Some new developments on the Pikoli-Selebi story, which I first posted about here and here. This is from a South African Press Association story:

“Why do you ask me these questions?” [president Thabo] Mbeki asked journalists… He was asked whether or not he had seen the widely reported warrant of arrest for Selebi.

“You cannot be serious; have you ever heard of a president issuing a warrant?” a bemused Mbeki asked.

When he was pushed for a answer (sic), he said the questions should be asked of prosecutors.

You cannot be serious, Mr President. The question wasn’t whether you’d issued the warrant. Have you ever heard of a president who suspends the head of the prosecuting authority, after he obtained a warrant for the chief of police and chairman of Interpol, and doesn’t know anything about it?

I guess there’s no innocent answer, then.

It can easily seem churlish, literal-minded or petty to point out the various evils that find themselves supported — or at least unprotested — in the name of some abstract, flower-power notion of “peace”. Hippie-era folk music is just youthful idealism, after all, and it’s meant well, is it not? We all know the kids are just hankering for an imagined utopia, not the reality of the gulag. Weren’t we all once young and idealistic? (I certainly was. Peace sign, long hair, the works. Thankfully, nature dealt swiftly with both.)

Pete Seeger is an iconic folk song writer and committed communist, who wrote such songs as Turn, Turn, Turn!, If I Had A Hammer, and Where Have All The Flowers Gone. Reportedly, the 88-year-old singer recently repudiated (wait for it…) Joseph Stalin.

Mark Steyn, in his eloquent comment on this about-turn by Seeger does not stop at, “Oh well, that’s okay then, you daft hippie.” He makes a much more serious point, and anticipates accusations of boorishness because of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a story: “U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb: witness.” Sounds serious, doesn’t it? I mean, read the intro:

BATI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - At least one U.S. soldier opened fire to scatter a crowd of civilians and police on Thursday after failed suicide bomb attacks on a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military and witnesses said.

Them US thugs, there they goes again. Indiscriminately killing civilians, just because they panicked. It takes Noor Mohammad Sherzai, the self-serving idiot who wrote the piece, until the sixth paragraph to point out that they were actually two warning shots, not aimed at the crowd, designed to disperse them after one suicide bomber had already failed and a second was thought to be approaching.

Why use the pejorative term “idiot”, or describe said idiot as “self-serving”? Well, besides noting the misleading reporting that once again goes on at Reuters, guess who the “witness” of the headline is?

“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

In Best of the Web Today, James Taranto has a funny response, under the headline The Lone Reuter:
Read the rest of this entry »

No sooner did scientists discover that plants talk to each other, using the internet, than it turns out they’re organising in protest:

Plants fall silent — headline, The Saginaw News