I like Canada and Canadians, so I'm sorry that the flake of the decade has to be from that country. He is Paul Hellyer, Canada's Defence Minister under Lester Pearson in the Sixties, who not only believes in UFOs, he's worried that George Bush and the US are on the verge of starting an intergalactic war. Yahoo! News reports that Hellyer said "'I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.'

"Hellyer revealed, 'The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.'

"Hellyer warned, 'The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, 'The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.'"

Next week, John Sentamu is to become the Church of England in Britain's first black archbishop. As this Independent Profile makes clear, this is no token appointment. John Sentamu is what others in the limping Church of England are not - a substantial human being. He reminds us that this is how history is most often made - by the effect the actions of people like him have on the course of events. The Independent comments that: "For the first time in decades, there is a sense of expectation about the appointment that goes well beyond the shrinking boundaries of the Anglican Church. Sentamu is expected to make waves."

The Israelis have reacted furiously to the leaking of a British Foreign Office report criticising Israel's policies in Jerusalem. The Foreign Office, they told the Guardian, is an "unrelentingly pro-Palestinian" organisation, noting that Britain makes more formal protests to Israel over its actions in the occupied territories than any other country.

It was interesting that the New York Times, one of the newspapers given a copy of the report, has just published a new policy on using material given to it on condition of anonymity. Byron Calame, its Readers' Editor, published an article last Sunday, saying that henceforth, "Readers are to be told why The Times believes a source is entitled to anonymity - a switch from the previous practice of stating why the source asked for it."

In its story yesterday about the Foreign Office report, the Times says, about its source, only that it was "someone who wanted to publicize it."

Wanting, perhaps, to soften the political effect of confirming that he would not file criminal charges against former American International chairman Maurice Greenberg, New York's Attorney General is signalling that he's going to beef up his civil lawsuit against him. The New York Times says "The amended complaint is expected to include additional civil fraud charges against Mr. Greenberg, whose lawyers have repeatedly said that he is not guilty and will fight all allegations against him.

"While the addition of civil fraud charges may be seen as a setback for Mr. Greenberg, the realization that Mr. Spitzer's office will not be pursuing criminal charges is likely to come as a relief to Mr. Greenberg and his supporters."

A fresco by Cimabue, believed destroyed in the 1997 earthquake, has been partially reconstructed from thousands of fragments, according to the Art Newspaper. It is to be reinstalled in the Basilica of St Francis next March.

"The restoration is the last in an extraordinary eight-year conservation project co-ordinated by the regional government of Umbria and the State-run Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome, and financed by the State. The 1997 earthquake wrought extensive damage to the 13th-century basilica, which is decorated with an extraordinary cycle of frescoes by Giotto which tell the story of Saint Francis along the length of the nave. The vault in the upper basilica partially collapsed bringing two diagonally opposite quadrants in the east end and nave of the main vault crashing 22 metres to the floor, where they broke into thousands of pieces. Both contained triangular frescoes measuring about 35 square metres, one was Cimabue's Saint Matthew and the other was decorated with a picture of Saint Jerome by an unknown Roman contemporary of Giotto. Giotto's fresco cycle escaped relatively unharmed, however."

An exhibition of art by the film-maker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, has opened in Munich. The Guardian comments: "In his History of Contemporary Italy, Paul Ginsborg quotes Pasolini as an eloquent witness to the melancholia of modernisation: 'In the early 1960s, with the pollution of the air, and above all in the countryside with the pollution of the water (the blue streams and the transparent sunbeams), the fireflies began to disappear ... After a few years they were not there any more...'

"Pasolini was a radical, then a poet, then a film-maker, and it is his radical moral sense that you see in his drawings. The oil lamps (which feature in many of them) are as lyrical as the images of southern Italy in The Gospel According to St Matthew. They stand for an older, softer light, that is being replaced in the countryside in his lifetime by electricity, swept away, like the fireflies, by the very world that now finds Pier Paolo Pasolini so marketable."

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seems to be creating serious political problems in that country. Members of the parliament ejected his third nominee as oil minister, the most strategically sensitive post in his government, amid a rising chorus of criticism of his confrontational style. Quoted in the Guardian, a political analyst in Tehran said: "We have never before seen this kind of conflict between parliament and the government, even before the revolution."

This story by NewsMax, published on Monday, established that it was Rep. John Murtha, the ex-Marine who has called for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, who persuaded then-President Bill Clinton to withdraw precipitously from Somalia in 1993. Clinton took his advice and ordered the withdrawal, and it was that decision that Osama bin Laden later credited with encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S.

Significant story, you think? Not a single mainstream newspaper, television or radio station has followed up on it. Conservative radio hosts and bloggers have used it, but otherwise it is being ignored.

John Bolton's continuing to scold the UN for failing to show any interest in reform in the wake of the UN Oil-for-Food scandal. The Washington Post quotes him as having said yesterday that "'Americans are a very practical people, and they don't view the UN through theological lenses...They look at it as a competitor in the marketplace for global problem-solving, and if it's successful at solving problems, they'll be inclined to use it. If it's not successful at solving problems, they'll say, 'Are there other institutions?'...that's why making the UN stronger and more effective is a reform priority for us: Because if it's a more agile, effective organization, it is more likely to be a successful competitor as a global problem-solver.'"

Asked to comment, Kofi Annan said, disdainfully, "I'm not the interpreter of Ambassador Bolton."

Half the world away, as he said that, People's Daily published a story quoting a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman as saying that the next UN Secretary-General really ought to come from an Asian country. The Chinese government attaches great importance to the selection of the next UN secretary-general, the spokesman said.

And at least one of us over on this side of the Atlantic was reflecting this morning that the UN, Iraq and so forth notwithstanding, really, the most important thing in the world is getting french fries right. The San Francisco Chronicle says double-frying is the thing. My brother, who was a dab hand with a French fry, used to say that soaking the cut, but uncooked potatoes in water overnight in the fridge was the secret. I think picking the right potato is the way to go, but don't expect me to give that one up...wild horses, and all that.

The vice-president of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Khairat el-Shatar, has published an article in the Guardian in which he says no one need fear their ambitions: "The success of the Muslim Brotherhood should not frighten anybody: we respect the rights of all religious and political groups. So much damage has been inflicted on the country over the past century because of despotism and corruption that it would be impossible to embark on wider political reform and economic development without first repairing the damage to our basic institutions."

I was interested particularly in what he said next - "Free and fair democratic elections are the first step along the path of reform toward a better future for Egypt and the entire region. We simply have no choice today but to reform."

Canada was one of those countries that quickly and wholeheartedly embraced the Kyoto protocol's tough emission cuts, way back when. But, like other countries, it is now finding that Kyoto really was what its critics said it was - a well-meant, but impractical agreement. This Globe and Mail story reports that the Canadian province most affected, Alberta, is in revolt against the federal law passed to give effect to Kyoto cuts. It says it's going to introduce its own regulations to govern greenhouse emissions — and they will take precedence over federal rules.

"The comments open a gaping hole in the credibility of Ottawa's plan for achieving its commitments under the Kyoto protocol, with less than a week before a UN conference on climate change opens in Montreal. Separately, two environmental groups released a report Tuesday saying countries must commit themselves to far deeper emissions cuts than those in the Kyoto treaty if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change."

The Washington Times has published a story this morning that will be fascinating to military buffs. An anonymous US Marine in Iraq has sent to the newspaper an assessment of weapons and equipment used in Iraq and the progress of the campaign. Those who have been in the military won't be surprised that his comments on the kit come first, on the war second. After panning the M-16 and the Beretta pistol, and praising the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, he says this:

"...Morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see s*** like 'Are we losing in Iraq?' on television and the print media.

"For the most part, they are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership. Bottom line, though, and they all say this: There are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren't enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just cannot stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally - with, of course, permanent U.S. bases there."

New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer dropped charges yesterday against an investment banker, thus backing off a second high profile case centered on illegal trading of mutual funds. The New York Sun says his loss in court in the case against Bank of America broker Theodore Sihpol III has made Spitzer gunshy. It quotes one observer as having said 'Wall Street used to just roll over when he would bring charges. He is now going to encourage people to fight a lot more.'"

Mark Steyn says in the Telegraph this morning that whether or not Abu Musab al-Zarqawi blew himself up in Mosul over the weekend (we'll learn the answer to that question this afternoon, when DNA tests have been completed, he's pretty much finished as a viable force in the Middle East.

"The old head-hacker was sufficiently rattled by the critical pans of his Jordanian hotel bombings that he issued the first IRA-style apology in al-Qa'eda's history. 'People of Jordan, we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties,' he said. 'For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets.' Yeah, right. Tell it to the non-Marines. It was perfectly obvious to Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari and his missus what was going on when they strolled into the ballroom of the Radisson Hotel.

"Still, Mr Zarqawi has now announced his intention to decapitate King Abdullah. 'Your star is fading,' he declared. 'You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off.'"

A book being published in France at the end of this week suggests that Maggie Thatcher forced Francois Mitterand to give her the codes to disable Argentina's French-made misssiles during the Falklands war by threatening to launch a nuclear strike against Buenos Aires. The Guardian's storysays Rendez-Vous - the Psychoanalysis of Francois Mitterrand, by Ali Magoudi, who met the late French president up to twice a week in secrecy at his Paris practice from 1982 to 1984, also reveals that Mr Mitterrand believed he would get his 'revenge' by building a tunnel under the Channel which would forever destroy Britain's island status."

The White House last night poured cold water on the idea that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have been one of those killed in that raid on a farmhouse in Mosul over the weekend, but officials on the ground are saying there is a 30% chance that his is one of the bodies. We'll wait and see. This Washington Post piece says "four of the fighters inside died while resisting the assault, and three others blew themselves up with explosives rather than be captured. A woman was also found inside with the words 'suicide bomber' marked on her chest, officials said. Brig. Gen. Said Ahmed Jubouri, a police commander in Mosul, said the force of the suicide blasts destroyed the house."

What is suggested elsewhere on the web this morning is that this raid was unusually well planned, that an unusually high level of resources were used to achieve it and that it was coordinated with other raids in Baghdad which resulted in arrests and, perhaps casualties. Add all that to the ferocity of the resistance in Mosul and the suicides of three of those trapped, and you have a highly significant, and probably highly successful strike at the insurgency.

The takeover of the Daily Telegraph in Britain by the Barclay brothers has been a disaster, built on the back of the disaster of the changes made by Conrad Black, according to Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who wrote for the Telegraph for 50 years. Writing in the Independent, he says: "The decline of the Telegraph group - where I happily worked for over half a century with many of the same colleagues throughout - is no laughing matter. Believe it or not, the Telegraph was once a paper which local bank managers used to carry - along with umbrella and bowler hat - as a symbol of reliability and respectability. Just as decent hotels would always have a copy of the bible in a drawer by the bedside table, so did decent middleclass families have an unopened copy of the Telegraph on the hall table. It was more than a newspaper: it was a talisman, believed to have magic properties which would ward off the evils spirits of modernity. Subscribers - a million and a quarter - were loyal addicts for life - as were the hacks, among their other addictions.

"It was too good to last, like so many other of Britain's favourite institutions - the BBC, the Civil Service, the police, the Church of England, the armed forces and even parliament itself. But none of these other national institutions has been so unnecessarily degraded as the Daily Telegraph. Certainly its finances needed reordering as did some of its more gothic journalistic customs, but the transformation by Conrad Black of what had once been a lovably teddy-bearish kind of conservative newspaper into a tigerish - albeit in the delectable shape of his wife, Barbara Amiel - American neo-Con propaganda sheet was most certainly not written in the stars.

"Has all been lost? Certainly bank managers are now an extinct species. But is the educated, non-ideological, agreeable conservative reader also a thing of the past? It would be comforting to suppose that the new proprietors - anticipating the David Cameron era - might have it in mind to test the waters all over again. But the omens are not good. For some of the columnists appointments made over Martin Newland's head seem to presage the adoption of a tone even more raspingly ideological - without even the mitigating advantage of Barbara Amiel's corporeal grace and beauty."

One of my readers asked over the weekend why I was being so mean to 'that nice Mr Annan'. The Wall Street Journal has the perfect answer to that question this morning - my concern is that "Dennis Kozlowski stole $600 million from Tyco and got eight to 25 years in prison; Kofi Annan supervised more than $12 billion in international theft and will stay in his job."

The context of that remark is an article written about UN attempts to take over governance of the Internet by a former governor of the state of Delaware, who warns that "...the war against Internet freedom is far from over; Mr Annan again demands international discussions of 'Internet governance issues' and says that change has become necessary regarding Icann Internet oversight. So first the UN and the EU will seek Internet content control, and then perhaps the old UN idea of applying an international tax on e-mail messages. When the U.S. attends those IGF meetings, our representative will surely be reminded of the repeated advice Tony Mauro, the Supreme Court correspondent for The American Lawyer, recalls receiving from Europeans at a run-up meeting of the UN Internet group in Budapest three years ago. Do not invoke the First Amendment in Internet discussions, he was told, for it is viewed as a sign of U.S. arrogance. If the U.N. establishment believes free speech is arrogance, we can be confident that U.N. control of the Internet would be calamitous.

I can't remember any issue which has sparked quite as much outrage as this attempt to grab control of the net - it seems perhaps a little muted because it is still tinged by a sense of disbelief. That will fade.

Harold Pinter reacted to the news of having been given the Nobel Prize for Literature by saying "I have no idea why they gave me the award." The New Criterion, in an article headlined "Earth to Stockholm", thinks it can explain: "We can help, Harold! Remember your speech before the House of Commons in October 2002? That was the one in which you suggested that Tony Blair was a 'deluded idiot' and that 'Mr. Bush and his gang are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way'...it was your ostentatious campaigns against George W. Bush and American military action to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq and confound the murderous plans of Islamic terrorists. That's what set hearts in Stockholm beating a-pit-a-pat."

Pinter's literary talent, says New Criterion, is in dispensing "a certain tone - an atmospherics of menace, borrowed largely from Samuel Beckett. Its chief effect, when you first encountered it, was to make semi-articulate dissatisfaction seem like existential profundity...Hence Mark Steyn's unsurpassable definition of the 'Pinteresque': 'a pause followed by a non-sequitur'.

"Another name for 'Pinteresque' is 'theater of the absurd'. It tells us a lot that the phrase was - is it still? - taken as a compliment, an expression of praise, as if the absurd were something to be proud of. Pinter injected a certain senility into language and counted on a credulous public to mistake catalepsy for depth. It paid off. It paid off so well that Pinter's admirers often sound a lot like the master. Witness the Swedish academy's citation, which told us that the seventy-five-year-old playwright 'uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms'. Would anyone care to parse that paean to opacity? We'd suggest starting with the word 'prattle'."

The Chicago Sun-Times was alone, early this morning, in reporting this raid on a farmhouse near Mosul this morning. Eight insurgents were killed. DEBKAfile suggests we should expect to hear more about the operation.

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have been one of those killed in this raid. "US forces sealed off a house in the northern city of Mosul where eight suspected al-Qaida members died in a gunfight - some by their own hand to avoid capture. A US official said Sunday that efforts were under way to determine if terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was among the dead."

The British, according to the Observer, are waking up to the value of graphic novels. The Royal Literary Society is devoting the cover of the 2006 issue of its magazine to the works of two graphic novelists - Rosy Simmonds and Raymond Briggs, who were both made fellows of the society this year. The paper says the pair "are designing a cover for the journal together, which will trumpet the arrival of graphic novels as a respected literary form."

It's a little piece of the UN Oil-for-Food scandal that Kofi Annan wants to go away - what happened to that Mercedes that his son bought in his name. But as Claudia Rosett writes in the National Review, reporters covering the UN are trying hard not to let it die: "The tale of Kojo's alleged Mercedes deal turned up this September in Paul Volcker's main report on Oil-for-Food, as a sidelight section titled 'Kojo Annan's Purchase of a Car in the Name of the Secretary-General'. Kojo's lawyers in a response included in the report dismissed the car caper as a youthful 'indiscretion', - 'if indeed it is one' - and perhaps they have a point. What young man could resist acquiring a $45,000 Mercedes, especially if the price could be knocked down to $39,000 by buying the car at a UN diplomatic discount in the name of an allegedly unwitting UN secretary-general. And what young man shipping that same Mercedes to Ghana could resist trying to save $14,000 in Ghanaian import duties by asking the local UN resident representative to claim a tariff exemption on the car in the name of the secretary general?

"The real issue is not Kojo Annan per se, but Kofi Annan's response - or complete lack of it - now that Volcker's report has officially informed him that a Mercedes appears to have been bought and shipped in his name, involving alleged misuse by the UN itself of the secretary-general's privileges. By Volcker's account, 'Kojo Annan saved $14,013 because of the false attestation that the car was for the personal use of the Secretary-General.' By comparison, in a UN financial report dated September 21, 2000, an instance of false customs declarations prepared by a UN country office was subject to UN investigation under the heading: 'Cases of fraud or presumptive fraud.'"

Victor Davis Hansen is scornful of those who support the emerging Democratic position that President Bush lied to get support for his invasion of Iraq. In the National Review, he writes: "To argue recently, as Howard Dean has, that the president somehow had even more intelligence data or additional information beyond what was given to the Senate Intelligence Committee can make the opposite argument from what was intended- the dangers seemed even greater the more files one read attesting to Saddam's past history, clear intent, formidable financial resources, and fury at the United States. If the Dean notion is that the president had mysterious auxiliary information, then the case was probably even stronger for war, since no one has yet produced any stealth document that (a) warned there was no WMDs, and (b) was knowingly withheld from the Congress.

"A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: 'For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?' Even more importantly, the U.S. Senate voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein for 22 reasons other than just his possession of dangerous weapons. We seem to have forgotten that entirely."