LONDON -- Like most Anglophiles, I feel cheated when I cross the pond and find myself listening to American accents or walking past Burger King and McDonald's in search of a British pub, only to find the bar cluttered with Rolling Rock and Bud taps. What we want is contrast (like Conservative proto-Prime Minister David Cameron embracing the National Health Service, a.k.a. the public option, as he did in a speech today).

Likewise, I relish reading the British papers with their accounts of endless "rows" -- an all-purpose, headline-friendly word that covers everything from mild disagreement to nuclear war -- even though I do keep up with the Times (our Times) online.  From my first visit to Britain as a high school student, coming here has been a trans-dimensional experience.  As they used to say of Earth-Two, the parallel universe in DC Comics, Britain was a world like our own, but with subtle and interesting differences.

That's less and less true in London with its similarities to other cosmpolitan, multicultural cities like L.A., New York and D.C.  But London isn't Britain (or even England) in the way New York isn't the United States. Thus I was chuffed, as they say here, to spend Sunday in the country celebrating (with 90 others) the christening of the son of an old friend. From the Saxon church where the baby was sprinkled by a Central Casting English vicar, we repaired to the manor (no kidding) for a post-baptismal repast.

An Anglophile's dream, but -- Globalization Spoiler Alert -- U.S. politics intruded even in this settiing. I found myself sitting with an American who engaged me in a mostly friendly discussion about whether Obama was really born in the U.S. (and where's that original birth certificate?). The really depressing thing wasn't that a fellow American asked for my view of the Birthers, but that English heads inclined interestedly to hear my answer (which, by the way, was "bunk').

More tea, Vicar? -- and how about that Glenn Beck?

--Michael McGough

An ounce of enforcement is worth a pound of new laws. Or something to that effect. The editorial board points out today that Los Angeles could more effectively limit the proliferation of marijuana clinics by enforcing existing state law against for-profit operations than by dithering over municipal restrictions.

The board mourns the deaths of more than 100 men, women and children in a Pakistani car-bombing, saying that such terrible events should convince Pakistanis that the fight against violent Islamic extremism is their fight too:

More than anything [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton can say, a series of assaults that have taken the lives of more than 500 civilians this year should serve to convince typical Pakistanis that this is not just a U.S. war. The United States and Pakistan have a common enemy in Islamist extremists, and the Pakistani state is fighting for its survival.

And the board urges President Obama to stand by his deadline for closing Guantanamo:

The legal axiom that "justice delayed is justice denied" applies with special force to Guantanamo. Whether they are dangerous terrorists or, like many of those already released, bystanders caught up in a post- 9/11 dragnet, these detainees have languished for years without adequate due process.

On the other side of the fold, a consultant to a documentary on convicted murderer Leo Frank writes about his 1915 lynching in Georgia. The subsequent campaigns either to vilify him or clear his name echo today, with haves and have-nots viewing the same events from markedly different perspectives.

Bernstein is just plain wrong that the organization's Middle East program focuses on Israel's alleged human rights violations while ignoring those committed by Arab governments and the Iranian regime. Even a quick glance at Human Rights Watch's website, where recent reports are posted, shows that the majority of those on the Middle East relate to countries other than Israel. According to Human Rights Watch, it has produced 1,776 total documents on the Middle East since 2000 -- 250, or 14%, of which were devoted to Israel.

--Karin Klein

Photo of the aftermath of the Pakistan bombing, Credit: Arshad Arbab / EPA

The police commission picked three finalists in its search for Los Angeles' new police chief, and the editorial board says each possesses many of the qualities needed to succeed atop the LAPD. Just so there won't be any confusion on that point, the board also describes what those qualities might be. The board also notes that two proposed ballot measures are due to be submitted today to enable and call a state constitutional convention, and it all but endorses them in a near-desperate plea for functional governance in California.

On the Op-Ed page, Raphael J. Sonenshein, former executive director of the city's charter reform commission, accuses rookie City Atty. Carmen Trutanich of not understanding what a city attorney is supposed to do in this town. Columnist Tim Rutten gives a highly nuanced defense of the push to reveal who is contributing to efforts in other states to put Prop. 8-style bans on gay marriage on the ballot. Musing about the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles, Peter Garrison, a pilot and contributing editor to Flying magazine, reveals just how boring it is to fly a modern airline jet. And columnist Doyle McManus dissects the Obama administration's decision-making process on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Credit: Ted Rall / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

Manny Garcia's AP photo on the left, Shepard Fairey's poster on the right.

For those who just tuned in, Fairey's the guy who created a poster supporting Barack Obama's presidential bid that was an impressive bit of retro iconography -- a cross between Andy Warhol and mid-20th century propaganda. Not sure why Obama supporters thought this was a good thing, but then, Mao's been dead for a long time (insert sarcastic emoticon here). Anyway, the Associated Press objected to the poster, saying Fairey had violated a copyrighted photo shot by the AP's Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in Washington, D.C. Fairey, who asked a judge to declare that the poster was a fair use (the AP later countersued), maintained for months that he'd used just a portion of a larger image that featured Obama sitting next to George Clooney. That's important, legally, because one of the four fair-use tests is whether the new object uses the entire original or just a portion of it. But the AP argued from the outset that Fairey's work reproduced virtually an entire close-up that Garcia had shot at the event.

This month, Fairey disclosed that he'd lied about which photo he had based his poster on. It was, as these things go, a whopper of an admission. This is from Fairey's website:

While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong.

In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.

In retrospect, Fairey's initial contention just wasn't credible. I mean, how many times has George Clooney been cropped out of a shot? More important, Fairey's case raises a great issue: how far does one have to go in transforming a photo for the use to be considered fair? Garcia's photo is easily recognizable in the poster, yet the latter has a completely different context. The original is a headshot of a politician. Fairey's poster, on the other hand, invokes the idol worship of Dear Leaders of yore. It's both hagiographic and, to me, subversive. The copyright lawyers I've talked to say that there's not a lot of case law regarding fair use and photographs. Although each fair-use claim is decided on its own merits, Fairey's has the potential to help clarify the boundaries for remixers, collage artists and others who make new works out of existing photographs without licensing them. But Fairey's lies already have weakened his case -- his legal team told the AP that it will ask the court's permission to drop out. That's just the start of the possible fallout, which may be severe enough to prevent the interesting legal questions his work raises from being answered.

-- Jon Healey

Columnist Tim Rutten notes the recent complaints about the California initiative process by the state's chief justice and a top fund manager and asks, what to do? The answer is, umm, unclear:

Also on the Op-Ed page, James D. Zirin, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, urges President Obama to hurry up and appoint a cyber security czar because the risks are so great. And hey, you can never have enough czars! And author Barbara Ehrenreich scoffs at a recent study, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," that "purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972." Says Ehrenreich:

On the editorial pages, the board blasts the health insurance lobby for hiring PricewaterhouseCooper to do a hatchet job on the Senate Finance Committee's healthcare reform bill. But it admits that the insurers have a point: The bill falls critically short of the goal of providing universal health insurance. And it argues that the recent botched execution in Ohio, the latest in a string of similar incidents in that state, adds to the evidence that lethal injections don't pass constitutional muster.

Photo credit: Susan Tibbles / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

The Times editorial board meets three times a week to discuss what we're going to say in our editorials, but sometimes news breaks between meetings and we scramble to reach a consensus through e-mail. The announcement that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize is a case in point. To give you an idea how ideas germinate within the Opinion Manufacturing Division, here's a transcript of that electronic discussion (with the spelling cleaned up a bit). Please note that this is just the starting point for an editorial -- the off-the-top thoughts that present the writer with angles to pursue and questions to answer. In other words, don't confuse this banter with the reporting editorial writers put into their pieces.

Michael McGough, our Washington-based senior editorial writer, started the conversation at 6:57 a.m. Pacific with a query circulated to the rest of the board:

Marjorie Miller, who writes about foreign policy (and Winnie the Pooh sequels), punched out a retort on her Blackberry as she got out of the gym:

Nick Goldberg, editor of the editorial pages, responded:

Miller soon elaborated ...

With my mother's side of the family hailing from Kongeriket Norge, I've gathered from personal experience that Norwegians (the ones I know, anyway) have a super-squishy soft spot for President Obama. This morning, the Norwegian Nobel Committee made its country's infatuation practically official:

President Obama, who has pledged to place diplomacy ahead of confrontation and reached out to a skeptical world with offers of mutual understanding, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today for what the Nobel committee called "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"I will accept this award as a call to action, a call to all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century," Obama said in a White House Rose Garden appearance. "This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity."

Professing humility and surprise in the awarding of the prize, the president said, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as a recognition of American leadership. . . .

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize," Obama said, suggesting that the prize has not always "been awarded just to honor specific achievements," but also to lend some momentum to the cause of peace.

I'm surprised, but not completely thrown for a loop. Norway, not being much larger than the city of Los Angeles in population, is deeply involved in world affairs to level that would suit a country the size of, say, France. Its diplomats have actively sought out peaceful resolutions to bloody conflicts in which Norway seemed to have had no practical national interest (the landmark 1993 peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis is called the Oslo Accords for a reason -- and yes, for their efforts the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin the Nobel Peace Prize). So when the leader of a nuclear-armed superpower, whose previous presidential administration disregarded parts of the Geneva Convention as "quaint" and was known for starting expensive wars it couldn't finish, reassures the United Nations General Assembly that the U.S. should not seek to dominate weaker nations, you can bet the Norwegian Nobel Committee took notice. So yes, chalk this up as a nakedly political statement, wishful thinking that the president's actions will align with words or some other kind of naïveté, but the Norwegian Nobel Committee had its reasons.

Enough Norse talk; click here for more reaction.

What are your thoughts on the award? Take our unscientific poll, post a comment or do both.

Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard, gets the Op-Ed page rolling this morning by accusing President Obama of being organized labor's Santa Claus. The First Community Organizer may believe that unionization helps lift workers into the middle class, Continetti writes, but the numbers don't support that argument:

Speaking of a unionized workforce, columnist Tim Rutten urges the state Senate to waive some California environmental rules to let developer Ed Roski Jr. build a football stadium in the City of Industry. Why?

Alllll-righty then. Closing out the page, Anna Husarska, senior policy advisor at the International Rescue Committee, laments the "huge human cost" of the Taliban's operations in Pakistan's Swat Valley and the government's counteroffensive. The image above is an illustration of the psychic toll; it's a drawing by a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley named Sheema.

On the other half of the opinion pages, the Times editorial board blasts the L.A. Department of Water and Power for the fabulous parting gifts it's planning to shower on departing chief H. David Nahai. We like how Nahai defied union leaders (the Opinion page's méchants du jour) to bring in more renewable power from outside the district, but we still don't see the need to pay him his salary for the rest of the year:

The board also says the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines for online advertisers could put too much scrutiny on bloggers and amateur product reviewers. And it warns that the Supreme Court's review of a case involving the giant cross in California's Mojave National Preserve threatens to "blow a gaping hole" in the 1st Amendment's wall between church and state.

-- Jon Healey

The Times editorial board laments the departure of Guy Mehula, the man who oversaw the recent surge construction for the Los Angeles Unified School District. That program operated with an efficiency and competence rarely found at LAUSD, the board asserts, and those qualities are threatened by Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines' reported plans to supervise the unit more closely:

Elsewhere on the editorial page, the board defends Facebook's handling of a user-generated poll asking whether President Obama should be assassinated. And it urges lawmakers to grow spines and stop blocking the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to maximum security federal prisons in the U.S.

On the Op-Ed side of the fold, columnist Tim Rutten runs through the list of policy challenges facing President Obama -- the jobless recovery, rising health insurance premiums, the war in Afghanistan, the Iranian leadership's nuclear ambitions -- and finds no easy choices. Nina Hachigian, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says the Chinese government is sending mixed signals about its willingness to play ball with international organizations to address global problems: And writer Kathryn Wilkens of Upland muses about the life and death of the mission fig tree that had anchored her garden for decades:

Insert your ironic comment about this article appearing in dead tree media here.

Illustration: Blair Thornley / For The Times

-- Jon Healey