For the second day running, the US press is full of stories and comment about a key provision of the Patriot Act having been struck down by a federal judge in New York. The truth is that no such thing has happened - the provision the judge was referring to was included in a 1986 law known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act - nothing to do with the Patriot Act.

US Senator John Cornyn held a press conference yesterday to try to explain what had happened. He gave credit to blogger Eugene Volokh, a lawyer whose website, The Volokh Conspiracy, drew attention to the mistake in the first place. So far, nobody seems to have paid much attention.

In a post this morning, Volokh explains how he thinks the press got it wrong in the first place.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, chairman of the department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, is axing questions about English, as it is spoken by blacks. He says he started to take the issue seriously after a trip to Bermuda, and asks the question: "Is it possible, after all these years, that white folk have come to speak 'black' far better than blacks speak 'white'? Just axing."

The Palestinians, you might think, are the best pratfall artists since the Keystone Kops. At an international couscous festival billed as a bridge-building event among "cooks for peace", they charged that Mossad had stolen their recipes in order to win one of the prizes.

In Gaza, they may have made a miscalculation with graver consequences. "On the face of it," says Haaretz, "the Hamas attack on Sderot fit perfectly with the militant group's overall strategy surrounding Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement proposal: lure large IDF forces into Gaza, attack them, then trumpet an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the Strip as 'running away under Palestinian fire' rather than a result of a consdered Israeli policy decision. But what Hamas may not have considered is a possible backlash among a Palestinian population for whom perpetual sacrifice has neared the breaking point."

The Guardian reminds us that two rather disparate anniversaries in the world of science and technology are marked this week. The first is the 50th birthday of Cern, the gigantic pan-European particle physics research centre, buried in a 27 kilometer ring under the border between Switzerland and France. Named after the subsequently retitled Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, the project was established in 1954 to repair the battered prestige of European science after the second world war. The other is the fifth anniversary today of UK operations by the auction website eBay. The Guardian says "With 25 million items on offer, Ebay turns over more than 1 billion pounds a year, bringing its 114 million-strong international army of users together in a marketplace unlike anything the world has seen before."

Here's a man who was allegedly bribed with Neil Diamond concert tickets. If they can make make that stick, he should get life on that charge alone.

The 14th Annual Ig Nobel prizes were awarded last night in front of a paper-airplane-throwing audience of 1,200 people at Harvard University. Big winners this year were sociologists who unravelled a link between country music and suicide, physicists who have earnestly explored and explained the dynamics of hula-hooping, and an ingenious bald man who patented the infamous combover hairstyle.

The official Ig Nobel web site has more.

The British have been tearing each other to bits over the social effects of charging students to attend university. You'd have thought they would have been a little more anxious to find out attention to how it works in other countries, like the US. This panel of experts, including a prominent American educator, comes just a little late in the game, and has the air of being slightly beside the point. That may well be because the Brits have this habit of engaging with each other not so much to find solutions, as to defeat their opponents.

"We are alone in this fight (against terrorism) - our major power 'friends' - except Britain - quite obviously enjoy that the focus of fundamental Islamic radicalism is on us. Traditional diplomacy, engaging the UN, and especially the election debate are phony exercises in present circumstances - and terrorists throughout the world will get stronger all the while." This is the thrust of an op-ed published by the Washington Times this morning, written by Daniel J. Gallington is a senior research fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va. He is a former deputy assistant defense secretary, Senate Intelligence Committee general counsel and Justice Department deputy counsel for intelligence policy.

"The president said it best after September 11, 2001," he concludes, when he said "'you're either with us or you're against us' - the French, the Germans and the United Nations are not yet with us: We need to understand it, get over it and get on with the war on terror."

This is a fascinating story of a Spanish ship taking slaves to Cuba that was wrecked off one of the Turks and Caicos islands. All of them made it safely to shore, except for one woman, who was shot to death on the beach by the crew as she tried to escape. Turks and Caicos authorities took the slaves from East Caicos to Grand Turk, where they were sheltered in the Cockburn Town prison, baptized, taught English and employed as free men and women in the salt trade. It's a story that has only recently come to Caribbean chroniclers' attention, says the Los Angeles Times, stirring curiosity throughout the region about the little-studied history of the islands' black populations. Scientists believe they may have found the wreckage of the brigantine Trouvadore off the coast of East Caicos, and are trying to identify whether ballast components found in the wreckage can confirm that the ship was built in Santiago de Cuba, as they suspect.

The story is especially interesting to Bermuda, because it was Bermudians who ran the Turks salt trade, and who traded the product in the Caribbean and in the American colonies. There was quite a lot of population movement back and forth, so it is just possible that the descendants of some of the Trouvadore people settled here.

A small number of media are reporting this morning that Russian troops have cornered Chechen rebel Aslan Maskhadov in a forest in south-east Chechnya. The Kremlin blames Maskhadov and the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev for the Beslan school massacre and has posted a $10 m reward for information leading to their "neutralisation". Maskhadov denies involvement in the Beslan atrocities. This story in Britain's Independent quotes Chechnya's deputy prime minister as having said he "had every reason to believe" Maskhadov and his associates were trapped.

A former director of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has charged that the International Fund for Animal Welfare has offered to pay the fare of members of the Russian and several west African delegations to next week's meeting in Bangkok, presumably in an attempt to influence them to vote the IFAW way. This is inappropriate lobbying, he says. I don't know what he's so surprised about. NGOs are up to this kind of stuff all the time in international forums. And if some of these groups don't wake up and start policing themselves properly, they'll find that NGOs, not countries, are calling the shots.

Modern music, says Norman Rosenthal, the outspoken exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, hasn't got the spirit that modern art has. It's worthy stuff, he says, but boring and marketed badly. Music students are "too busy getting drunk to engage with what composers are writing."

He was speaking, says the Guardian, "to a gathering in London of the great and the good of new music. Mr Rosenthal, the curator behind the Britart exhibition Sensation!, said: 'At that college in Marylebone [the Royal Academy of Music] they had a very good festival of music by that Argentinian composer [Mauricio Kagel], and I was amazed how few students were there. But there were plenty downstairs, drinking heavily in the bar. Art students are plugged into the contemporary art world in a way that music students certainly aren't into the new-music world. It's a real riddle.'"

The powerful British broadcasting regulatory agency, Ofcom, has published a long-awaited report on the future of public service broadcasting, and has recommended, surprisingly, a new public service TV channel to keep the BBC on its toes. Ofcom says the competition from a new Channel 4-type operation is needed give the BBC an incentive to to continue operating as a public service broadcaster when analogue TV is phased out in 2012. It will cost 300 million pounds, money Ofcom says should come from an increased licence fee, a World Service-style government grant, or a tax on the turnover of UK broadcasters.

Ratification of the Kyoto Treaty by the Russian Cabinet will bring the pact into effect, and put more pressure on holdouts like the US to sign. The treaty still has to be approved by the Duma, but that is unlikely to be a controversial process. "It's a political decision, it's a forced decision," according to President Vladimir Putin's economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, who led Russian opponents of Kyoto. "It's not the decision we are making with pleasure." Mr. Putin in May pledged to speed up approval in return for European Union support of Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization.

David Warren, in another of the calm and insightful pieces he writes for the Ottawa Citizen, could teach the UN a thing or two about defining terroism. "According to Reuters' oft-repeated dictum," he writes, "'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' Yes, and one man's Nazi is another man's saviour of Germany, and Stalin was my garrulous Uncle Joe. It is an outrageous moral evasion to take the criminal at his word, and I am proud of every person in my trade who refuses to play along. The purpose of terroism is to terrify: to drive us nuts, to leave us incoherent, to make us run away. To spread fear and confusion, feeding upon each other. To make, for instance, the American electorate think: 'O dear, Iraq is a nightmare, we had better get out right away.'

"But that will not do. Instead, we must look, as calmly as we can, right into the heart of the carnage, and find, unblinking, a way to bring it to an end." Amen to that.

Cuba has an interesting way of dealing with its population's unease over breakdowns in the supply of electricity. Fidel's really a master at this kind of thing.

According to People's Daily, China's got low income tax, no inheritance tax, a booming economy and welcomes non-Chinese.

Bermuda's Premier, widely believed to be under pressure from his old-style labour party to start paying more attention to its socialist core beliefs, made a speech last week that one politically-savvy newspaper here interpreted as referring to a coming policy of "wealth tranferrence". That is the sort of concept that would separate the men from the boys anywhere, but in ultra-capitalist Bermuda - well, it was the kind of speech with the power to alter the economic and demographic underpinnings of the country almost overnight. The Premier said he'd been misinterpreted...but if there were some kind of one-to-ten scale of capitalist nervousness, it would have gone from two or three all the way up to ten. His denial will have pulled it back to eight, but I don't see it moving from there for a while.

Now, if only they spoke English in China...

One blogger this week described Jimmy Carter's warning of voting irregularities-to-come in Florida as "pre-emptive whining", which I thought had a certain ring to it. I'd credit the blog, but can't remember which it was. Today, the Washington Times editorialises about the politics of Mr Carter's effort, and the inaccuracies (he is a former president and due the benefit of the doubt, I think) that underlie what he said. "Clearly, Mr. Carter's move is a blatant attempt to scare up voters in Florida and tilt the playing field to the Democratic Party's advantage. That's to be expected in an election year, but we were surprised to see a former president stooping to such depths in pursuit of those ends.

"He could at least admit that he is trying to help his Democratic Party, rather than the democratic process."

A tide seems to have begun flowing in Brussels against the era of "nanny-state" directives and anti-business reflexes of the European Union in the 1990s. Chris Davies, the British Liberal Democrat leader, predicts a dramatic change in the EU's overall direction over the next five years as a new, more conservative broom sweeps through Brussels. That's encouraging news for those who understand how important it is for European countries to reform their economy-stifling cradle-to-grave welfare systems, but it is going to be a messy process.

The Telegraph has an account this morning of one little struggle which may be typical of many others to come. Holland's Neelie Kroes, nominated for the powerful job of European competition commissioner, accused her left-wing critics of "character murder" in a campaign of "lies" at her confirmation hearing. Mrs Kroes, 63, a former transport minister, said she had been subjected to 18 sets of false allegations. These included rumours that she had slush funds squirrelled away in tax-havens. "I don't have a bank account in Switzerland. These are lies," she said.

"There is no way I've had anything to do with any slush funds, I haven't taken any bribes and never would. You have to prove when someone is guilty and not the other way around. We say in Dutch that's character murder," she said. "I'm convinced that the diversity of my business experience is an asset," she said, calling herself a "tough girl" who knows how to see off lobbyists.

I can't help feeling sorry for Britain's Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. Being well-mannered isn't something you can turn off and on. Either you have the instinct, in which case you are a slave to it, or you don't. Instinct would have made him shake Robert Mugabe's hand long before his reason kicked in. But British politics is pretty unforgiving, so his name is mud at the moment.

The Telegraph this morning manages to conflate that controversy up with another, over whether a British cricket side should go to Zimbabwe to play "a series of meaningless one-day internationals". In an editorial, the paper says, "Mr Straw's acute diplomatic embarrassment at the UN's HQ would not have been so noteworthy had it not coincided with the latest chapter in the debate about whether the England cricket team should play against Zimbabwe. Like Mr Straw, the England and Wales Cricket Board cannot make up its mind whether or not to be rude to Mugabe. Like Mugabe, the government-controlled Zimbabwean Cricket Union has done everything it can to cause domestic and international offence. It has dropped 13 white Zimbabwean cricketers in a contrived racial dispute, and now plans to put up a purged team of untried no-hopers against England in a series of meaningless one-day internationals in Zimbabwe this autumn."

Armed Haitian gangs are defeating the efforts of aid workers to deliver life-saving supplies of food and water to those affected by Tropical Storm Jeanne. They "mob aid convoys, break into homes to steal food and shoot anyone who gets in their way, according to the Globe and Mail. "Street gangsters have put aid workers squarely in their sights and are subjecting weary storm survivors to life-threatening delays in getting food and water. The failure of Haiti's government to disarm gangs, including the Cannibal Army that started the revolution that ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has created a climate of insecurity that jeopardizes lives after the calamity visited on Gonaives by Tropical Storm Jeanne." I feel a little silly re-stating the blindingly obvious, but gangster politics armed these gangs, and Haiti will never have peace until they are disarmed. Jamaica learned that lesson back in the '70s, when they had to do some terrible things to get the situation there back under control. That included instituting the draconian Gun Court system to deal with people caught with firearms - a facility that makes Gitmo look like a Boy Scout camp.

Raymond Danowski has amassed the largest collection of 20th Century poetry ever put together by an individual - 60,000 volumes and tens of thousands of posters, broadsheets and other related items - and gave it, recently, to Emory University in Atlanta. It contains 1,000 volumes of WH Auden alone, and a first of Leaves of Grass (not quite in period, but included because of Whitman's influence on later poets). This New York Times account of Danowski's collection will leave you breathless, if you know anything about collecting books, and clueless, if you know anything about how much they cost, as to how he financed this little endeavour.

The United States has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation, alleging that the European Union is failing to apply consistent, uniform customs rules, making life difficult for US companies trying to export to European countries. Companies in agriculture, textiles and high-tech claim their products are often subject to one set of criteria for entry to one EU country, and another, quite different set for entry into another.

The complaint is said to have been made to the WTO only after US officials tried repeatedly to deal with the issue directly with their EU counterparts. The EU added 10 new members in May. Although it promised to address the lack of uniformity as part of the enlargement process, its attempts made the problem worse. Trade experts say the US has a good chance of winning its case.

Having to examine a tractor-trailer load of documents dealing simply with one bank's involvement with the Oil-for-Food programme has provoked a squeal of dismay from one of the Senate committees investigating the scandal. "From our perspective, this is a scandal of overwhelming proportions. There are so many pieces. We want to follow the money wherever it leads," Sen. Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told the Associated Press.

Meantime, the New York Sun (I won't link to the story because one needs to be a subscriber to read it) is saying today that some of the inquiries into Iraq's Oil-for-Food program are turning into full-fledged criminal investigations of foreign and domestic companies. The paper says it has learned of "three separate federal investigations into foreign and domestic banks and companies that could lead to serious charges against individuals who participated in Saddam's multibillion-dollar swindle. Already under way are investigations from US attorneys in the District of Columbia, New York and Texas, according to sources familiar with these tightly-held probes."

"Every time I hear about one of these reporters going in to speak about their sources, my stomach drops to my shoes," the New York Times has been told by Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. "We're in a crisis on this. I'm absolutely terrified about how this is going to turn out for media credibility." And Brian A. Sun, a former federal prosecutor who now represents the atomic scientist Wen Ho Lee, told the Times that the press should be more concerned about publishing classified information than about protecting sources. "It's aiding and abetting a crime." The comments are carried in a story about the investigation currently being conducted into whether a crime was committed when CIA employee Valerie Plame was named, perhaps by a White House employee. What they suggest to me, as a journalist, is that some people will say almost anything to get their names in the New York Times. A crisis? A crime? The Times should know better than to publish such nonsense.

Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, was hoping there would be no media interest in the visit he was paying to a recording company in Nashville last week. He had no clue that being separated from his 21-year old daughter and sent packing by zealous US immigrations officers back to Britain was going to give him the media exposure of his life. In a commentary published in the Los Angeles Times this morning, he insists that those who think he has some connection with terrorism are wrong. "I am a man of peace, and I denounce all forms of terrorism and injustice; it is simply outrageous for anyone to suggest otherwise. The fact that I have sympathy for ordinary people in the world who are suffering from occupation, tyranny, poverty or war is human and has nothing to do with politics or terrorism."

An Israeli scientist has invented a device that could put an end to injections and the widespread fear of needles. Among those expected to benefit eventually are millions of diabetics and children needing shots for immunization or anesthetics. The SonoPrep is a hand-held ultrasound device that painlessly opens microscopic pores in a small area of the skin, allowing medication to pass into the bloodstream. It was invented over a 20-year period by Joseph Kost, a 54-year-old professor of chemical engineering at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, together with Prof. Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Atlantic is in the midst of a 20-year upswing in hurricane activity, and while it was a peculiar set of conditions that funneled four storms directly toward Florida this year, the broad pattern of increased activity is far from over. "It's reasonable to assume above-average years for another 10 years," Gerry Bell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center, tells the Christian Science Monitor.

Space Daily is calling Mars's Valles Marineris, the Grander Canal. What they mean is that if it were on Earth, it would dwarf our Grand Canal, stretching from New York to Los Angeles. It is the largest canyon in the solar system, the paper says, at more than 2,500 miles long, and three to six miles from floors to tops of surrounding plateaux.

Virgin's boss Sir Richard Branson is saying this morning that he's got a plan to take tourists into space before long. At the moment, his plan is simply to take them into orbit and back again. But maybe...I really would like to take a closer look at that canal, among other things up there, and I'm surely not the only one. He's a smart guy, isn't he?

According to a report released last week by the European Court of Auditors, says the Washington Times, subsidy fraud has cost EU taxpayers at least $3.15 billion between 1971 and 2002. The court found that not only did EU officials award subsidies improperly (and, presumably, unwittingly) when those payments were determined to be "irregular", but it also found that the union's recovery efforts were unimpressive. During the 31-year period, 83 per cent of all payments found to be irregular were never repaid.

The United Nations awarded a contract to the Swiss firm Cotenca to police Oil-for-Food shipments into Iraq, but then gave Contenca no authority to inspect the shipments. The New York Post says it has learned that the company, which is under subpoena from a variety of Congressional committees investigating the scam, has admitted its agents really did little more than look at the paperwork of the hundreds of thousands of shipments of goods that went into Iraq. It was only able to look at the actual shipments if the importers agreed to co-operate.

Russia has taken its case for intensifying the global war against terrorism to the United Nations, proposing, according to the Moscow Times, that the Security Council establish a new list of terror suspects who would be subject to extradition. Russia shouldn't hold its breath - the UN hasn't managed to get around to defining terrorism yet, as Anne Bayefsky said in the Jerusalem Post last week.

The Telegraph, ruminating about attempts to enlarge the Security Council, thinks that's beside the point. What should happen, the paper says, is the UN should get its nose out of areas of policy where it has no business in the first place.

"Because there is no proper system of accountability, their officials get away with a good deal more than they would within a democratic nation-state. On the ground, whether in the Balkans or Iraq, UN staff have been involved in bribe-taking, racketeering and embezzlement; and in New York, too, business is often done grubbily. This did not much matter as long as the UN was simply a forum for the arbitration of disputes among states. But it now aspires to a good deal more than that, seeking, in effect, to legislate on behalf of all mankind. Its initiatives - whether aimed at stopping wars, empowering refugees, cleaning the environment or improving the lot of the poor - are always well-intentioned. But we are in danger of losing the principle, 300 years in the making, that law-makers should be answerable to the people. Inviting more countries to scramble aboard is no answer; better, rather, to withdraw the UN from areas of policy where it has no business in the first place."

Hamas is having a hard time getting its head around the death of one of its senior operatives in a car bombing in Damascus. There are two ways to think about it. It could be that it is true that Syria provided information to Israeli intelligence that was crucial to planning this assassination. That would mean Hamas isn't safe in Syria any more. Or it could be that Syria didn't, and rumours that it did are being planted to destabilise its relationship with Hamas and the other terrorist organisations that thrive there. But Iz a Din al-Sheikh Khalil was killed in Damascus by Israeli intelligence, which means that Hamas isn't safe in Syria any more. It's a hard-knock life.

Blogger Arthur Chrenkoff reports today that the Paris Club of creditor nations has agreed in principle to a major reduction of Iraq's outstanding debt, with a final announcement expected before the end of this year...Officials from the Paris Club's 19 members, including the United States, France, Russia, Germany and Japan, met last week and agreed to cut Iraq's estimated $120 billion dollars of debt by at least 50 per cent. In his twice-monthly summary of good news from Iraq, published in the Wall Street Journal, he says: "The obstacles are considerable, the challenges huge, but day by day the Iraqi people, assisted by the coalition and people of goodwill from around the world, are slowly forging ahead with the task of reconstructing their country - and more importantly - reconstructing themselves."

I wondered aloud whether American forces were learning from the Israelis last Thursday when I posted something about the death in a missile strike on a car of a man who was said to have been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's spiritual mentor, Sheik Abu Anas Shami. It appears that they are so learning, and it also appears that Shami was more than a spiritual adviser, he was Zarqawi's chief lieutenant. DEBKAfile praises the American forces for their enterprise. "No one knows exactly how many lieutenants Zarqawi has, probably four or five. But locating and killing a high-profile member of Zarqawi's organization a few days after the capture of another top Zarqawi aide, known as Omar Baziyani (an alias), is a considerable American feat in its relentless offensive against the group behind the deadly suicide bombings and hostage-taking atrocities afflicting Iraq. These operations go on clandestinely behind the well-publicized US air strikes."

US Forces may also have stopped a Zarqawi operation that might have caused them some difficulty in Baghdad if it had gone ahead. DEBKAfile says that two months ago, Shami "received his last assignment, the sensitive mission of implanting a major al Qaeda team in the Shiite Sadr City of Baghdad. Zarqawi calculated that by quickly filling the vacuum left by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's defeat in Najef, al Qaeda would draw in Mehdi Army militiamen deprived of their leader and establish a formidable anti-US anti-government presence in the Iraqi capital. By killing the Palestinian terrorist mastermind, the Americans stymied this plan."

David Shaw, who writes on the media for the Los Angeles Times, says someone's head is going to roll at CBS because of the airing of forged Bush National Guard letters. Just whose, he's not sure, but it probably won't be Dan Rather's. "I don't think one mistake - even one this egregious - cancels out an entire career of good work and loyal service. But if Rather doesn't leave, who will? Will Mapes be fired? Or will the ax fall on some network executive - CBS News President Andrew Heyward or maybe Josh Howard, the 60 Minutes producer?" I don't know why he discounts the possibility of Dan Rather falling on his sword - it would fit with his view of himself as warrior newsgatherer.

Buried in this story about hypochondria in France is an insightful little comment about its cause by Dr Philippe Nuss, a leading French psychiatrist who has written books on depression. He blames a huge increase in France in the use of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. He says it has happened because humans' expectations of their health have been led to change, recently. What he says is certainly also true of the United States, where my impression is that the pill culture is more developed than anywhere else in the world.

"Until the middle of the last century," said Dr Nuss, "if I couldn't sleep or was anxious I considered it part of human nature and accepted it. Today we regard our bodies and our health as objects which belong to us, and we find it impossible to accept the idea of not sleeping, for example. Our attitude is that we have to be well, and our doctor is there to make us well, so we will ask for something."

An interesting development in the Middle East over the past few days. Yesterday, the second most senior Hamas official in Syria was assassinated by Israeli intelligence agents. Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil died when his car blew up in Damascus. The assassination comes just days after the London-based Al-Hayat paper reported that the intelligence service of "an Arab state" had passed to Israel extremely valuable information on the Hamas infrastructure "in foreign countries". That sounds like Syria, which is also reported to have ordered the offices of Palestinian organizations operating in its territory closed. Khaled al-Fahum, former chairman of the Palestinian National Council said the Syrian authorities have closed the offices of various Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, in recent days, and in some cases have even cut their phone lines. Israel Radio has reported that Khalil, 42, helped train Hamas' chief bomb-maker Yehiya Ayash, who Israel assassinated in January 1996. Khalil is believed to be in charge of Hamas's military wing outside the Palestinian territories.

I post this story from the Guardian because it is the first I recall having seen in that newspaper in which nanotechnology is discussed, but the dangers of malevolent little robots taking over the world isn't. Has to be some kind of breakthrough.