UN Deputy Secretary General Benon Sevan have been extremely busy being unavailable over the last month or so, being heavily implicated in UNSCAM by documents showing him personally having recived 14.3 million barrels of Saddam's oil. Lately, he has only surfaced, sort of, to send nasty emails to potential UN witnesses ordering them not to cooperate with the US congressional committee investigating the oil for food palaces scandal.
Now Sevan has finally given a brief interview, just to tell that he has not been running away, he will cooperate with the UN Volcker inquiry, and this story is all an evil conspiracy to smear the UN.
The worst thing is that the "this is an American smear campaign" meme will no doubt play very well, especially among the Russians and French, who've been wholesale into the scam from the very start. And the UN can apparently be involved in as many scams, pedophile and genocide scandals it wants without losing credibility in Europe.
A preacher died after a rattlesnake bit him in the finger during an Easter service. Nobody in the church made any attempt to get medical help for Rev. Dwayne Long, because the community believes that when people die from ceremonial snakebites, it is a sign that their time was up.
Sheriff Gary Parsons shrugs it off.
"We don't anticipate any charges," he said. "That's their belief."
An encouragment for Christians to play with dangerous snakes is part of an ending to the Gospel of Mark widely believed to be spurious, but still accepted by many groups as the actual words of Jesus.
Mark 16: 17, 18 "And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
Did they try the holding-hands-on part after he got bitten?
Eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg (remember him?) criticises the new Hollywood eco-disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow for pretending to be a reflection of accurate science about climate change, which it is charitable to say it is not.
The film's creators is using the hype to, well, hype the Kyoto protocol, which they seem to believe has any chance to protect us from global warming. In fact, Bjørn Lomborg says the agreement (which luckily is now dead in the water) would cost $150 billion a year to implement and only buy us a six year delay in the warming process.
There is another reason why it is wrong - I would even say amoral - to overplay the case for combatting climate change. We cannot do everything. Our resources are limited, and our attention is quickly diverted from one fashionable cause to another. We must ask ourselves if spending $150 billion every year for the rest of the century to postpone warming for six years is really the best use of that money.
For the cost of implementing Kyoto in just one year, we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation to everyone on the planet.
It is tragic that cost-benefit analysis has not at all been part of the decision making process behind the Kyoto protocol, which now gathers dust and only serves as ammunition against the Bush administration. One is tempted to believe that was the only rationale behind it to begin with; none of the European signatories display anything resembling a willingness to implement its goals. However, now they have someone else to blame to their home audiences, who are unlikely to understand that Kyoto was the result of politicians' "we must do something"-panic. ie. it was "something" so let's do it.
It's slightly disquieting if postal services don't know their geography, but this is what has apparently happened in Ireland. The new stamp celebrating the new EU countries depict the old members in blue and the new ones in yellow. On the above detail, you can see Malta off Italy, but what is Crete, which is a Greek island, doing there? Well, apparently it's meant to be Cyprus, but it both looks like and is located where Crete actually resides.
The producers deny there is any error, and claims "artistic licence." Let's hope that is not what they do with people's letters.
A fitting time not to forget the horrible suffering caused and the sacrifices made necessary by fascism the last time it was on the rise. Since history never repeats, even as certain recurring patterns can be discerned, new threats are frequently misinterpreted. However, the dual phenomena of Islamic fascism and European anti-Semitism is hard to ignore. The pathetic response of much of the European left to the threat of terrorism shows, however, that many Europeans are doing their darnest to do just that.
