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oaked in sweat. There were no lunch or tea breaks. “You have to eat when you can,” said Lucni, a balding middle-aged ethnic Albanian from Macedonia.

Soon afterwards the Romanian had had enough and left. It was his first day and like me he had not been paid. His departure was good news for me because it meant I could wear his wellington boots. But it also meant that we were a man short.

Later that afternoon showers of rain slowed things down and we rested in the store cupboard. There were no windows, lights or heating and you could just about stretch your legs without touching the walls. Drinking water came from the sink in the toilet, the flush of which was operated by pulling a metal hanger in the cistern.

Thomas, 27, told me it was his third day in the job and that he shared a rented house with several other Poles, all working in the black economy. Their poor English had meant it would be difficult for them to get legitimate work.

A tall man with a wispy moustache and watery blue eyes, Thomas had come over from Cracow on a tourist visa. He had not registered to work, neither had any of the Polish people I met. “We are free now but too poor,” he said of life back in Cracow. “One day I will go back but only when I have money in my pocket.”

MEMRI have compiled a selection of clips from Iraqi election commercials and public service announcements in advance of the January 30 election. Some are inspirational.

An old man rounding a corner into an alleyway looks up and sees young, masked militants facing him down. A couple joins the old man. Slowly, more and more people join the old man.

Voiceover:”On January 30, we meet our destiny and our duty. We are not alone, and we are not afraid. Our strength is in our unity; together we will work and together prevail”

Those joining the man now outnumber the militants. He nods and they move forward. The militants run away.

Written on screen: ” Don’t worry about Iraq. We are its people. We will allow no one to deprive us of our rights. For the building of Iraq: Peace, freedom and democracy. The heroes of Iraq.”

e, and Dan turned up a newspaper report of the time, noting how charming she looked. “Patronising” was his verdict, and I thought, yes, that’s the word alright – but you, not them. The whole tone of the programme is patronising. “The enormous condescension of posterity” in EP Thompson’s phrase. We get silly little reconstructed tableaux of Mitchell and Kenyon and their co-workers in silent comedy mode. We get constant reminders of how backward these people were; of how they may look like they’re happy and having a good time, but really their lives were awful. And then we get some (wonderful) shots of a parade, including – oh dear! – people blacked up as golliwogs. “They didn’t realise they were being racist.” Well maybe, just possibly, they weren’t being racist: you simply cannot judge people then by today’s standards. As the programme went into a “black” section, with every shot analysed to see if there was someone of African descent in the frame or not, it wasn’t clear to me that we were, as the programme makers liked to think, looking back at these ignorant primitives from some enlightened perspective where we’ve at last got all this race stuff sorted out.

Got that off my chest. I’ll still be watching the rest of the series.

ional anthem and an army flag — have been restored to use, reflecting widespread nostalgia for Russia’s communist years.

But rehabilitation of Stalin, who was denounced after his death in 1953 by the Soviet leadership for encouraging a cult of personality and killing millions of real and imagined opponents, has previously been out of bounds. Statues of Stalin were removed from Moscow’s public spaces in the 1960s.

“A monument will be erected to those who took part in (leading the war against Adolf Hitler), including Stalin,” Oleg Tolkachev, Moscow’s senator in the upper house of parliament, told Ekho Moskvy radio.

Interfax news agency reported earlier that a Stalin monument would also be built in the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border to mark the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany 60 years ago — seen as the country’s greatest military triumph.

In another sign of Stalin’s growing appeal, state television channels have shown a number of prime-time television shows in recent months depicting him in a positive light.

tinians against Israeli control of their lands.

Their outspoken book “The Lost Territories of the Republic” opened France’s eyes to classrooms where some Muslim pupils openly denounced Jews, praised Hitler and refused to listen to any non-Muslim teacher talking about the history of Islam. […]

Both Roder and Claude Singer, head of Holocaust education projects at the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDJC), underlined that most schools had no problem teaching about the Holocaust and most pupils learned the lesson being put across.

“A national survey of history and geography teachers showed that only 15 percent of them had problems teaching about the Shoah,” Singer said, using the Hebrew word widely used in French for the Nazi massacre of six million Jews.

Only 15% had problems? That’s still a lot of problems.

.irk.ru/Eng/index.htm”>Here (via Metafilter) is a website devoted to the Circum-Baikal railway – “a golden clasp on the steel girdle of the Russian empire”. It’s all quite charming, from the postcard-style photo gallery, including a huge collection of pictures of old stations (this is lovely), to the quirky translations: “Through numerous water obstacles on Circum-Baikal railway it was built both standard bridges and graceful viaducts. The viaduct over Bol’shaya Krutaya Guba river: in the beginning of summer it looks so“.

I can only echo the sentiments expressed on the main page:

This site devotes to the wonderful Circum-Baikal railway. Here you can receive the most full and authentic informations about it to learn its past and present. The large collection of exlusive photos will help to you to feel spirit of this railway, to make virtual excursion under it.

April 9, 2003. At first, Yasser Al-Shab’awi was put in charge, until his capture in July 2003. Then Sa’d Hammad Hisham was in charge until December 2003. Then I was put in charge from January 2004 until now. The Army of Muhammad has some 800 armed fighters.”

Interrogator: “What operations did you carry out? How many operations did you carry out?”

Muayed Al-Nasseri: “We carried out many armed operations against the coalition forces in all the districts. The operations included bombarding their military posts, their camps, and their bases, fighting these forces, and planting explosive devices against their patrols and convoys.”

Interrogator: “What was the nature of your organization?”

Muayed Al-Nasseri: “The organization was a military armed one, which operated according to a method of non-centralized command.”

Interrogator: “How is the Army of Muhammad related to the Ba’th party?”

Muayed Al-Nasseri: “The Army of Muhammad is militarily independent. After Saddam Hussein’s capture in December 2003, for a period [of] four months, the Army of Muhammad had no connections with the party, but after April 2003, there was a meeting with the party and we are currently coordinating with them.

“In addition, Saddam Hussein distributed a communique via the party, back then, instructing all his supporters or whoever wants to fight the Jihad for the sake of Allah, to join the Army of Muhammad because it is the army of the leadership.”

Al-Nasseri goes on to describe how the Army of Muhammad was supplied with money and arms by both Iran and Syria.

f the British Government did not relax its tough anti- terrorism laws, the response from Muslims would be “horrendous”. He added: “I declare we should ourselves join the global Islamic camp against the global crusade camp.”

The event was held this month at The Friends Meeting House in Central London, the British headquarters of the Quaker movement. Mr Bakri Mohammed’s followers booked the hall for a health conference entitled Women’s Dawah UK and the Quakers were unaware that it was a political gathering.

Two reporters from United Press International, a United States-based news agency, attended and reported a series of inflammatory speeches by Mr Bakri Mohammed and his cohorts. One speaker said that Western governments would face “a 9/11 day after day after day”.

As the crowd chanted, the man shouted: “Whether they be stones, whether they be sticks, whether they be knives, whether they be bombs, whatever they may be, prepare as much as you can.”

‘”

And he has concerns about the referees of the Nature article. “The reviewers seemed unevenly selected, very one-sided.”

It is an argument Roberts [Professor Richard “Bert” Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a co-author of the original Nature paper] categorically rejects. The referees were leading anthropologists. “They [Nature] had six referees on each paper, the most I have ever known. They made damn sure they had a cushion behind their arse. The papers had to be submitted three times. It took six months, so was hardly rushed out. It was fair and rigorous.

“Our team had everyone involved – geomorphologists, geochronologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropolgists … We left no bone unturned. Good grief, it was a soccer team of authors!”

And he raises the stakes by suggesting that Jacob and other critics have an “intellectual interest” in denying that the skeleton was a new species. “All … are supporters of the multiregionalism evolutionary model … This discovery would destroy their theory. It suits their purposes very nicely [to oppose Homo floresiensis].”

The background to the row is a long and bitter debate between those anthropologists who say the modern human evolved in Africa and that all modern Homo sapiens developed there, and those such as Jacob who say that Homo erectus migrated from Africa through the north and spread [and developed] throughout the rest of the world. The argument is far from being resolved on either side.

Presumably a new species would fit better into the out-of-Africa theory: just one more hominid species left by the evolutionary wayside as the latest model Homo, hot from the Great Rift Valley, spreads triumphantly across the globe. It’s not obvious to me though why this should be particularly damaging to the multiregionalism theory, and besides, my understanding is that the battle’s all over bar the shouting anyway, as genetic studies tend to confirm the out-of-Africa theory. It all seems more like a case of professional jealousy. We’ll see.

former Shadow Foreign Secretary, writing on these pages last week, have invoked the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War Memorial. Can we not learn from history, they ask, and recognise we have made another error to rank with that error-strewn conflict in the jungles of South-East Asia?

The demand that we should learn from history makes sense. But, sadly, none of the comparisons so far drawn with Vietnam display a full sense of the nature of that conflict, or the one we face now.

There are key differences between the North Vietnamese and Vietcong assault on South Vietnam and the insurgency being mounted in Iraq. Differences which suggest we face a radically different outcome. In Vietnam the Communist forces were ideologically united, enjoyed broad popular support and were battling against a corrupt status quo with the promise of a radically different, and more hopeful, future.

In Iraq, by contrast, the insurgents are united only in their hatred of the West and dislike of democracy. The most implacable are remnants from Saddam Hussein’s most loyal cadres. They have been joined, in this fight, by other Sunnis who fear that the privileges their minority group once enjoyed will be lost in a future democratic Iraq. And their struggle has been augmented, for tactical reasons, by outside jihadis, from Syria, Jordan and across the Arab world, drawn by the heat of the crucible.

They lack any sort of political unity and offer no coherent programme of hope for Iraq’s people. While they might hanker for the restoration of Sunni minority rule, such a reactionary step could, by definition, never secure majority popular support.

In contrast to insurgents who are either nostalgic for Saddam’s reign or, in the case of the Islamists, dreaming fondly of the restoration of a medieval caliphate, a radically different and more hopeful future looks likely to be embraced by Iraq’s majority. In Iraq, unlike Vietnam, it is the Americans who are offering an escape from the corrupt status quo that prevails in the region. If democracy takes root, then Iraq has a chance to transcend the miseries of arbitrary and autocratic rule which, so sadly, imprison many other Arab peoples.