Hearts and minds

Pakistan's government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out "President George W Bush". The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds. We're not going to reproduce the poem here, because quite frankly, it blows. But if you think The Da Vinci Code is good prose you can enjoy it here.

Its rhyming couplets describe someone "solid as steel, strong in his faith".

Officials cannot explain how the poem entered the curriculum. Pupils are being told to ignore it.

The BBC's Zaffar Abbas in Islamabad says it is a bizarre episode which has left education officials short of explanations.

At first they put the poem's appearance in the grade 11 textbook down to a coincidence. Hmmm that's a helluva coincidence. Probability experts please write in and let us know what the odds are. It appears that if you put a finite number of monkeys in a room in the White House with a typewriter, they eventually produce self-agrandising pap.

White House spokesman Bud Tackett said: "We're not sure how this bomb Al Jazeera happened, but we'll be looking into it. There are no subliminAl Gore rapist messages in our briefings." He then shuffled his papers looked sternly at the camera and repeated five times "I slam evil acts"

Joseph Goebbels is 108