Brad Pitt creates a sense of inferiority among Asians

Joe Conason at Salon notes a deal between CSX, the railway company formerly headed by John Snow, the new Secretary of the Treasury, and the Carlyle Group, the evil Republican conglomerate I’ve talked about before, a deal that was threatened by the dock conflict until Bush ordered the dockers back to the jobs they’d been locked out of. Also, Snow got CSX to give him a new contract last year whereby he’d make a bundle if he left for...a government job.

Malaysia bans a series of Toyota ads from tv, saying that ads featuring non-Asians create a sense of inferiority among Asians. The ads star Brad Pitt.

A town in Switzerland, Meilen (pop. 11,500), tried to establish apartheid, banning asylum-seekers from certain parts of town, and not allowed to gather in groups in other parts. They had to back down. Did I mention the area is the German-speaking part of Switzerland?

And American Samoa banned Middle Easterners.

Medical break-through: a man’s liver is removed from his body, given radio-therapy, and then reimplanted, without the radiation endangering his other organs. Pretty cool.

Last time, I mentioned a scandal in the Likud party primaries, which like the Lott scandal raises the question, where the hell were the American newspapers? The Israel story is two weeks old, and nothing before tomorrow’s NY Times. This story fails to mention that one of the new Likud candidates is Sharon’s son. This is doing major damage to Likud’s reputation in advance of next month’s elections, but not enough damage. The next Knesset will therefore be full of criminals and their relatives, who bought their way in with cash and hookers. And in a separate scandal, the guy who assassinated Rabin says that he had been heard talking about the need for Rabin to be assassinated by the head of the religious-settler party Molodet.