Like Kryptonite To Stupid
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Virginia Signs Up Almost 300,000 New Voters Via Obama
Eva Mendes Got Therapy For ?Fame Guilt?
Tommy Lee Jones Sues For $10 Million Over ?No Country For Old Men?
Cowardly Bill O?Reilly Sends Crew To Ambush Atlanta Journalist
Shareholders Blasted By Takeover Of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae
Interesting that this isn’t an option for Americans.
Belgian writer, poet and artist Hugo Claus has died aged 78, ending his life by euthanasia, his wife has said.
He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had “picked the moment of his death”, Veerle De Wit added.He died at Middelheim Hospital in Antwerp but no further details were given. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium.
It’ll be interesting in the future when we look back and see how the dithering of the Bushies led to Russia becoming some kind of threat again.
President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he had ordered the military to resume regular long-range flights of strategic bombers, a show of Russia’s resurgent military power amid a chill in relations with Washington.
It’s interesting that anyone with two shakes worth of knowledge about foreign policy advised the Bush administration to meet directly with North Korea, and the idiots in the administration went with their same old tired stubborn path that just gave North Korea more time to build up its nuclear infrastructure. Then, we had direct talks with them and they’ve now apparently shut down the reactor in Pyongyang.
The administration’s decision making is like the kid who holds his breath and throws a tantrum for no good reason.
Democracy, while the best system of government, is not the cure all as detailed in this column in the Post. The entire Bush administration foreign policy was spun (I say spun because they only discovered democracy promotion when it turned out there were no WMDs in Iraq, remember Bush’s ridiculous second inaugural address?) around the sprinkling of magical democracy dust all over the world, and it doesn’t do any good to have an election when the underlying society is just this side of anarchy (ie, Iraq, Palestine, etc.)
Media freedom in Russia is doing about as well as it is in China and Iran - in other words, quite badly, according to the ranking of the US Freedom House organisation, which monitors freedom of the press in different countries. The organisation rates countries as free, partly free, and not free. Russia ranks in the third group.
So, I get this channel Mhz that occasionally shows France 24 which is an English language news station from the French and while I don’t think it’s as good as BBC News they noted a story that our press didn’t really cover (because international news coverage is done better even in a poor country like Jamaica than in America, I’ve seen that first hand). When he was running for the French presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy said he may pull French troops out of the NATO force in Afghanistan.
French presidential front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy outlined his stance on key foreign policy issues Thursday, saying he might pull France’s troops out of a NATO force in Afghanistan if he is elected.
Now, a French national has been held by the Taliban for a while now and they said they would wait until after the French election to make a move. Now, they’ve released the hostage.
Taliban captors Friday said they had freed a French aid worker
kidnapped more than five weeks back in southern Afghanistan. But the
fate of his three Afghan colleagues is yet to be decided.Purported Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi phoned Pajhwok Afghan
News to say Eric Damfreville - working for Terre d’Enfance (A World For
Our Children) - was handed over to tribal elders in Maiwand district of
the militancy-plagued at 5:30pm.…
He said the aid worker was freed in the wake of a recent statement from
newly-elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he would ponder
over the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan - a key demand of the
captors.
Cons in America have acted as if the election of Mr. Sarkozy is a French turn towards neocon policy. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
Most of the signs in the French election seem to indicate that Nicolas Sarkozy is going to win the French election over Segolene Royal. I would almost say it’s a sure thing to bet that some conservative blogger, columnist, or pundit of some sort will appoint himself a keen observer of French politics and claim that France is moving in a conservative position. The truth of the matter is, while Sarkozy is more conservative than maybe what the French are used to, even a cursory look at French and European politics shows us time and time again that what they consider conservative we here in America would see as considerably to the left. Heck, the Democratic party that cons usually accuse of being nothing more than a front for Fidel Castro would be considered at best a center-right party in most of Europe (and I am definitely in favor of being to the right of Europe).
I mostly only speak about U.S. politics because that’s what I know, and on occasion I can comment on Jamaican politics because I lived there and my mom is really involved in it as an activist, but I don’t pretend to be an expert on the rest of the world - and most liberal bloggers don’t. But the cons? They act as if they know everything.
Earthquake’s Toll Expected to Rise; Aftershocks Feared
A powerful earthquake centered in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan on Saturday morning sent tremors across South Asia, killing more than 18,000 people, including at least 1,600 in remote northern Pakistan, among them hundreds across both sides of disputed Kashmir, and shaking houses and high-rises throughout the region.
Oliver Willis
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