Sky News, one of the non-BBC outlets in the UK, has me confused this morning. I flipped on the hotel TV while getting dressed, and was greeted with a headline declaring that Zarqawi had been captured and two men discussing the good news. One of them noted that this was particularly fortuitous news on the day of the handover.

Eh, what? Wasn't the handover supposed to happen on Wednesday? CNN certainly gave me that impression, with their non-stop display of graphics and journalists bragging about how On The Ground, In The Action they were.

Then the headline suddenly changed to 'General Denies Zarqawi Capture,' and the two men, as confused as myself, haltingly claimed that Reuters had gotten something wrong. An erroneous translation of something from an Arab news source. Or something.

Getting back to the early handover -- Chris Patten said that moving it up by a couple of days, and doing it without too much ceremony, was very sensible, as the Iraqi insurgents probably had planned to cause as much havoc on June 30 as possible. This sounds right; I think the Bush Administration probably has learned that the more fanfare they produce, the more likely it is to come back and bite them on the butt.