The fuss about the cartoons continues unabated, and a pox on both their houses, say I. It seems quite likely that the original Danish paper was being just a teeny bit xenophobic, perhaps even (gasp!) deliberately trying to stir up trouble. “Scratch a freedom-loving Dane,” said a colleague who has spent considerable time there “and you find a racist xenophobe”. Not that that constitutes evidence. And as for the Muslim reaction, well, if they wanted to be further reviled as crazed intolerant lunatics, they could hardly have done better. Clearly deeper forces are at work, using and inflaming passions on both sides. How much simpler, and possibly more effective, a Muslim boycott of all Danish products. Like, er, Danish Bacon. How much simpler, and more effective, a simple statement of support -- we laugh at all your gods -- in the freedom-loving European press, rather than a reprint of the cartoons in question (which don’t even sound all that funny).

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One of the best parts of traveling for work is that one sometimes gets out and meets the people for whom one is ultimately working. One of the worst is that usually there is no direct communication. Sometimes, with an associate who is reasonably out-going and self-assured, the nuisance of having an...

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To Sri Lanka, which I feared would be like India and hoped would not. And my hopes have been fulfilled. Of course after barely two days it may be too soon to tell, but my feeling is that the people are a lot less fatalistic. There certainly are fewer of them.

I’m here to do some training, but that...

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Seems Silvio Berlusconi isn't the only head of state who likes a laugh, though as far as I know he doesn’t choose a State of the Republic address to clown around. From Neddie comes news that George W Bush was only kidding when he said that the US was going to reduce its dependence on Middle East...

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Eric Meyer reveals his “Sooper-Dooper No-Patent-Pending DIY Anti-Jet-Lag Technique”. Not a lot to it; arrange matters so that you get your customary amount of sleep and wake at the time you would normally wake shifted to your destination's time zone. But Eric refuses to use melatonin. Why, I won...

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