Admittedly, the taxi-driver had crawled through a red light; normally, this might have provoked a shaken fist or a curse on your progeny for seven generations. But, in Scotland, they do not like to risk being misunderstood If you've done wrong you should know about it. There is the Castle and the Royal Mile, but these hardly evoke the Acropolis. And the annual Festival, though a breathtakingly catholic event, is hardly the repository of cultural antiquity, unless you count some of the precious relics on the stand-up comedy circuit.

Maybe what they mean is that the traffic is so bad that, as in the real Athens, they should allow cars to enter the city on alternate days only. Sandy Berger explained that Clinton acted in order to enhance "the psychological dimension of power" against terrorists. I believe Bill Clinton is a good and courageous leader, not a liar and a bully I mean, look at what nice ties he wears.. PUZZLINGLY, THEY call Edinburgh the Athens of the North, though, as one of my Edinburgh friends points out, the August weather makes it feel more like the Reykjavik of the South. (I wasn't impressed by that either.)"I talked to a man from the US State Department," el-Bashir told me.

"I said if you know of any terrorist training camps, then bring your elite forces and we'll bring our special forces and we'll go together to eliminate these camps, if they really exist." You'd expect a towel-head to say something like that.According to reports in yesterday's Observer, US intelligence told the President that there were no traces of nerve gas production in the factory his missiles were going to hit He fired them anyway. At the same time, notorious Saudi terrorist Usama bin-Laden was booted out of Sudan. (That didn't fool me.) His expulsion came a year after the Sudanese government had arrested and extradited Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as the terrorist "Carlos the Jackal", to France. That means, as one Hamas official said in 1995, that Sudan is where you come when you've got nowhere else to go."Until 1996, Sudan naively allowed any Arabs to enter without a visa, seeing itself as an oasis of pure Islamic faith, unlike neighbour Saudi Arabia, which they regarded as too close to the non-Muslim Western nations.President el-Bashir ended Sudan's non-visa entry policy in May 1996.