I suppose everybody has heard that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. What a dreadful choice. Al is a partisan politician, not a disinterested truth-seeker; Al's documentary, which made him internationally famous, is full of errors; Al's personal lifestyle, with his private jet, energy-wasting mansion, and mining interests, is the height of hypocrisy; and it's quite obvious this is just the Nobel committee trying to slap Bush again, like they did with Jimmy Carter. Of course nobody takes the Peace prize seriously--I mean, they gave it to Arafat, of all people.

Not many people take the Nobel Lit prize seriously, either, because they keep giving it to obscure writers nobody has ever heard of for political reasons--this year it's a French speaker, next year it has to be an Asian, and so on. So I was surprised to see that Doris Lessing won it this year, an author that real living people have actually read. I've only read The Good Terrorist by her, and that is a hell of a good novel. She's certainly a much better choice than jokers like Dario Fo.

La Vanguardia is proposing that Quim Monzó should be awarded the next Nobel Lit prize, in the wake of his stunning triumph at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Yeah, right. When donkeys fly. I think Eduardo Mendoza would be a good candidate, though.

There's an alleged John Edwards sex scandal breaking; he's been accused of having an affair with a very weird New York woman who he hired to make films showing the behind-the-scenes of his presidential campaign. The National Enquirer, not the most trustworthy of news sources, broke the story, and Edwards made the mistake of publicly denying it, which lets the mainstream media run with it on the grounds that they're just reporting the candidate's denial, not actively spreading sensationalistic muck.

I have to say I doubt it. I don't like Edwards at all, I think he's just a rich ambulance-chaser who bought himself one term in the Senate and is now trying to buy the presidency. He stands for nothing but what the focus groups tell him is going to sell. But he seemed to have a real relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, who was diagnosed earlier this year with what might be terminal cancer; when that story broke, she announced that her top priority was going to be her husband's campaign. It's hard to believe that he was cheating on her, and especially not with such an unpleasant woman as this filmmaker seems to be.

If he has been cheating on her, though, his campaign is dead, because pretty much all he has going for him is his attractive image and this scandal would completely wreck it.

One point: No lawsuit against the National Enquirer has yet been announced, and if the story about the affair is not true, Edwards should sue the hell out of them. He's a trial lawyer, he knows the libel laws better than anybody else. If he does not sue, it's tantamount to admission.

The European press is going to go wild over this one.