Al.Jazeera says it has received a tape saying that South KoreantranslatorKim Sun-ilhas beenmurderedby terrorists. A militant website is reportedly making the same claim. Korean authorites now say they have found his body and confirmed his death.
This tragic news came shortly after earlier reports said the execution had been delayed and negotiations were going well.
As I don't believe in hell, I can only hope that al-Zarqawi and his murdering thugs take a long time dying in a very painful way.
Iran is threatening to prosecute the eight British sailors it captured, allegedly in Iranian territorial waters, according to a state-run TV station.
British diplomats are working to have the men released.
A complicating factor may be that the sailors are detained by the hardliners of the revolutionary guard, while diplomatic access only gets them in toich with reformist fractions that are more eager to end the standoff.
Obviously Iran took them to send a message. If it also intended to use the men as a bargaining chip in the nuclear standoff, this can get messy.
Hopefully Tony Blair will stand better up to such blackmail than Jimmy Carter did in 1979.
Christopher Hitchens writes a devastating criticism of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, saying it is essentially the same type of lies, distortions, deceptions and omissions we found in "Bowling."
It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending.
This is Moore's modus operandi. "Bowling", taken at face value, actually debunked the crime that the availability of guns caused gun-related crimes. Yet, a large part of the movie was him lobbying to stop a supermarket chain selling ammunition. There is no logic, the movies just creates a conmfortable fuzzy feeling in the audience that they are right and the opposition is ridiculous and wrong.
Since Moore has been issuing some preemptive threats to sue people who "lie" about him, Hitchens tries to provoke him into doing such a silly thing:
However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.
They calculate that expresses between London and Edinburgh consume slightly more fuel per seat (the equivalent of 11.5 litres) than a modern diesel-powered car making the same journey.
The car's superiority rises dramatically when compared with trains travelling at up to 215mph.
The Government is considering such a railway to provide extra north-south capacity in the next decade.
Assuming the continuing dominance of fossil fuel-based electricity, the study indicates that suitable French-style rolling-stock would require twice as much fuel per seat as a Volkswagen Passat, and more than a short-haul aircraft.
Prof Roger Kemp, who led the research, said that in its efforts to improve performance after privatisation, the rail industry had "taken its eye off the ball" environmentally.
Somehow I doubt Greenpeace et al will support the conclusion of this finding, regardless of how well documented it should be.
“In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States…somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power.That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power,” said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan.
“The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy,” Judge Calabresi continued, as the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.
“The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual,” the judge said.
Maybe Calabresi is a good legal scholar - I don't know - but he's a totally incompetent historian.
He also flunks rhetoric. I bet he never heard about Godwin's law.
Iran has seized three small patrol boats from the Royal Navy and eight British crew. According to the Iranians, the patrol boats had entered Iranian waters.
"This morning three British vessels with eight crew entered the Islamic Republic of Iran's waters and Iran's naval forces, acting on their legal duty, confiscated the vessels and arrested the crew," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said in a statement.
"The crew are under investigation in order to clarify the issue," he added.
Let's get this straight. Iran would never do a thing like this just because craft came a few meters into its territorial waters. If Iran didn't actually want an incident, and some small craft had gotten lost, they would have handled this much more leniently.
Whether the crafts actually did violate Iranian waters (which is doubtful) is really not important. If Iran wants to send a message by harassing the British military, it is either tied to the Iraqi occuption (where Iran has been trading very carefully) or to the international standoff over Iran's nuclear programme. I bet it's the latter.
Britain has been instrumental in putting pressure on Iran, and there has been a number of incidents involving Britain's Tehran embassy in the past.
It is also not impossible that this is related to an unconfirmed Iranian military buildup near the Iraqi border, reported last week.
I doubt Iran is planning anything suicidal like getting involved in Iraq. If Iranian forces had tried to seize anything bigger than these small, unarmed vessels from the Royal Navy, they likely would have been very badly bruised.
Rather, this is about the nuclear standoff, and Iran is making it clear it will not back down, and are willing to create and risk international incidents to continue its nuclear programme. Next move is up to the international community, more specifically Britain, to demonstrate how forcefully they will demonstrate their resolve. A powerful response to Iran on this provocation will make it clear that the world will not tolerate the theocracy in Tehran to go nuclear.
Update: I just heard the Iranians claim the sailors were really british special forces, and not a Royal Navy training team like the UK said. However, there are a number of reasons to disbelieve that. I have a problem imagining a under-cover mission using three vessels to carry eight men. Besides, I somehow doubt the Iranians could very easily capture British special forces.
The timing, just after a IAEA censure on the Iranian nuclear programme and EU criticism of Iran's worsening human rights record, clearly shows this is a wholly political move from Iran.
