Quote of the week: Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Penn.) said that amendments to the bill to ban "partial-birth" abortions would allow a woman "having a bad day" to get an abortion.

As I said, I hate to be supporting the white landowners in Zimbabwe, but there it is. Incidentally, an opposition leader says that if he wins the next elections, he will seize the farms which have been seized by Mugabe cronies. This could be fun, but I don't foresee a lot of planting getting done. Which is too bad, since the banking system is dependent on mortgages paid by white farmers and the economy on farm exports.

Florida is doing something or other to make it possible to harvest organs from those it executes. I assume with their consent, although you never know in Florida.

Just because Nawaz Sharif's wife declared her intention to lead his party after his conviction does not, as it turns out, mean that the party has to accept her as its leader. And it didn't.

If Germans were not all comfortable with the Christian Democratic Union being run by a cripple, they surely won't be happy with the female Easterner they just replaced him with. Don't bother learning her name, she will never run the country, being about as electable in the modern Germany as someone named Seymour Lipschitz.

London Times:

Gnomes released into wild
FROM ADAM SAGE IN PARIS

A SINISTER threat returned to haunt suburban France yesterday when the infamous Garden Gnome Liberation Front (GLF) claimed its most daring exploit to date.

In a statement, the Paris branch said that it had "freed" 20 of the 2,000 gnomes on display at an exhibition in the Bagatelle Park on the outskirts on the French capital.

A GLF statement said: "We want to end the ridicule to which these garden gnomes are subjected. We want to return them to their natural habitat by releasing them into the forests they should never have left."

The theft came more than two years after French justice dismantled a movement that began as a student joke but turned into a wide-ranging social trend that forced home-owners to buy guard dogs and lock up their gnomes at night.

On that occasion, in November 1997, three men were given suspended prison sentences and a fourth lost his driving licence.