The Editors

General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led the Vietminh against France and the People's Army of Vietnam against the United States, is 100 today. 'It has always been hard to see in the colourless Ho Chi Minh and his bookish general Vo Nguyen Giap the towering military geniuses of their reputations,' Murray Sayle wrote in the LRB in 2002, 'but there is no doubt about their patriotism.' Here's an extract from Sayle's account of the battle of Dien Bien Phu:

On Jadaliyya, an anonymous eyewitness account of the violent dispersal of a protest outside the Syrian Embassy in Beirut on Tuesday night: The Lebanese security detail disappeared, and the now larger group of counter-protestors began to push towards us, clearly trying to intimidate us into leaving.

Syed Talha Ahsan was arrested in London on 19 July 2006 in response to an extradition request from the United States. He has been detained without trial for five years. Tomorrow evening, the Islamic Human Rights Commission is holding an event to mark the anniversary of his arrest at its bookshop in Wembley. One of the speakers will be Gareth Peirce, who mentioned Ahsan's case in a piece for the LRB last year, outlining the case against extraditing suspects to the US: A number of individuals, arrested in the UK, were astonished to learn that activities they had undertaken years before offended against US law.

From Alan Bennett's diary for last year: I give my details, and my address and phone number, to a constable who, when I get back home, duly rings with the incident number. Ten minutes later, less than an hour after it has occurred, the doorbell rings and on the doorstep is a rather demure girl: ‘My name is Amy. I’m from the Daily Mail. We’ve just heard about your unfortunate experience.’

There are still tickets available for tonight's discussion at the British Museum, After Egypt: Revolutions in the Arab World.