordinary CT-scan images, SGI technology allows users to manipulate the 3-D images in such a way that researchers can probe the material in great detail. Poor old Nesperennub apparently had a killer of a toothache.

Investors Business Daily is expressing a fine sense of outrage about the beating the US is taking at the AIDS conference in Bangkok this week. It blames the usual suspects.

The UN Oil-for-Food scandal investigation seems to be acquiring a little momentum - a House committee has just issued a subpoena for financial records from the Banque Nationale de Paris, which managed billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenue through the UN-administered humanitarian program. This is an escalation, says the Washington Post, in the campaign of congressional Republicans to obtain documents related to the investigation. Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing to expand the investigation to cover the US-led coalition's stewardship of Iraq's oil revenue, particularly its decision to award $1.4 billion in contracts without competitive bidding to Halliburton, a Texas oil services company that was once run by Vice President Cheney.

The Christian Science Monitor this morning is concerned about the UN's ability to investigate itself, and about how effectively investigator Paul Volcker will be able to examine the 270 companies and individuals from 46 countries - including the UN official who ran the program - implicated in scheming with Mr. Hussein. "Critics suggest the findings will reveal that some of the countries most opposed to sanctions and military action - like Russia and France - were some of the greatest beneficiaries of the sweetheart deals and essentially did Hussein's bidding."

Here's what happened when British journalist Elena Lappin admitted to US Immigration authorities at Los Angeles airport that she was a journalist. She was interrogated for four hours, subjected to a body search, fingerprinted, photographed, handcuffed and forced to spend a night in a cell in downtown LA, then a day as a detainee at the airport before being deported to London. I doubt she's doing a lot of complaining. She probably went back with a much better story than the one she was sent to cover in the first place.

When 'information' is sucked into a black hole in the universe, where does it go? It can't be destroyed, because...because them's the rules. The physicist Stephen Hawking once thought it was swallowed and forever hidden. Now, he's changed his mind. As the universe cools, he thinks, black holes will emit more and more of their heat in Hawking radiation, and will eventually open up to reveal again the 'information' that they originally sucked in when they formed. His new theory might solve a big mystery, but it also means he loses a bet.

Britain's High Commissioner in Kenya has launched an extraordinary attack on the country's leaders, accusing them of arrogance and a greed for corruption that is costing the country a fortune. "Evidently the practitioners now in government," he said, "have the arrogance, greed and perhaps a desperate sense of panic to lead them to eat like gluttons. They may expect we shall not see, or notice, or will forgive them a bit of gluttony because they profess to like Oxfam lunches. But they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes."

Romano Prodi, the outgoing European Commission president, has rejected calls for financial restraint in the organisation, and proposes to cancel Britain's budget rebate in order to get the budget he wants. If his proposals go ahead, Britain would become the largest contributor to the EC's budget. It would pay considerably more than France, which, despite having similar population and economy, does very well for itself as a result of Europe's agricultural policies. Michaele Schreyer, the EU budget commissioner, said Britain now had a "magnificent" economy and did not need the money.

Lord Butler's report on the pre-Iraq War failures of British intelligence adds one more nail to the coffin in which former ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson's allegations about the administration are now lying. The Wall Street Journal says: "We're awaiting apologies from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and all those who championed him, after his July 2003 New York Times op-ed alleging that Mr. Bush had 'twisted' intelligence 'to exaggerate the Iraqi threat'...

"Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a 'liar', regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are."

The UN Oil-for-Food scandal specialist Claudia Rosett has another update in the Wall Street Journal this morning. "Another stack of secret United Nations Oil for Food documents has now reached the press," she says, "this batch procured by congressional sources and providing - at long last - a better view of Saddam Hussein's entire UN-approved shopping list. This huge roster of Oil for Food relief contracts fills in a few more of the vital details about Saddam's 'humanitarian' partnership with the UN, spelling out the names of all his UN-approved relief suppliers and the price of every deal."

Coincidentally, the National Review has published the text of Ms Rosett's July 8 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, which concerns the Oil-for-Food scandal, which is worth reading. In her testimony, she refers to this document, which she describes as "an excellent, lengthy, and detailed study published back in September 2002, by the Coalition for International Justice, chronicling Sources of Revenue for Saddam & Sons, which focused heavily on Oil-for-Food and the accompanying sanctions-busting smuggling of oil from Iraq." It's worth reading, but I should warn that it is a long (70 pages) .pdf file.

This 14-year old kid may be a culinary genius, as the San Francisco Chronicle suggests, but he's got a lot to learn about garlic bread.

This is by far and away the best story of the day. The premise is simplicity itself - Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle's film critic writes this: "With most movies, even great movies, there's usually The Scene. The one that defines it, encapsulates it, embodies its appeal or contains its signature moment." Then what he does is make a long list of popular and classic films and what he thinks are their not-to-be-missed moments. You'll be glued to the page, right the way to the end.

See what a powerful draw Bermuda is? People are even coming here to watch the Olympics.

Microsoft has released a batch of critical security updates for Windows software, so it's worth paying a visit to download them. Forbes has more on what the updates are.

The Washington Post is reporting the concerns of US Gen. Charles Wald, deputy commander of the European Central Command, about the presence of al Qaeda-affiliated groups are active in Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger. "'The terrorist activity in this area is not going to go away,'" the newspaper quoted Wald as having said recently. "'This could affect your kids and your grandchildren in a huge way. If we don't do something about it, we are going to have a real problem on our hands.'

"Wald has had success in bolstering regional efforts to face the terrorist challenge, but the problem is real. Despite Wald's warnings and other reporting on al Qaeda's regional activities and ties to the diamond trade, the intelligence community (particularly the CIA) has dismissed the reporting as inaccurate or irrelevant."

John Keegan has weighed in on the debate about reform of the British system of honours and awards. He's agin it, as befits a man who has received both an OBE and a Knighthood from the hands of the Queen. Says we should learn from Napoleon, who created the most successful honour in history. Again, perhaps that's what you'd expect from Keegan, who is almost without argument the best writer on matters martial alive. I agree with him completely. The push for reform is just another silly skirmish in Britain's class wars - the latest advance in the slow-motion British version of the French Revolution.

Well, now it seems undeniable. Robert Mugabe is as mad as a stark, staring hatter. For his latest trick, he's banned the colour red.

In the days of the last ice age, 13,000 years ago, Britain was still joined to the European continent. Still, it was thought that the ancient Britons were still back in the stone age (or something) when it came to culture. In France, cave paintings were a sou a dozen, but the British cave was bare...not so much as a simple anti-immigrant imprecation was to be found. But Britain need no longer hang its head in shame...cave thingies have been found. They aren't paintings, but they're carvings, which are just as good.

"These are masterpieces," says Spanish cave art expert Dr Sergio Ripoll. "These people had a very good knowledge of the animals they hunted. They had looked at them for many hours and knew their shapes very well. So they could represent them exactly on the walls of caves."

Dr Paul Pettit, lecturer in human origins at the University of Sheffield, says "This bring Britain into line with the continental mainland. We were not just a shadowy reflection of everything that was going on further south. The finds clearly demonstrate that the hunters operating in this country in the ice age were culturally as sophisticated as hunters on the continent."

Whew.

The Commission for Racial Equality, the UK's main race watchdog, is investigating whether its own recruitment and promotion policies are racist, because its statistics are apparently suggesting that black staff are far less likely to be promoted within the organisation than white or Asian employees. The organisation is in distinguished company in the self-investigation business - Ahnuld investigated himself after charges that he had been groping women (I think he let himself off, didn't he?), and of course there's the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, perhaps the biggest rip-off in history, which the UN will itself be severely looking into. Self-punishment? Self-rehabilitation? How would the European Union view self-smacking? We may be looking at a brand-new ethical corpus with enormous potential for growth and savings. Thanks to Phil for the tip.

More than 30,000 white pelicans that normally spend the summer procreating at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in central North Dakota returned in their usual droves in April from their winter residence on the Gulf Coast, but then they suddenly dispersed in May after starting an apparently normal breeding season. They abandoned their chicks, their eggs and flew off in all directions. Nobody seems to know why.

The Kondozi farm, too, has been seized from its owner in Zimbabwe, to allow the redistribution of his land to black Zimbabweans. What is different about the Kondozi farm, though, is that its owner is a black Zimbabwean. According to the Washington Pose, "Edwin Moyo, who owned 52 percent of Kondozi, thrived at what was traditionally a white man's business in this former British colony, running a horticultural company that stocked vegetable bins throughout Britain and brought in $15 million a year to this poor corner of a poor nation.

"But under a farm seizure program Mugabe has said was necessary to redistribute the ownership of land, Moyo's business met the same ruin as those owned by thousands of whites. On Good Friday, in April, dozens of police arrived with water cannons and submachine guns, Moyo said, and blocked off the road, looted the offices and beat anyone who sought to resist."

A federal judge in the US has ordered the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to pay $116 million to the family of a US citizen who was murdered in Israel eight years ago. In a decision announced yesterday, District Court Judge Ronald Lagueux of Rhode Island upheld the findings of Magistrate David Martin, issued March 31, that the PA and PLO provided a safe haven and operational base for Hamas to carry out the shooting death of Yaron Ungar, an American living in the West Bank, and his Israeli wife Efrat Ungar. The Ungars were murdered near Beit Shemesh on June 9, 1996, while driving home from a wedding. They were survived by two young sons, Dvir and Yishai. This case has proven that individuals can join the fight against terrorism and that litigation can be successful against terrorist entities, the Ungars' attorney, David Strachman, said Monday. The link is to the Jerusalem Post, because the rest of the world's media do not appear to have covered this story at all.

Sabah Noori Ibrahim Salim, 38, a member of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and the office manager for Iraq's finance minister in the first postwar cabinet, has been jailed by an Iraqi court for four and a half years on charges of making false arrests. The convictions relate to the disappearance of 36 billion dinars (around $26 million) last year in the switch to a new Iraqi currency. According to the judge's verdict, Salim went to several state-run banks and arrested nine women cashiers, accusing them of forging currency and stealing the missing money. Salim still faces a number of other charges which suggest that he himself was the thief.

Far from nobly turning his back on attacking, but lightly-armed Hawaiian Islanders to order his ship not to fire on the poor dears, Captain James Cook fought desperately for his life. A re-discovered painting, based on eye-witness accounts, depicts the man who is thought of as the greatest explorer who ever lived him in the last minute of his life, his shot gone, about to club an islander with the butt of his rifle. Most of the islanders have heavy clubs, and others have picked up rocks. One is about to smash the skull of a fallen sailor and the bodies of several islanders are heaped at the water's edge.

Ken Jennings, a softly-spoken software engineer from Salt Lake City, has gone 29 days without being beaten on Jeopardy!, the popular game show hosted by Alex Trebek. With another record-breaking, single-day win of over $50,000 last night, the 30-year old's winnings edged close to $1 million - $972,960. One of the reasons he's so good at it, apparently, is that he's had a lot of experience in trivia contests. Jennings participated in Quiz Bowl while a college student, and also in regional and national trivia bowl contests since he left college. Jennings also edits questions for the National Academic Quiz Tournament.

November's presidential election, says columnist William Safire, is going to be determined, at least in part, by issues we cannot yet foresee. Except, perhaps, for one. Kofigate, as he calls it, is rapidly bursting the bounds within which some would like to confine it, and by then should be in full swing.

"Seeking to manage the news of the scandal, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed former Fed chairman Paul Volcker to head an internal investigation. That seemed to slam the door on UN cooperation with truly independent inquiries, but Volcker last week announced that 'appropriate memorandums of understanding with a number of official investigatory bodies are in place or in negotiation.'

"To overcome criticism like mine of his committee's lack of subpoena power or ability to take testimony under oath, Volcker has hooked up with Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who has been prosecuting two men in an unrelated distressed debt case at BNP Paribas; that's the French bank the UN used for its oil-for-food letters of credit. That grand old prosecutor has a staff skilled at following money and has sitting grand juries available to encourage truth-telling."

The English language, according to an official of the EU, "is a predator which destroys other languages. When people use English, other languages get crushed." Stephane Lopez is in charge of persuading the new member states to take up French, instead of English. "This isn't a question of distaste for the English language or culture, nor is it tied up with anti-American sentiment,' she said. "Clearly the French language is not as powerful as it was in the 18th century, when diplomats all over Europe used it as their language of choice, and we're not stupid enough to want to see a return to that era," Ms Lopez said. No?

Columnist Thomas Sowell thinks the French are a pretty low bunch. Doesn't think much of the UN or Europe, either, but "France was the worst. "In the 1920s, its foreign minister Aristide Briand negotiated much-ballyhooed agreements renouncing war - agreements that won him the Nobel Prize but did nothing to deter war. In fact, such things lulled peaceful countries into a dangerous complacency that emboldened aggressor nations. France's record of cowardice and betrayal of its allies during the 1930s, was climaxed by its own surrender to Hitler after just six weeks of fighting in 1940. At the 11th hour, France appealed to the United States, which was not in the war at that point, for military equipment -- that is, for the kind of 'unilateral' American intervention at which the French would sneer so often in later years.

"Are these the people to whom we should defer on life-and-death questions? Are our actions to be limited to what is acceptable to the lowest common denominator at the UN or in Europe? Are the lofty rhetoric and condescending airs of foreigners to impress us more than their dismal track records?"

The Wall Street Journal suggests this morning that a few apologies would seem to be in order, in the wake of the publication of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Allegations of lying or misleading the nation to war are about the most serious charge that can be leveled against a President. But according to this unanimous study, signed by Jay Rockefeller and seven other Democrats, those frequent charges from prominent Democrats and the media are without merit." Conclusion 83 says the committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to influence analysts to change their judgements related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. The Committee similarly found no evidence of pressure to link Iraq to al Qaeda.

The Journal also points out that the Committee's report exposed Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA agent Valerie Plame, as "a partisan fraud whose trip disproved nothing." Last year, Wilsoncreated a public furore by accusing the administration of manipulating intelligence to build a case for the war. He said his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there, and said his findings were ignored by the White House. According to the Washington Post, the panel found that Wilson's report, far from debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he claimed, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

The British Government has made much of its eagerness to make government open and forthcoming. So why do you suppose that 76,000 files which have passed the normal 30-year closure period laid down by the Public Record Act remain hidden on the Lord Chancellor's instructions? More than a third of them are apparently regarded as so sensitive by the Whitehall departments which produced them that even a description of their contents has been suppressed.

Police forces in Britain and the US have ordered tests of the new system that delivers a blast of radio waves powerful enough to knock out vital engine electronics, making the targeted vehicle stall and slowly come to a stop.

For nearly three months, the Italian police have eavesdropped on Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed - "Muhammad the Egyptian", as the 32-year-old Egyptian who masterminded the Madrid train bombings is called. The New York Times says this morning that the contents of his conversations, both in custody in Milan and before his arrest last month, have provided the police with a mother lode of information about the secret world of a man who claims to have recruited suicide bombers and organized terrorist operations in the name of Islam.

Prince Charles was at it again over the weekend in an article published in the Independent in which he renewed his warnings about the dangers posed by nanotechnology. "For the record," he wrote, "I have never used that expression (grey goo) and I do not believe that self-replicating robots, smaller than viruses, will one day multiply uncontrollably and devour our planet." Nonetheless, he insists that it could happen, and it will if we don't mind our bally Ps and Qs.

I thought it was bad enough when British legislators tried to prevent parents from spanking their children, but now they really have outdone themselves - A new animal welfare law to be announced by the Government this week will give courts the power to impose fines for killing insects, worms, caterpillars, slugs and snails.