A weird lite news day. This is an edited-down version of the table of contents to the Daily Telegraph's international section.


[21]War crimes suspect met by protests in Australia
KONRAD KALEJS, the suspected Nazi war criminal, returned to Australia
from Britain yesterday amid angry protests by Jewish students
demanding further investigations into allegations against him.
[did anyone catch the I think justice minister of Australia saying that they wouldn’t put him on trial because Australia doesn't do "show trials"? Incidentally, I don't think a Latvian should be called a Nazi war criminal, since he's unlikely to have been a member of the party.]

[24]Internet threat to Israel, say rabbis
ISRAEL'S leading orthodox rabbis have issued a ruling banning the
internet from Jewish homes, arguing that it is "1,000 times more
dangerous than television" and threatens the survival of the country.

[27]Head of foot cult is stepping down
THE leader of a Japanese cult who read his followers' fortunes in the
soles of their feet said yesterday that he was resigning on advice
from God.

[28]Bungee ride rebounds on counsellor
THE screams of thrill-seekers on an inner-city bungee ride are proving too much for the patients of a trauma therapist whose consulting rooms are next door.

[29]News in brief
* Rapist and victim, 11, both guilty, says judge
[this was in Maryland--the rapist is 24]
* Red card for women's football
[one of the I believe 3 Nigerian states that have now adopted sharia law finds women's footie to be unIslamic]
* Mob attack after circumcision
[Kenya--the circumcision (male) was performed at a hospital instead of by a witch doctor]
* Farmer kills drunken pigs
[Somewhere Eastern Europe, Bulgaria maybe. He thought they had a horrible disease, but they'd been getting into the waste of a distillery]

As I write I am watching the hilarious Republican debate. At the start of yesterday's Dem debate, Peter Jennings said "This is the first debate of 2000." So after today, it'll be 2 down, 1,998 to go. Read the Jacob Weisberg report on this debate in Slate, it's hilarious reading.

Alan Keyes is a loon. I don't have anything funny to say about that, it's just sad.

Dubya referred to the little Cuban kid as Alien Gonzales.

The first millennial baby is already undergoing open-heart surgery in New Zealand. Always a good sign.

The "Secret Society of Happy People" has announced its holiday, National Admit You're Happy Day.

It's on my fucking birthday.

It is now legal for California drivers not to use hand signals when making turns and stops. You were all using hand signals, weren't you? Besides the obvious one?

In Scranton, a billboard for a shoe store, Shoestrings, the billboard measuring 14 X 48 feet, said on it "Bring in this ad, and you'll get a free pair of shoes." Presumably intended as a joke, but some people did. The store gave them their shoes in exchange for getting the sign back.

A story for former Manhattan Beach residents, who will understand: a gym that opened there this year advertised "Join before 3-7-99 and we will pay your next parking ticket."

Alan Greenspan, economic dictator for life. Why is it that in order to be credible, Democratic presidents have to appoint Republicans to the Supreme Court, Republicans to the Fed and Republicans to head DOD?

So John Anderson will probably be on the California ballot. I might just vote for him, since I was too young to in 1980 (although I was a Barry Commoner fan that year). Of course now he's too old, but what the hell. I'd like to vote for Bill Bradley's wife for First Lady without actually having to vote for Bill Bradley. I think we should get the Constitution amended to allow for this. Of course in 1992 this would have meant that Bill Clinton would have been elected president and Barbara Bush first lady. Sounds like the makings of a sitcom. Oh well, don't mind me, it's way too late at night.

Now Barak wants $14 billion in US arms, including cruise missiles, and real-time access to US spy satellites. I don't think the US can afford for there to be peace in the Middle East. Alternately, those countries could just sign a peace deal because peace is good for their countries, without extorting the massive bribes.

So who was it who, out of the goodness of their heart, paid for Linda Tripp's plastic surgery? Off the top of my head I can think of only a few million better causes, but that's me.

Speaking of fatsos, who would have thought Helmut Kohl was corrupt? The president of Israel has also just been found to have taken a rather large bribe.

But on the integrity side, the parents of Britain's millennium baby did not accept the hundreds of thousands of pounds they could have done. They want their baby to have privacy. Some day the kid will look back and become deeply depressed.

The political games-playing re Elian whatsis, the Cuban boy, goes on. All 6 Republican candidates support his being kept in the US. The Clinton admin wants to make it go away without their ever having to take an actual decision, by getting the father to come to the US, at which point he has the legal right to leave the country with his son. Your mother has just died in front of you and you were found floating in an ocean, what will you do now? I'm going to Disney World! If he were Haitian he'd have been expelled as an illegal alien long since.

As part of the peace deal, if it ever comes, Syria wants to be removed from the US list of states which sponsor terrorism.

Dubya has presided over 113 executions. In the week following the Iowa primaries he is scheduled to execute 3 who were 17. Guess what else they all have in common? If you said, they are black, pat yourself on the back for your excellent understanding of the judicial system.

The Clinton Admin is calling on the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of the discrimination in Alabama prisons (and others) against HIV-positive prisoners, who are barred from educational and religious and recreational programs, including work-release programs which would get them out of prison faster.

All those British couples competing to have the first kid of the millennium minus one and have it be on tv and stuff, and who wins but a premie. Actually I think they fixed it and that a black kid really won. Also in the running, someone who not only wasn't competing but didn't know she was pregnant.

Other millennial freaks: 3 pairs of twins in America and one in Bulgaria with the kids born in different centuries. First marriage, in New Zealand--televised. First massacre: Natal, South Africa.

On the millennium, the ashes of Graham Chapman of Monty Python were fired on a rocket over a Welsh mountain.

As in Britain, one of the contenders for first millenial baby in Germany was born to a woman who, at 11:30, didn't know she was baby, felt a pain, went to the hospital, and had the baby 15 seconds after midnight. But the probable winner was an unmarried 18-year old.

Some idiot who has officially changed his name to DotComGuy will live off of the Internet for the next year in Dallas. You can watch him on the web, assuming you have even less of a life than he does.

Australia and New Zealand are currently battling it out over who has the millennium baby.

Personally, at midnight I was watching a discussion over the future of Britain and the EU on C-SPAN, if anyone was wondering.

I got the first newspaper with the year 2000 on it and, as I was afraid, it just looks fake, not like a real year at all, rather like the new twenty-dollar bills.

There is fighting in the Spice Islands in Indonesia. I’m not sure, since there hasn’t been much reportage on it, but I think it’s because they just found out that just because they’re the Spice Islands doesn’t mean they get the Spice Girls.

There was a secret plan to build Belfast’s millennium beacon out of decommissioned terrorist weapons. Unfortunately, no one turned any in.

I just ran another check on my computer and found that while it recognizes the year 2000, it does not recognize 2100, when I still plan to be using the computer, if only to piss Kevin off.

A goodbye to the oldest person in the world, who died just before the millennium minus one, at 119. And to anybody else who happens to be raptured.

And a big hello to President Putin, which is Russian for Gerald Ford.

Shouldn’t it be the bi-millennium? Anyway, for those not of the Christian faith, which as far as I know is all of us, the millennium, according to South Park, is the day every thousand years when Jesus comes out and if he sees his own shadow, we will have a thousand years of peace and contentment.

Jesus will appear on the Mount of Olives, and you can watch it on web-cam. Well, you can if your web-server isn’t an incredible wimp like mine, which is shutting down for a day just to be safe.

With increasing mutterings about whether the Russian apartment building bombings were just a Reichstag/Tonkin Gulf-type incident, the Russians miraculously arrested some of the culprits yesterday. Very believable.

So on Monday Turkmenistan abolishes the death penalty, and on Tuesday it names Niyazov president-for-life. I’m sure this amounts to some sort of collective statement about life imprisonment, but whatever.

Guatemala elects a president who is a confessed multiple murderer and, worse, a crony slash puppet of Efrian Rios Montt of evil memory. And it wasn’t even close. In Peru, Fujimori is also giving that president for life thing a go. And in Venezuela, the first thing former failed-coup leader and now elected-president Hugo Chavez does when there’s a national disaster is start wearing military fatigues. At least in the good old days immortalized by the movie Bananas, when these assholes seized power through coups rather than elections, you could kid yourself that the locals would probably prefer to live in a democracy.

A perhaps unfortunate headline in the Washington Post: “Tipper Gore Has Lump Removed.” But he’s still running for president, right?

NY Times headline: Scientists Place Jellyfish Genes into Monkeys. It’s good to have a hobby. And their hobby is Tampering in God’s Domain.

Britain discovered it first, because of their tradition of the Queen sending telegrams to people on their 100th birthday: the YXCX Bug. Computers made Y2K compliant no longer recognize the year 1900, which they now think is 2000. That sound you’ll be hearing a week from today is every computer in the world singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...” in chorus.

A news update from my vacation period.

Texas removed a death row inmate from intensive care two days after he attempted suicide in order to execute him. Dubya’s 113th execution, I believe.

A Zimbabwe couple have a bet as to which of them is infertile. A judge allows the wife until Feb. 22 to have affairs without risking divorce in order to win the bet, which is I believe for $200.

Forbes accused Dubya of being weak on abortion because a stretch of Texas highway is named after a doctor who performed abortions (and whose son is in the state legislature).

A second and third Nigerian state adopt sharia law.

The US wished Panama a merry isthmus (I know, I know).

I said it in one of these very e-mails: Kenneth Starr’s office did not have the authority to waive Maryland law. Tripp and Starr’s people get into a he-said-she-said in court over the alleged promise of immunity, raising the question of why it wasn’t on tape. The members of the Starr Chamber say that what they told her is that they would make it almost impossible for Maryland to convict her, which sounds rather like obstruction. Fortunately for MD, Tripp bragged about taping Monica to her bridge group, and had an Xmas party to which Monica was invited so that all her bridge cronies could look her over.

A robber was caught after holding up someone at an ATM machine. The machine was located in the lobby of the 77th Street police station in LA.

India discovers a prisoner who’s been sitting in a cell since 1963. They postponed his trial due to his mental instability, and forgot to get back to it.

The pope apologizes for the execution of Jan Hus in 1415.

A new law bans crush videos, in which women in high heels crush small animals. Something else you probably read here first, back in 1996 or so.

Two Brits become the first gay couple jointly listed as father on a California birth certificate, with no mother. They hired one woman to bear the in vitro embryo from another woman--reproduction as three-card monte. You can tell they spent too long in Cal. because the kids (twins) are named (shudder) Aspen and Saffron.

Macau goes back to the Chinese, if you consider something that was a Portuguese colony for three plus centuries to belong to China. No one will miss the Portuguese, as ever the worst of all European colonialists. There are a lot of casinos, though, as befits a reservation.

If Barak manages to negotiate a peace deal with Syria, which would evidently cost the US tens of billions of dollars, he will have to use some of that money to bribe the Shas party in order for it to pass the Knesset. Shas’s religious schools have been going bankrupt and have been forced into such expedients as selling videos of a fake exorcism (I hadn’t even known that Jews had exorcisms; I’m picturing Linda Blair spitting up matzo ball soup).

As the Russian elections show, genocide is just good politics.

In one of the great public relations moves of the war, Russia creates a puppet Chechen militia unit under a puppet former mayor of Grozny, who they found, conveniently enough, in a prison serving a term for embezzlement.

Unity in Northern Ireland achieved at last: the first move of the new Stormont Assembly, literally the first, is to vote itself a 30% pay rise.

Emma Thompson has her first child, named, until she can come up with something better, Jane.com.

A church in Little Rock has set up a drive-through Nativity scene. Now normally I’m against drunk driving....

The Daily Telegraph has another of its odd little juxtapositions. One story says that paintballing war games has led to a rise in serious eye injuries. The next says that marijuana improves the vision, that scientists have discovered the ingredient that causes Caribbean fishermen who drink a rum & cannabis concoction to say that they can see in the dark. I think I may just cancel my Thursday opthamologist appointment.

Some of the best political news this year, in case you weren’t paying attention, is the Newt Gingrich divorce. It will give us lots of opportunities to hear about Newtie’s sex life (shudder shudder), but the political part is that his decision to contest it, and allow every sordid detail to be examined publicly, means that his political career is dead forever.

On the other hand, Bob Dornan’s son is thinking about running for Congress.

At the first debate he bothers showing up for, George Dubya says over and over that if Texas were a country it would have the 11th largest economy in the world. He also said that he was the only one of the candidates who had ever signed a tax-cut bill. Great, he signed a bill. He can sign his name on a piece of paper. That qualifies him to run the fries machine at McDonald’s or graduate from USC, but not be president. Still, if word leaked out that there was going to be a test on name-signing at some point in the presidential primaries, it would explain why Quayle dropped out.

New Zealand has the world’s first transexual MP.

How nice that at the Seattle conference on world trade, the US got to display one of its best exports--crowd control weaponry.

Bumper sticker seen in Berkeley: The truly educated never graduate. I don’t think I’ll repeat that one to my mother. The bumper sticker was on a beat-up old Peugeot, if you were wondering.

For everyone on your Christmas list: a book called Meditation for Dummies.

The IRA now has control over education in Northern Ireland. Mostly Protestant education, actually, since the Catholics mostly go to private schools. The rumor is that truancy or throwing spitballs will now be punished by kneecapping.

“Ice Spice” wins the New Zealand election, beating out “Big Spice.”

$50 billion on the Stealth planes, and it can now all be flushed down the toilet, since the Chinese have figured out how to beat it. What the Pentagon planners didn’t think of was the growth in computing power, evidently. The planes may be semi-impervious to radar (as long as they don’t make any sharp turns or open a door to drop a bomb, as I recall) but do make disturbances in ordinary radio and tv waves. These disturbances can be very cheaply monitored, and the pattern figured out through a computer. It’s not only easy, but it’s pretty cheap.

So now that the Iron Curtain is down, a lot of Israeli schools send out parties of students to visit the death camps, which is personally my idea of a waste of a good trip to Europe, but that’s me. The problem is, they’re teenagers. On a field trip. So these kids, from a kibbutz yet, after an afternoon’s entertainment at Treblinka, get back to the hotel and they order up some stippers. This is the latest national scandal in Israel. Incidentally, there were male strippers for the girls and female strippers for the boys, so that famed kibbutzim equality is still going strong.

For any of you now needing to read about a more depressing family than your own: a woman just died in Britain, age 53, who has been in a coma since 1965 following a car crash. Her mother cared for her for 25 years at home.

On tour, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia (est 1879), not selling that many tickets, had to busk on street corners for food in Swansea (Wales).

New Zealand is having an election where the heads of both major parties are women. It has been dubbed the Xena election.

So is Yeltsin playing sick to get out of signing the unification treaty with Belarus? or to escape responsibility for atrocities in Chechnya? Or is he actually sick? Or drunk? Or in withdrawal from the drugs they used to prop him up at that conference in Turkey?

The Kuwaiti parliament fails to approve votes for women. Iraq has sold Scud missiles to Congo-Kinshasa. Florida to have “Choose Life” license plates.

A letter in the NY Times on the case in Michigan of a kid convicted of a murder committed when he was 11 suggests that if 11-year olds can be tried as adults, they should have a jury of their peers as well.

Yesterday I mentioned a nicotine vaccination that will never see the light of day. Today I read of a study showing that certain types of female infertility are traceable to teenage girls wearing too-tight clothing. Whoever wrote this study must be tracked down and killed before they spread it any further.

Ambulances in Romania have installed taxi meters. They will charge the same per-mile rates as the local taxis, but are not supposed to collect from the unconscious or DOAs.

The London mayoral race gets even more interesting as Lord Jeffrey Archer quits as Tory candidate (and unfortunately returns to his career as novelist) after it comes out that he suborned perjury in a libel case that netted him 500,000 pounds (and he only paid the prostitute 2,000 to leave the country). The Tories, who like the Bourbons never forget and never learn, have nominated another adulterer (at least 5 times that we know of) to replace him.

Amazon.com stops selling Mein Kampf to Germany.

“O Come All Ye Faithful” was evidently meant as a covert coded rallying song for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion.

An article in Salon reveals jokes Bush the Elder planned to use against Clinton in the 1992 election to show his ignorance of foreign affairs, being a mere governor and all. Every joke can be used against Shrub, of course.

Someone has invented a vaccine against nicotine. OK, so some scientists will get very rich and this invention will never be heard of again, but its potential is interesting. For existing smokers, it would do nothing to help their nicotine addiction, but would make sure that cigarettes didn’t assuage it. It’s potential is more interesting for children. Vaccinate your 12 year old (it’s an annual vaccine) and make sure he never starts smoking.

Tony Blair’s wife is going to have a baby, the first baby born to a sitting PM in 150 years (that baby being Bertrand Russell’s father). The British media are going wild, including trying to figure out where it was conceived (yesterday they thought Tuscany, today France). It brings up the question, how different would the Clinton presidency have turned out, image-wise, if he had knocked up Hillary in 1993? The last kid born in the White House, a still-born, was born the week of my birth.

An article a couple of day’s ago in the NY Times on Gore’s several-year stint as a newspaper reporter commented that he lost interest in the job after a corrupt city councilman he’d helped set up in a bribery sting was acquitted. According to a friend, “I think it destroyed his feelings about justice”. So Gore went to law school instead.