The Egyptian censor came down hard on a proposed song with the lyrics, "I don't like Israel." No, no, he said, change that to "I hate Israel." The song reached #1.

Attorney General Ashcroft holds a Bible study every day, which certainly isn't mandatory for any Justice Department employees wishing to advance their careers, no sirree bob.

The Italian electorate votes into power media magnate and Mafia stooge Berlusconi, again. He plans to run the country like a business. The good news/bad news is that the near-fascist regional separatist party the Northern League has seen its electoral support collapse. This is bad news in that if it had
been part of Berlusconi's government coalition, it would have been easy to treat Italy as the pariah state that Austria was last year (Belgium already threatened to do so).

The British elections are humming along nicely. William Hague, sporting his new Bruce Willis haircut (if I shave it maybe no one will realize I'm bald), was in Wales to launch the Tory party's Welsh manifesto. Which had to be scrapped because it was so badly translated. The slogan behind him was also wrong. Some smartass local reporter asked him to pronounce it, but he refused. I should say that this man was once the Welsh Secretary. And his wife is Welsh. Sad really. The British Politics e-mail discussion group is currently debating why Hague is portrayed as such a loser. The consensus is that he is a loser. Also that his voice is terrible. He sounds like a 13-year old trying to deepen his voice in order to buy cigarettes.

Finally, a sentence one simply does not read every day: AN exercise involving 27,000 American and Australian commandos was temporarily halted last week when a US Marine shot dead an emu.