[the doha dodo] logically impossible

The whole point in trade is that you get access to their markets and can access their technology, whilst protecting your own producers, e.g. in grain and minerals.

At a meeting like Doha, it's slightly ridiculous because each side is never going to concede protection of its farmers but at the same time, it wants access to the other nations' markets.

Pascal Lamy's 12% protection proposal is fraught because the very 12% each nation protects is precisely the one which the other countries wish to access. No one's going to settle for second best and offer their best to partners. China in particular is not going to do that.

Therefore Doha is still a Dodo, even before its official close.

[bart simpson] now the exhibition

From late July to August, you can see the exhibition inspired by Bart Simpson.

All you have to do is motor up to Glasgow, catch a flight to Iceland and ask at the nearest bar. Should be well worth going to see.

Presuming you're crazy about Bart that is, as seen through Icelandic eyes.

[terrorist attack] perhaps

They may well be as claimed by Turkish security:

Police said they believed the attackers were members of a Turkish Sunni fundamentalist group, the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front.

... or they may not. There've been a number of instances of groups being slow to claim responsibility and that smacks of a broader destabilization plan. I always think one must look at the net effect of such a thing - whose attitudes does it harden and why would anyone want those attitudes hardened?

In other words, who are all the groups or countries who stand to gain overall?

I can't see the killing itself as the main object. On the other hand, there is a type of law-unto-himself person who just gets a kick out of seeing the big explosion. The sniper killings in the U.S. spring to mind here.

Might well be wrong.

[british seaside resorts] one beneficiary of the recession

Rather pleased, actually, that many Brits are turning back to a long neglected part of their country - the seaside resort. Morecambe in particular holds an interest for me.

When it lost out to Blackpool with its greatly overrated illuminations, even the Winter Gardens, Frontierland, the Midland Hotel and the rest of it couldn't save it - that is, until now. Now the British holidaymakers are returning due to soaring costs elsewhere but it's a sorry sight to return to.

It's a bit like neglecting a trusty car which had served you well for some new-fangled piece of machinery, only to have to sell it and return to your old faithful, now half corroded and careworn but with a smile on its grill that you have returned.

Morecambe's tides made the news not so long ago with the deaths of those Chinese fishermen; it has always been a problem, necessitating a Queen's Guide to the Sands and yet ... and yet ... isn't that part of the adventure, like Lindisfarne on the other coast?

It would be lovely to see places like this drag themselves into the 21st century and offer some of the things overseas holiday spots offer, with just that touch of Britishness to them and a rich history to boot. Drop some of the tackiness and it could take off in the new millennium.

UPDATE at No Clue on seaside resorts.

UPDATE UPDATE at Weston-super-Mare

[justice] what lengths would you go to

Older readers would recall the Winslow Boy, the play by Terrence Rattigan, where a boy is wrongly accused of stealing and his father almost breaks his family in getting the boy exonerated.

Witness this one in the photograph. It was when a black soldier was accused of participating in a lynching and:

Despite their protests of innocence -- and the government's own secret investigation showing the prosecution's case was poisonously flawed -- the men were sentenced to hard labor and forfeiture of military pay and benefits, and were given dishonorable discharges.

Now they have finally been exonerated but at what cost? In Agatha Christie's Tuesday Club Murders and other stories, a similar theme appears quite often - that someone is accused but in this case is not punished but merely suspected for the rest of his or her life.

Example was the trusted servant whom the husband and wife then no longer trusted anywhere around money or valuables when a brooch went missing. She went to her grave, the servant, still under the cloud. Later the wife found her brooch down the back of a chest of drawers.

UPDATE Monday - the veteran who was the subject of the report has now died after receiving his apology.

[drunk passengers] rear deck urgently required

What the hell is going on these days? Here it is again:

Two drunk British women went on a rampage on a charter plane, trying to hit a flight attendant with a bottle of vodka and attempting to open a cabin door as the aircraft was cruising over Austria at 10,000 metres, police said today.

Just posted on that recently and so we have more evidence that we need a rear deck and railing on aircraft.

It's simple. Passenger gets drunk, is issued with an auto-opening parachute and food pack, then courteously shown the rear deck exit.

He or she does the rest.