This is an nicely-observed piece by Christopher de Bellaigue of the Guardian about a very fine, outspoken collection of modern art that has been put together (and put on display) in Iran, a classically repressive Islamic society.

"An Iranian woman stands in front of a huge Picasso, Painter and his Model, on show at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. Standing in his studio, illuminated by subdued pools of coloured light, the artist is depicted as an extension of the inanimate objects around him. He has been reduced to a series of mostly straight lines; his arms, palette and easel merge into each other, and the rest of his body into the floorboards and wall panelling. To the model, on the other hand, Picasso has given a stark voluptuousness. With her expanse of stomach, distended breasts and club-like limbs, she imposes herself on the scene in a way that the painter, who is part of the scene, cannot. For a few minutes, the Iranian woman is absorbed by this rich autobiographical painting, with all its intimacy and ambiguity. Then, rearranging her headscarf to cover her fringe, she moves on to a Braque still life.

"It is hard to decide what to marvel at - the Picasso, or the fact that it hangs here, in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, part of a big show of modern western art. In Tehran, any big exhibition is scrutinised before it begins, by censors from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. What, you wonder, did they make of the Picasso? Are the model's breasts too removed from conventional anatomy and her genitalia, paraphrased by an inky sliver, too figurative for her to be considered a proper (and therefore impermissible) nude? Perhaps they were flummoxed by the phallic limb protruding from her side? Whatever the reason, they let the Picasso through..."

I'm linking to this New York Times report not because it is an interesting piece, which it is, but because of its headline - Experts Give Scientists Roadmap on Nanotechnology Research. That seems to me to express with haiku-like eloquence why it is that science, capable sometimes of moving with great speed, is slowed down to a molasses-uphill-in-January pace by the unrealistic expectations of a society which is apparently no longer prepared to live with risk. I thought it was interesting that the report fails to identify the expertise of any except one of this group's "experts".

This is a classic example of one of those idiotic press releases so beloved by bureaucrats. It contains an important fact, but so buries it in a welter of meaningless contextualisation that you need a guide to show you to its meaning. It's from the UN, of course, which has a habit of trying to tame harsh reality down to about the significance of an overdue library book. The important fact is that the International Criminal Court has issued its first-ever arrest warrants. They name five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan cult known for its cruel treatment of children. Jurist has more. "The group is believed to have forced more than 10,000 children to take up arms, work as laborers or become sex slaves. The arrest warrants are the first in the history of the three-year old ICC, who has been investigating the situation in the Congo since June 2004. Swing did not reveal the leaders' names, and the ICC has yet to formally announce the warrants, which, if sealed, will not be announced until arrests are made."

Interesting that the first group the ICC go after invokes the Lord in its name.

A Canadian judicial advisory committee has recommended that some court documents considered public property should not be considered public enough to be made available through the internet. The Globe and Mail has details. "The new guidelines say that judges' decisions and some case information should be available to everyone by remote access, but detailed filings such as affidavits, motion records and pleadings should not get this kind of exposure, even though they are public documents. The guidelines also say personal information should be deleted from court documents made available to the public to ensure the safety and security of those whose lives are exposed in legal proceedings."

This is an interesting distinction - information ought to be public, but not too public. Those who believe in public information can hardly object, because to those who have what might be called a genuine interest, a trip to the courthouse is not sufficiently high a price to interfere with public access. And of course it does tend to separate out the flakes whose interest is simply salacious.

Author Joe Klein, who wrote the book Primary Colours about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, but tried unsuccessfully to keep his name off the cover, is writing another, this one about UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The PRWeb blurb says: "United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan, already under fire in the Oil-for-Food scandal, is the subject of an upcoming book by Joseph Klein that may bring about the final downfall of his scandal-ridden administration, this according to World Ahead Publishing.

"Global Deception: The UN's Stealth Assault on America's Freedom...will debut this November, but its revelations already have people talking. With Annan a major subject of the scathing book, the publisher says that this expose will weaken the secretary general's already precarious grip on the UN by exposing the secretive means he has used to manipulate countries into expanding the global institution's power at the expense of their own."

More provocative ideas about race in Britain from Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. In an article in the Guardian, he says Britons have to do more talking about race, calling their silence "a breeding ground for far-right extremism." He says the idea of separate racial communities has been accepted in the US, because true integration of two races must mean the sublimation of the culture of one of them. "But...I passionately do not want us to be like the US. Nor do I want assimilation. Instead I believe that we can be an example to the world of how to handle multi-ethnicity - but only if we take steps to arrest our drift to separation before it becomes irreversible."

Interesting debate, stirred up by an interesting man. I can't help thinking Britain will end up with more or less the same solution the US has arrived at - the logic of it is pretty compelling.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle tried to get a third grand jury to indict former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but it refused, according to Jurist. DeLay has been indicted by two grand juries in the past week, but Earle has revealed that prosecutors took their case to a third grand jury between the two indictments, and that grand jury refused to issue an indictment."

In a related story, the National Review says: "Lawyers representing a co-defendant of...DeLay have sent a letter to the makers of a new film about the DeLay investigation, saying they will seek a subpoena that would order the filmmakers to turn over a copy of the film and all unused footage from the project.

"The Big Buy chronicles...Earle as he pursued the investigation that led to DeLay's indictment on conspiracy charges last week and on money-laundering charges yesterday. Filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck describe the film as 'a Texas noir political detective story' about the Earle/DeLay investigation."

Perhaps, like me, you missed the weekend announcement of a new corrections policy at the New York Times, arrived at after Byron Calame, the paper's public editor, and others, had fussed about Paul Krugman's attempts to avoid correcting an error he made about the Bush/Gore Florida vote. The announcement was in the form of a A Letter From the Editor, signed by Gail Collins, the editorial page editor. I thought it was so defensive a letter that it came across as pouty and childish, not at all the sort of thing you would expect of an editor of one of the leading papers in the world.

Donald Luskin of the National Review, who has seemed to want to call this story his own, writes about the Collins letter triumphantly, as if it had all been the result of his work: "Our long-running campaign to get Paul Krugman to retract the lie in his August 19 New York Times column about the 2000 Florida presidential election has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Not only was the correction finally made in print in Sunday's Times, the newspaper of record also announced the imposition of a new and more rigorous corrections policy for the entire Times editorial page."

I wrote an article once that I thought was a light-hearted tour of the various theories about who really wrote William Shakespeare's plays, etc. I can't say any of the calls I got was threatening, but one came pretty close. They had two things in common. The first was strange enough - I was a villain for daring to give credence to the notion that Shakespeare might not have been Shakespeare. But the second was downright bizarre - my callers believed that making such a suggestion was actually an attempt to diminish the quality of what whoever-it-was had written.

This morning, more grief for people like my callers. As the Independent (and other newspapers in Britain) are reporting, two eminent scholars have suggested a new theory - that the real author was not Shakespeare, but a contemporary of his, a courtier and diplomat called Sir Henry Neville. The theorists are former university lecturer Brenda James, and an historian, Professor William Rubinstein, of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. They say Sir Henry used Shakespeare as a front, because he himself was not in a position to write such sensitive and controversial stuff. "Indeed," says the Independent, "if the Elizabethan authorities had known that Neville was the author of Richard II, he would probably have been executed rather than merely imprisoned after the Earl of Essex's revolt in 1601."

The latest Wallace and Gromit film, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, has opened in the US. I suggested a few days ago that it might be a little alien to the American palate, but if Kenneth Turan's LA Times review is anything to go by, the British pair are anything but a mystery. "Though Wallace & Gromit makes some use of computer-generated images for story elements like fog, its characters are still created frame by painstaking frame in the old-fashioned stop-motion way. The process is so meticulous, taking days to produce seconds of finished film, that Curse of the Were-Rabbit took nearly five years to finish, including an 18-month shooting schedule. That's a lot of work for an 85-minute film, but, if you want to know the truth, it was worth every second."

On the other hand, A O Scott, the respected New York Times reviewer seems unable to get very far beyond Gromit's forehead. "Gromit has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen. In particular, his brow - a protuberance overhanging his spherical, googly eyes - is an almost unmatched register of emotion. Resignation, worry, tenderness and disgust all come alive in that plasticine nub. To keep matters within the DreamWorks menagerie, you might compare Gromit to Shrek, who has the genetic advantages of Mike Myers's Scots burr, a bevy of celebrity-voiced sidekicks and rivals, and state-of-the-art computer-animation technology. Good for him. But Gromit, made by hand and animated by a painstaking stop-motion process, has something Shrek will never acquire in a hundred sequels: a soul."

Britain's Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has urged the United Nations to support his efforts to deal with suspected Islamic militants by deporting them, even though they might have come from countries believed to engage in torture. My Way News has the story. Britain is negotiating with several countries in the Middle East, including Jordan, Egypt and Algeria, with a view to making an agreement that they will not torture deportees from Britain.

Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, however, cut across Clarke's lines by publicly urging Britain in August not to deport militants to any country suspected of using torture, dismissing any assurances these countries might give as, essentially, worthless. Clarke objected "in the strongest possible terms" to a UN official expressing such views without first consulting with London. He made this point in a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday, saying: "The United Nations ought to be supporting government-to-government treaties in areas such as this..."

It's the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's reading of Howl to a small crowd of people in San Francisco, an event that changed the direction of American literature. The San Francisco Chronicle tells the story: "No photographs of the evening have turned up, but by all accounts, when 150 to 200 people showed up at this low-ceilinged former auto-body shop in response to hastily printed postcards, the size of the crowd astonished everybody. (Kenneth) Rexroth served as master of ceremonies that Friday night. (Jack) Kerouac, who had declined to read, brought jugs of burgundy to share."

After poet Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen had read poems, "Ginsberg took the stage, drunk, some say, and visibly nervous. Kerouac urged him on, hollering 'Go! Go! Go!' as the poem gained momentum:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

"The poem brought down the house. Ginsberg and Rexroth were in tears."

There is something very odd about Judith Miller's sudden release from jail and testimony before a grand jury. In the New York Times this morning, she says she was simply following her conscience and the principles that she worked out at the beginning of the investigation of her part in the Valerie Plame case. She said she had not been given the explicit waiver she needed from Scooter Libby, the White House aide with whom she spoke about Ms Plame, before she went to jail, but got such a waiver a few days ago, just before her release.

But Scooter Libby's lawyer told the Washington Post yesterday that Miller had been given permission a year ago to tell a prosecutor about private conversations she had with Libby. The correspondence between Libby and Miller can be read on the New York Times website, and certainly seems to bear out the Libby version of the story.

This story obviously hasn't been told in its entirety yet. The Weekly Standard says "It is widely believed that Miller went to prison in part to restore her credibility on the left, which was damaged by her Iraq war reporting." But the Standard also has a theory, one that seems a little far-fetched to me, that Miller might also have been seeking to dodge questioning about a leak that it describes as "far more serious than the relatively trivial Plame matter. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Miller learned from a leaker in the federal government that the FBI intended to raid the offices of an Islamic 'charity' that was suspected of being a terrorist front. According to a court decision in February 2005...Miller responded by telephoning the charity and asking for comment.

"...The most plausible explanation of Miller's conduct is that she went to jail because she feared that if she agreed to testify before Fitzgerald's grand jury, she could be asked about the FBI leak, and she wanted to protect both her source and herself. In that case, perhaps what really got her out of prison was the agreement that her lawyer made with the prosecutor to limit questioning before the grand jury to the Plame matter. This would have the effect of barring any inquiry into the more significant FBI leak. Why would Fitzgerald agree to forgo any questioning about the FBI leak, which until recently he pursued aggressively? Based on publicly available information, there is no way to know. Maybe Fitzgerald is so concerned with securing an indictment of an administration official that he is willing to sacrifice the FBI investigation in order to achieve that goal. Another possibility - one hopes, a more likely one - is that Fitzgerald has agreed not to ask for the name of the source of the FBI leak because Miller, through her lawyer, has already given it to him, perhaps in exchange for an assurance that she will not be criminally prosecuted."

People's Daily says a government-affiliated research body in China has announced in Beijing that it will develop China's own DVD format in order to break monopoly of foreign companies in DVD manufacturing. So if you thought that the fight between two different US technologies (see this Softpedia story) was tiresome enough, stand by.

"Lu Da, deputy director of the National Disc Engineering Center," People's Daily says, "said that the new Chinese DVD format will be based on the prevailing format of HD-DVD but incompatible with the HD-DVD systems. The Chinese format will produce higher definition, better sound and safer way for copyright protection, Lu said."

This Haaretz report must have been published too early to carry the news, but after Palestinian policemen broke into the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City on Monday, the Palestinian Parliament voted to call on Mahmoud Abbas to dismiss his Cabinet for allowing such signs of chaos in Gaza. Inside the parliament building, the policemen fired in the air to protest what they said was the humiliation police are facing because of attacks by Hamas militants, and because they say they don't have enough ammunition to defend themselves.

The storming came one day after fierce clashes between police and Hamas in Gaza City and the nearby Shati refugee camp, during which Hamas gunmen attacked the local police station with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The camp's deputy police chief, Ali Makawi, was killed in the fighting."

Andrea Levy's book, Small Island, has been named the finest Orange prize winner of the last ten years at a ceremony in London last night. The Guardian reports that Levy, 48, who was born in London to Jamaican parents, won the Orange for the novel in June, last year. All her books - Small Island, Every Light in the House Burnin', Never Far from Nowhere and Fruit of the Lemon - explore problems faced by black immigrants to Britain.

"Small Island, which has sold 466,000 copies in the UK, is set in 1948 and draws poised comedy from the misunderstandings and illusions, sometimes shading into prejudice, of the small pre-Windrush (the vessel that took them to Britain from Jamaica) postwar generation of immigrants and the curious natives they settled among."

It pleases me, not only because it's a fine book and she's a fine writer, but also because I received, in the mail late last week, a signed first edition of Small Island to add to my collection.

There was no posting for the second time in a week on this day because my web host, Blogger, was down. This firm must have, I think, one of the worst customer relations departments on the internet - without warning, service ceased. Again, they put a sign up saying the service would be undergoing maintenance for one hour, from 4 pm to 5 pm Pacific time. The sign was there at about 3 am Pacific time, when I started trying to blog. The only message on their website this morning that refers to maintenance relates to a shutdown early in August. I say again - Google, which owns the Blogger organisation, ought to be ashamed of itself.

Sending a reporter up a mountain in Japan, to be dangled over a cliff in the name of the search for personal enlightenment by someone called a yamabushi, one of "the fabled Shugendo monks", is something only the San Francisco Chronicle would dream up. I'm not knocking it, mind, I hope blessings rain down upon them for being so wonderfully trendy. I just wish they had picked a reporter who was capable of entering into the experience with a little more understanding than John Flinn did. Game though he was, he seemed to think the whole thing was some kind of weird Nipponese reality show that he had to suffer through. In every paragraph, there is the clear signature of a man who would remain impervious to enlightenment if it kindly spared him the necessity of taking a single step along the path, by visiting him in his office on a clear San Francisco day.

At least he lets us see how different shut is from open.

Janet Daley, the American who writes for the Daily Telegraph in London, writes with what seems almost fearful enthusiasm about the future of the Conservative Party in Britain.

Shock news: the Tories have a plan is the headline on her story this morning. "Talking to front bench spokesmen, backbenchers and especially the new intake of MPs," she says, "it is clear that there is now a real and urgent understanding, after years of failing nerve, opportunism and inconsistency, that there must be a coherent Conservative philosophy - and that it must be presented not just in practical managerial terms but in specifically moral ones...People who are themselves secure and privileged want to believe that they are being generous and public-spirited when choosing a government. Efficiency and good management may be admirable, but as political objectives, they are, by themselves, perceived as callous and uncaring."

Simon Jenkins, in the Times, has a different take. He thinks the situation's so hopeless, he may as well run for leader of the Conservatives himself. "Everyone's doing it, so I may as well join in. I hereby stand as the next leader of the Conservative party. Its plight is dire. Tony Blair hardly bothered to mention the Tories in his speech last week. Already the next Tory defeat, the fourth in a row, is being confidently predicted. So why not grab a brief moment of fame in a lifetime of obscurity?

"...no Conservative can possibly outflank Blair or Gordon Brown on the right. That shot is snookered. No Tory could be tougher on welfare, tougher on crime, tougher on unions, kinder to business, keener on war, more besotted with prisons than is Labour. Blair wants selective education and more private health. He believes in cheaper private cars, cheaper jets and more expensive trains. Abroad he is a card-carrying Donald Rumsfeld neocon. What can a Tory say to such a man? As for Brown's policy of spend-and-borrow, that is pure George Bush. Curing it would take a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher, whom God preserve."

Correct. And the Conservatives still haven't understood what happened to them. They thought the country wanted them to be more like Labour, so they all put on their best, caring lefty looks...and people have been giggling at them ever since. No wonder, they look like what they are - a bunch of J Wellington Wimpys pretending to be Che Guevaras.

Ernst Gombrich wrote his book for children, A Little History of the World, in Vienna in 1935. It has not, until now, been published in English, because Gombrich thought English speakers weren't, on the whole, interested in the world. Just before his death, in 2001, he softened a bit, and agreed an English edition, which is being officially published by Yale University Press on October 13.

The Observer quotes his granddaughter and literary executor, Leonie Gombrich, as having said this about him: "'The obituaries for my grandfather all said how solid he was...Perhaps people with a thick Germanic accent seem that way. But he had lightness, too. He was Austrian, not Teutonic; he always said that his music was the Viennese waltz, not some plodding Prussian march. It's true he moved very slowly, with enormous care. After all, he was carrying so much weight in his head."

Gombrich was an art historian, his book The Story of Art has so far sold six million copies.

The Observer says "Gombrich begins the book (History of the World) by acknowledging that history is first of all a story, the transmission of experience between generations. That is why 'we ask old people to tell us what they remember'. The process, he says, is like lighting a scrap of paper and dropping it into a black, abysmal well; the flare illuminates the past...

"Leonie remembers that he once sadly said to her: 'Thatcher has destroyed England.' He could not forgive her government's attack on culture and learning; he classed her with the ignorant ogres who are the villains of his Little History - the vandals who torched the library at Alexandria, the Chinese emperor who tossed the writings of Confucius on a funeral pyre, the Nazi book-burners. Gombrich calls Shih Huang-Ti, the emperor who incinerated all books apart from agricultural manuals, 'an enemy of history'. That is the remonstrance of his own book: if we know nothing about history, we are bound to repeat its errors."

I've been visiting Byron Calame's blog at the The New York Times, where he's the Public Editor, and I'm impressed. Significant stuff gets dealt with there, like this:

"Let me get this straight: a Democratic senator from NEW YORK has had two top aides accused of illegally tracing credit information from a potential Republican senatorial candidate. The aides have resigned and there is a FEDERAL investigation into the matter. And The New York Times has not printed ONE word about it.

"Aren't you even occasionally a little embarrassed?

"Andy Ahrens
"New Canaan, CT

"9/30/2005

"Dear Mr. Ahrens:

"I've been asking editors since Monday about the situation involving the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and confidential credit records of Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a Republican. The Times now has reporters looking into it.

"Sincerely,
"Byron Calame"