Hurt feelings, and other atrocities

By the luck of the draw, every item in this post is about the success or failure of a nation or institution to acknowledge and correct problems in its past behaviour.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has ordered Japan to go to its room and “seriously reflect” on what it did in the 1930s and ‘40s. Also, in the future it “should never do anything again that would hurt the feelings of the Chinese people or the people of other Asian countries”. You mean the Nanking Massacre hurt your feelings, Mr. Sensitive?

There’s a steaming turd at the top of the Friday Afternoon Info Dump: the Army, in a no-holds-barred investigation of...itself, has cleared all its high-ranking officers, including Ricardo Sanchez, of any responsibility for Abu Ghraib torture.

Neither the Post nor the AP story the NYT runs use the word torture.

As of next year, Romanian men won’t be allowed to marry unless they take a three-day anti-wife-beating course.

The Observer (London) has a memo issued by Pope Benny in 2001 ordering bishops to keep abuse evidence secret, or to put it another way, to obstruct justice. Asked for a comment, the Vatican press office says, without a hint of irony or shame, “This is not a public document, so we would not talk about it.”