Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States, said on Thursday that Mr. Bush and Mr. Chirac had a "positive, relaxed" 10-minute phone conversation this month in preparation for Évian, and that they "want to go beyond the bitterness of the past."

Mr. Levitte said that France did not see its role as serving as a check on American power in the world.

"Our problem is that there is not enough European military capacity," he said. "It has nothing to do with the supposed desire of France to limit American power."

But no one cares about the LA Times. The NYT, the WaPo and the WSJ set the the agenda and shape the discussion. The very phrase “The Los Angeles Times reports . . .” has the same impact as “Cheryl Crow remarked.”

Maxim magazine called me recently and asked me to write for them. They liked something I'd written, finding it "humorous." This puzzled me. I supposed they meant "unintentionally." I had the vague notion that Maxim featured women casually splaying their genitals, but the editor was polite and funny, so I said I'd consider it.

Americans have even made themselves physically ridiculous. When you walk around Paris, the memory you bring home with you is not of the Seine or that embarrassing dog problem, it's les fesses enormes,the huge buttocks of the American tourists. They go one way, their owners go another. These people look like they're being stalked by something horrible, and to what purpose? It's not as if they enjoyed the process.

If you ever want evidence that Americans are the most ineducable people on Earth, read the amazon.com Web site that purports to sell books and offers "reviews" written by actual readers. It's terrifying. Most of them are complaints that they were forced to read this damn book by some hated authority figure like a teacher, or Oprah, and it doesn't have a plot they can follow, so watch out.

I just don't get the ending, one wrote angrily, and I wanted to cry. He was talking about The Great Gatsby. "Gradually, I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world."

I think of the bounty Americans had, an Edenic landscape clogged with visionaries, some with a notion that the freedom of slaves was worth a fight to the death.

And then I think how the U.S. Postal Service just issued a Barbie stamp.

Americans themselves call it dumbing down, but I think it's more a matter of catering to Southerners. My theory is that the United States was ruined by air conditioning. That's what made possible the industrial rise of the South and finally allowed what was basically a swamp populated by yokels to be taken semi-seriously.

Do the Americans even use soldiers any more? I am not aware that any significant number died in the last war with Iraq. Plus it is hard to worry about people dying when they have applied for a job where a willingness to die is the main qualification. Now that soldiers aren't expected to snuff it, I don't know what defines a good soldier anymore.

[ . . . ]

Read it before the Brad Pitt movie comes out with a love interest added and the salient point removed -- that it gradually becomes apparent that Muldrow [protagonist of James Dickey's To The White Sea] is a sick man. He is psychotic and ultimately not even human.

But he is a very good soldier.

Visit the website of Major Harry Schmidt, the man who is being dishonourably discharged for dropping the bomb that killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan last year and who is collecting money for his legal defence. He was a jet fighter pilot part-time. This is mystifying. I suspect The Globe would frown on me working as an assassin for CSIS on public holidays.

[ . . . ]

In Vietnam, a good American soldier there was defined by his countrymen as a stupid monster, and in many cases he probably was. Friendly fire deaths were rampant and the only time a soldier looked glamorous was when he was calling in an air strike, often on the wrong target. Technology was on the rise and the soldier was sinking.

[emphasis added]

"It could be a kumbaya-like get-together with everyone holding hands and committed to forgetting about the past," said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a director of European Affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. "But more likely, it will be a schoolyard with bullies on opposite sides glaring at each other and still angry about the fight they just had."

[ . . . ]

Scholars note, however, that Poland and some other Eastern European nations of Mr. Bush's "new" Europe date further back than nations like Germany, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld infamously derided as part of the "old" Europe, along with France.

"They're all old — Europe is old," Mr. Daalder, the Brookings fellow, said. "In that sense, it's nonsensical. There are countries that are now members of the `new' Europe that predate countries of the `old' Europe. Germany was unified and became a single state long after Poland was an independent country."

As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on perceptual and motor skills. It is well known that exposing an organism to an altered visual environment often results in modification of the visual system of the organism. The field of perceptual learning provides many examples of training-induced increases in performance. But perceptual learning, when it occurs, tends to be specific to the trained task; that is, generalization to new tasks is rarely found. Here we show, by contrast, that action-video-game playing is capable of altering a range of visual skills. Four experiments establish changes in different aspects of visual attention in habitual video-game players as compared with non-video-game players. In a fifth experiment, non-players trained on an action video game show marked improvement from their pre-training abilities, thereby establishing the role of playing in this effect. [emphasis added]

Ten hours of the block-rotating game Tetris failed to improve test scores.

Improvements came with "the least socially desirable games", [vision researcher Jeremy] Wolfe [of Harvard Medical School (oooh!)] points out - those in which shooting and killing is commonplace. The fact that you are defending your own life in these games may be what makes their lessons stick, Wolfe speculates.

A fifth experiment trained nonplayers, including some women, for 10 consecutive days on one of two video games — either Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, a first-person-shooter game that simulates World War II combat situations, or the slower-moving puzzle game Tetris. Only the shooter game improved visual attention, Dr. Bavelier said, and it did so in both sexes. Among novices, the effects waned within a couple of months, but superior visual attention skills seemed firmly rooted in game addicts. .

Last month, as Congress was departing for a two-week recess, the Defense Department submitted a 200-page draft "transformation" bill that requests extensive new authorities. It is not an understatement to say that this bill, taken as a whole, is the most sweeping defense reform legislation proposed since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which changed both the structure and the policies governing our military. The only thing that is obvious and consistent throughout the 50 provisions included in this bill is the aggregation of power sought for the Department of Defense, removing the legal restrictions and congressional oversight that should safeguard against any abuses, however unintentional. This approach is a rush to judgment that will affect vast numbers of people and, in many cases, will enshrine bad policy in law.

[ . . . ]

The proposed legislation makes sweeping changes to both military and civilian personnel systems. On the civilian side, the Defense Department wants unfettered freedom to hire and fire its nearly 700,000 employees. Congress had a long, contentious debate over similar personnel proposals when creating the Department of Homeland Security. That legislation is barely being implemented now, and there has been no opportunity to evaluate its results. The Defense Department wants changes that are even more dramatic, including, just as one example, the repeal of laws preventing nepotism. What justification based on our national security or sound management principles can justify that? What message does this send to the hundreds of thousands who have dedicated their careers to the service of this nation? And why do such changes need to be rushed through now, when a successful military campaign has shown that the existing system works?

The department also is requesting extensive exemptions from a host of environmental laws that have helped safeguard the long-term health of our communities and of the global environment. As a solidly pro-military member of Congress, I believe the readiness and exceptional training of our troops are of paramount importance and should be taken into account in our environmental laws. But the Defense Department has not yet made use of the legal remedies that already exist to accommodate military readiness. Operations in Iraq showed the exquisite capability of the U.S. military trained under the current system. Changing the law at this point has not been shown to be needed for military readiness, but it will certainly undermine the legal structure that ensures the nation's environmental health.

Today we do not have that kind of agility. In an age -- the information age -- when terrorists move information at the speed of an e-mail, money at the speed of a wire transfer and people at the speed of a commercial jetliner, the Defense Department is still bogged down in the bureaucratic processes of the industrial age.

[ . . . ]

We are working to fix problems that we have the freedom to fix. We have reduced management and headquarters staffs by 11 percent, streamlined the acquisition process by eliminating hundreds of pages of unnecessary rules and red tape, and begun implementing a new business management structure. But we also need legislative relief. That is why we are asking for:

• Measures for transforming our system of personnel management, so that we can gain more flexibility and agility in the way we manage the more than 700,000 civilians in the department. And let me be clear: The provisions we have proposed explicitly bar nepotism.

• Expanded authority for competitive outsourcing so that we can get military personnel out of nonmilitary tasks and back into the field.

• Measures to protect our military training ranges so that our men and women in uniform will be able to train as they fight, while honoring our steadfast commitment to protecting the environment.

It is true, as Rep. Skelton notes, that the Goldwater-Nichols Act took four years for Congress to pass. But we do not have four years to wait before we transform -- the new threats are here now. If anything, our experience in the global war on terror has made the case for transformation even more urgent. Because our enemies are watching us -- studying how we were successfully attacked, how we are responding and how we might be vulnerable again. In distant caves and bunkers, they are busy developing new ways to harm our people -- methods of attack that could kill not 3,000 people, but 30,000 or 300,000 -- or more. And they are not struggling with bureaucratic red tape fashioned in the last century as they do so.

When the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, the vigorous US-based group which fights for freedom and human rights in Zimbabwe, proposed that [Archbishop] Pius Ncube should visit London, the news was greeted with dismay. The Catholic bishops did not show delight and gratification at the chance to give moral support to a fellow Christian in his lonely battle against terror. Incredibly, it seems that Ncube was asked to reconsider his plan. At the time of the Bishops’ Conference, during Low Week after Easter, the Catholic establishment looked set to block the Ncube visit. It is still unclear why Westminster Cathedral felt so uneasy about Ncube, though sources say that David Konstant, the Bishop of Leeds who has responsibility for international affairs, came under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church in Zimbabwe. There are also intriguing suggestions that No. 10 Downing Street, which has close links with Westminster Cathedral, was putting steady pressure on the Catholic Church to play down the event. Moves to block the visit altogether were stymied at a party given by the Bishops’ Conference on 29 April, when the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, a prominent Catholic, made it known that he would cause a public fuss if Ncube was stopped.

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.

"We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."

There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.

But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.

[ . . . ]

The American strategy was to ensure the right television footage by using embedded reporters and images from their own cameras, editing the film themselves.

The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies, notably the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer.

Bruckheimer advised the Pentagon on the primetime television series "Profiles from the Front Line", that followed US forces in Afghanistan in 2001. That approached was taken on and developed on the field of battle in Iraq.

The French government believes it is the victim of an "organized campaign of disinformation" from within the Bush administration, designed to discredit it with allegations of complicity with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.

In a letter [signed by French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte and] prepared for delivery today [Thursday] to administration officials and members of Congress, France details what it says are false news stories, with anonymous administration officials as sources, that appeared in the U.S. media over the past nine months. A two-page list attached to the letter includes reports of alleged French weapons sales to Iraq and culminates in a report last week that French officials in Syria issued French passports to escaping Iraqis being sought by the U.S. military.

The stories, all of which Paris has heatedly denied, are part of an "ugly campaign to destroy the image of France," a French official said. Officials said they have no doubt that the stories were spread by factions in the administration itself -- hard-line civilians within and close to the Pentagon are their primary suspects -- and that there was no visible effort by the White House or other departments to discipline those involved or even find out who they are.

[A French Embassy spokeswoman protested against the stories: The impression given, she said, was that France had "protected a tyrant and a bloody dictator" and was "hostile to the United States."]

Maybe the reason a lot of us have that impression is because France is hostile to the US and did try to protect a bloody, dictatorial tyrant. Wasn't it the French President himself who bluntly announced that France would veto any UN resolution which actually authorized war against Iraq? And wasn't it French policy all along that the "world's" policy towards Iraq should concentrate on disarmament and specifically eschew "regime change"?

The lawsuit, filed last week in Marin County superior court, seeks a ban on the black and white cookies, arguing the trans fats that make the filling creamy and the cookie crisp are too dangerous for children to eat.

Stephen Joseph filed the suit against Nabisco, the maker of Oreos, in Marin County Superior Court last week after reading articles about the health threat posed by the artificial fat that is contained in most packaged foods but isn't listed with other the nutritional information.

The San Francisco attorney who made news earlier this week for suing Kraft Inc. to stop the sale of Oreos to California children because the cookies are high in trans fat plans to drop the suit today [Thursday].

The reason? He's drawn so much media attention that he says he's accomplished what he set out to do -- raise awareness about trans fat, a hidden but dangerous substance in processed food.

The reality is that in this city we do next to nothing to help the homeless.

She's viperous, unprincipled, holier-than-thou, paranoid, whiny and blessed with a perpetual smirk.

After all, Houston is in Texas. And we know how Texans deal with their problems. - February 11, 2003 column

"Class warfare"! It has a nasty ring. It sounds thoroughly undemocratic, the sort of thing we don't tolerate in America. [. . .] Okay, you santimonious creeps, we accept your accusation. - February 13, 2003 column

The suckers bought it, hook, line and sinker. [. . .] Considering [Bush's] shaky military record, it was the height of chutzpah for Bush to make his dramatic landing on the Abraham Lincoln, but, standing tall and saluting smartly, he got away with it. - May 5, 2003 column

Whenever George W. Bush says something I like, I get suspicious. - April 28, 2003 column

Also, over the past year, I've been appalled by the number of normally pacifist American Jews in public life who suddenly turned pro-war, favoring a war against Iraq, a war that, incidentally, was thought to be greatly in Israel's interest. - April 21, 2003 column

Okay, got me there. The picture on his page is too darned small to tell.

The Ministry of Information and Communication (MOIC) announced Monday that it has decided to expand its list of [Korean language pornographic] websites run from countries that have been banned from gaining access to the Korean Internet market in Korea. About 190 new porn websites will be put on the list from the current 50 sites, bringing up the total number of banned sites to 240, the ministry said.

Korea will get its first sex museum later this month when the Asia Eros Museum opens in the northeast Seoul neighborhood of Samcheong-dong. The facility will exhibit more than 300 objects - some from Korea and many collected from the curator's travels overseas.

Included in the collection are Joseon Dynasty coins engraved with various positions for sexual intercourse - mothers of that era used to give them to their daughters. Also of note is a 2,200-year-old wooden phallus from China.

Senior Defense Department officials told Fox News Friday that documents found inside Baghdad are pointing to Iraq's diplomatic communications with France and show detailed discussions about pending U.S. actions — up to and after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases—or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. See, e.g., Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc), rev’d sub nom. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997). But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 6011-12; see also Brannon P. Denning & Glenn H. Reynolds, Telling Miller’s Tale: A Reply to David Yassky, 65 Law & Contemp. Probs. 113, 117-18 (2002). The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller’s weapon—a sawed-off shotgun—was reasonably susceptible to militia use. See Miller, 307 U.S. at 178. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller’s claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller’s test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

The majority falls prey to the delusion—popular in some circles—that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth—born of experience—is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks’ homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went”). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. All too many of the other great tragedies of history—Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The sheer ponderousness of the panel’s opinion—the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text—refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel’s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it—and is just as likely to succeed.

However, [retired] Col. Pellerin [director of the Conference of Defence Associations] said Canada will not really be in command because years of government cuts have stripped the Canadian Forces of most of the personnel, skills and equipment it needs to run the Kabul-based force.

"It's going to be a NATO operation," he said. "Canada will provide the largest contingent, but we won't get the high profile because we aren't in a position to command, which is kind of sad."

As well, the Canadian troops will be sent to the turbulent Asian nation with little in the way of armour to protect them. Some armoured vehicles are to be shipped to Afghanistan by sea, but one officer said there will be only a handful of Coyote reconnaissance vehicles or LAV III armoured personnel carriers to protect the Canadian infantrymen.

The government said Tuesday that it would stop using the word "tripwire" to refer to the stationing of U.S. forces near the Demilitarized Zone, and would instead use the term "frontline partnership."
Americans strongly dislike "tripwire," saying it is a negative concept and degrades the value of the soldiers' lives, an official at the prime minister's office said. The government will use the new term beginning Friday, when Prime Minister Goh Kun visits the headquarters of the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division.

The official said that the government had considered a few other expressions to refer to the forward-deployed U.S. troops, such as "frontline together." The "frontline partnership" term will be used during all talks related to the USFK.

Last month, Leon J. LaPorte, the commander of the USFK, appeared on the television program MBC Document and said that the word "tripwire" was disgraceful to the soldiers of the division and was also an obsolete concept.

U.S. intelligence officials told the [Washington] Times that an unknown number of Iraqi regime members were given French passports by French officials in Syria.

The report could not be independently confirmed.

French passport holders are able to enter any European Union country without a visa, and are usually granted tourist visas upon entry to many other countries, including the United States.

[ . . . ]

Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington, told the Times that French authorities had not issued any visas or passports to Iraqi regime officials since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"France formally denies this type of allegation, which is not only contrary to reality but is intended to discredit our nation," she said. "It is certainly time for rumors of this type — totally unfounded and a dishonor to those who spread them — to stop."

The reports add fuel to the fire over allegations that Paris had been colluding with Baghdad before and during the coalition invasion of Iraq.

One report said a French company covertly sold military spare parts to Iraq in the weeks before the war. Another indicated that a French oil company had been working with a Russian oil firm to clinch a deal with Saddam's government at the same time.

Every part of Germany's international position has been wounded by the Iraq war. The country can no longer play the role of transatlantic mediator between France and America. It can forget about U.S. support in its campaign to gain a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Instead of forging a "third way" for Europe's left with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder needs Blair to plead his case with President George W. Bush, who feels personally betrayed by the Chancellor's conduct in the run-up to the war.

In post-communist Eastern Europe, Germany is no longer perceived as an absolutely dependable advocate of the region's needs. Multilateral institutions that served as pillars of German foreign policy for almost half a century have been weakened: the European Union's hopes for common foreign, security, and defense policies have been gravely jeopardized.

[ . . . ]

German-American relations suffered a devastating blow when Schroeder stoked the country's overwhelmingly pacifist attitudes. By doing so, he drowned out the concerns about low growth and high unemployment that were threatening his reelection prospects. But that political strategy left President Bush believing that Schroeder had stabbed him in the back. As with people, so too with states: Trust, once lost, is extremely difficult to regain.

Germany's opposition parties and much of its foreign policy establishment warned that the country risked diplomatic isolation, so Schroeder joined an ad hoc coalition of the unwilling, along with France and Russia. This compounded the error by adding to it a public relations disaster. Much of the world press dubbed this "gang of three" an "axis," a word with sinister echoes of the German-Italian-Japanese World War II axis. Not surprisingly, Poland - like other Central and East European countries - sought reassurance from the U.S. and Britain when their colossal neighbors, Germany and Russia, embarked on their anti-American flirtation.

[ . . . ]

That French President Jacques Chirac is even less popular in the U.S. than Schroeder gives German diplomats slight consolation. But opposition to U.S. policy from France never comes as a shock. Indeed, Chirac's tone and tactics conform to textbook Gaullist patterns. By contrast, German assertiveness vis-the U.S. was stunning - perhaps because, as it is said, you have to be fully behind someone who you stab him in the back. [emphasis added]

Prime Minister Goh Kun and Defense Minister Cho Yung-kil will visit the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division on Friday, just days before President Roh Moo-hyun leaves for his visit to the United States. Goh will express the government's concern about the controversial plan to relocate the division, now centered in the Gyeonggi province city of Uijeongbu, south of the Han River. Goh is expected to request that discussions about the plan be postponed until the North Korean nuclear crisis is resolved.

The prime minister's senior press officer, Kim Duk-bong, said Monday that Goh would meet high U.S. military officials and convey Seoul's stance that the relocation of the division should not yet be discussed. Goh will also affirm that the Korean government officially supports the continued stationing of the division in its current location, Kim said.

The trip will mark the first time in Korean history that a prime minister has visited a U.S. army camp. Goh's visit is designed to alleviate the uncomfortable sentiment that has prevailed since the incident last June when two middle school girls were killed by a U.S. army vehicle from the Gyeonggi province base, insiders said.

Goh will hear out the U.S. forces to get a reading on the difficulties they face, Kim said, and promise to provide support for a stable stationing of the U.S. Army in Korea by moving training camps and expanding roads.

Saudi Arabia Awakes to the Perils of Inbreeding

[ . . . ]

Spinal muscular atrophy and the gene that causes it, along with several other serious genetic disorders, are common in Saudi Arabia, where women have an average of six children and where in some regions more than half of the marriages are between close relatives.

Across the Arab world today an average of 45 percent of married couples are related, according to Dr. Nadia Sakati, a pediatrician and senior consultant for the genetics research center at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh.

In some parts of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the south, where Mrs. Hefthi was raised, the rate of marriage among blood relatives ranges from 55 to 70 percent, among the highest rates in the world, according to the Saudi government.

German warnings not borne out by Iraq war; Dire predictions look like anti-U.S. feeding frenzy in hindsight

Not so long ago, prominent German politicians were outdoing each other forecasting worst-case scenarios for the Iraq conflict. The predictions ranged from "millions of victims of U.S. rockets" to "millions of Iraqi refugees desperately fleeing the country."

While few are willing yet to eat their words publicly, the media is having a field day with the wildly inaccurate pronouncements.

"They were all wrong with their horror scenarios," snorted the Bildzeitung, Germany's largest nationally distributed newspaper. Under the heading "The embarrassing predictions on the war by our politicians," the paper recently listed some of the most erroneous ones.

[ . . . ]

On March 28, a nationwide poll by ZDF indicated that 84 percent blamed the conflict wholly on the United States and President Bush, and only 26 percent held Saddam Hussein responsible. Another poll conducted April 3 for the Stern magazine showed 89 percent of Germans do not regard America as a role model.

The deputy editor in chief of Stern, Hans-Ulrich Joerges, asserted in a recent issue that many Germans greeted early U.S. military missteps in Iraq with "clammy joy" and "perverse partisanship."

A study commissioned by the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper pinned part of the blame on German television networks, which it said constantly criticized the U.S.-led military action as an illegitimate attack in which innocent civilians were the primary victims.

"Saddam's terror was no topic for the German TV media, but criticism of America was," the study concluded. "If Americans would have watched German television during the war, and Germans would have viewed U.S. programs, their respective moods . . . would have been reversed."