Since President George Bush is widely seen as the architect of peace, he is perhaps more popular in southern Sudan than anywhere else on earth. At the Rumbek sub-chief's election one young warrior called Thuapon leaps frenetically in the air, proudly waving a white Barbie-doll in a pink dress. This is a new wife for President Bush. May God grant him many fertile women with firm bodies and an election victory without problems in Florida.
One likely side effect of the recent enlargment of the European Union is that the new eastern European countries, with a recent history of communist oppression, are more positive to the US and realise that freedom sometimes must be defended by force.
"One fundamental likelihood of the enlargement is that we are bringing in a number of NATO members who understand they live in a dangerous neighborhood and understand that they owe their current freedoms very much to American resolve and American policies through the Cold War. That means, I think, that for quite some time to come, there will be a much greater weight of pro-Americanism within the EU. I think also that there is going to be a greater readiness to accept that sometimes there will be a need for a robust military action," [UPI editor in chief Martin] Walker says.
We remember that the French weren't too happy about the new EU members voicing their opinions about the Iraq conflict.
Iraqis are beginning to accept their new security forces
The coalition-trained Iraqi security forces - soldiers and police - have been derided as collaborators and attacked by insurgents from the start, but there are now signs of more acceptance among Iraqis generally.
There is no way to tell the breadth of this apparent change in popular thinking. But some dozen security personnel in Baghdad and the flash point of Fallujah report that the views of their fellow Iraqis - tired of the continual burn of insecurity, car bombs, and kidnappings - are shifting.
"It is beginning to change," says Emad Abbas Qassem, a lieutenant in the Facility Protection Service (FPS), at his post outside a central Baghdad education ministry office. "It's not only the people, but my wife, my family and brothers tell me: 'Go to work and do your duty.' They used to be so afraid."
Seriously, who'd want that job? To the degree these guys work to improve the security situation for ordinary Iraqis, I applaud their dedication and courage.
Christophe at monputeaux.com, a French blogger in Puteaux near Paris, has been criticising the local city management for months and received a lot of attention locally. The powers that be do not like this at all. The city mayor has even been phoning him with threats (of course recorded and duly blogged).
Today, he has been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging. Fortunately for Christophe, the National Police arrived immediately as they found what was happening weird, and let him go.
Christophe is filing a complaint with the National Police.
None of the sources I could find (and read) gave the name of the mayor. Or his address. Or his home phone number.
It's all in there: Benon Sevan, Kofi Annan, his son Kojo, and of course our friends the Russians and the French and the vouchers from Saddam and a Mercedes Benz sedan that obviously fit the UN's definition of humanitarian aid.
Could Annan possibly have been ignorant about this massive fraud? That is hard to believe.
I am proud to say I did not watch the Eurovision Song Contest this year either (in fact I did not know the final was tonight), but I did catch a glimpse of the Ukrainian winner Ruslana (picture). Well, wow!
Ukraine has only taken part in the presigious competition (really!) of horrible pop music once earlier. At any rate, nobody would be ashamed of being represented by Ruslana, no matter what she sang.
Norway's Knut Anders Sørum ended rock bottom despite calling his exceptionally crappy song "High." He was saved from zero points by Sweden.
PS: Famously, ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo" in 1974, 30 years ago. Nothing even remotely interesting has happened in the competition since. Musically, that is.
The large peace rally in Israel today is really confusing the heck out of Europe's leftist media. Ariel Sharon is consistently portrayed as the evil hawk, and his Gaza disengagement plan has been met with deep suspicion here, to put it mildly. So when the Likud party handed him a stinging defeat by rejecting the plan, glee filled the pages of European newspapers.
Now, the majority of Israelis clearly support Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, and the demonstration today was a clear support for it, but it was organised by the Labour party along with various peace groups, and the left's unlikely hero (through little fault of his own, I have to add) Shimon Peres addressed the crowd in support of the plan.
Of course, the Norwegian state broadcaster and anti-semitic bastionNRK took great pains avoiding to mention anything that could remind the viewers that this large demonstration was not precisely a stinging rebuke to Sharon. They had no problems finding and interviewing the least representative people they could find, but the irony was quite sickening.
These guys are such a self-parody sometimes. I wish they were allstriking. For a very long time.
