Water, water, everywhere

After 6 months in an Australian detention center, a Pakistani seeking asylum is released--and handed a bill for $85 a night for a dorm without a door and a two-hour wait for the showers. Of course, his new visa doesn’t allow him to work and...wait for it...potential immigrants aren’t allowed to have debts to the government.

At the Earth Summit, the Bush admin wrecks another international agreement, this one on clean drinking water, the lack of which kills millions of children each year, but screw ‘em. Let ‘em drink Coke (except in LA schools, where it will soon be illegal--what will they wash down their Ecstacy and Ritalin with?).

The constant references by Bushies to Churchill in the drum beating for war against Iraq is pissing off all the British newspapers, one of which even interviewed, gasp, historians.

Robert Mugabe fires the last white cabinet minister.

A couple of times this month I’ve sent funny stories about the megalomanocracy running Turkmenistan. In today’s paper was the punch line: US to expand military cooperation with Turkmenistan.

If you haven’t seen the study which says that the US has quadrupled its inmate population in twenty years, and that there are now 791,600 black men in jail or prison compared to 603,032 in colleges or universities, seek it out.