news bulletins: international politics link-o-rama

From CNN.com:

• The Eastern Catholic Archbishop who was kidnapped on Monday, was released unharmed today. However, in the same article it was illuminated that 8 Chinese construction workers were kidnapped. (fyi, the Archbishop belongs to the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church that accepts the pope as Supreme Pontiff, but uses the smells and bells.)
• The Danish Prime Minister is calling for elections to be held 9 months early due to sweeping reforms of local governments scheduled to be completed in June.
• Iran says to US: You invade us, we'll fight back!

From New York Times.com (free subscription):

• Rice tries to get confirmed (and not in the Christian sense). She went to my school. As we NEVER cease to hear. I took a class with her PhD advisor - that's kind of fun to bandy about!
• China doesn't want us to pay much attention to the death of Zhao Ziyang, former Communist Party chief who said, "okay guys, not so much with the violence on the democracy proponents!" (maybe I paraphrased a bit)
• Sharon is on some people's bad lists for current tensions of Israeli residents of Sederot (which is in Israel) for not cracking down on the missiles that regularly fly into the town compliments of Hamas and "other Palestinian militant groups." They prefer to NOT have those missiles land on 17 year old girls who throw themselves over their brothers to protect them. True dat.

From The Moscow Times:

• A 21-year old Chechen Woman was sentenced to 9 years on terrror charges after recruiting 2 suicide bombers to blow up a Russian mall and getting them the blowupables to do so.
• The U.S. has granted political asylum to a survivor of the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia for fear of reprisals since she assisted investigations.
• The Russian Communist Party has called for the government to resign (yes, the WHOLE GOVERNMENT) due to the replacement of pension benefits with monetary compensation. In response, ol' Vlad Putin has placed blame (strangely not on himself, but on his Cabinet) to illuminate his non-involvment in this process and has said, I'll DOUBLE pension benefits!

From Le Monde (all links to articles in French):

• The French debut a REALLY BIG PLANE! It can seat 555 people, and cost 10.7m euros - as much as the Chunnel. So they're throwing a party for 5,000 people.
• From the other side of the cnn story, Iran is the newest target in the American war on terror. (please note, I didn't capitalize those on purpose)
• The French are tired of "social worries."

From Al-Jazeera.net:

• A car bomb in Baghdad targeting Shias goes off, killing 4, injuring 8. Do NOT become immune to bombing stories.
• Spain is being protested for holding in solitary an Al-Jazeera journalist with reported ties to al-Qaeda although his health is failing, some say due to prison conditions. People will investigate the conditions.
• Algerian fuel is expensive. The Algerians don't care much for this development.

No energy to crawl through Ha'aretz now... But thanks to Particleman, we have a new link to www.patentlysilly.com where my favorite is a joke embedded in the smart alarm system.