Favorite London Times opening paragraph this week:

THE Tory MP who provoked fury by warning that immigrants had undermined Britains Anglo-Saxon society admitted yesterday that he owned a house in France, drove a Mercedes and had a business
importing European wine.

You'd think that if anyone was going to be sympathetic this week, it would be the Israeli parents of the 10-month old baby who got shot by a sniper this week. But they were settlers, so you'd be wrong. They decided to hold their own dead baby hostage, saying they would not bury it until the Israeli army retook a hill.

Speaking of occupying the moral high ground, Mayor Benito Guiliani appointed his "decency panel" this week, to vet art in publicly financed museums. He named his divorce lawyer to it.

The Supreme Court will reconsider whether it is ok to execute the profoundly retarded (an oxymoron, surely).

Like us, Jamaica doesn't put insane people on trial, but it does put them in jail until they're sane enough to be tried. And then, sometimes, forget about them completely, like this guy who broke a window in 1972.....

For the first time in history, the Japanese are now on average taller than the Chinese. This is actually a source of concern to the Chinese government, which is encouraging its youth to grow, dammit, grow. Milk-drinking is now compulsory, despite the fact that most Chinese are lactose-intolerant. The youth themselves are going in for that horrifying leg-lengthening surgery, and taking quack growth pills (I'm sure there's also some endangered species that they're eating for the same end, but it's not mentioned in the Telegraph.