A couple of days ago, Bush said that Cuba was like a prison, with no civil rights. As opposed to the part of the island the US occupies.

An Israeli astronaut, the first, is going into space in, um, July I think. He has requested the Kosher meal. Tang and gefilte fish.

A lot of Russia’s criminals are orphans, and there are many orphans because life expectancy is so low now. But one boy was lucky. A couple took him from the orphanage. Unfortunately, they also made him clean his room. He’s 12, by the way. He didn’t like having to clean his room. Fortunately, he knew some criminals. From the orphanage. So he arranged a hit.

When the pope was in Bulgaria, he brought a present. A piece of Pope John XXIII (who was once a priest in Sofia). They won’t say what part. The Guardian story said that if anyone else got on a plane with a body part in his luggage, he might be in some trouble. If you’re a pope, evidently that’s considered normal behaviour.

You probably missed it, but there was a threat of invasion against Pakistan this week because it’s harboring terrorists. The threat came from General John Keane, #2 in the US Army. Fortunately, the Ghauri missile they tested today can’t reach the US (it’s named after a 12th Century warlord type who beat the shit out of some Indians). By the way, Pakistan evidently has many more nukes than we realized, thanks to a crash program to produce weapons-grade uranium. I don’t think westerners realize how ready both sides are to use their nukes. For a start, these are not world-ending weapons. They’re mostly only about 15 kilotons, which is enough to destroy Hiroshima but not enough to set off nuclear winter. They are, in a word, usable. And they’re five minutes away from their targets, which creates a lot of incentives to shoot first when that sparrow sets off your radar.