India's decision to pull down the last of the Lutyens bungalows in New Delhi is an obscenity. William Dalrymple, whose books about India are well known, writes in the Guardian about the plan to pull them down. "Lutyens' Delhi is not only one of the supreme achievements of British architecture in any period of history - the colonial equivalent of Bath, Dublin or the Edinburgh New Town - it still ranks as one of the most elegant urban landscapes anywhere in the world, and a rival to Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's Washington. Although it is the grand monumental structures - Edwin Lutyens' Viceroy's House and Herbert Baker's two Secretariats - that are justly the most famous buildings in New Delhi, it is the smaller domestic buildings which give it its character. From wide avenues and open boulevards shaded by neem, tamarind and arjuna, low red-brick walls give on to sprawling white classical bungalows with bow fronts, porticoes and dim colonnades of tall Ionic pillars, all surrounded by long lawns, jungly shrubberies and bushes of molten yellow gulmohar.

"...Almost every Lutyens bungalow in private hands has gone, destroyed in the welter of demolitions that took place between 1980 and 2000. Now it has been announced that the same fate awaits the remaining 60% of the Lutyens buildings still owned by the government. The Central Public Works Division (CPWD) this week announced its intention to raze the remaining Lutyens bungalows and so demolish arguably the most important colonial townscape in the world. The CPWD has decided the bungalows have 'gone beyond their lifespan', 'are unsafe' and 'should be up for demolition'. The idea is to replace them with 'ultra-modern day fuel-efficient apartment blocks', which, if the mock-ups published in the Times of India are anything to go by, will resemble bland 1960s student housing projects of grey windowless concrete, with the additional attractions of tangles of barbed wire around the heightened perimeter walls. If the CPWD gets its way, no fewer than 1,114 houses built across 1,000 acres will be demolished: a virtually unprecedented act of mass vandalism."

In a sense, internet case law is going to develop internationally, more so than any other branch of law. This Canadian libel trial doesn't sound like a particularly difficult case, but is worth noting nonetheless.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe is trying to persuade English Canadians that political divorce would benefit both Quebec and the rest of Canada. "Quebec slows Canada down, just as Canada slows Quebec down. Too often we stand in each other's way," Mr. Duceppe told about 100 members of the Economic Club of Toronto in a luncheon speech at a midtown hotel. Sounds as if it went over like a lead balloon.

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post is another commentator who doesn't believe all that stuff about "moral values" having turned the tide in favour of George Bush in the presidential election. He is pouring scorn this morning on the post-election analyses of, among others, what he calls the holy trinity of the New York Times - Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd. The trio "just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. As usual," he says, "Dowd achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the Republicans for pandering to 'isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism' in their unfailing drive to 'summon our nasty devils'."

The Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, accused George Bush and Tony Blair of lying over the way in Iraq, and withdrew Spain's troops. He backed John Kerry in the presidential election and cancelled a standing invitation for US forces to participate in Spain's annual military parade. Now he's complaining because the US President won't return his calls. Spain seems to understand it elected a yoyo - a columnist for the conservative newspaper ABC, stated bluntly: "Zapatero has put his foot in all of our arses".

Last year, I seem to recall, it was bully-boy American squirrels who were being cruel to their British counterparts. Now it's American crayfish beating up their French cousins. Poor Europe!

This is a rather polite examination by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal of how CBS and the New York Times managed to decrease the public believeability of the media in the United States by 10 percentage points in a year. The answer is that Dan Rather and Bill Keller fell victim to kingmaker syndrome - a condition that affects people who are smart enough to know they're clever, but not smart enough to know their cleverness has limits. Such people should never be given their head, because when they lack restraints, they are the most dangerous bastards in the world.

Walter Cronkite, on the other hand, is a dear old thing who has, I guess, moments of fuzziness.

It has been years...going back into the Clinton era...since the American government first served notice on the air conditioning industry that they were expected to increase the efficiency of their machines. The industry fought back. Several years later, the result is that instead of the 30% increase initially demanded, and the 20% increase the industry wanted to give, airconditioners will improve in efficiency by 26%. A victory for consumers, despite the waste of time.

Yasser Arafat seems to have died on cue. What a surprise.

Arafat was no stranger to that half-world between truth and fantasy which characterised his death in a hospital in Paris. Many parts of his myth are untrue. The one I hear and read most often in the news this morning is that his ambition was to create two states in the Middle East, an Israeli and a Palestinian. The truth is that he wanted instead a one-state solution to the Middle East problem. He wanted the creation of a Palestinian state on its own, and what stood always in his way was the fact that the creation of his state required the destruction of the state of Israel first.

Haaretz publishes a grudgingly sympathetic look at his life this morning, but I'm more inclined to think like Max Boot. Writing in this morning's Los Angeles Times, he says "It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third World after the demise of the European empires...He and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against various enemies and 'collaborators'. In return, Arafat reaped worldwide adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize.

"There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most." That about nails it.

First, as an inveterate and utterly unashamed devotee of punning, I have to recommend this headline from the Independent today, which must go in the book of classics. But second, I also recommend the story, which concerns a study done in England about why Chinese students do so well in school. It's not a study of whether the Chinese people are cleverer than the rest of us, but of what attitudes they have toward education that are different from those of the rest of us. In short, their success seems to be because they believe it should be school first, life later.

Islam is making a come-back, according to one sect, quoted in the Guardian this morning.

"...The west 'needs to understand what is really an inevitable matter, and that is that Islam is coming back, the Islamic caliphate is going to be implemented in the world very soon...The Muslim people need to realise that the way in which they will restore a form of dignity and bring civilisation back to the Islamic world is to establish a modern caliphate.'

"The call to re-establish the caliphate, the single Islamic state that existed for a millennium and a half, until the end of the Ottoman empire in 1924, forms the thrust of the group's message. But its call for Muslims to be strong is not just political; it is also religious: 'Secularism has failed the world' declares a Hizb poster."

It has been the Zippo lighter of rifles, and Russia has saluted the man responsible for its design on his 85th birthday. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, says the New York Times is the creator of the world's most widely distributed firearm, the AK-47.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the legacy of John Ashcroft at the Department of Justice, and at what his successor-designate, Albert Gonzales, is bringing to the table. Ashcroft, despite his unfortunate ability to bring criticism raining down on his head, will leave behind an improved organisation, the Journal says. His perhaps most singular achievement was breaking down the wall between the CIA and the FBI which had so hampered the country's intelligence efforts.

Although Gonzalez has the advantage of a personal relationship with President Bush, the sticking point with him will be the "torture memos" bearing Mr. Gonzales's signature. In the heat of the Presidential campaign, the media connected this legitimate internal legal discussion on the Geneva Convention to the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib. The ACLU, People For the American Way and other liberal interest groups are already hitting this allegedly "troubling" record and gearing up for a fight. The Center for American Progress, financed in part by George Soros, says it has "grave doubts" about his nomination.

It's a bum rap - the memos were precisely what they should have been - an exploration of the limits of the law as it affects the interrogation of prisoners. They were not a statement of policy, or even an invitation to the President to frame his policy in those terms. For a sane and measured look at the arguments that were put forward and what they meant, read this article, written by John Yoo, and published a few months ago in the Los Angeles Times. Yoo is now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, but worked in the office of legal counsel (which produced the document) at the Justice Department when the memo was written.

"The memo did not advocate or recommend torture," he writes, "indeed, it did not discuss the pros and cons of any interrogation tactic. Rather, the memo sought to answer a discrete question: What is the meaning of "torture" under the federal criminal laws? What the law permits and what policymakers chose to do are entirely different things. Second, there was nothing wrong--and everything right--with analyzing a law that establishes boundaries on interrogation in the war on terrorism. Unlike previous wars, our enemy now is a stateless network of religious extremists. They do not obey the laws of war, they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians. They have no armed forces per se, no territory or citizens to defend and no fear of dying during their attacks. Information is our primary weapon against this enemy, and intelligence gathered from captured operatives is perhaps the most effective means of preventing future attacks.

"An American leader would be derelict of duty if he did not seek to understand all his options in such unprecedented circumstances."

Kofi Annan and the various committees of the American legislature investigating the Oil-for-Food scandal have a delicate dance to do together. Annan has appointed Paul Volcker to make the official investigation, but the need for good PR, at least, suggests that he shouldn't stiff-arm the others. Some Senators think he's getting the balance wrong. The New York Times reports that "In a letter sent to Mr. Annan yesterday, the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations charged that the secretary general and a panel he appointed to conduct an independent investigation into the charges of abuses appeared to be 'affirmatively preventing' the Senate from getting documents from a former United Nations contractor that inspected goods bought by Iraq.

"The senators also complained that Mr. Annan was blocking access to 55 internal audit reports of the program and other relevant documents and refusing to permit United Nations officials to be interviewed by the subcommittee's investigators."

The Dutch now have a tough row to hoe, don't they? The Telegraph says: "While the Arab-European League accused the Dutch immigration minister of giving a 'Hitler speech' at a rally in protest at van Gogh's murder, the Dutch know who the real Hitlers are. Even the most liberal society is illiberal when it is a question of survival. The Dutch see those who dream of Europe under a revived caliphate as a threat to their way of life. The prospect of Islamist imams imposing sharia law on Dutch cities amounts, they feel, to a new Nazi occupation.

"Unlike his great, great, great uncle Vincent, Theo van Gogh was not a genius. Was he really an artist at all? But van Gogh's murder has proved him right about the hardline Islamists. Their ideology is inimical to all that the Dutch hold dear. Last night, as van Gogh's cremation was seen on television, the tension was palpable. Holland is now the crucible of Europe. Not even the most tolerant people on earth can tolerate the Islamists."

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more banal than it is already, Haaretz reports that there's a handsome terrorist on the scene: "French officials who have been following Yasser Arafat's treatment were astonished to discover that Suha Arafat's constant companion and financial adviser was none other than Pierre Rizk, who headed the intelligence service of the Phalanga during the Lebanese civil war and was in close personal contact with the guerrilla group responsible for the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp in 1982.

Rizk has been spotted in or near Percy Hospital in recent days. Since Rizk holds power of attorney for Suha Arafat, French and Palestinian officials have been in constant contact with him over Suha Arafat's financial demands, which she says are designed to ensure the financial future of her and her daughter. Rizk, a Maronite Lebanese, is well known to Israeli officials, and has spent long periods in Israel where he met with government officials and private business figures. Israelis who have met with him in person describe him as a colorful figure, and say that he is something of a womanizer."

DEBKAfile, incidentally, suggests that a deal has been done. Suha's to get $22 million a year for the rest of her life, and her husband's to get buried on Friday.

It was a mistake to have sold Bird's Custard to an American firm in the first place - Americans wouldn't understand the attraction any better than they do Marmite. That's all right...the Brits don't understand the American relish for eating pills, so that makes them even. The Guardian laments that "Bird's Custard, primary yellow, thick as glue, sweet, warm and comforting, with its addictive flavour of sugar and dust, was a staple of home and school. In fact, it would be hard to find a dessert, be it jam roly-poly or steamed ginger pudding, baked apple or treacle tart, that couldn't be improved by a liberal helping."

I posted something about Google's release of a desktop search engine, so I feel bound by fairness to mention that Microsoft is supposed to be releasing a competitor tomorrow, Thursday, if you can believe the New York Times. It's one of those things you don't need every day, but when you do need it, you really need it.

I'm one of these coffee freaks the New York Times is talking about today. What they don't explain in their story, though, is that you can spend a fortune on fancy machines, and still make bad coffee if you don't pay attention to the coffee you're using. Roasting your own is the best (and cheapest) way to go, but if you find that too much to chew, buy good, freshly-roasted beans often, and grind them yourself. Google Sweet Maria if you want to investigate roasting your own.

Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's minister of European affairs, last month withdrew his candidacy to become European justice and home affairs commissioner after an outcry about his unpolitician-like characterisation of homosexuality as a sin. I suppose this piece in the Wall Street Journal is part of his campaign to win his reputation back, but it does seem a little thin - "We still live in a world in which resources are limited, we have to work hard to have our share of them, we need the support of a family and we need the old traditional virtues that had been too easily dismissed. Americans have become aware of this state of affairs sooner than Europeans. This is another explanation of the difference between the two sides of the Atlantic. But we can expect also in Europe a change of attitudes within a comparatively short period of time. Our struggling economy and ageing society can survive and be modernized only if we recover at least some of the values of the past - among them the ethics of hardworking and caring fathers and mothers."

I read this Washington Post piece about the significance of the Presidential election because it was written by Newt Gingrich. I was disappointed. I thought he was going to give himself a grand platform to work from when he wrote about Thomas Jefferson's victory in 1800, but instead, he drew some rather predictable, short-term lessons from the Republican victory.

A long way away, a Russian writer called Yevgenia Albats takes a much more satisfying crack at explaining what was going on in the Moscow Times. It was the end of liberalism, Albats says, and it has some ominous overtones.

"The most frightening issue concerns the kind of impact that the end of liberalism outlined in the US elections will have on politics in our part of the world. Throughout the final decades of communism and well into the 1990s, the Unites States served as a model of a better world to come, in which individual freedoms and choice took precedence over the supremacy of the state, aiding the prosperity and well-being of society as a whole. Even the somewhat less comforting idea of the United States as the world's policeman served as some kind of insurance against the re-emergence of the apparently defeated forces of domestic nationalism and authoritarianism. The last four years, however, have shattered such beliefs.

"The United States has turned a blind eye to the unleashing of precisely these forces in Russia. Last Tuesday put paid to whatever hopes remained. No wonder Kremlin hawks are celebrating the Republican victory in the United States as their own."

Further to my expression of disbelief yesterday that anything much could come of a military operation which featured a month's notice being given to the enemy, the Washington Post has published an interview with some of the terrorists who have stayed in Fallujah to fight. Once, as a young reporter, I was accidentally locked between security doors in a mental hospital, and turned, to find myself in a Last Year at Marienbad moment, being stared at by 50 or so absolutely silent, motionless female patients who had been let into a bare yard to get some air. I feel the same shocked fear, mixed with pity, about these young men in Fallujah.

Philosopher Richard Dawkins has rather a sweet piece in the Los Angeles Times this morning about those little people.

"Did H floresiensis have language? I suspect not. Some commentators have latched onto a local Flores legend of a little hairy people called the ebu gogo, which means 'grandmothers who will eat anything'. The ebu gogo are said to have conversed in strange 'murmuring' tones. Is this just the local leprechaun, hobgoblin or fairy story? I suspect so; after all, legends of giants and werewolves are just as ubiquitous. But myths of this kind feed my hopes of finding surviving specimens.

"In any case, let's not call these wonderful little creatures hobbits. I know that is the nickname chosen by their discoverers, but if ever there was a case where fact is stranger than fiction, this is it. Such a name from fiction only diminishes the wonder of this sensational discovery and insults the memory of these tiny cousins whom we have come tantalizingly close - yearningly close - to meeting."

As a further episode unfolds today in the soap opera that is Yasser Arafat's death in Paris (I always thought God was beyond revenge, myself, but you have to admit that one possible explanation for this mess is that the whole Palestinian business was really pissing Him off), I thought readers might be interested in a profile of his wife, Suha, which was published this morning in Haaretz.

I can't resist using this piece written by commentator Jon Friedman and published in Investor's Business Daily, in which Friedman tries, in a bewildered sort of way, to figure out how the mainstream media got the mood of the country so wrong before the election. "The Bush political team," he says, "intuitively understood the tone of the US voters much better than the media did. To be honest, I still don't quite understand how certified media junkies like me could have been so wrong.

"I read the New York Times and the New Yorker religiously. I watch CNN and the networks' evening news programs as well as the gabfests on Sunday mornings, too."

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is bristling at Kofi Annan's protest against the invasion of Fallujah. The Guardian quotes him as having stated the obvious in reply: "If the terrorism and insurgency stopped, there would be no need for American and British and other countries' troops to help the Iraqi forces before the Iraqi forces were able to look after Iraq on their own."

The scrappy little New York Post puts it rather more bluntly - "Annan has spent most of his life with the world body and seems to have been wholly corrupted by it. It's more than the bribery and theft he permitted under the UN's Oil-for-Food program. Annan has long done the bidding of the dictators and thugs who comprise the institution and view it as tool with which to bludgeon the West. To Kofi Annan, no regime, no matter how ruthless and criminal, should ever be called to account."

Annan's letter seemed odd and a little out of place when he sent it last week. The truth is that he simply doesn't have the stature any more to be operating as a kind of godfather to world leaders. The UN has been sitting for weeks, slowly revolving on its thumb, apparently unable to do anything to bring the genocide in Sudan to an end. That must have been a substantial blow to those who still had confidence in the body. Annan himself has been diminished by the Oil-for-Food scandal and his efforts to make sure it is investigated in as quiet and controlled an environment as possible, and by his interference with a number of embarrassing personnel problems, including one in which his own High Commissioner for Refugees was accused of sexually harrassing his staff.

An organisation that lacks the courage even to sort out its personnel problems in a just and even-handed manner simply has no place from which to deliver lectures on how to sort terrorism out, and Mr Annan is making himself look ridiculous by trying.

That ugly squabble between Suha Arafat and Palestinian officials has little to do with her ambition for her husband's continued success as leader. It's about money, as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Times report this morning.

"Palestinian officials who gathered around Yasser Arafat in recent weeks have been anxious to extract from their ailing leader the secret codes and locations of bank accounts they believe contain more than $1 billion diverted from official Palestinian funds," the Times says. The paper uses a figure of $1 billion - the Chronicle says it could be anywhere from $200 million to $6 billion. We'll probably never know what it is with any accuracy, but the Times quotes a senior Palestinian banker as confirming that "A huge scramble has been going on to get the codes he holds in his head for various bank accounts he holds in secret."

One site this morning suggests that Suha will demand Abbas and Qureia sign documents drafted by her French lawyers guaranteeing she gets to keep what she's got - both her multimillion dollar inheritance and pension - as her price for switching off her brain-dead husband's life support systems.

The Washington Times suggests that Donald Rumsfeld got it right earlier this year when he suggested a division between old Europe and new Europe. The new blood's having its effect, but don't look for any great change in official attitude for a while. The reason? It's the French, stupid!

I have to say, as someone with a military background, that giving your enemy a month's notice of your intention to assault his positions, and keeping the press up date with your preparations, is a heck of a way to wage a war. By the time they get into Fallujah, the only insurgents left there will be certifiable lunatics. Mr Zarqawi and his associates are probably going to watch this one on television from a beach somewhere in the South Pacific.

Iran seems to be in the middle of a crackdown on free speech in that country at the moment. The New York Times says another two journalists were arrested last week, and the authorities have moved against pro-democracy Web sites, blocking hundreds of sites in recent months and making several arrests.

Western-style art sales and auctions are to be allowed in to China as part of that country's World Trade Organisation obligations, as of next month. The Art Newspaper is cautious about expecting any sudden flooding of Western markets with Chinese goodies. "With a history of looting by foreign invaders and a continuing leakage of antiquities through smuggling, China will be cautious about allowing the sale of art and antiquities. The big international auction houses generally hold their auctions of Chinese art in Hong Kong, but can import and export listed items for previews in Chinese cities. For example, the German auction house Nagel held a preview in Shanghai last month for its November auction in Stuttgart of porcelain, ink-wash paintings, Buddhist sculpture and classical furniture, including a rare Qing vase similar to one in Beijing's Palace Museum.

"No-one is expecting an early departure from Hong Kong similar to the exodus from Monaco that followed France's decision to allow foreign auction houses to hold sales in the country. Hong Kong is still rich compared to the mainland, and China's new wealthy elite tend to transfer disposable wealth outside mainland jurisdiction."

"Powerline blog, via one of its readers, brings to our attention," says Arthur Chrenkoff in his twice-monthly summary of good news from Iraq, "the results of an opinion poll that is not getting any publicity outside Iraq. '[The] poll taken in Baghdad, Mosul and Dehok and published in Iraq on October 25. The poll probably over-sampled Sunnis, which makes its results even more striking'.

"63% of Iraqis say that the withdrawal of American and allied forces will not be in the best interest of Iraq, it will undermine the work towards security and control of the country. 27% say that it would be in the best interest of Iraq. 9% had no opinion. 58% say that terrorists do the kidnappings and assassination of police and soldiers. 9% say that patriots fighting for Iraq carry them out. 32% say ignorant Iraqis who have been brain washed & misled carry them out. 89% said that the terrorism, kidnapping, beheadings and assassination of police and security forces do not help the freeing of Iraq and the building of a stable country. 6% said that it would help free Iraq and build stability. 4% had no opinion."

Yasser Arafat, claims DEBKAfile, died on Friday, and the French are beginning to wish the Palestinians would come and take his body away.

NASA's pair of exploration vehicles on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity, are still in the best of health, ten months after Spirit's dramatic landing, and nearly seven months after completing the three months of work they were designed to achieve. Fine by NASA...they've got lots for them to do.

This idea of Canada making some kind of special relationship with the Turks and Caicos Islands has been around for some time, kept alive by, as much as anything else, reporters who manage to persuade their editors to send them down there to check on whether there's been any progress. There never really has been and, I think, it is most unlikely that there ever will be. It's just a dream.

Language experts Gunther Kress (he's a professor of English at the University of London) and John Humphrys (author of Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulation of the English Language) have a lively go at each other in today's Guardian about whether English needs protection from slovenly users. Humphrys has a nice little quote towards the end: "Let's remember why we need good, simple English. Orwell put it nicely: slovenly language 'makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts'. A basic grasp of the rules makes it less likely that we will use slovenly language. So let me offer you one more quotation, this time from the Roman theoretician Quintilian, writing 2,000 years ago: 'One should not aim at being possible to understand but at being impossible to misunderstand.'"

It's no wonder I was so taken aback the day after the election about this business of conservative Christians having captured the Presidency for George W Bush by voting their values. According to that understated (and perhaps a little underappreciated) columnist, David Brooks of the New York Times, it's a bunch of malarkey. "Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

"In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top...

"The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums. He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.

"The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not."

I did admire commentariat. Much wieldier than punditocracy.