Friday, March 21, 2003
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
From the Israeli news site, DEBKAfile:
Kurdish sources confirm that Iraqi deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz is in their hands and is being questioned by US intelligence officials.
Earlier, as American and British forces began invasion of Iraq, DEBKAfile’s military sources reported persistent rumor that two leading powerbrokers of Saddam’s regime had fled Baghdad: deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, who is thought to be hiding in Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan who has not been seen for three days.
Reuters refutes this convincingly.
Christopher Hitchens says Bush is bored.
THE attitude, body-language and tone of the President last Thursday night managed to convey in a passive form what many of his aides are thinking in an active fashion.
He looked - to the evident alarm of the TV critics - as if he was becoming dangerously bored with the whole argument about Iraq.
How tedious it is to have to say all of this, in ABC fashion, again. How dull to be compelled to act polite, to reiterate the obvious, and to remember that he is speaking to a global audience as well as a local one.
And yet how satisfying, if one has so often been teased for being stupid, to state a case that has been learned by heart and that hasn't yet been mastered even by one's most show-off fellow pupils.
(Yes teacher, Resolution 1441 means what it says and contains the clauses of its own enforcement. No teacher, we don't assume that we are dealing with Belgium or Luxembourg here. Some presumption of past and future guilt is pardonable when talking of Saddam Hussein)
A little something for the French-bashers. . .
That was when the suave Dominique de Villepin said that France's real worry was that "American boys" would get killed in Iraq. There is, after all, a limit to the amount of condescension that can be borne.
President Bush has seen American GIRLS fly tough combat missions over Afghanistan with great success (and what woman would want to parachute down among the Taliban in case of a mishap?) and he's had enough of this hogwash.
Christopher Hitchens is dreamy.
THE attitude, body-language and tone of the President last Thursday night managed to convey in a passive form what many of his aides are thinking in an active fashion.
He looked - to the evident alarm of the TV critics - as if he was becoming dangerously bored with the whole argument about Iraq.
How tedious it is to have to say all of this, in ABC fashion, again. How dull to be compelled to act polite, to reiterate the obvious, and to remember that he is speaking to a global audience as well as a local one.
And yet how satisfying, if one has so often been teased for being stupid, to state a case that has been learned by heart and that hasn't yet been mastered even by one's most show-off fellow pupils.
(Yes teacher, Resolution 1441 means what it says and contains the clauses of its own enforcement. No teacher, we don't assume that we are dealing with Belgium or Luxembourg here. Some presumption of past and future guilt is pardonable when talking of Saddam Hussein)
A little something for the French-bashers. . .
That was when the suave Dominique de Villepin said that France's real worry was that "American boys" would get killed in Iraq. There is, after all, a limit to the amount of condescension that can be borne.
President Bush has seen American GIRLS fly tough combat missions over Afghanistan with great success (and what woman would want to parachute down among the Taliban in case of a mishap?) and he's had enough of this hogwash.
Christopher Hitchens is dreamy.
They've identified the family of the virus behind SARS:
Everyone will be relieved it's not from a completely unknown taxonomic group," says Yvonne Cossart, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Sydney, Australia. "But the antivirals we have at our disposal will not be useful against it.
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
What happens when you combine Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe?
The Grameen Bank provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral. At Grameen Bank, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight poverty and it serves as a catalyst in the overall development of socio-economic.
As of September, 2002, it has 2.4 million borrowers, 95 percent of whom are women. With 1,175 branches, GB provides services in 41,000 villages, covering more than 60 percent of the total villages in Bangladesh.
Monday, March 17, 2003
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is a very interesting resource. "MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media..." I cannot vouch for their impartiality, but I have not found other means of reading foreign-language Middle Eastern media.
A while back, they needed a logo for the Total Information Awareness System at DARPA. ("We created the Internet.") For three nanoseconds, this was there choice:
The government will claim this is merely based on the Great Seal and not totally creepy. However, despite what some might insist, rumors persist to the contrary. I'm just gald they didn't choose this design.
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