America, champion of democracy and a free press? I doubt one young, extremely brave, Iraqi journalist thinks so:

“American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.
Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.
Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.”

So was this yet one more American stuff-up, or something worse?

But a cheer for Norway’s equality minister:

“After a week in which the Equal Opportunities Commission in Britain has warned that it would take 40 years for women to break into the ranks of the FTSE 100 in the same way as men, Norwegian companies face a two-year deadline to ensure that women hold 40% of the seats of each company listed on the Oslo bourse. …
The requirement came into effect at the start of this year after companies were given two years to embrace the demands voluntarily following the passing of the law in 2003. …
The failure of companies to act – about half of the companies on the stock market are estimated to have no women on their boards – has prompted the Norwegian equality minister, Karita Bekkemellem, to take the draconian step of threatening firms with closure.
“From January 1 2006, I want to put in place a system of sanctions that will allow the closure of firms,” she said. “I do not want to wait another 20 or 30 years for men with enough intelligence to finally appoint women.”

Who says “draconian”? The Guardian. Someone should surely have subbed that out.

I’ve stumbled across a couple of gems recently:

An Irish “bog man” who used hair gel (well at least that’s the journalistic take on it):
“The preserved remains of two prehistoric men discovered in an Irish bog have revealed a couple of surprises – one used hair gel and the other stood 6 foot 6 inches high, the tallest Iron Age body discovered.
…the other man was quite short, about 5 foot 2 inches,” said Ned Kelly, head of antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland.
The shorter man appeared to attempt to give himself greater stature by a rather curious headdress which was a bit like a Mohican-style with the hair gel, which was a resin imported from France,” Kelly told BBC radio. …
… Kelly said the fact he was able to buy imported cosmetics suggests he was a wealthy member of Irish society about 2,300 years ago.”

And good news about the Chinese starting to treasure their heritage. A Sung dynasty merchant ship (dated to between 1127-1279), 25 metres by 10 metres and containing an estimated 70,000 piece of pottery, is to be raised whole from off Guangdong (Canton) and, it is hoped, eventually put on display in a sea-water tank.

According to Zhang Bo, the first step is that the surrounding environment of the ship will be cleared as it is covered with two-meter-thick silt and sits at 20 meters below sea level. The second step is that stakes will be rammed into the seabed and the ship covered with a huge box with the bottom sealed. Following this, the box will be slowly moved on board a 4,000-ton ship, which will be specially built for the salvage in May 2006.

A first for me, I spent an interesting, if very wet, afternoon canvassing for the Greens for the Camden Council election, coming up in May. I previously only had a very vague idea what canvassing meant, but, for these purposes anyway, it meant collecting names of people who would or might vote Green, for further targetting.

So it meant ringing lots of door-bells to no reaction, and occasionally a reaction, and pleasantly often a positive one. (And I didn’t get yelled at once, which surprised me a little.) Since these were mostly Victorian four-storey terraces converted to flats, it also meant lots of shouted conversations up to third-floor windows – not entirely easy when the rain is falling your eyes.

And it was eye-opening just how many ranges of lives were being lived in one overtly middle-class street, from old people in extremely dilapidated conditions, one of whom would only conduct a shouted conversation through the door (I suppose a good effect of “watch out for sneak thieves” campaigns), to a South Asian family in which a ten-year-old was the only one who spoke English.

The doors were telling. From new, cheap double glazing, to battered original, to neatly and expensively restored etched glass (one of the few terraces that was still one house) – you could write a thesis on what was likely to be found behind each.

The initial call for submissions for the Carnival of Feminists No 7, to be posted on January 18, is up. Feministe is suggesting a theme of feminism and pop culture, but I’m sure other topics will be welcome too. Submissions are due by January 15. Please help to spread the word!

Meanwhile, Sour Duck, host of Carnival No 3, has put up an extensive guide to her experience and thoughts. (I do have to blush slightly in linking to this, since Sour Duck describes me as “obscenely nice” – thanks!)

But there are a lot of good ideas about how to organise and promote a carnival there – for any carnival, not just this one. Other carnival organisers might like to take note.

Having been tagged by Rhetorically Speaking with “one of these terrible memes””, five facts about myself designed to add a touch of creative incoherency:

1. I may be the only person ever to have arrived at their “surprise” 21st birthday party and been utterly surprised. I seem to recall that I thought I was going to a Trivial Pursuit party, which is probably dating myself rather badly. I was very short on social skills and social understanding in my youth.

2. I once got drunk with a group of Han Chinese tourists from Hohhot outside the mausoleum of Genghis Khan (with whom I didn’t have a word of language in common). But vodka shots, it seems, speak a universal language.

3. I taught myself to bowl left-handed at cricket (although I’m otherwise strictly righthanded) because I’d done serious damage to my right shoulder with a weird tennis service action. I can still trundle down slow left-armers, the emphasis being on trundle.

4. I get blisters on the bottom of my feet very easily. One excuse for not being a runner – the other is that I don’t actually know how to run. I can’t work out how to put down my feet.

5. Much of my “leisure time” in my teenage years were spent sorting sheets of sandpaper into retail packs. This may be related to No 1.

I’m not going to directly tag anyone else for this – it seems a bit prescriptive – but, hey, if you’re reading this, why not give it a go …!

* The market for organic food, cosmetics and clothing is becoming mainstream. Broadly to be applauded, but the trick is going to be maintaining regulation and ensure that organic “factory farming” and the mulitnationals, which would destroy many of its environmental and social benefits, don’t take over.

* Even The Economist has decided declining populations might not be a bad thing.

* Radio 4’s Broadcasting House is, as I write, playing a Fifties-sounding song called “Goodbye Charlie … cashing in his chips”. Yes, Charles Kennedy, as I predicted yesterday, has resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats. I wasn’t perhaps expecting it to only take six hours from the time I wrote – but Kennedy’s failure to resign immediately has done, I suspect, a lot of damage to the Lib Dems. I suspect bar-takings in Westminster may be seriously down for the next week or two.

* Simon Jenkins (for whom I have much respect as a columnist) is, however, showing his age, in this piece on computers and “dead tree” newspapers. Interesting that he feels the need to assert that they will survive.