What would have been our reaction if the ambassador of Germany had written a note to the same effect? "You allege that a 'Jewish genocide' took place in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 ... I believe you have some misconceptions about those events..." Of course, the moment such a letter became public, the ambassador of Germany would be condemned by the Foreign Office, our man in Berlin would - even the pusillanimous Blair might rise to the occasion - be withdrawn for consultations and the European Union would debate whether sanctions should be placed upon Germany.

But Mr Alptuna need have no such worries. His country is not a member of the European Union - it merely wishes to be - and it was Mr Blair's craven administration that for many months tried to prevent Armenian participation in Britain's Holocaust Day.

Amid this chicanery, there are a few shining bright lights and I should say at once that Mr Alp-tuna's letter is a grotesque rep-resentation of the views of a growing number of Turkish citizens, a few of whom I have the honour to know, who are convinced that the story of the great evil visited upon the Armenians must be told in their country. So why, oh why, I ask myself, are Mr Alptuna and his colleagues in Paris and Beirut and other cities still peddling this nonsense?

In Lebanon, for example, the Turkish embassy has sent a "communiquZ" to the local French-language L'OrientLeJour newspaper, referring to the "soi-disant (so-called) Armenian genocide" and asking why the modern state of Armenia will not respond to the Turkish call for a joint historical study to "examine the events" of 1915.

In fact, the Armenian president, Robert Kotcharian, will not respond to such an invitation for the same reason that the world's Jewish community would not respond to the call for a similar examination of the Jewish Holocaust from the Iranian president - because an unprecedented international crime was committed, the mere questioning of which would be an insult to the millions of victims who perished.

But the Turkish appeals are artfully concocted. In Beirut, they recall the Allied catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915 when British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops suffered massive casualties at the hands of the Turkish army. In all - including Turkish soldiers - up to a quarter of a million men perished in the Dardanelles. The Turkish embassy in Beirut rightly states that the belligerent nations of Gallipoli have transformed these hostilities into gestures of reconciliation, friendship and mutual respect. A good try. But the bloodbath of Gallipoli did not involve the planned murder of hundreds of thousands of British, French, Australian, New Zealand - and Turkish - women and children.

But now for the bright lights. A group of "righteous Turks" are challenging their government's dishonest account of the 1915 genocide: Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran, Halil Berktay, Hrant Dink, Ragip Zarakolu and others claim that the "democratic process" in Turkey wil "chip away at the darkness" and they seek help from Armenians in doing so. Yet even they will refer only to the 1915 "disaster", the "tragedy", and the "agony" of the Armenians. Dr Fatma Gocek of the University of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire's terror against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word genocide - though she acknowledges its accuracy - on the grounds that it has become "politicised" and thus hinders research.

I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alputuna writes to me - with awesome disingenuousness - that Ar-menians "have failed to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of genocide". And he goes on to say that "genocide, as you are well aware, has a quite specific legal definition" in the UN's 1948 Convention. But Mr Alputuna is himself well aware - though he does not say so, of course - that the definition of geno-cide was set out by Raphael

Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass slaughter of the Armenians.

And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West which reveal the smell of death - Armenian death - in their pages. I quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of Denmark's minister in Turkey during the First World War. "The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people," Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The Bishop of Karput was ordered to leave Aleppo within 48 hours "and it has later been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him have be e n. killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate... In Angora ... approximately 6,000 men ... have been shot on the road.e v en here in Constantinople (Istanbul), Armenians are being abducted and sent to Asia..."

There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to me: "In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including Istanbul... were excluded from deportation." Somebody here is not telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish Ambassador to the Court of St James?

Al the while, new diplomatic archives are opening to reveal the smell of death - Armenian death.

The Germans have no to reason to celebrate the damning verdict. They came second on all three counts.

WAYN's French founder, Jerome Touze, told the papers he had been stunned by the thumping condemnation of his compatriots and sought to blame it on Gallic love-struck sulking.

"I had no idea that the French would emerge as such an unfriendly country," he said.

"I think our romantic 'moodiness' is misunderstood and I will be sure to pass on the message to my family and friends back in France to be a bit more cheerful to tourists in the future."

Italy was voted the world's most cultured nation with the best cuisine, while the United States was named the most unstylish with the worst food.

The British did not feature in the top 10 of any of the categories.

"The British fit in nowhere -- good or bad. It appears that we are so completely average that the voters did not include us in any category," the tabloid Daily Express commented.

"And to our shame, four percent of respondents -- all British of course -- said they would only talk to other Britons when they are abroad."

This unwillingness to talk to the locals appears to go hand in hand with respondents' perceptions of foreigners.

While most said Spain was the foreign country where they would most like to live, they said the Spaniards were nearly as unfriendly and ungenerous as the French.

To add insult to injury, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph put the boot in on Saturday by saying in an editorial that the French stank.

"The French may like to think that Chanel No 5 is their scent but we all know that garlic and stale Gitanes are much more representative."

"It started jerking and moving around, like, not right," said Katelyn Churchich, 16, of Oakdale, who was in the second-to-last car. "We kind of heard scratching and we didn't know anything was wrong until we smelled metal grinding with each other, and then when we looked back, one of the cars was tilted on its side."

Bailey Merchant, 12, of Shakopee, said she was in the rear car when the car in front started jerking and smoking. She said she fell out of her car when it tipped.

"We were jerked and twisted and it started to hurt really badly," she said.

Fourteen people were taken to St. Francis Regional Medical Center, where they were treated for mostly strains and sprains and released, hospital spokeswoman Lori Manke said. Four people refused medical attention, Von Bank said.

The roller coaster, the Wild Thing, has six cars and was carrying 35 people at the time of the accident. It reaches speeds of up to 74 mph but was braking and going much slower as it approached the station, Von Bank said.

Valleyfair, which is owned by Cedar Fair LP, of Sandusky, Ohio, said its maintenance officials were investigating and the ride was closed until further notice. The suburban Minneapolis park remained open.

Von Bank said the Wild Thing had been in operation for 10 years without any similar problems.

The park later said in a statement that two sensor faults caused the computerized safety system to shut down the ride twice Saturday. Both times, it said, maintenance staff found no problems and the ride was reopened. The ride was shut down for 10 minutes less than two hours before Sunday's accident for a routine inspection, but no problems were noted, the statement said.

Tomas Bohr and colleagues made plexiglass buckets, 13 and 20 centimetres across, with metal bottoms that could be rotated at high speed by a motor. They filled the bucket with water and spun the bottom to whip up the liquid into a whirlpool that rose up the sides of the container.

This set-up is very similar to the rotating bucket that Isaac Newton used in the seventeenth century to investigate centrifugal forces.

The researchers found that once the plate was spinning so fast that the water span out to the sides, creating a hole of air in the middle, the dry patch wasn't circular as might be expected. Instead it evolved, as the bucket's spin sped up, from an ellipse to a three-sided star, to a square, a pentagon, and, at the highest speeds investigated, a hexagon.

In a spin

The apparatus needed to see this strange effect is so simple that it seems surprising that it has never been reported before. Bohr suggests that either no one was looking for it, or they simply didn't spin water fast enough.

Harry Swinney, a specialist in pattern-forming fluid flows at the University of Texas at Austin, says the new observation is roughly in line with what one might expect. At high enough rotation speeds, he says, a fluid will always experience some flow instability that creates a symmetrical structure.

Similar polygonal shapes have been reported in gigantic, vortex-like flows in the atmosphere of our planet and others, as well as in the eye of a hurricane2. And an immense, hexagonal-shaped vortex was spotted by the Voyager spacecraft at the northern pole of the gas-giant planet Saturn3.

These natural structures have never been fully explained. Could they be produced by the effect observed by the Danish team? "I expect that similar conditions might apply in these atmospheric flows," says Bohr. But he admits that at this stage he doesn't understand the pattern-forming process well enough to be sure of the comparison.

Swinney, meanwhile, thinks that the process is unlikely to apply to large-scale flows such as that on Saturn, but might be relevant to smaller-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.