Great photograph by Adam Ranshaw, brought to us via The Register.

Thanks to James Miller (who is as fastidious about apostrophes as I am) for spotting it and forwarding the link.

.. to his column in the Washington Post. First column is a meditation on his time in Oxford (where he was a Reuters Fellow and where, apparently, “all the stores close at 5:30 p.m. and you can’t get a jar of low-fat chunky-style peanut butter to save your life”).

Ah, yes: England. There are worse places to spend a year, though to hear my Stilton-hating teenage daughters tell it, not many. I think in time, after years of quiet reflection and expensive therapy, they will come to appreciate having been rudely plucked from their schools, their friends and their familiar surroundings and deposited in a country where it rains all the time. I did it for them, you see, to broaden their horizons…

Wonder what will happen to his Voxford blog. Apparently he will now be required to blog for the Post. He’s soliciting suggestions for a name for the blog.

If ever you doubted that Boris Johnson was a figment of P.G. Wodehouse’s imagination, then see here.

… in 1944, Paris was liberated from German occupation.

I’m not a fan of the French President, and became even more irritated by his antics down the road on vacation in Cap Negré, where he’s been running a kind of holiday camp for chopper-ferried celebs like U2’s Bono. But at least he knew what to do when ten French paras were killed in Afghanistan. First he interrupted his holiday by flying out to see the troops, and then he was in Les Invalides at 11.30am yesterday for the ceremony to honour the returning dead. Compare that with the fact that Tony Blair never turned up at Brize Norton to greet the coffins of soldiers he had consigned to battle. Or the way that George Bush has always studiously avoided any public encounter with his returning casualties.

Tom Friedman on the Georgian mess…

If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams…

Hmmm… Not quite. The Gold goes to Saakashvili IMHO.

This is the time of year when US News & World Report publishes its list of the ‘top’ US universities. And guess what? Harvard comes out top, followed by Princeton, Yale and MIT & Stanford tying for fourth place. Average annual fees for the top five = $35,636.60. Just thought you’d like to know.

Ever wondered why magpies are obsessed with bright, reflective objects? New Scientist has a video suggesting an explanation.