And people wonder why I’m boycotting the US…

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From today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, July 2 — President Bush spared I. Lewis Libby Jr. from prison Monday, commuting his two-and-a-half-year sentence while leaving intact his conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice in the C.I.A. leak case.

Mr. Bush’s action, announced hours after a panel of judges ruled that Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, could not put off serving his sentence while he appealed his conviction, came as a surprise to all but a few members of the president’s inner circle. It reignited the passions that have surrounded the case from the beginning…

This, presumably, is the ‘rule of law’ that is going to be planted in the fertile soil of Iraq?

The Six Stages of E-Mail

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I love Nora Ephron. Well, to be precise, I love her writing. Someone kindly sent me a link to this from the New York Times. It opens thus:

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

You can guess how it goes on. (Hint: it corroborates my view that email has become dysfunctional — at least in large organisations.)

Celebrity culture

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Engagingly hysterical scenes outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange tonight as revellers arrived for my daughter’s Leavers’ Ball. It was interesting to see how many of the girls had managed to transform themselves into replicas of the kind of people normally seen only in Hello! magazine.