Dr Mahathir Mohamad cruises over to Africa, that cradle of democratic tradition and thought (and one of the few places left where he is genuinely welcome), and trots out his time-worn blast against the big, bad Western media as he helps launch a Third World "truth-reporting" media alternative.

Then, a few days later, he laments that the Western media have not given any decent publicity to what he did in Africa!

Also in Africa, he touts another sterling example of the evolving 'Mahathirnomics' when he calls for developed countries to pay some sort of 'global tax' to even out the world's wealth imbalances. The last we heard, finance ministers in the developed world were scrambling to put this brilliant idea into practice! The cheques are probably in the mail!

sResponding to Suhakam's scathing report on police conduct during an opposition gathering, Mahathir says the Italian police are more brutal, therefore our police are not bad. What a concept! "As long as somebody else somewhere is worse than us, we are good."