The stated goals of Iran - and its Lebanese proxy - are to wreck the Middle East peace process and, ultimately, to destroy Israel. Fisk gives voice to conspiracy theories about Israel's 'real' intentions, wondering through the mouth of a Lebanese newspaper editor whether Israel was seeking to destroy the fragile peace in Lebanon and whether the South Lebanese would ever be allowed to return to their homes.In the event, there was no conspiracy. 'Is the fighting over, Angus Roxburgh?' asked Ed Stourton, turning not, as you expected, to a live link but to a correspondent who was sitting next to him in the studio.The question doesn't make sense on CNN because the fighting simply interrupts the punditry. Wharton took it well, but was also afforded the respite of having the mouthpiece cleaned by his corner while he gulped in air.As in his re-match against Chris Eubank, though, Benn was not fighting with his old fury. The apparently stupid light-bulb flapping secures his survival.' It remains to be seen how the moth population will cope with the imposition of VAT on fuel bills and the possibility of cutbacks in light- bulb usage.The moth's 'single-minded fidelity' is praised by R J Pickles, which he sees as perfect religious enlightenment: 'Having seen the light, it rushes to become as one with its source.'So if not the moth, what is the most stupid thing? Peter Lawrence suggests some runners for the stupid stakes, including the bullhead, booby, noddy, tit, ass and baboon, with the silly billy-goat - 'so prevalent in political circles' - starting as favourite.Stuart Cockerill identifies the ant as the most stupid.

You'd just go into a room and put on the gramophone and dance. I was terribly busy.'By now she was so tense that I was afraid for her. Now in the sober guise of Dame Edna Everage, on prime-time television, he can say things like 'my gynaecologist often compliments me on my interiors'.A story like Humphries' should be dynamite in anybody's hands Oddly, he himself chooses to tell only half the tale. Yum pum.' Madame Messerer, former Bolshoi ballerina, is guest teacher with the company and is coaching the principal girls She is 84 years old.

A 15-minute job, requiring only two power sockets - one for the processor and one for the screen - was only complicated by the usual problem of computer manual muddle. Someone who urges that blacks be called 'nig-nogs' so they can be part of the English world of jolly nicknames, who says that a meritocracy is unfair because of its cruelty to people without intellect or talent, and who thinks the Holocaust may have been justified after all because a rabbi trod on his wife's toe - surely such a man has been invented solely for the New Yorker's 'There'll Always Be an England' column. It is an exciting and unusual piece because little glass from this period has survived. The potential for tragic incidents, real or staged, is also a threat.A better option would be for Italian peace-keepers to deploy in Croatia, where Italy's own record is less inflammatory than elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. A further 75 per cent got an average one-off lump sum of pounds 800; 15 per cent got nothing..

So perhaps the convention contains the memory of a reality.Christopher Isherwood pointed out that if Sally Bowles had been at all like Liza Minnelli was in Cabaret, the club at which she sang would have had a queue around the block. Or think of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, whose brother, an author of bedroom farces, had been a conscientious objector.All of which throws new light on Mrs Thatcher's longevity. Working for Marlene Dietrich was hell. PAULA RADCLIFFE likes running in cold weather. The cakes are the work of experts, little short pastry cases filled with honeyed walnuts, thin fragile Florentines and dense chocolate torten.Over in Knightsbridge, Harrods has various tea and coffee shops within its acreage, but the nicest is the Dress Circle on the second floor: weak cappuccino with sad froth, but excellent sliced cake loaves, also four sorts of muffin, and frosted chocolate brownies. Examples include the tiny accelerometers inside airbags in cars, the holes inside bubble jet printers and pinhead-sized components inside video players.Pinheads are common currency to nanotechnologists, who have modified the latest microscope technologies to etch all the words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on to the head of a pin. Ho, ho]But had that honest little conversation not reached the outside world, the tactic could not have succeeded indefinitely.

He is, however, accused of being the financier of Abul Abbas's extremist Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), to have financed and helped deliver the arms used in the 1985 hijack of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and to have abetted the 1984 Madrid shooting of a Lebanese, Elias Awad, suspected by the PLF to have been an Israeli Mossad agent.Also pending are a string of lesser accusations, drawn up by an investigating Spanish magistrate, ranging from illegal possession of firearms to using false passports and running a network of stolen luxury cars.He denies all the accusations that led then magistrate Baltasar Garzon to order his preventive detention in June last year. But the general view of the Warwick Business School MBAs questioned is that instead of the heady days of the late 1980s there is 'an unsettling no man's land' in which businesses are waiting for something to happen. When Dr Feinmann followed up 71 patients four years after they had been prescribed these drugs for facial pain, she found 69 per cent were pain-free, but the rest were still suffering. Why, after several decades now of ever-accelerating technological sophistication, are electronic instruments and methods of sound manipulation not well on the way, as early prophets such as Varese hoped, to superseding traditional orchestral instruments which, as Boulez often complains, have developed little since the 19th century? Part of the answer is that the orchestra has proved unexpectedly adaptable; that, after toiling in their electronic laboratories to devise unprecedented sounds, composers have found they could draw the same effects from complex blendings of acoustic instruments - resulting in a whole new range of cloud textures and sonic frissons in the orchestral works of such composers as Ligeti and Berio But part of the answer is surely artistic. 'You might say we've created the biggest red-light district in London, but the idea was Shirayama's London director, 'Mac' Toyota, and he just wanted the building to look festive. Brussels sources say that on his recent trip through Europe he received some 'good signals' from member states A discreet British lobbying campaign is clearly under way. But the Pope's visit has become a political issue in Lebanon with both Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, and the pro-Iranian Hizbollah party opposing the pilgrimage because of the Vatican's decision to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.The government hopes the Pope will urge Christians to place more faith in their own future here.