Black churches, which are known here in Bermuda, as in the United States, as bastions of Old Testament views of such things as homosexuality and capital punishment, are apparently on the verge of changing their ways. The Los Angeles Times reports that yesterday, "more than 100 pastors and theologians from around the country filled Atlanta's First Iconium Baptist Church for a summit on homophobia in black churches...

"As the national debate continues over whether same-sex marriage should be legalized or constitutionally banned, the Black Church Summit organizers said their goal was to encourage greater understanding. 'It's time,' said Sylvia Rhue, religious affairs and constituency development director for the National Black Justice Coalition, the gay rights group that organized the summit. 'HIV and AIDS is a major concern in the black community, and churches can't deal with it if they can't deal with human sexuality.'"

The Times story quotes that peripatetic clown Al Sharpton as saying the whole thing's about black churches breaking the backs of people on the right wing, who are trying to use homosexuality as a political weapon. Anyone who understands what on earth he's on about is invited to let the rest of us in on it.

Paul Motian's going to be playing at the Village Vanguard next week. If you're a jazz fan, that's worth a trip from the other side of the world, because not only is Motian one of the best drummers in the world, but you're unlikely to see him, these days, anywhere but in New York. The New York Times explains: "The drummer Paul Motian doesn't get on airplanes anymore. Once, in the mid-90's, he took a three-week tour with 35 flights. By 2003 he was booking himself with three different bands all over Europe and Japan. He decided he was sick of traveling.

"It's not just long distances. 'I don't even go to New Jersey or Brooklyn anymore, man,' he said defiantly one recent rainy midday, looking west toward the Hudson River from the window of his Central Park West apartment. He is 74, and has lived in the same spot for nearly 37 years, most of that time alone...

"He works mostly with three of his own groups: his trio with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, which has grown steadily more influential over 21 years; Trio 2000 + 1, with the bassist Larry Grenadier and the saxophonist Chris Potter, the plus-one being the enigmatic Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi (or lately, the singer Rebecca Martin); and the group formerly known as the Electric Bebop Band, now called the Paul Motian Band, with the odd structure of three guitarists, two tenor saxophonists, bass and drums. That is the group that will play next week at the Vanguard; simultaneously, it will be releasing a new album, Garden of Eden, on ECM."

It's a long way off, the Velazquez exhibition at the National Gallery in London. It doesn't begin until October 18, but already Jonathan Jones of the Guardian is calling it the best art exbition of the year.

"Velazquez is the Shakespeare of painters - an artist who portrayed the world around him so richly and truly that you can never exhaust him or pin him down to a single 'message' or theory. Like Shakespeare, too, he effaced himself: you can't even decide if Velazquez was a loyal Christian court artist or a sly ironist who saw through the whole charade. I believe he is both. And this complexity is what makes him the Old Master who exerts the greatest fascination for our complicated world."

A variety of interpretations of Osama bin Laden's latest communique (transcript by courtesy of the NYT) from his headquarters in the field, somewhere, have appeared in the media today. The New York Sun endorses any reply to him that captures the spirit of Brigadier Gen. Anthony McAuliffe's one-word response to the Nazis who asked him to surrender in December, 1944 - "Nuts!"

The Sun gets it right, I think, when it says: "The cave dwelling terrorist's commentary on American politics could have been written by Howard Dean. He (bin Laden) notes President Bush's declining poll numbers and takes solace because it proves 'an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.' That'll go down just great with the Democrats who have called for timelines and withdrawal while arguing there is no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

That surely, is what bin Laden is doing, (and has been doing for many months, now), using those in the US who oppose the Bush administration's policies as a potent weapon in his own arsenal.

But you have to wonder how he lost his little video camera, don't you?

Another study on the effects of cellphones in increasing the risk of brain cancer among users - this one more extensive than the rest - has demonstrated there is no such effect. London's Times newspaper reports that: "Although it is impossible to say that there is no risk at all, the authors say that the data they have gathered so far provide no evidence of one. Fears about mobile phones have not discouraged the public from buying and using them, but have encouraged a wave of research and reports from advisory bodies. Little good scientific evidence exists to show that they are a threat."

The Guardian, in quite a detailed and well-written report, suggests that our understanding of the implications of biometrics, and other high-tech methods to collect personal information, so lags behind our ability to use them that the techniques pose major dangers. "Late last year, the US state department announced its next generation of passports would contain a thin metal sheet, a little like a layer of tinfoil. To privacy advocates and lobbyists in the US, the seemingly innocuous move was an official acknowledgement of their worst fears...

"One of the greatest challenges to those in the field is working out how many databases there are and how they relate to each other. Stewart Room is an information lawyer, law lecturer and the chair of National Association of Data Protection Officers (NADPO), a professional body spanning the public and private sectors. He admitted at his organisation's annual conference in November that this was something not even he knew.

"'It is shrouded in ambiguity,' he said. 'I'm regarded as an expert in this field and I can't tell you how many databases exist, what firewalls are in place and what checks and balances. I've looked everywhere to find the rules and I can't find them. They are not there. We are doing all of this but no one is in control. Information leeches out."

Even Ted Kennedy, in a speech to the Center for American Progress yesterday, acknowledged that the Alito hearings have shown that that process is no longer capable of providing information about the candidates in a free and honest exchange of ideas. (He said that was because the nominees were coached to say as little as possible, but said nothing about his contribution to the excesses that caused that response.) Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan says Mr Kennedy and his fellow inquisitors don't realise the full extent of the damage they've done. A second development, the contemporaneous decentralisation of media communication, has had a major effect: "I don't think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, 'He's like me,' and the charges they made - You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy - went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It's over.

"Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry. The other day, Dana Milbank, an important reporter for the Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the capital, wrote a piece deriding Judge Alito. Once such a piece would have been important. Men in the White House would have fretted over its implications. But within hours of filing, Mr. Milbank found his thinking analyzed and dismissed on the Internet; National Review Online called him a 'policy bimbo.'

"Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his 'Robert Bork's America' speech unanswered? No."

FLASH - Bloomberg is reporting that Osama bin Laden is suing for peace. This is, as Drudge would say, developing.

Counter-terrorism expert Dan Darling of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Policing Terrorism says that one of the al Qaeda leaders killed in the missile strike at Damadola was the man who moved the possibility of radical Islamists using unconventional weapons "out of the theoretical and into the practical". Writing in the Weekly Standard, Darling says Abu Khabab al-Masri was the man the leaders of al Qaeda turned to when, in the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan, they decided to establish an unconventional weapons program codenamed al Zabadi ('curdled milk').

"The unit was to be headed by Khabab; a large sum amounting to several thousand dollars was approved as its start-up budget. As of May 26, 1999, another computer file noted that Khabab had made 'significant progress' with his work, a comment made all the more ominous by the discovery of al Qaeda videotapes aired on CNN in 2002, which showed Khabab and several assistants killing three dogs in crude chemical weapons experiments using what is believed to have been hydrogen cyanide, the same agent used by the in gas chambers in Nazi death camps.

"How far Khabab got with al Zabadi before the war in Afghanistan is unknown, but according to the Robb-Silberman commission on weapons of mass destruction, US intelligence had assessed prior to the invasion that al Qaeda 'had small quantities of toxic chemicals and pesticides, and had produced small amounts of World War I-era agents such as hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene...Training manuals...indicated that group members were familiar with the production and deployment of common chemical agents' and that unconfirmed reports 'indicated that al-Qa'ida operatives had sought to acquire more modern and sophisticated chemical agents.'"

A linguist from China (unnamed in the People's Daily story) says the suffix 'ese', when applied to a people, is derogatory and should be banned. That would make him Chinian, not Chinese, if you wish to be polite.

"Even these two dictionaries published in modern times when racism is illegal reveal that, clearly, '-ese' here relates to derogation and shows a low opinion of people, to say nothing of centuries ago when the ancient Europeans saw themselves as the centre of the world, and called the countries near the eastern Mediterranean sea 'Near East', the Asian countries west of India 'Middle East', the Asian countries east of India 'Far East' and North America the 'New World'."

He also says we Europeans called the people of India Indians, not Indiese, because we saw Indians as our relatives. That's not the way I heard the story. However, it is nice to be the inscrutable ones, for a change.

I wasn't reading a lot of newspapers 63 years ago, but I do remember reading, some years after that, a wonderfully lurid Life magazine spread on the sensational murder (he was bludgeoned and covered with feathers) of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas during the war. In those days, people thought Count Alfred de Marigny (they'd have called him a lounge lizard, in those days) done the dreadful deed, and got away with not only that, but with Sir Harry's daughter and his fortune as well. They were wrong, apparently. Documents recently released in Britain suggest that Sir Harry's lawyer, a man named Walter Foskett, was the culprit. The documents also cast rather an unflattering light on the part played by the Duke of Windsor, who was Governor of the Bahamas at the time. The Independent has the story.

Even the Pope thinks Design Theory as science is a bunch of crap, according to the New York Times.

Robert Pollock, a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, got to Iraq some time before Paul Bremer did, and saw rather a different country than the one Bremer describes in his new book, My Year in Iraq. In a Journal opinion piece, he says "...On the political front, Mr. Bremer stumbled badly. In My Year in Iraq, he claims that he was under persistent pressure from some Pentagon figures, who indulged a 'reckless fantasy' that Iraqi sovereignty could be rapidly returned to the 'unrepresentative' group of 'exiles' who had formed the core of the anti-Saddam opposition. This argument is something of a straw man. The issue wasn't so much one of sovereignty as one of putting an Iraqi face on the occupation. And Mr. Bremer could easily have done so by giving the Iraqis more governing responsibility and a more prominent place in the spotlight - all while reserving the right for the US to intervene in extremis. Instead, he kept the spotlight on himself. Even as late as December 2003, seven months after his arrival, Mr. Bremer was still the 'we' who famously announced "we got him" when Saddam was captured. Such missteps badly delayed the development of Iraqi self-government.

"A senior American military commander once described Mr. Bremer to me as something of a 'control freak'. The urge for control is on full display in My Year in Iraq. Mr. Bremer fulminates over inconsequential 'leaks' and complains when free Iraqis dare to express opinions at odds with his own. Ahmed Chalabi is alleged to be 'incorrigible' for contending that the Iraqi political process should move more quickly than Mr. Bremer envisions. Indeed, Mr. Bremer's unhappiness with challenges to his authority leads him to accuse two of the most capable and secular-minded leaders in Iraq - Mr. Chalabi and Jalal Talabani (the less "tribal" of the two most prominent Kurds) - of 'intriguing' against him.

"Nor is Mr. Bremer shy about denigrating, as he has before, the rest of the 25 Iraqis who emerged as members of the US-appointed Governing Council in the summer of 2003. Echoing what he and his spokesman, Dan Senor, frequently told reporters at the time, Mr. Bremer accuses the council members of 'lax work habits', calling them so incompetent or indecisive that they (yes, he really writes this) 'couldn't organize a parade', let alone run the country."

This Slate Article by Christopher Hitchens is a little old, but my friend Patrick points out that it has great significance.

It's a surprise that Clive James has a web page, but perhaps not a surprise that it should be an unusual web page. The New York Sun explains: "Some writers have blogs. The Australian critic, poet, novelist, television personality, and all-around man of letters, Clive James, is more ambitious than that. And though still unsure of how precisely to characterize his Web site, CliveJames.com, he thinks of it as a cross between a space station, college campus, and online pyramid that will preserve much of his prose, poetry, conversation, humor and, eventually, television programs for as long as forever is. Gloriously erudite and various, it is becoming more erudite and various if not by the minute, then by the season.

"Technically, CliveJames.com is a multimedia Web site, divided into four sections: text, audio, gallery, and video. According to Mr. James, it is the first such Web site to be created by any writer in the world. Besides the ever-increasing corpus of writings by Mr. James himself, it includes contributions from many of his fellow writers and friends. As of now a partial list would include Martin Amis, Peter Porter, Cate Blanchett, P.J. O'Rourke, Piers Paul Read, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Miller, and Ahdaf Soueif. All can be heard (and seen) on the site, chatting away as if in talk-show paradise. If you want to enter conversational heaven, it is now officially just a click away."

MEMRI - the Middle East Media Research Institute - says a programme of counselling terrorist prisoners in Saudi jails to stop their wicked ways is having success. "For the past two years, the Saudi Interior Ministry has been implementing a counseling program for security prisoners in the Saudi jails, intended to encourage prisoners to renounce their extremist beliefs. Up until six months ago, the existence of the counseling project was kept a secret so that 'it would bear fruit far from the [eye] of the media.'

"According to the head of the counseling committee, Dr. Saud Al-Musaybih, the committee 'includes more than 100 ulema and fuqaha and some 30 psychiatrists and psychologists, who are divided among the various districts in the kingdom.' He also said that, in addition to counseling sessions with the prisoners, the committee also holds religion classes, with '20-25 participants in each class who study concepts such as al-walaa wal barraa, takfir, and [other] issues that concern them.'

"Al-Musaybih added that, at first, 'a large percentage [of the prisoners] refused to meet with the fuqaha, [but in time] they began to ask for meetings on their own initiative...' Today, 'the committees are achieving a high rate of compliance amongst the prisoners.'"

Nicole Gelinas of New York's City Journal pulls a concealed truth out into the open: "The national media's fixation on Katrina evacuees' skin color, and the same media's easy amnesia about the real violence that plagued New Orleans immediately after the storm, obscured a burgeoning crisis that still demands sustained attention: Katrina's floods dispersed throughout the unprepared South the uniquely vicious New Orleans underclass culture of drugs, guns, and violent death.

"This is good news for New Orleans (for now, anyway): the few citizens who have repopulated the city thus far are enjoying the newfound ability to walk around their streets without the once-pervasive fear of catching the glint of a gun. But it's bad news for cities like Houston, which inevitably must struggle with the overspill of New Orleans's pre-Katrina plague of violence."

One of the great treats of my life is visiting the Strand bookshop whenever I go to New York. There is such an extraordinary variety of remaindered titles on sale that it is almost not possible to leave without at least one book in the absence of which you can no longer live. Last time I was there, I found two - a paperback edition of Hobson-Jobson, The Anglo Indian Dictionary, and a new edition of another gem, Leo Rosten's Yiddish dictionary (kind of), now called The New Joys of Yiddish. It is this book which I presume sparked this article in the Independent this morning, from which I offer two little excerpts: "In the glory days of Hollywood, a little Yiddish was the passport - 'Hey! Bubbeleh!' - to insiderdom. But the passport was phoney. The Hollywood Jews used little Yiddish, being more anxious to assimilate. The goyim - the shiksehs and shaygets with their cleft chins, their neat noses, their blond hair, their terrible, icy emotional control - who larded their speech with schlemazls and babkes were waving the flag of acceptance, just as, now, there are fools who use black street-slang and claim not to, my dear, notice the colour of whoever they are talking to."

"...When words fail - as they do even in Yiddish - there is the nuclear option. Or three nuclear options: oy, ai and gevalt. It is not easy. The road to becoming an accomplished oyster is hard. But once you understand the difference between oy and oy-oy-oy; between oy, gevalt and GEVALT and ai-ai-ai-geVALT, you will never again find your position inexpressible."

This is a pretty bizarre story about what's kosher in a Muslim's sex life and what's not. It's in the Guardian - read it and you'll learn just how Dorothy felt when that tornado blew her little ass out of Kansas.

A further development in the bid by the exiled Syrian politician, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, to force the ouster of president Bashar al-Assad. Aljazeera reports that "Michel Aoun, the Lebanese Christian leader, has launched a scathing attack on Syria's exiled former vice-president, accusing him of bearing responsibility for a string of assassinations. On Saturday, Aoun called on Abdel-Halim Khaddam, an ex-Baath Party stalwart turned whistleblower who last month implicated Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, in the murder of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, to publicly explain the killings.

"Aoun's attack came on the same day Khaddam said he was forming a government in exile and predicted that al-Assad would be forced from power this year."

This is the second story out of Trinidad and Tobago in the last few days that suggests the country is cracking down on sleazy politics. Caribbean Net News says Trinidad's current opposition leader is going to go on trial for breaching the country's Integrity in Public Life Act while he was Prime Minister of the country.

Panday has been charged with failing to declare his finances to the Trinidad Integrity Commission, relating to a London bank account. The offences relate to failure to declare assets for period April 9, 1999, March 15-22, 2001, and December 19-24, 1999. He is said to have made false declaration about his income and assets for 1997, 1998 and 1999.

This is particularly interesting to us in Bermuda because we have a government which doesn't seem to recognise the concept that anything short of a criminal offence can be a breach of integrity. It has brushed aside requests that it should investigate allegations, for example, that a Cabinet Minister was involved in a pay-for-play scheme that would have been illegal under US law. The idea that someone in the government here might be prosecuted for failing to honestly disclose his or her personal finances is about as far-fetched to us as landing a Bermudian on the moon.

Matthew Bogdanos is the US Marine Corps Reserve Colonel who was chosen to lead an investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum during the invasion of Iraq. His calm, efficient manner and his single-minded dedication to getting the job done tamed the chaos that surrounded the event and, eventually, led to the recovery of more than 5,000 artefacts. Col Bogdanos is now returning to his civilian work as assistant district attorney in Manhattan, a position he has held since 1988. According to The Art Newspaper, Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau intends to use him to establish the city's first task force "dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking."

Bogdanos wrote, in a December New York Times article: "The patina of gentility we associate with the world of antiquities has always rested atop a solid core of criminal activity [and] we intend to expose those who engage in the illegal trade for what they are: criminals." There's talk of a movie.

It's Martin Luther King's birthday, as just about every media outlet in the US is noting today. Paul Greenberg has a thoughtful piece in the Washington Times, regretting that King is becoming "only another Great Man, not a living presence, an incantation rather than an influence...Dr. King's legacy lies untended, fallow, sprouting weeds. His memory becomes parochialized, largely limited to one community, much like Robert E. Lee's. Year by year, like Lee, he becomes more and more their hero, not ours. What a sad fate for a leader who set out to unite, not divide, and whose strength was tied up in his absolute faith that he had an ally in the heart - and soul - of his adversaries. Yet we begin to think of Martin Luther King not as a prophet but as an American social reformer of the mid-20th century, which is like thinking of Gandhi as an Indian nationalist."

In the New Yorker, there is a long review of the third and final volume of At Canaan's Edge, the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental chronicle, America in the King Years, which provides some of the analysis that Greenberg thinks figures like King need in order to become three-dimensional heroes.

At least, with Martin Luther King, any frustration that exists is simply with the slow pace of his translation to three-dimensional hero. Coincidentally, there's a sad piece in the Washington Post this morning about Marion Barry's struggle with his various addictions. He's no Martin Luther King, yet the human need for heroes is so great that for a time, he was treated as if he were. I found myself thinking, as I read the story, that in some fundamental way, the circumstances of Marion Barry's difficult life are now an irrelevance. The point of the story is really the remarkable, frightening way the Washington community clung on to the idea of Marion Barry. It wasn't so much that they were blind to the reality of Marion Barry, but that they used that reality as a matador would use a cape - flourishing it at the concept of standards and respectability in public life as if it were a bull they meant, at some time, to kill. Scary.

Chinese researchers have found a new sub-species of panda, the Qunling. People's Daily says the Qunling's got a round head like a cat, while the Sichuan panda has a longer head, like...well, like a bear's.

"The research team was led by professor Fang Shengguo from Zhejiang University and also a member of the expert committee in panda protection and management under the Administration of National Forestry. The team has studied and compared the two kinds of pandas from Sichuan and Qinling areas in their genes and the differences in their body forms. As a marked achievement of the national 973 project, the research has passed the appraisal by experts from the Ministry of Science and Technology and won high commend."

As the US space probe, Stardust, landed in Utah this morning, SpaceDaily was publishing word of the discovery of an X-ray tunnel big enough to hold the Milky Way: "Using the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the multi-million degree gas in the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, the scientists discovered an unusual X-ray tunnel large enough to fit the entire Milky Way galaxy inside. The cluster, located at a distance of roughly one billion light years, contains a tunnel in the hot gas, which measures nearly 110 thousand light years by 36 thousand light years in size. The tunnel, which appears to originate near the core of the central giant galaxy in the cluster, may be more than 200 million years old."

Stories like this one in Israel's Haaretz are appearing all over the Middle East this morning: "A former Syrian vice president said he is forming a government-in-exile, forecasting in remarks released yesterday that the rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad will collapse by the end of the year. Abdul-Halim Khaddam, who lives in Paris, also renewed his charge that Assad must have ordered the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

"Asked in an interview with the Spiegel news magazine if he was forming a government-in-exile, Khaddam said: 'That is correct.' He said he was willing to cooperate with all political forces in Syria, from Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood to disenchanted members of the ruling Baath Party. Assad, he said, was losing support within Syria.

"'His fall has begun. I don't believe his regime will survive this year. The internal pressure and the international pressure through the Hariri investigation are growing with each week,' Khaddam said in the interview, which was released ahead of its publication tomorrow."

In 1925, the left-wing writer Guo Moro published a short story called Marx Enters the Confucian Temple, in an effort to reassure the Chinese people that communism was not as alien as it seemed. The story describes a somewhat comical encounter between Confucius and Karl Marx, in which the two men discuss whether their individual ideas of the good life are compatible. In the Wilson Quarterly, an associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville, Shiping Hua, suggests that the object was to show that the Confucian concept of Datong, or the Grand Harmony, would not be threatened by communist precepts. In his story, Guo cited a much-quoted Confucian description of datong:

"'When the Grand Harmony was pursued, a public and common spirit ruled all under the sky. They chose men of talent and ability, whose words were sincere, and they cultivated harmony. Men did not love only their own parents, or nurture only their own children. The elderly were cared for till the end of their life...Provisions were made for widows, orphans, childless men, and the disabled...Possessions were used, but not hoarded for selfish reasons. Work was encouraged, but not for selfish advantage. In this way, selfish schemings were repressed. Robbers, thieves, rebels and traitors had no place, and hence the outer doors remained open, and were not shut. That was what we called the Grand Harmony.'

"Eighty tumultuous years after Guo wrote - after a world war, civil war, and several gigantic utopian attempts to transform Chinese society - the communist dream is all but dead in China, but the 2,500-year-old idea of datong is very much alive. Datong plays a role in China much like that of freedom in American society: It is a lodestar of Chinese attitudes and thinking - and is also more prescriptive and all-encompassing than the American idea of liberty. This ideal of a prosperous and harmonious political and social order still defines the future imagined by many in China's large and influential intellectual class."