Every morning I check one German news site, n-tv.de, the German version of CNN.

I do so for two reasons. One is that I do want to know what is going on in the country where my parents live. The other is that n-tv is less anti-American than most English news sites.

They also have Ulrich Sahm, one of the few European journalists who actually knows something about Israel other than what the Nazis and later the PLO said about Jews and who actually lives in Jerusalem.

But when it comes to Am...

(Read the story here.)

Breaking news out of Pakistan. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated by asshole extremists just a few days before the first elections for Prime Minister in many years in the country.

A suicide bomber finally took her out, after a failed attempt a few weeks ago.

This truly is a tragedy for the country. She was Prime MInister twice, and did a lot of good for her country when she was leader. She was a female PM in the Muslim world, which in an...

I am sure most of us remember the President of Iran declaring that Israel must be wiped off the map,{this was a translation from his native language to English} Now I have heard several lefties declaring that Ahmadinejad did not mean that all the Jews of Israel should be killed, that we have misunderstood him, that the translation was wrong, what Ahmadinejad said was Israel as a country should be deleted from world maps that the country has no right to the name and it should be called Palestine...

PESANTEURS

Ce n’est pas comme le régime chérifien, qui résiste fort bien aux tentations démocratiques. Après les années de plomb du règne d’Hassan II, les Marocains étaient en droit d’espérer un régime moins autocratique, sous le sceptre du fiston, Mohammed VI : changement de génération, de mentalité, d’environnement. Le jeune roi n’était-il pas présenté comme un libéral, formé dans les meilleures écoles et même un temps stagiaire à Bruxelles au cabinet de Delors, qui en disait beaucoup de...

Excepté l'atmosphère d'état d'urgence que prend la campagne électorale ces derniers jours dans certaines villes et contrées, rien ne prédit que ces élections ne seront, encore une fois, qu'une piètre affaire de style pour le Makhzen. Loin de moi l'idée de jouer les Cassandre, mais le constat est flagrant : la représentation est en crise depuis des lustres, puisqu'il y a un fossé social immense entre les élus et le peuple d'une part, et un autre plus idéologique entre les "intellectuels" et l...

The development dilemma addresses the compulsion for the so-called Second and Third Worlds to grow and prosper only through sustainable development. Sustainable development is defined as improving living standards without sacrificing environmental integrity, thus allowing nations to grow with minimal impact on the environment. This is in complete contrast with the development of those countries that have already gone through their growth phases. The nations of the First World became industrio...

When you get a steel bar and start to put loads on it, it gets stressed. When you remove the load, it regains its former shape as if nothing happened to it. For each metal, or any thing for that matter, there is a load that will stress the system beyond a limit at which the system will not regain its former shape and it suffers a permanent deformation. This point is called the Yield Point and the stress causing it is called the Yield Stress.

Beyond the yield point, the system will never be t...

Link

Seven soldiers who are coming off of a fifteen month deployment in Iraq wrote an op-ed piece for the NYT. I am going to quote from their article but if you would like to read the entirety the link is above. I think it is very interesting to get the viewpoint from the actual troops with their boots on the ground. I would love to hear from other soldiers in Iraq but I'm not sure what the military regulations are and how much they are allowed to share about their experiences. One of th...

President Bush compared Iraq to Vietnam today. He is using this comparison as an argument to "stay the course". The fear is that we will have "another Vietnam" if we were to leave Iraq now. I guess there are similarities to Vietnam. We are again in the middle of a civil war. There is less and less support for the war at home. What bothers me is the simililarity to the fact that Nixon knew the war was lost but stayed and let more and more of our soldiers die for political reasons. Is that ...

La CIA vient de déclassifier un document historique (Link) à pour le moins étonnant sur le conflit ensablé du Sahara Occidental. Daté du 23 février 1985, le texte autrefois « top secret », révèle que l’Algérie, alors présidée par Chadli Bendjedid, aurait proposé au Roi Hassan II une sorte d’autonomie pour le territoire contesté. « Les Sahraouis contrôleraient les affaires intérieures, tandis que Hassan II serait souverain du territoire qu’il représenterait aux organisations internationales. » Ce...

We seem to look at Saudi Arabia as an ally. They are considered to be the most moderate country in the middle east that is supportive of the United States. The thing is that though the government seems to be more friendly to Americans, the Saudi citizens are not. Fifteen of the nineteen terrorists on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. There have been accusations of Saudi's financing Islamic fundamentalist, or are they terrorists? The U.S. government says that 45% of the foreign fighters in Iraq...

Considering the way of treating dogs to prevent rabies, the issue of Chibet, the Chinese attitude against us the Japanese and most of all, the conflict of Darfur, I protest the Olympics in Beijing.
Please join the campaign below.

This as of yesterday:

Russia May Back
Iran’s SCO Membership
Russia will probably support Iran’s membership in Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Russian newspaper wrote.
IRNA quoted Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Gazetta) as reporting on Monday that Moscow is likely to back Tehran’s membership in SCO’s upcoming meeting in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in August.

Although induction of new members is not on the agenda of the meeting, heads of member-states will discuss the issue informal...

Few days ago the British Government honored Salman Rushdie, the West-Celebrated Islam-Bashing Indian writer by making him a Knight.

Now, if Rushdie was a great novelist or even close to that one would understand honoring him with such a venerated title. But given that his only achievement was that he wrote a novel in which he insulted Islam and its prophet in such a way that even the most anti-Islamists would not think of, it is only logical to ask: why was this writer honored in that way?
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Zimbabwe
Mugabe is a blight on this once magnificent country. What will it take for the world to unite and do something about him? What are they afraid of? Why the apathy? Too often the world stands by while Africa dies under its own hand, and when they do step in it is with money, money, money – flushing it down the loo.

Africans appoint a leader who quickly becomes a dictator. Filled with hope and dreams they go forward, only to have those dreams shattered within a few short years, as...