South America is gradually turning back into banana republic land. Venezuela just elected a Constitutional Assembly that will give Hugo “I am Venezuela” Chavez the authority to take all power into his hands and secure a second term. That will make Venezuela the third country down there, after Peru and Bolivia, to actually vote in a dictator knowing full well what they were getting.

Evidently kings in Morocco are supposed to be married, so the new king quickly got himself engaged right before going to dad’s funeral.

It didn’t make it into the newspapers at the time, but the police in Hawthorne California, last year shot a guy 106 times. Unlike the guy in NY this year, he was at least armed (with an air pistol), but like NY, the more frightening fact is how many of the bullets missed. One went through several walls and came to rest two blocks away on the bed of a teenage girl. We have to take these over-powered guns away from the cops.

The Burmese have arrested a dissident, a girl aged three, whose father they failed to catch.

If we’re going to have armageddon before the end of the year and make all those Christians happy, it’s likely to come out of Asia. US satellite information said back in May that India was making preparations to invade Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, and of course both those countries are nuclear powers. China today claimed the ability to fire a ballistic missile from nuclear submarines and directly threatened any country that comes to the aid of Taiwan, which not only hasn’t taken back last week’s declaration that it is a nation, but is rumored to be planning another announcement to the effect that it is an island. China, which insists that Taiwan is an isthmus, has threatened massive nuclear bombardment. And North Korea is about to test a missile. On the positive front, the US has decided to forgive Vietnam and normalize trade relations.