In my country nice people always apologise even when they are in the right. This is not the case in Sweden or in Germany but may be the case elsewhere in Europe...and I am thinking of Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, the Czech Republic or Poland. Unfortunately nasty people have used this against nice people in court. So I rejoiced to see that a clause had been inserted into the Compensation Act which received Royal Assent this summer that ‘an apology, offer of treatment or other redress shall not of itself amount to an admission of negligence or statutory duty’. Yo! It was of course the House of Lords that inserted this small victory for Common Courtesy...and the Government that tried to remove it but then surrendered. What the bill means with Brussels lurking beneath the Woolsack is another matter.

In his 1993 book The Engineer in the Garden the author Colin Tudge mentions that if we were really in command of the technologies that emerge from science we would not now be anticipating the greenhouse effect, there would not be a hole in the ozone in the sky growing bigger and we would not be wondering if the world can truly contain the projected ten billion population of the mid-21st century.

If we were truly in command we would not have created the world we have unless we were overwhelmingly perverse. Fair comment...and my paper on Real Science addresses this issue...but buried in the small print on the inside pages of today’s newspapers was the good news that the UN World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme had just reported that the ozone layer over Europe, America, Africa and Australasia would be back to pre-1980 levels by 2049 while over Antarctica full recovery was expected by 2065. Now for the bad news.

At least four people died after stepping on Cluster Bombs dropped by the Israelis during the final days of the recent conflict on scores of villages surrounding the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh. There have been growing calls to outlaw cluster bombs which scatter hundreds of bomblets the size of an AA battery over a target area. Although designed to explode on impact they often fail to do so remaining a deadly threat to civilians who might tread on them.

Among the victims was Ali Turkiye (13) who was harvesting grapes in the village of Zawte when he accidentally dislodged a bomblet that had been caught in a vine. ‘It tore the top of his skull off,’ said Ali Haaj Ali the director-general of the Najde Hospital in Nabatieh. ‘We tried to save him but we could not.’ Yusuf Khalil died while helping the Lebanese army to clear the munitions. ‘He was close to one of the bomblets and a frog jumped from next to the device and set it off leaving him with fatal head injuries,’ said Mr Ali.

In a double tragedy an 11-year old boy Hadi Hatab was killed by a cluster bomb as he wandered out of the family home; his father Moussa (32) was killed by another bomb after he sprinted over to help him. ‘The Israelis dropped them when the fighting was nearly over,’ said Hussein Khatib a family friend. ‘They were dropped at night and landed in the rooftops, on the road, everywhere.

Chris Clark the head of the United Nations Weapons Clearance Team in Southern Lebanon said the cluster bombs found were contained in artillery shells and had not been dropped by aircraft. Sean Sutton of the Manchester-based charity the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) said Israel appeared to have used even more cluster bombs than America during the invasion of Iraq...tactics widely criticised by human rights groups.

‘The contamination is incredibly widespread. I have never seen anything like it. In Iraq they were used mainly in rural areas and in some villages but nothing like as much as they have been here. We have visited about 30 or 40 villages in the Nabatieh region and I would say that about 50 percent of them have been carpeted by cluster bombs often with one lying every few metres. We have found them on people’s doorsteps, in school playgrounds and even in the front room of an old lady’s house. Both American-made cluster bombs and Israeli-manufactured copies have been found. They are essentially anti-personnel devices and we think they have been aimed at areas where the Israeli army thought Hezbollah was firing rockets from.’

Israel says that all its munitions used in conflict comply with international law although the American-based campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) argues that their use in civilian areas breaks a legal ban on indiscriminate attacks. ‘Cluster munitions are unacceptably inaccurate and unreliable weapons when used around civilians,’ said Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director. ‘They should never be used in populated areas.’

Britain makes a great deal of money from selling weapons. Yesterday a deal to sell 72 Eurofighter planes to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was signed. The initial value of the deal is £6 billion pounds but it will be worth £30 billion over its lifetime. BAE Systems...Britain’s biggest defence contractor and a partner in the four-nation Eurofighter Consortium...estimates that the contract will provide 40000 jobs directly at BAE Systems and indirectly at companies in the supply chain. The Serious Fraud Office is investigating claims that bribes were paid by companies used by BAE Systems to win orders for equipment as part of the Saudi deal. Shares in BAE Systems rose 3 percent yesterday.