BANGKOK,July 22 (Reuters) -
Separatist militants in Thailand's Muslim deep south have killed three Thais, including two security officers, in a spate of violence days after an unknown rebel group announced a "ceasefire".
One soldier was killed and five wounded on Tuesday when their patrol was ambushed in the southern province of Narathiwat, one of three provinces where a four-year-old insurgency has killed more than 3,000 people.
Gunmen fired on the 12-man patrol after setting off a large roadside bomb, police said.
The near daily gun and bomb attacks have not stopped since the Thailand United Southern Underground, which claimed to represent 11 insurgent groups, announced a "ceasefire" last week.

Neither of them is in the finest of voice but this particular pairing has to be listened to – it’s probably the only time that Diva Tebaldi displayed true emotion! Franco Corelli is simply, well, Franco, to be frank.

On this day, July 22, in the year 1456, the two-week Siege of Belgrade ended with a rout of the Islamic invaders. After the Ottomans were unsuccessful in their full-scale assault on Belgrade the previous day, some of the Hungarian peasants left the fortifications against the orders of the Hungarian military leaders, Cardinal Giovanni da Capistrano and General János Hunyadi, to harass the Turks. Christian soldiers, seeing that the Turkish cavalry were unable to repel the peasants, also disobeyed orders and began streaming from the fort to join the fray. In the chaos, Capistrano and Hunyadi instinctively took advantage of the situation and ordered an all-out attack on the Turkish position.

This article appeared in The Daily Mail, which is a prominent English language daily newspaper published in Islamabad (Capital of Pakistan). This is a follow up to this of mine posted on the 13:vii:2008 here at NER.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt881jdUIbU

From The Telegraph
A college pupil has been banned from taking AS-level courses in chemistry and biology after a judge ruled he may use the knowledge for terrorist purposes.
Mr Justice Silber, sitting at London's High Court, ruled the Iraqi national, known as AE for legal reasons, had taken part in terrorist activities and knowledge from such courses could be used to make explosives.
The judge dismissed AE's appeal against Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's decision last September refusing to permit him to undertake the AS-level courses in the 2008-9 academic year at a regional college. He had acted on the basis that the Home Secretary had reasonable grounds to believe AE had received terrorist training and had taken part in terrorist activities.
Mr Justice Silber said: "The use by a terrorist of the practical experience learnt on those courses to produce explosives or pathogens could lead to a substantial loss of lives. It requires relatively small amounts of either to cause loss of life and damage to property. It will be recollected that the bombs which caused so much loss of life on 7 July 2005 were created by individuals in their own homes. There is no suggestion that AE was involved with those events but they show how much damage can be caused by such bombs by people who have the expertise and confidence to produce dangerous items."
AE is a well-known figure in the Iraqi Kurdish community and since arriving in the UK, there were reasonable grounds for believing that he was involved in providing support for the Jihadist insurgency in Iraq and in radicalising individuals in the UK.
The judge's ruling follows an internet audio statement in 2006 from Abu Ayyub al-Masri . . the leader of al-Qa'eda in Iraq - which called on specialists with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. . . the Mujahidin in Iraq was in "dire need" of chemists and physicists, as well as electronics experts and nuclear scientists to join the jihad (the holy war) against the West.

Yes, it's as bad as we thought. It was published in the NY Post this morning.

...As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields (such as Afghanistan) without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I've said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I've also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground - not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Sen. Obama.

Sen. Obama has said that he'd consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his "plan for Iraq." Perhaps that's because he doesn't want to hear what they have to say.

During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I've heard many times from our troops what Major Gen. Jeffrey Hammond (commander of Coalition forces in Baghdad) recently said: Leaving based on a timetable would be "very dangerous."

The danger is that extremists supported by al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we've had too few troops in Iraq.

Sen. Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. Indeed, he's emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the "Mission Accomplished" banner prematurely.

I'm dismayed that he never talks about winning the war - only of ending it. But if we don't win the war, our enemies will - and a triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us.

As president, I won't let that happen. Instead, I'll continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

For once I have to agree with The Times. Without a definition of victory, there is no clear strategy, just endlessly chasing  the unattainable goal of making Muslim states our "democratic allies."  What the Times missed is that both candidates are chasing this illusive goal. Obama is more focused on Afghanistan and McCain on Iraq, but there is no overall strategy for dealing with Islam from either candidate. Shifting troops from one Islamic morass to another is no more prescription for victory than staying where we are.

From The Times
A Palestinian bulldozer driver who went on the rampage in Jerusalem killing one person and injuring at least 11 including two children, was shot dead before he could complete his attack.
In what appears to have been a repeat of events earlier this month in the city, the driver rammed into three cars on the main street in Jerusalem before an Israeli civilian opened fire on him.
The JCB driver, who is said to be a construction worker, carried out his attack in the exclusive area of Jerusalem crushing one car to half its size and completely overturning another.
The attack took place outside the King Soloman hotel and a short distance away from the hotel where Gordon Brown was staying last night before he flew out of the city this morning.
The scale of devastation in the previous bulldozer attack was averted by the actions of a civilian and the police.
A police spokesman said: “The bulldozer driver left a construction site, and hit two cars, a civilian who saw what was happening, shot him. The bulldozer continued on its way. A border police patrol ...continued to shoot and the terrorist was killed. Another person was wounded.” 
Courtesy of Rebecca I see that The Jerusalem Post reports in more detail.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police sealed off possible escape routes into east Jerusalem and were searching for two suspects who fled the scene.
The attack took place in a busy part of downtown Jerusalem, several hundred meters from the luxury hotel where US presidential candidate Barack Obama is supposed to stay Tuesday night as he kicks off a visit to Israel.
The bus that was hit, No. 13, belonged to the same line of the bus that was overturned in the previous attack.
"I was driving on the main road when the (construction vehicle) hit me in the rear, on the right hand side," the driver of the bus, who was not identified, told Channel 10 TV. "After I passed him he turned round, made a U-turn and rammed the windows twice with the shovel. The third time he aimed for my head, he came up to my window and I swerved to the right, otherwise I would have gone to meet my maker," he said.
Witness Moshe Shimshi said the driver, who was wearing a large, white skullcap commonly worn by religious Muslims, slammed into the side of the bus, then sped away and went for a car. "He didn't yell anything, he just kept ramming into cars," Shimshi said.  The driver then headed for cars waiting at a red light "and rammed into them with all his might," he added.
Channel 10 TV said a mother and her baby were wounded. Israeli rescue services said they had evacuated one person whose leg was partially severed; Israel media said he was in the car that was overturned.

Who could not be for a "realistic assessment" on the ground? And the "ground" for which such a "realistic assessment" is required is the entire earth, the entire giddy globe, where everywhere Muslims are on the march, and they can be on the march simply by sitting at home, in Bradford or Marseille, in London or Paris, and procreate, and live off the Infidel dole, and make demands for this and for that change to social arrangements, to legal and political institutions, to everything that makes the local  Infidels what they are-- and it hardly matters if those demands are crazed, hardly matters if, for now, those demands are turned down -- because simply by increasing their numbers, through overbreeding and campaigns of Da'wa directed at the psychically and economically marginal, the islamization of Western Europe proceeds, inexorably.

It is that "ground" too -- the "ground" of Western Europe -- that requires a "realistic assessment" by the likes of Senator McCain and Senator Obama, each lacking the understanding necessary.

In McCain's case, as a not-very-imaginative military man, he has accepted the idea that the war on what he, what even Bush, have described as an "ideology" must proceed through boots-on-the-ground warfare, though they fail to see that the side they are helping, or sides, for there are seven or eight or ten such discrete sides in Iraq, and counting, are all Muslim and that if Iraq is helped to stay together, stable and prosperous, this does nothing to weaken the Camp of Islam. McCain shows no signs of understanding what Jihad is, rightly defined, (as the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then dominance, of Islam),  nor of understanding, or even recognizing,  the instruments of Jihad other than "terror" (in this respect he is a Bush-Administration loyalist). He certainly is far from grasping a strategy that husbands rather than squanders resources, that recognizes and then exploits the pre-existing fissures -- sectarian, ethnic, economic -- within the Camp of Islam, and that wishes the Muslim world not well but ill, or rather, wishes it truly well, in that if Infidels, and then Muslims, come to see the connection between the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failings of Muslim polities and peoples, and Islam itself, then there may be an Ataturk-like movement, for some, to constrain Islam, and for others, especially among non-Arab Muslims who have not been allowed to share in the Arab oil wealth,  and who may come to recognize that Islam is, and what's more always has been, a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

This is beyond McCain.

Oh, it's beyond Obama too -- his Islam, or his knowledge of Islam, is colored by his oneiric fantasies of his father, the Father He Never Knew, but who was nominally a Muslim, and his childhood memories -- don't discount the enormous power of childhood memories -- of a completely anomalous brand of Islam, the kind exhibited in comparatively tolerant Indonesia, at a time before the Return to Islam, and in a setting -- a school where Muslim parents agreed to send their children along with Christian children -- that was as atypical as, say, the American school in Kuwait City, or the high school run by Boston College Jesuits in the old days, Baghdad College.

Both candidates so far have shown themselves to be completely inadequate to the task at hand. But McCain may be salvageable-- just.

Muslims continue their self-segregation with yet another enterprise based on an already existing infidel model.

PE: A Temecula group has launched a Muslim version of YouTube.

MuslimChannels.tv aims to educate non-Muslims about Islam and provide an Internet site for Muslims to view videos without worrying about anti-Islamic tirades or sexually explicit content, said Tarek Ayoub, a volunteer for the site and for the site's nonprofit founder, Islam The Answer Corp.

"It's a way for Muslim users to feel safe," Ayoub said.

The site also includes non-religious programming, such as comedy, travel, sports and cultural videos, along with documentaries containing trenchant political commentary on subjects such as the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. The volunteer-run site will not accept advertising or donations, to avoid compromising its mission, Ayoub said.

Larry Slusser, secretary of the Southwest Riverside County Interfaith Council and a Mormon, praised the idea behind the site.

"I think it's great anytime someone can dispel misconceptions and promote understanding of and appreciation for a faith," said Slusser, who has not visited the site. "As a Latter-day Saint, I know many people have misperceptions about my faith. There's enough hatred in the world. We need more understanding of our differences."

Mr. Slusser makes the assumption that criticism implies a lack of understanding and furthermore that Muslims' shrinking from criticism and subsequent self-segregation is an appropriate response, and that this type of behavior will promote "understanding of our differences." It's hard to see how.

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said MuslimChannels.tv's nonreligious videos show how Muslims are culturally and ethnically diverse and cannot be defined solely by their religion.

The diversity smokescreen is always handy to divert attention from the common denominator that causes disfunction in Islamic countries - Islam.

Ayoub said the site was founded in part because he and other Muslims grew weary of seeing viciously anti-Muslim comments that YouTube users posted as reactions to Islamic-oriented videos. Some YouTube users e-mailed Muslim video-posters and threatened them with violence -- in some cases with warnings such as "We know your address" -- or made sexually demeaning comments toward Muslim women, Ayoub said.

Ayoub said he and others have met with FBI agents about the threats. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the agency does not typically confirm or deny investigations. Ayoub said YouTube did not respond to repeated phone calls and e-mails about the anti-Muslim comments or to allegations that the company suspended the accounts of some people who had posted videos critical of Israel.

In an e-mailed statement, YouTube said it does not comment on individual videos. The company said it relies on users to flag content that violates YouTube's prohibition on hate speech, defined as speech that demeans people based upon their religion, race, ethnic origin, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity. YouTube staff reviews flagged material and usually removes it within minutes if it is deemed hate speech, the statement said.

Although Islam the Answer founded MuslimChannels.tv in part as an alternative to sites such as YouTube, volunteers with the group are also forming a team to better respond to the anti-Muslim comments on YouTube and other sites, said Cait Ramshaw, a Florida volunteer for MuslimChannels.tv and a sister site, MuslimBridges.org.

Muslims need to ensure that misrepresentations of Islam do not go unanswered, and that the responses are reasoned and factual rather than angry, said Ramshaw, who developed "Golden Rules for Muslim Bloggers."...

Perhaps Ms. Ramshaw would like to counsel some of the Muslim would be posters to this site and explain how not to write threatening and misspelled letters.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Oil prices will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years if the United States fails to reduce its dependence on foreign imports, billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens told U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday.

The United States imports nearly 70 percent of its oil and Pickens said the world's top petroleum-consuming nation would import 80 percent in a decade if it does not aggressively tap its own natural gas and renewable resources.

"If we continue to drift, oil will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years," Pickens testified at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

He testified as the Senate planned to debate energy legislation amid calls for more oil drilling to help lower oil prices which hit a record this month of over $147 a barrel.

Pickens has been touring the country pushing a plan under which domestic natural gas supplies would be used to power cars instead of electrical power plants. The federal government and private investors would build a massive wind farm system in the middle of the country from Mexico to Canada to provide electricity.

Pickens, who heads the hedge fund BP Capital, stands to benefit from such a program. He's building a 4,000 megawatt, $10 billion wind farm in northern Texas that should start generating power in 2011.

Industry group the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) has said the Pickens plan could work if the government renews the production tax credit for renewable energy, preferably for longer than a year or two.

Growth in U.S. wind power has been dramatic. Preliminary figures show the United States in July may have surpassed Germany as the world's largest generator of wind power, AWEA said.

"We're on track to doing that, if it hasn't happened already," said an AWEA spokeswoman.

Wind could generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030, only slightly less than natural gas currently fires, the Department of Energy said in a report...

[As I recall, the Elmo Tanner Whistling-In-The-Dark Whistlestop Campaign talked about wind power to the Texas oil men. Maybe T. Boone was listening.]

MEMRI translates the controversy between Muslim intellectuals and carries this revealing statement by Sa'ad Eddin Ibrahim:

Sa'ad Eddin Ibrahim struck a rather different tone in his article "Even if Islam is a Solution, the Arab Muslims Are the Problem," published in Al-Masri Al-Yawm on May 17, 2008. Here, rather than looking at Iraq through the prism of anti-colonial wars of liberation, Ibrahim condemned Al-Qaeda in Iraq as one of many Islamist groups fighting and killing other Muslims in the name of Islam. Following are excerpts:

"In May 2008, the Arab nation witnessed a number of conflagrations - armed conflicts in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. In all these armed conflicts, the fighting factions used Islam as a slogan for mobilization.

"These are all Muslims fighting Muslims. After some of them raised the slogan of 'Islam is the solution', their Islam has become the problem. As soon as any number of them acquire weapons, they raise them against the government - even when the government also rules in the name of Islam.

"We saw this in the last few years with bin Laden's followers and Al-Qaeda on one side and the government of the Saudi Kingdom on the other, as well as with their bomb attacks in Morocco, where a king rules in the name of Islam and bears the title of 'Commander of the Faithful.' In other words, each of them kills fellow Muslims in the name of Islam.

"A quick glance at what the media shows us demonstrates how the word 'Islam' and its derivatives became a plaything in their hands. Here are some [of the names of these organizations]:

"In Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jihad, the Islamic Group (al-gama'a al-islamiyya), and the Brigades of the Merciful; in Palestine: the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), the Islamic Jihad; in Lebanon: Hizbullah [lit. 'the party of Allah'] Fath Al-Islam, the Islamic Group; in Yemen: the Zaydi Houthis and the Islamic Congregation for Reform; in Somalia: the Islamic Courts; in Jordan: the Islamic Action Front and Hizb Al-Tahrir Al-Islami; in Sudan: Justice and Equality and the Islamic Front Party; Islamic Al-Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb [sic]; in Morocco: Al-'Adl w'al-Ihsan and the Justice and Development Party; in Algeria: the Islamic Salvation Front and the armed Islamic brigades; in Iraq: Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, the 'Islamic' Da'wa party, the Mahdi Army, and the Badr Army."

"Hasan Nasrallah Told Me... His Followers Would Never Open Fire on Other Lebanese... He Did Not Keep His Word"

"The evidence shows that everyone who tries to use the name of religion to lend himself legitimacy while oppressing and tyrannizing Allah's servants in his country opens the gates of hell on himself, his people, and his country, and he harms Islam. Here are some examples:

"What the late president Anwar Sadat tried to do in the last century, when he called himself 'the believing president' and introduced two amendments to the constitution, making of the 'Islamic shari'a' 'a source of legislation' - and then 'the primary source of legislation.' Yet this did not prevent those who outbid him in Islamicness from felling him with a deadly blow on the anniversary of his victory [in the 1973 war], on October 6, 1981. His murderers belonged to an organization that called itself 'the Jihad';

"What the Sudanese President Ja'far Al-Nimeiri tried to do. He had already conducted a military coup and seized power; then, when protests against his dictatorial behavior increased, he imitated President Sadat and proclaimed his 'Islamicness' and the implementation of the shari'a.

"He found himself an Islamist [Muslim] Brotherhood ideologue, Hasan Al-Turabi, who then declared other Muslim thinkers apostates. Four of them, who were known as the 'Islamic Republican Brothers' [i.e. the followers of Mahmud Muhammad Taha] were sentenced to death because of their peaceful new conclusions in religious and worldly matters.

"Then Al-Nimeiri had a falling out with Al-Turabi and imprisoned him. A popular intifada started that removed Al-Nimeiri from power, and he fled to Egypt.

"Shortly thereafter Al-Turabi plotted with officers in the Sudanese army, in the name of 'Islam,' to once again assail a democratically elected government - [this time] headed by his brother-in-law, Imam Sadiq Al-Mahdi.

"Al-Turabi and the head of the new coup, Colonel, [then] Major General, [then] Lieutenant General Omar Al-Bashir, announced the founding of the Islamic Front and the implementation of the shari'a on all the Sudanese, including the 25% who are non-Muslims, in the South. A grinding civil war broke out once more. And when other Muslims felt oppressed at the hands of the Muslims of the North in Khartoum, they formed their rebel organizations, to which they also gave Islamic names, like the Darfuri 'Justice and Equality' [Movement].

"Something similar happened, and continues to happen, in Yemen. Those vying for rule have found their long-cherished goal in the same use of religious terminology and slogans, [which they employ] so that the oppressive regime won't outdo them in religion.

"When the Yemeni president Colonel 'Ali 'Abdallah Saleh called his party the National Congress, a faction of his opponents founded an opposition party called the Islamic Reform Congress. And when this latter grew stronger, 'Ali 'Abdallah Saleh suggested to one of the tribal leaders, Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi, that he form an Islamic movement from followers of the Zaydi school in order to counterbalance the Islamic Reform Congress party, most of whose followers are from the Sunni Shafi'i school and which is supported by Saudi Arabia.

"... [But Al-Houthi] refused to remain in the role of the cat's claw, and he and his tribesmen in northern Yemen began to demand their share of [national] resources and power. In other words, they wanted to be partners to 'Ali 'Abdallah Saleh, and not just his hired men or his agents.

"But 'Ali 'Abdallah Saleh, like the other Arab tyrants, doesn't want any partners, overseers, or anyone who could hold him accountable. He ordered the army to discipline Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi, and [as a result] bloody battles broke out, in one of which Badr Al-Din was killed.

"But his brother continued as leader of the tribesmen against the 'Ali 'Abdallah Saleh regime...

"Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah told me in January 2007 that his followers would never raise their weapons against or open fire on other Lebanese - even if other Lebanese opened fire on them. It is clear that he did not keep his word.

"Hizbullah fighters opened fire on other Lebanese when the Lebanese state attempted to establish control over the communications network that Hizbullah set up around the Beirut airport, claiming that it was essential to potential future rounds [of fighting] with Israel.

"In other words, Hizbullah, which had conducted honorable resistance against Israel in the past, wants the Lebanese state to recognize the legitimacy of its being a state within a state. By so doing - and knowingly or not - it behaves like ruling Arab regimes behave, imposing tyrannical rule under the pretext of preparing for the struggle against Israel - despite the fact that they haven't liberated a single inch of Palestine in the past 60 years.

"In other words, what [Hizbullah] is saying is that one should submit to the tyranny of the brothers close to you, in the hope that they will protect you from the tyranny of the enemies far from you."

"Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers Has Killed 10 Times More Iraqi Muslims than Invading Americans"

"In this way, the slogan first raised by the Muslim Brotherhood years ago, 'Islam is the solution,' has been transformed into a reality in which the Muslims who applied [the slogan] have become 'the problem.' Sometimes they use it to fight non-Muslims, but at other times they use it to kill fellow Muslims.

"Thus, Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers has killed 10 times more Iraqi Muslims than invading Americans.

"Are those raising the slogan of 'Islam is the solution' doing so in order to strengthen their position and then rule over and torture other Muslims as well as non-Muslims?

"No doubt there are pious, believing Muslims who believe in this appealing spiritual slogan and are swept away by it, without asking how and when those who constantly repeat the slogan have ever created a society without problems.

"Perhaps they don't understand that a society without problems cannot possibly be a human society. Perhaps a society of angels is the only one that is without problems.

"The evidence shows that it is only the Arabs who play on these religious slogans, and not the rest of the Muslims. Perhaps this is the reason why two-thirds of the world's Muslims live today under democratic, elected regimes, whereas the other third, who live under tyrannical, unelected regimes, is the one that is comprised of the Arab Muslims.

"In other words, even when the Arab Muslims employ the slogan 'Islam is the Solution', [the fact is] that in their hands, it turns into a problem..."

Brian of New York writes:

This week our feature interview is with Anne Franklin, a spokesman for Clintons For McCain, Hillary Clinton supporters who are working overtime to defeat Barack Obama in November.

That's right, independents and Democrats who are so alarmed at the prospect of an Obama presidency that they're supporting Republican nominee John McCain.

Ann Franklin, herself an independent, tells SNN's in house spin doctor "Tom Paine" why Clintons For McCain feel America can't afford what would probably turn out to be a Dhimmi Carter second term...

More barking mad shenanigans from the gang of the University of Wessex.
Italy v England 46 AD and as the Radio Times puts it extras in travel blankets are shrieking.
Cut to a restaurant in modern Bath. Lights dim and things fall off tables. The chandelier swings ominously. It makes a change from things falling off shelves. An earth tremor with release of poisonous gas opens up the hollow which is known to exist under the baths in Bath. Into which our intrepid archaeologists, giving the geologist the slip, boldly go.
To cut a daft story short, they find the body (crystallised in the sulphurous water) of Boudicca who didn’t die in battle/commit suicide to avoid dishonour but was hidden under the baths by her Roman lover, an inventor and writer. They are discovered by another Roman and this time Boudicca really does commit suicide. This is acted in rather bad Latin (even my accent is better) with subtitles.
Regina, Regina. Queen, O Queen!
Captiva Mea You are my captive!
Mea Culpa. It’s all my fault.
Eheu eheu - I’m making this up now but you get the idea.
However the fire brigade up above are trying to rescue them and, surprise, surprise, a batch of Roman terracotta hand grenade booby trap type things explode, (no, they are not the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the Arthurian spoof is episode 6) burning the remains of Boudicca, her lovers mosaic tribute to her, and numerous inscriptions. On return to the lab they receive a fax from colleagues in Rome which indicate that the lover returned to Rome in disgrace but used his incendiary devices to burn Rome and avenge his sweetheart. 
So that’s two out of three episodes in which priceless and hitherto unknown antiquities go up in smoke in the presence of our heros.
Rumour has it that the final episode (no 6) will feature Excalibur. I missed last week which was about the Bristol slave trade and a Barak Obama alike.  Next week’s trailer has a man from Iraq with some Babylonian artefacts from “the cradle of civilisation”. Episode 5 is anyone’s guess so far. Both in keeping with the West Country connection I think the Armada and my husband favours the lost land of Lyonesse.

This Edwardian vision of Boudicca, or Boadicea as the Victorians translated her name is probably equally inaccurate but she at least has better weaponry.

Kevin Myers, in the Irish Independent, "Writing what I should have written so many years ago"

Last Thursday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia. Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia's population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language -- as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible Famine.

I was sure that my column would arouse some hostility: my concerns were intensified when I saw the headline: "Africa has given the world nothing but AIDS." Which was not quite what I said -- the missing "almost" goes a long way; and anyway, my article was about aid, not AIDS.

Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90pc+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)

We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid 1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.

That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80pc of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12pc of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine -- roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.

So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the west would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.

But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age -- sexism and racism -- by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia.

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability...

But I've also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground - not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons.
--John McCain

Those "domestic political reasons" that McCain sneers at could be described as concern that our economy and military readiness are being severely damaged by our continued involvement in Iraq.  Those "domestic political reasons" include a realization that the trillions we are spending (directly and indirectly) in Iraq could be much better spent here at home, protecting the kufirs, rather than in Iraq, improving the lives of the people who are trying to kill our soldiers.

If McCain believes that "domestic political reasons", in other words the will of the American people, are less important than some Don Quixotian desire to save Muslims from themselves, no matter what the cost to us in lives and money, then I would beg to differ.

And that "realistic assessment of conditions on the ground" that he's so enamored of, would lead a better informed leader to understand the opportunity laid out before us.  He would understand how to manipulate and utilize those schisms and centuries-old grudges, for our benefit.  That "realistic assessment" is not an excuse to continue to mire ourselves in the internal conflicts of Islam; quite the opposite.

If I were an Iraqi, fearful of what my fellow Iraqis had planned for me, and desirous of a new school for my children and a new water treatment plant and a new bridge and a new soccer stadium and and and, I would vote for John McCain.

Fortunately, I'm not an Iraqi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Oe8ZBTjY8&feature=related