I can't think of a title for this post

The man in charge of French intelligence at the time admits what we all knew, that the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor (in which a photographer was killed) was personally authorized by François Mitterrand. He denied this at the time, but then put tremendous (and illegal) economic pressure on New Zealand to have it release the agents responsible for it from prison. France promised to keep them under house arrest, but didn’t. Then it promoted them and gave them medals. So the fact that they weren’t the rogue agents France claimed they were at the time isn’t a huge surprise.

Really, it was a big deal at the time. It would still seem a big deal if GeeDubya hadn’t raised the bar for state-sponsored evil so high.

The UN is at long last going in for some nation-building in Kosovo, with plans under way to transfer the police and judicial system to local (i.e., not Serbian) institutions, bolstering Kosovo’s de facto independence.

Speaking of places that we’ve all forgotten about, there were presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan this weekend. To recap: after blatantly fraudulent parliamentary elections in March, a popular uprising forced dictator Akayev to flee, whereupon opposition leaders did a backroom deal putting Kurmanbek Bakiev in power and retaining the fraudulently elected parliament. Now, Bakiev has been confirmed as president in an election in which he was virtually unopposed, because he bought off his chief rival. Whether he’s actually any good or not as a leader, I have no idea.