Fidel Castro looks like such a romantic, nice old bugger that, to their everlasting discredit, even my own government is taken in. Vaclav Havel, who really is a romantic, nice old bugger, isn't fooled for a minute.

Here's another charming story from Zimbabwe - thousands of Robert Mugabe's supporters who chased white farmers from their land four years ago are now themselves being evicted by riot police, who are burning down their houses. I especially like the quote from Member of Parliament Sabina Mugabe, the president's sister, who was asked by journalists whether it was true, as the squatters said, that she was behind the evictions. "You white people," she said, "are paying them money to talk. If I hear of a white person there again, I will order the police to arrest you."

Tony Blair reads PG Wodehouse. David Blunkett reads Christina Rosetti's poetry. Liberal Democratic MP Lembit Opik is reading a book about kamikaze pilots. Tony Benn reads nothing at all. And Ann Widdecombe says she reads John Wyndham's The Chrysalids "a lot" - does that mean she reads it over and over again, or that it is taking her a long time to get through it?

If you follow British politics, and you believe that what people read is a measure of their character, you'll need to read this story.

I can't believe a story that purports to list lessons learned from the damage caused by three hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast says nothing about building sturdier buildings, and not building so close to the shore, but this piece published in the Christian Science Monitor does just that.

Well, looky here! The US owns its own little island tax haven. Guess they figure if you can't beat 'em, why, all that's left is joining 'em.

A court in Indonesia has sentenced a newspaper editor to a year in jail for defamation and "inciting unrest" after he published a story saying that a powerful businessman could stand to gain from a mysterious fire that ravaged Jakarta's largest textile market. The article included a denial from the businessman, Tomy Winata, who nevertheless pressed charges with the police and also filed a civil libel suit last year. As long as there was a reasonable basis for the allegation in the first place, no court in the US or the UK would have convicted the editor on such a charge. International observers have condemned the ruling as a setback to press freedom in a fledging democracy. The judge handed his decision down just four days before Indonesians vote in the final phase of their first direct presidential election.

This explains a couple of things. In Russia, apparently, there are ticket scalpers outside airport airline offices. Give one of them 500 rubles ($17), and he'll guarantee you a seat on the plane.

1905 might have been Albert Einstein's best year. He was 26 years old, and wrote five powerful papers, any one of which would have been worthy of the Nobel Prize. He laid the foundations for the modern pharmaceutical industry, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. He even came up, in that year, with the beguilingly simple formula - E=mc2 - that has done so much to transform our century.

Einstein was born and raised in Germany, so he had the trait many immigrants share, because they are, in a sense, outsiders, of questioning what the society around them accepts as true. "Although Einstein's parents were not very religious," the Los Angeles Times says, "he knew he came from a line of very Orthodox Jews who had no knowledge of 19th century science. At university, he learned that the biblical tales those ancestors had believed were false, or at least incomplete when it came to science. But then when his Zurich teachers told him that what he was learning was the total and complete truth, he didn't believe them. After all, his family had been fooled once by taking too much on trust. He ended up questioning whether, by simple analogy, what his overconfident professors were teaching him could be incomplete as well."

Joseph Epstein may not be known as a poet, but his prose is such bubbly, good-humoured, well-written, enthusiastic stuff that no one in his right mind should miss an opportunity to read one of his books or essays. This is a piece in Poetry magazine, his first appearance in that publication, about poet laureates. It's like really good pink champagne, a perfect antidote to whatever ails you. "As a man who has published a single poem, my own position is that I would like to be asked to be poet laureate of the United States so that I could refuse it, for this seems to me a job that would bring much greater glory to turn down than to take up. True, I am not in danger of being asked to become poet laureate of the United States, or even of Illinois, the state in which I live, if it, like several other states, has a poet laureate (I've made a note someday, though not too soon, to check). But I have been a more than thirty-year subscriber to this magazine; I am someone who came of age with Oscar Williams's splendid A Little Treasury of Modern Verse; and I continue to believe that, though the calling and craft of poetry have been debased every which way and in most others is in trouble, some of the best writing done in America continues to be written by poets and to show up in verse. Because I have great respect, affection, love for poetry, I find the creation of the poet laureateship of the United States a comical insult to a serious enterprise, and one which ought properly to be mocked every chance one gets.

I spotted this essay, by the way, on Arts and Letters Daily.

British police were apparently warned three times that protestors were going to make an attempt to get onto the floor of Parliament, but did nothing about it. It almost seems, from the way this and other stories about it are written, that there was no operational commander on the police radio net. That would account for the failure of people on the ground to pass these tips on, but it would raise serious questions about whether the police are competently organised.

Slowly, robots are coming of age. We've got a robotic vacuum cleaner, a robotic dog, a dancing robot...and China has just invented a robot doctor to help with such tasks as setting bones. Robodoc has already helped conduct 21 bone setting surgeries, all of which were successful. The New York Times has a little feature this morning about some others, including a robot lobster.

WF Deedes, in an article I think must have been written before the extraordinary scenes in and outside the Houses of Parliament yesterday, says he thinks Tony Blair's Labour Party has behaved disgracefully in trying to ban fox hunting. I think I probably speak for many stunned onlookers around the world when I say that all of the people of Britain seem to be the guilty parties here, not just those who favour fox hunting, or those against. To allow something quite as absurd as the class envy that is behind this silly struggle to drag the country that quite recently ruled half of the world down to the level of some obstreperous and ungovernable little republic is a disgrace the size and shape of which I lack words to describe.

Old Fidel Castro may be a villain, but he still knows how to run a tight ship. Hurricane Ivan hit the western end of Cuba on its way to the US Gulf Coast, but killed not a single person. The UN is praising the country...justly.

Haiti seems to be living up to its promise as a problem incapable of solution. A disarmament deadline passed without progress on Wednesday as Haiti's US-backed government faced a looming power struggle with rebels unwilling to disarm since they ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February. You'll remember that M Aristide managed to disband Haiti's military when he was in power, but neglected to take their weapons away from them. Great strategy...almost as good as the foxhunting thing.

Souheila Al-Jadda, a freelance writer and Arabic translator, explains in the Christian Science Monitor how difficult it is to be precise in translating Arabic, which has almost as many closely-related varieties as that well-known soup does.

The Wall Street Journal nails the significance of the furore over CBS's forged documents perfectly in an editorial this morning. "However the flap over CBS and those National Guard 'memos' turns out, the past few weeks mark a milestone in US media and politics. Along with the Swift Boat Veterans' ads, the widespread challenge to Dan Rather's reporting - to his credibility - means that the liberal media establishment has ceased to set the US political agenda."

The American General who last year said that America's enemy was Satan, that God had put President Bush in the White House and that one Muslim Somali warlord was an idol-worshipper, says he didn't mean it. He appeared on 60 Minutes in the wake of the publication of a Pentagon report saying he had violated regulations by making such claims in more than two dozen churches, in uniform, without making it clear he was not speaking in an official capacity. He says, apparently quite unapologetically, that he has no plans to quit, but one hopes that someone in the US chain of command realises that while characters like this may be funny in films like Dr Strangelove, they are distinctly unfunny when they're allowed command of men and munitions.

Indian Larry Desmedt, the custom motorcycle builder known all over the US for his designs, and for his likeable personality, has died following an accident in North Carolina at the Liquid Steel Classic and Custom Bike Series. He was performing a famous stunt, standing on the seat of the moving motorcycle, when his bike started to wobble, and he lost control, striking his head when he fell. After a weekend at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, Desmedt died of his injuries.

This is a developing story I suspect we're going to hear more about. The German newspaper Die Welt is alleging that Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Darfur, in Sudan, in June, killing many people. This story in Turkish Press.com suggests that Die Welt's sources indicated that the weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan.

In China, it's Democracy, No! A great invention of integrating the basic principles of Marxism with the actual conditions of China, a natural choice of China's social development since modern times, and an important achievement in the long-term struggle of the Chinese people of all ethnic groups under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, Yes!

The Chicago Tribune Group has been so impressed with the way bloggers have chewed up CBS's forged National Guard documents over the last week that, it's calling them The Big Bang of the Information Age. "Bloggers," writes Kathleen Parker, a columnist for one of its newspapers, "love fact-checking television and newspaper reporters and commentators, for instance, and have proved themselves both energetic and competent on both fronts. They've been credited with challenges that led to the retirement of both Senator Trent Lott as majority leader upon his waxing nostalgic for Strom Thurmond's good ol' Dixiecrat segregationist days and Howell Raines as editor of the New York Times after the Jayson Blair debacle.

"But the piece de resistance has occurred over the past several days, as bloggers questioned the authenticity of documents CBS News presented allegedly proving that President Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard... Such was the spark that ignited the flame that grew into the wildfire that became the conflagration that threatens to consign journalistic credibility to history's ash heap."

The traditional way of dealing with a man like this is to coat him with tar and feathers, tie him to a length of 4X6 and run his sorry ass out of town.

A new book published in Germany suggests that the country's intelligence service was so amateurish at the end of the Cold War that they went rummaging through dustbins near Soviet military installations, and bribed soldiers with toasters in order to get useful information. The author was one of those bumbling agents, and he admits that in writing his book, he's trying to settle some scores. The Germans are so horrified they're going to prosecute him for betraying state secrets. Federal prosecutors confirmed yesterday, says the Independent, that they had begun an investigation into Norbert Juretzko, 50, a former agent for the BND foreign intelligence service, whose whistleblowing critique of his former employers was published last week. Mr Juretzko's 382-page work, Fit For Certain Duties Only, is a sometimes hilarious account of his time as a BND agent in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when German intelligence worked with the CIA to gather information, in farcical circumstances, from the departing Soviet army.

Bill Foggitt, one of the most respected amateur weather forecasters in Britain died yesterday at 91, after years of using moles, flies and seaweed to beat the Meteorological Office at its own game. He combined natural lore with an exceptional file of family records dating back to 1771 to make his forecasts.Foggitt's Forecasts, which were appended to Yorkshire Television weather bulletins and treated with great respect.

The link between these two stories is a little tenuous, I agree, but it's still there. In the Guardian, Oscar-winning song writer John Barry talked about his film of the musical of Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock. "Many potential collaborators were put off by the film's darkness. Barry doesn't even sound entirely convinced by his own attempt to suggest it isn't. 'I remember Kander and Ebb [the writers of Cabaret] met me in a restaurant and said, 'It's very dark.' I just said, 'I think it's got a lot of colour.' The gang's terrific and Ida's great and Rose is lovely.' Come on, though, it's Brighton Rock. You can't really get away from the fact that it is very tense and very dark. 'Right,' he concedes. And then: 'I tended to like dark things. I've always had a tendency ... sad things and romantic things.'"

Barry's best known for his film themes - one of his best-known being that of Goldfinger.

Many, many miles away, Dale Wasserman talked to the San Francisco Chronicle about the decades he spent tracking down and reassembling the score and script to Beggar's Holiday, the 1946 John LaTouche-Duke Ellington musical that broke racial barriers but flickered out after a few months and disappeared into the annals of Broadway also-rans. He liked the original Broadway piece because "it is a very realistic assessment of politics and morality in general. Whatever The Beggar's Opera said in 1728, you can say today just about double. Times and circumstances have changed, but it's the same corruption and mendacity, the things we experience both in our government and social life."

The trial of 17 alleged members of the Red Brigades began in Rome on Monday, and a decision by one of their number to give evidence against the rest could lead to the definitive dismantling of the Marxist revolutionary group. Cinzia Banelli, a hospital technician from Pisa who was known by her colleagues as Comrade So, has been providing magistrates with information about her alleged accomplices since July. Part of the reason for her conversion from the Red Brigades cause has been the realisation that her violent political activity had contributed to four "completely useless" deaths.

Be nice to think we might be reading something similar about al Qaeda before long.

Dan Rather was dismissive again last night of charges that the National Guard documents CBS had used in a story discrediting President Bush last week were forged. He sounded defiant about it, but somehow a little nervous, I thought. He had good reason to be, because this morning, for the first time, the major media have joined the pack of blogs that have been nipping at CBS's heels. The Washington Times gets it just about right in this story, and in this editorial, which summarises particularly well the evidence that makes it unlikely the documents could be genuine.

CBS tried to fight back, but it was like swimming against a tide in full flood. There have been suggestions on some of the many blogs working on this story that the documents were given to CBS by someone connected to the Kerry campaign. If that can be proven over the next couple of days, I expect that Dan Rather's career, and John Kerry's run for president, are over.

"It is clear," claims Claude Salhani, international editor of United Press International, that "Saudi security forces now are on the offensive, the insurgents on the run. 'The terrorists are on the defensive, and the government has the upper hand,' Prince Mohammed Al-Faisal told this reporter."

DEBKAfile is suggesting that the Russians have wrongly accused two Chechen separatist leaders of having masterminded the Beslan school seizure. The real culprit, they say, was al Qaeda, and specifically cells that have established themselves in Kabardino-Balkaria, northwest of North Ossetia and separated from Chechnya by Ingushetia. There's a map.

Robert McCrum, literary editor of the Observer in London, has written a new biography of PG Wodehouse which is to be published by Norton in November. In the LA Times this morning, he writes about the great man's days living in California, working as a Hollywood scriptwriter. "I get up, swim, breakfast, work till two, swim again, work till seven, swim for the third time, then dinner and the day is over," he wrote. "Add incessant sunshine, and it's really rather jolly. The actual work is negligible."

Techniques devised after the floods in central Europe two years ago are being used at the Leipzig Centre for Book Restoration in an attempt to save volumes soaked by firemen's hoses. Many of the estimated 32,000 damaged books and manuscripts from the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar have been burned as well as soaked. But curators and scientists are taking on even the most hopeless looking cases, dry-freezing them to protect them from further damage by bacteria and fungi.

The BBC has begun a new poll today designed to find the books women like best. In a preliminary poll, 400 academics, publishers, teachers and journalists picked a long list of 40 books that shares many titles with the long list for last year's non gender-specific Big Read exercise. The new list, according to the Daily Telegraph, is headed by two fairly predictable heart-throbbing classics with female heroines - the Bronte sisters' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. But it also contains some surprises - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, Heart of Darkness and Catch 22. The Lord of the Rings, which won the Big Read poll, is also on the list.

In a rare challenge to a fellow Arab state, foreign ministers of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states have urged Syria to comply with the Security Council resolution of September 2 that demanded the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon and the holding of presidential elections in the country. The GCC is a loose political and economic alliance comprising Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

"New research on memory has opened a promising window on the phenomenon, providing both possible explanations for the sensation and novel ways to create and measure it, the New York Times says this morning. "'It has been either ignored or considered too spooky or flaky for many scientists to touch,' said Dr. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who reviews the history of the field in a new book, The Deja Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology. 'But it is real, and by bringing it into the lab we can at least begin to understand it.'"

As time goes on, China seems less and less like the other planet it was once portrayed as, and more and more like the country next door. People's Daily reports on fretting that the Chinese language is being corrupted by foreign words. They reckon that about 1,000 a day enter the language, like the dreaded maidanglao (McDonalds), the awful kendeji (KFC) and, perhaps worst of all, the evil xingbake (Starbucks). I say it serves them right for chow mein and Dr Fu Manchu.

Grace, or Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, is a two-spacecraft, joint partnership of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. And for the first time, the programme's scientists have demonstrated that precise measurements of our changing gravity field can effectively monitor changes in Earth's climate and weather.

"As the International Atomic Energy Agency's governing board prepares for its meeting today - during which it will discuss Iran's nuclear weapons program - the radical Iranian regime's defiance is growing, says the Washington Times in an editorial this morning. "...It remains to be seen whether the Europeans or other Security Council members will have any more of an appetite for taking serious action two months from now than they do today, which is not very much."

That's about the size of it, the German publication, Deutsche Welle, agrees. "It's always the same, a British diplomat recently complained: Whenever more pressure is applied to Tehran, the government concedes at the last moment to a compromise. But what does such action actually gain? A little more time for negotiation, but hardly the solution to end the conflict once and for all."

EU finance ministers agreed overwhelmingly at the weekend to set up a group to consider how to unify the way firms pay their taxes. Although that would not immediately result in a unified tax rate, the UK and Ireland - which made plain their opposition - fear that could be the ultimate objective."

I'm linking to this piece in the Guardian this morning not because I have any particular interest in Britain's Richard Dimbleby and Panorama, the programme he once presented, but because it contains a paragraph at the end about a man I think is worth ten Richard Dimblebys - Tim Sebastian. He is the BBC's former Moscow correspondent and now presenter of the in-depth interview programme Hardtalk, and he is quitting. Sebastian is an interviewer tough enough to have it out with the heaviest weight on the planet, but the heaviest weights on the planet keep agreeing to be interviewed by him because they know he's also thorough, intelligent and straight. The Guardian says the BBC's been trying out other presenters for the programme, but hasn't decided yet who should be his permanent replacement.

How contrary is a contrarian? A lot more than quite, according to this Christian Science Monitor piece, in which it is suggested that investors reduce their stock holdings to zero, in this kind of market.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of African and African-American studies at Harvard, has described the friendship of James Baldwin and his schoolmate Sol Stein as "one of the great moments in interracial harmony and intimacy in the history of American literature." Mr Stein is a novelist and playwright who founded the publishing house Stein & Day, now defunct. He reflects on the relationship he had with the author of Notes of a Native Son in his own book, Native Sons, published last month by the One World imprint of Ballantine Books.

The NY Times says the book is a "concise memoir augmented by their correspondence and a story and play they wrote together. But it manages to recreate a time in New York when, however deep-seated the prevailing racial hostilities, a relationship between kindred spirits could still flourish."

The Wall Street Journal has published another of blogger Arthur Chrenkoff's bi-monthly roundups of news of progress in Iraq. One comparatively small sample:

"With Western assistance, more and more Iraqi police officers find their way onto their beats. Says a British brigadier who is helping to rebuild the force: 'Why would anyone want to be a police officer in Iraq? It's dangerous, no question. But there has never been a problem recruiting. We're training 5,000 new officers every eight weeks. Obviously, one reason is the pay: $220 a month is a lot here. But most officers say they want to serve their country. They want to build a better Iraq. Their nation has such potential; fulfilling it requires security, and they want to be part of that...We were late to recognize that without an effective police force, we're going to be here a lot longer. But now we have 500 international police advisers and 200 police trainers. The FBI and DEA have arrived to teach intelligence. We've put 23,000 officers through leadership courses at three different levels.'

"Meanwhile, the police force is chalking up some successes, like breaking up the biggest kidnapping ring in Baghdad, responsible for taking several government officials and scientists for ransom. The gang was composed of criminals amnestied by Saddam Hussein in 2002."

European Union finance ministers have cold shouldered France's contentious proposal to cut off development funds for EU newcomers unless they agree to stop luring Western companies - and jobs - with low tax rates. Newsday is quoting French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is expected to step down soon to prepare to run for the French presidency in 2007, as saying he isn't giving up on his week-old idea. "We're at the beginning and like every problem it's hard to find a consensus in Europe," he said.

Thomas P. Kilgannon, president of Freedom Alliance, a foundation dedicated to preserving U.S. sovereignty, is understandably angry that this is going to be the first Presidential election ever to be monitored by representatives from foreign nations. The team of foreign observers is being sent by the UN as a result of a request sent to Kofi Annan by a group of Democrats. "This cast of pathetic patriots," Kilgannon writes in the Washington Times this morning, "is led by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Texas Democrat, who, with 10 of her House colleagues, sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan - on the eve of this nation's 228th birthday - demanding he dispatch election observers from the scandal-ridden United Nations. 'International oversight is critical in this election,' they insisted, arguing 'international election monitors' could help prevent 'questionable practices and voter disenfranchisement.'"

Kilgannon's point is that "There is a point when partisanship must yield to patriotism." He's dead right, and as I've said before, if I were an American, Rep Johnson's action would have ensured I never voted Democrat again.

Tony Cozier, who is probably the leading cricket broadcaster and a leading writer on cricket in the West Indies, had some really disparaging things to say about the West Indies test team in the Barbados Daily Nation this morning. "The leadership, on and off the field," he says, "has been so weak, so disunited, so self-centred that the storm clouds gathering at least since 1991 have been allowed to develop into the raging winds that have reduced West Indies cricket to its current state of utter disrepair.

"If the nonsense that went on in Bermuda last weekend under his (Brian Lara's) captaincy is allowed to continue, as it has done for so long with no one held accountable, with no action taken against the perpetrators, West Indies cricket will never get back to where we want it to be."

He's basing his remarks on a hard-hitting report in our daily newspaper, the Royal Gazette, on a warm-up match held here for the International Cricket Council Champions Trophy. Sports reporter Sam Stevens wrote a piece that included this: "Lackadaisical throughout, Windies dropped catches, missed obvious run-outs, bowled countless untidy overs and generally went about their business in a way which suggested they would rather have been sitting in a bar sipping on a black and coke and flirting with the barmaid.

"The lack of imagination in Lara's captaincy and the general shortage of urgency between overs - as Windies fielders sauntered at a snail's pace from one fielding position to the other - was baffling and an affront not only to the tour's sponsors and the paying spectators, but also to the West Indies' colours. It is difficult to imagine the Australians, the Indians or the English treating crucial warm-up games in such a casual and cavalier manner and, as many observers sitting on the boundary edge were not afraid to point out, it is therefore of no surprise that Windies are languishing so far down the pecking order of world cricket."

More than one story has been published this morning, crediting blogs with casting doubt on the documents that were the basis of CBS's story that George Bush had ducked some of his National Guard duty 30 years ago. Someone called "Buckhead" started the ball rolling by commenting on a conservative blogsite that the proportional spacing in the documents made him suspicious that they might be forgeries. Other blogs picked the story up and added to it, and within 12 hours, the mainstream press had taken the story over. The LA Times quotes the host of one blog as having said "If the blog enthusiasts wanted to write a better scenario, they'd have a hard time coming up with one more spectacular than this one." Democrats point to the rapidity with which the story moved as evidence of a right-wing conspiracy orchestrated by Karl Rove, but that's pretty far-fetched.

Incidentally, anyone who still thinks, as a result of Dan Rather's enthusiastic defence of his story, that the documents are genuine, should read this story in the Washington Times. Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt - who supposedly forced an underling to favorably alter reports on Mr. Bush's activities as a member of the Guard in the early 1970s - was apparently discharged from the National Guard nearly 18 months before the date of the memos.

In truth, I don't know any more about the life of Sylvia Plath and who was to blame for her suicide than anybody else. But I've heard "the truth" about her relationship with her husband, Ted Hughes, often enough to understand that "the truth" is the last thing on the minds of most of those involved. This new edition of Ariel, which is supposed to "prove that she was not a doomed depressive but an upbeat, optimistic character whose suicide in 1963 came out of the blue," sounds like just another suck at what is now literature's golden tit.

In an attempt to fight back against the 'gangsta' street culture that black kids emulate at the expense of the potential their lives hold, London authorities have sponsored for three years, now, a conference on London Schools and the Black Child. This year, the 2,000 delegates heard black BBC sports presenter and former Tottenham Hotspur striker, Garth Crooks, say there is a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black youth away from education and into crime and violence.

"There is an epidemic out there, and it is killing some of our children. Do you think there could be a correlation between this and the growing dissipation of our cultural values?" he asked, in a passionate plea to the black community to tackle the issue. Addressing himself directly to young black men, Crooks said: "As for the youngsters in our community who think they are gangsters; grow up. You are pathetic. You are not gangsters or clever. You are kids and it's time to impose zero tolerance."

Educational underachievement among young black males, and their emulation of a violent culture, are not peculiar to Britain. Bermuda is one of many countries that suffer from this virus. What Britain has, but we do not, apparently, is the will to find solutions as a community. Every once in a while - most often after some incident that has disturbed the community - a meeting is held to discuss the problem, but the organisers are generally political hucksters and flimflam men more anxious to sell themselves than find a solution. Any good idea put forward simply dies on the vine. Our political leaders seem to feel it's too difficult a problem for them to invest much more in a solution than talk.