Author: Mick Hartley

The front cover of HELLO! magazine, peaking out at the back of a newsagent’s display, caught my eye. SHARON STONE INTRODUCES HER ABORTED SON…

What! I realise Hollywood stars are different from the rest of us, but this is ridiculous. Does she have the foetus in a glass jar on her mantlepiece? Perhaps a small shrine with mementos, where she spends time in expiation of what she now sees as her terrible crime? I lifted the magazine up – the bottom half of the ABORTED SON line was obscured – to reveal the real, and much duller, story.

with a shopping trolley has been hung on the walls of the British Museum.

The rock was put there by art prankster Banksy, who has previously put works in galleries in London and New York.

A British Museum spokeswoman said they were “seeing the lighter side of it”. She said it went unnoticed for one or two days but Banksy said three days.

Banksy also hung a sign saying the cave art showed “early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds”.

It read: “This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era.

“The artist responsible is known to have created a substantial body of work across South East of England under the moniker Banksymus Maximus but little else is known about him.

“Most art of this type has unfortunately not survived. The majority is destroyed by zealous municipal officials who fail to recognise the artistic merit and historical value of daubing on walls.”

I’m off for a week’s holiday, to Scotland. No posts till next weekend, the 22nd.

This UN report will no doubt be the subject of much discussion, but at least it should finally put to rest the Lancet’s 100,000 figure:

The invasion of Iraq and its aftermath caused the deaths of 24,000 Iraqis, including many children, according to the most detailed survey yet of postwar life in the country.

The UN report paints a picture of modern Iraq brought close to collapse despite its oil wealth. Successive wars, a decade of sanctions and the current violence have destroyed services, undermined health and education and made the lives of ordinary Iraqis dangerous and miserable.

The survey for the UN Development Programme, entitled Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004, questioned more than 21,600 households this time last year. Its findings, released by the Ministry of Planning yesterday, could finally resolve the debate over how many Iraqis were killed in the war that overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

The 370-page report said that it was 95 per cent confident that the toll during the war and the first year of occupation was 24,000, but could have been between 18,000 and 29,000. About 12 per cent of those were under 18.

In the Lancet study, remember, most of the casualties were supposedly women and children, caused by air strikes from coalition forces.

and these promises have not been lived up to,” he said in a rare interview at his home in Qom, Iran’s clerical capital just south of Tehran.

Once tapped as the successor to revolutionary leader Khomeini, Montazeri fell from grace after he became too openly critical of political and cultural restrictions.

In January 2003 he was freed from five years of house arrest on health grounds, but his activities are still subject to tight controls.

He said disdainfully: “I have no opinion regarding the elections. I have stopped giving my opinion, because every time I have given my point of view the reverse seems to happen.”

Montazeri complained he was still the victim of tough regime controls.

“I am no longer under house arrest but the way they are treating me is not correct,” he said. “My offices in Mashhad and in Isfahan have been closed by the special clerics court. I am only able to give small lectures in my home twice a week.”

The entrance to his narrow, dusty street also remains under close watch.

His Qom lecture hall, situated next to his home, has also been sealed off for close to a decade. The center sports huge portraits of Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – serving as a reminder of who is now in charge.

In a neighboring street, Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei – a prominent pro-reform cleric and one of around a dozen grand ayatollahs in Qom – also had reserved harsh words for regime hard-liners.

“We cannot foresee the future. We do not know if we can trust the candidates to deliver on their promises and to what extent the rights of the people will be preserved and how much choice they will have,” he said.

The issue of choice has emerged as a contentious issue in Iranian elections, with the hard-line-controlled Council of Guardians – an unelected political watchdog – brandishing the power to screen all candidates for public office.

Ahead of the February 2004 Parliament elections, the council disqualified thousands of candidates, most of them political moderates, handing certain victory to religious right-wingers.

“There should not be guardianship. In an election guardians are not needed, it is contrary to human liberty,” declared Saanei, who is in his late 70s and was also one of the earliest followers of Khomenei.

As the murders continue, Omar at Iraq the Model tells a story of reconstruction in Iraq against the odds:

Many “experts” outside Iraq watch from a distance and enjoy counting our dead and they ignore what we’re building here but I don’t care because I believe that victory is near…..

This short story represents one of a thousand unreported struggles where victory sided with our people and in the same way victory will be on our side in the greater war against the forces of darkness and terror.

ed by political affiliations, or multi-millionaire proprietors, or both.

Of all the publications in Britain which can lay a claim to such independence and which we rely on to speak out fearlessly where others remain silent, there is perhaps none which enjoys higher general regard, or exercises more invisible influence, than Private Eye.

It is therefore particularly disturbing and significant that Private Eye should, for so many years, have been one of the prime upholders of the very mythology which has undergirded police trawling operations and permitted them to flourish in the manner that they have.

It is because Private Eye, on the basis of little or no reliable evidence, took up very early a credulous position on the allegations of abuse which were made in North Wales (and in relation to Bryn Estyn in particular), that it has in practice been obliged to remain blind to the dangers of police trawling ever since.

Two weeks ago in their last issue Private Eye ran a piece “Trawling for the Truth” which brought up the practice of police trawling, and in the latest issue there are three letters on the subject, including this, from Margaret Jervis:

I’m glad to see you recognise the injustice of Operation Goldfinch [the police investigation into alleged abuse in Glamorgan]. Perhaps now the editor would be willing to retract his claim, made on BBC Question Time, that Derek Brushett, an exemplary headteacher and later inspector of social services in Wales, was a paedophile who was part of a “cover-up” of the alleged widespread goings on in North Wales children’s homes. This claim was made on the publication of the Waterhouse report in 2000.

Mr Brushett was a victim of Operation Goldfinch brought about by the prior chain of events supported by Private Eye. These were aided by the misjudged enthusiasm of Paul Foot….

Publishing the letter is probably as near as the Eye will get to admitting it got it wrong.

Now, with regard to MMR and autism….

The BBC has an open forum on “How can we end slavery?” (via Butterflies and Wheels).

As a Muslim, I have a different view of slavery. Slavery is part of Islam. It is not racially based. Instead it is a fundamental aspect of the Islamic society. Westerners think slavery is a bad thing because Westerners treated slaves so badly. In Islam the master must look after his slaves even better than he looks after himself. The idea that slavery is always wrong is just another example of Western cultural imperialism.
Saeed Aktar, Birmingham, England

What business is it of the West what we do in Africa? You all claim to be so tolerant and multicultural, but then try to stop every custom you don’t agree with. Most ‘slaves’ in Africa are better off than American or British blacks, who have no rights or protection.
Name withheld, Niger

I’ve been critical of Simon Jenkins in the past, it’s true, but I have to admit that there are few journalists who can equal his ability to lift one’s spirits with just a few well-chosen words:

This is my last column for The Times.

the tragedy on the A46 in south Warwickshire at about 3.20am.

A police spokesman said the accident happened between Bidford-on-Avon and Alcester as the cyclist was heading towards Alcester.

“He was struck from the rear by a motor vehicle,” the spokesman said. “The vehicle did not stop and the pedal cyclist died at the scene.

“Police have reason to believe that a cream-coloured Iveco box-type vehicle was involved. This vehicle will have sustained nearside damage.”

There was a police notice in Drayton Park (by the Arsenal ground) last week appealing for witnesses to a fatal road accident, involving “a collision between a cyclist and a tipper lorry”. A collision? Well that’s one way of putting it. No prizes for guessing which was the fatality.