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hanced in such societies. Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond set out to test this hypothesis. […]

By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed.

While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word “sinister”.

Are there any activities in the modern world where handedness might have a comparable effect? What about driving? If my theory is correct that driving on the left is natural for right-handers, then we should see higher accident rates for left-handers in those countries that drive on the left, and vice versa. Several millennia down the line and there’ll be no British or Japanese left-handers at all. Will anyone miss them, I wonder?

ng others from examining them. In the case of Homo floresiensis, it seems he was miffed that he was not involved in the original project, even though the idea of digging in Flores was not to find new species, but rather to look for evidence of exactly how and when humanity first arrived in Australia. Hence the involvement of Australian researchers. However, since Florence’s existence was announced in a paper in Nature, he has been trying to get in on the act.

First, he wrote a piece for Nature’s rival Science, suggesting that the skeleton was merely a diminished—possibly diseased—version of Homo sapiens, rather than a genuinely new species. That was despite the fact that many of its features are completely different from those of modern humans. Then he removed the original specimen that was the subject of the Nature paper. Now, he has taken most of the rest of the material—dramatically stuffing the bones into a leather case with the assistance of Radien Soejono, a researcher at the Centre for Archaeology who was one of the authors of the paper in Nature, but apparently without the permission of the centre’s director, Tony Djubiantono.

Meanwhile here’s a model of what Homo Floresiensis may have looked like.

g their extreme rhetoric, hoping thereby to bolster the parties’ own credibility with dissatisfied radical voters. The French Communists, traditionally one of the larger and more mainstream leftist parties, have been leaders in this regard. […]

As we and our allies try to develop more sophisticated political and diplomatic strategies for dealing with the Muslim world, the temptation will be great to reach out to those Islamist groups that express some willingness to work with us. Signs of apparent reasonableness are difficult to resist, especially for well-meaning internationalist bureaucrats. In its item on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Washington Post reported that some State Department officials believe the group could be persuaded to temper its anti-U.S. stance and even to battle the jihadists.

Such hopes defy reality. They also ignore the long history of Islamist groups in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that have worn a moderate face in their formative years but, once in power, have moved quickly to implement shari’a law, eliminate all opposition, and give aid to terrorists. As Islamists become more visible participants in the politics of the Western democracies, and as their new friends on the hard Left strive to obliterate or gloss over their record of mendacity and violence, the rest of us cannot afford to turn a blind eye to who they are and what they stand for.

Still doubtful, Meybodi grabbed a piece of fruit from a wooden tureen sitting on the nearby coffee table.

“What am I holding?” he asked. By this time Atabay and others had filtered into the makeshift studio.

“An apple,” replied the caller.

Before long, everyone in the studio was weeping, and calls began pouring in from all over Iran. It turns out NITV reached Iran as the result of a technical snafu; someone at Eutelsat, the French satellite company, had flipped the wrong switch.

When he realized he could reach into Iranian living rooms, Atabay’s programming turned political. He wasn’t the first to beam dissent into Iran. Since the early 1980s, expats had been staging sporadic assaults on Iranian airwaves, mostly via short-wave, which regular Iranian radios receive. But after NITV’s launch, with the cost of satellite airtime dropping and dishes sprouting from rooftops throughout the Middle East, Iranian exiles flocked to long-distance broadcasting.

As a result, Iranians can now tune into twenty-six television and twelve radio stations produced by expatriates, if they have the right equipment — and many do. There are 17 million radios in Iran, and an estimated 3 million to 4 million houses have satellite connections, in spite of the government’s longstanding satellite ban.

Test your geography by slotting the states into a map of the US, jigsaw fashion. Difficult if you get somewhere like Nevada early on. I scored a creditable 90%: any less and I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Via Live from Brussels.

people have realised that the consequences are too serious for this to be allowed to happen. The peace talks will go on for ever.

Rachel Campbell-Johnstone in the Times wonders what might win the Turner Prize next year, under the heading “Batty enough to win in 2005?”. Alas, this isn’t a cue for a spot of piss-taking. She’s the Times’ art critic, and takes it all very seriously. Batty is a reference to this year’s winner Jeremy Deller’s video of bats in Texas. His entry/display also includes video footage of Waco, and of Dubya’s favourite burger bar. Bats in Texas…Waco…Dubya. Geddit? As Campbell-Johnstone puts it:

Jeremy Deller, Monday night’s fitting champ, emphasises the way in which art could be political and reach out from the gallery to infiltrate the real world and alter the way we approach it. Art, his work stresses, cannot be left stranded in its own self-referencing aesthetic sphere.

Indeed not.

What I’d love is for someone to do a Sokal on the Turner: that is, knowingly produce some worthless garbage, then get in with the right crowd, schmooze the critics and the makers-and-shakers in London’s art world, come up with the artspeak needed to present your work – challenging pre-conceptions….subversive….moving out of the artworld’s self-referencing aesthetic sphere – and then, at the ceremony, announce that your work is in truth a load of complete crap, and walk out of the room leaving an open-mouthed audience. But then I think, well, this is pretty much what Duchamp did nearly a century ago. And his urinal has been voted the most influential modern art work of all time.

They’re way ahead of me.

The EU looks like ending its embargo on arms exports to China: something the French have long been pushing for:

A new transatlantic rift will open today when the European Union formally tells China that it is prepared to lift its 15-year-old arms embargo. Washington said that the prospect that its Pacific forces could be threatened by advanced European weapons sold to China was unacceptable and that lifting the embargo would lead to restrictions on American co-operation with Europe on defence issues.

“We can’t countenance the notion of advanced European weapons technology finding its way into the People’s Army and threatening our forces in the region, or Taiwan,” a US government official told The Times. “It is very close to the bone for us. It is not at all in the EU’s interest to lift the arms embargo.”

At an EU-China summit in The Hague, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, will tell Wen Jiabao, his Chinese counterpart, that Europe has agreed in principle to end the embargo once China improves its human rights record and the EU has agreed a new code of conduct for arms sales

Once China improves its human rights record? Amnesty have just issued a report on human rights in China. From Fabian’s Hammer:

Amnesty’s 42-page report said even though many of those campaigning for better rights – including health, housing, labour, religious and ethnic freedoms – are members of groups set up by the Communist Party-directed government itself, activists are vulnerable because their rights are limited and poorly defined.

“Torture and ill-treatment remain widespread and endemic within China’s criminal justice system, particularly at the pre-trial stage when beatings or other forms of torture are often used by the police in an attempt to extract a ‘confession’ from detained suspects … Human rights defenders and others with strongly held beliefs or opinions who refuse to ‘confess’ to their ‘crimes’ are at particular risk of torture or ill-treatment,” the report said.

A very British tale. Not only are our racists incompetent, they’re even too embarrassed to identify themselves (via Secular Blasphemy):

BNP members who mistakenly hired a black DJ for their Christmas party proved yesterday they were not just racist but STUPID.

Official Bob Garner said: “There was a bit of a cock-up. The chap who booked him didn’t realise. The DJ sounded white on the phone.” […]

Some members of the far right group were so outraged by the blunder they walked out of the hotel where their party was staged.

And those that stayed had to keep their bigoted beliefs secret instead of parading them in end of year speeches.

Garner, branch organiser for Croydon, South London, admitted: “Everyone was a bit alarmed when the DJ turned up.

“A lot of people weren’t happy – I wasn’t, really – and one or two walked out. But some younger members thought it was a bit ironic and danced away the night.

“Traditionally someone stands and says what’s happened in the year or in the elections. But it was a bit difficult to say we were even the BNP. We even had to be careful what we said when we did the raffle so we didn’t offend this guy.

“What are you supposed to do? Tell him to clear off? It was very, very embarrassing.”

Ian Buruma (via ALDaily) has a thoughtful article on the prospects for an Islamic democracy. The only alternative to theocracy need not be a hardline separation of state and religion, following the example of the post-enlightenment West, or Ataturk’s forced secularisation of Turkey. A zealous anti-clericalism can backfire:

In fact, anti-clericalism, much more than a history of religious zeal, formed the basis for many of the Middle East’s bloodiest political failures: Nasserism in Egypt, Baathism in Syria and Iraq, the shah in Iran. These regimes were led by secular elites who saw religion as something that held their countries back or in a state of colonial dependence. The fact that a number of iron-fisted reformers, like Nasser himself, were routinely the objects of assassination attempts by religious zealots showed the gap between the secular ”progressive” elites and the people they ruled. When organized religion is destroyed, something worse often takes its place, usually a quasi religion or personality cult exploited by dictators. When it is marginalized, as happened in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, it provokes a religious rebellion.

Indonesia provides an example of a Muslim country with a functioning – if flawed – democracy. And there’s hope in the pronouncements of Al-Sistani:

The ayatollah insists that an Iraqi constituent assembly must be chosen through direct elections and that ”any basic law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum.” He makes only cursory reference to Koranic law as the basis for that legal code. Any attempts to postpone general elections because of security concerns, especially in the Sunni areas, have also been fiercely resisted. In mid-October, he issued a fatwa requiring all men and women to vote, equating voting with such basic religious duties as fasting during Ramadan. It is the duty of the Shiites, according to the ayatollah, to protect Sunni and Christian interests as well. And although he opposed a plan to allow Kurds, who make up 15 to 20 percent of the Iraqi population, veto power over the constitution, he has not squelched Kurdish hopes of preserving some degree of autonomy under a new government. All these are fine words, of course, yet to be tested in reality. But they are remarkable words for a Shiite cleric born in Iran and should be taken seriously.