FLAT EARTH : Going ... gong

Ah, the wonders of Italian bureaucracy. Just as the world was writing Sali Berisha of Albania off as a corrupt, authoritarian, thoroughly nasty piece of work, the Italian government's official gazette announced on Friday that he had been awarded the highest decoration in the land.

Nobody was more surprised than the Italian government itself. It turns out the award was conferred on Berisha during a state visit to Tirana by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro last April. It took 11 months to process the paperwork and make the award official, by which time everyone had forgotten all about it.

With armed gangs out for his blood and the whole country clamouring for his resignation, Berisha's grip on power is a bit tenuous. At least, though, he will be able to tell his grandchildren how he became a Knight of the Grand Cross with the Decoration of the Grand Sash of the Italian Republic.

Sold a pup

This sounds like the bad old Cold War days, when the Soviet Union was always claiming to have invented everything from psychoanalysis to the helicopter. A Russian scientist is asking why there is such a hullabaloo over cloning, since he and his colleagues did it first: they produced not just one, but two clones of a dog in a secret KGB-run laboratory in the mid-1970s, he says.

Sensational if true, but doubts begin to creep in as one reads the transcript of Voice of Russia's interview with the scientist, named only as Boris. He furnishes impressive detail of the work, names the scientists in charge and tells of infighting between the KGB and the military to gain control of the research. All very convincing, but then he announces that the three dogs are still alive, which seems a bit implausible.

It gets a lot weirder: according to Boris, the scientist who keeps the dogs says they look exactly the same, but the "original" is more responsive than the clones, whose behaviour is more robotic - "they lack a soul, divine intervention".

"But outwardly they are absolutely alike," says Boris. "Even when out for a walk they stop at the same tree and lift their back legs at the same time." I start to think that either Boris is completely credulous or imagines we are.

Who's sorry now?

Being the eminence grise of Singapore means never having to say sorry - or almost never. If you are Lee Kuan Yew, you are accustomed to telling everyone what to do and suing anyone who shows insufficient respect, sometimes to the point of bankrupting them.

The latest to get the treatment is Tang Liang Hong, an opposition politician who left Singapore for Johore, just across the causeway in Malaysia, and later for London, saying he feared for his life at home. In an affidavit supporting his libel suit, one of 12 against the hapless Tang, Lee jeered: "Of all places he went to Johore. That place is notorious for shootings, muggings and carjackings."

Hundreds of demonstrators came out last week in Johore and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, indulging in the luxury of being safe from the Singaporean courts to call Lee crazy, rude and senile. Diplomatic considerations forced the great man to announce that he "apologises unreservedly for the offence he has caused to the government and people of Malaysia". Unfamiliar words indeed - it is refreshing to know Lee still remembers them.