GEORGE Galloway's expulsion from the House of Commons for having the temerity to criticise members of the Commons standards and privileges committee illustrates the depths to which the House has sunk.

Its members failed to halt the illegal drive to war led by war criminal former prime minister Tony Blair.

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At the time, he was facing the fallout from his much-ridiculed impersonation of a cat on Celebrity Big Brother, and he ran the risk of losing yet more credibility in the world of Westminster politics with another foray into commercial media.

"The Lebanese army is about the only institution still working in this country"

I returned home to Beirut this week to find my landlord, Mustafa, welding an armoured door on to the entrance of his ground-floor flat. "There are many thieves nowadays, Mr Robert," he pleaded with me. "They will come to my house first - they will not reach your apartment."

Well, I don't really want an armoured door on my home. But have things deteriorated this far in Beirut? I pondered what to say to Mustafa. Truly, I could not repeat the latest mantra of the late Tony Blair - south of the Lebanese border and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that he had "a sense of possibilities".

Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that the rejection of Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky by the administration of the University of California at Irvine as the new dean of its law school because he is "too politically controversial" is the latest chapter in the post-September 11 attack on US academic freedom under the guise of protecting security ...