You heard it here first: Jorg Haidar is gay!

I should feel guilty about knowing and enjoying the fact that this particular "charge" is what could really damage the fascist asshole, but I don't.

The new status symbol among billionaires is evidently sleep. 8, 9 hours a night.

David Trimble wins the challenge to his leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party, but they put a new condition on re-entry into a power-sharing executive for Northern Ireland: the Royal Ulster Constabulary, long a symbol of occupation, remain that symbol by retaining its name and the crown on its insignia and so forth. An entirely symbolic measure is to be the make-or-break condition for peace in the North. These people are idiots. On the other hand, last I heard they were still looking for a new new name for the RUC when Northern Ireland Police Service was shot down for what should be obvious reasons.

The British military has a new toy: a £25,000 pound sniper rifle capable of taking out a tank.

Speaking of toys: the Israelis plan to safeguard their new border if they hand back the Golan Heights by the use of nuclear landmines.

In 1972, 3 members of Black September were captured at the Munich Olympics. I'm a little unclear on the details, even after reading the Observer's story twice (www.newsunlimited.co.uk if you want to give it a shot), but the Germans evidently faked a plane hijacking in order to hand them back (Black Sept. were threatening a bombing campaign if they weren't released) not 8 weeks after the massacre. One is still alive. This is the reason the Israelis spent all that effort tracking down Palestinian terrorists and the occasional waiter (oops) and killing them.

If you'd like some more oil companies to boycott, how about the ones including BP and Amoco, but also Exxon and some others, who financed the 1993 coup in Azerbaijan that put dictator wannabe Aliyev in power. BP has close connections with MI6, so I'm assuming that that coup was one of ours as well as Britain's. Which makes it one of Clinton's.

Thai elephants, fired from their logging jobs and making themselves obnoxious begging in the streets, have now been given new careers as artists. That was a really sentence I just wrote, wasn't it? But true, of course, and their paintings are going for quite a bit of money. They're evidently rather like De Kooning's.

Moscow has its first Ikea store.

But does it have democracy? This is the question asked in two op-ed pieces in the Sunday New York Times. You know, will Putin operate democratically, will democracy win in this election. The obvious answer is no. Putin refused to run for office, accepting only a coronation. He has refused to campaign, refused to advertise, refused to debate and refused to issue a platform. There may be an election tomorrow, but there cannot be democracy without some sense of what is being voted for.

The real question is, who are those idiots in Russia who are reassured that a government run entirely by KGB hacks, as Putin is threatening to install, will clean up corruption? Who says the KGB isn't corrupt? You only have to look further up this page: Aliyev was KGB, and he sold out his country to British Petroleum and Standard Oil of Indiana.