ELSEWHERE

The post of 11th on A Tangled Web is one of many deploring GWB’s failure to endorse Israel’s right to pursue terrorists. The USA can pursue Bin Laden and Saddam but Israel cannot pursue Hamas??

Or as the WSJ says: “The only way to stop the "cycle of violence" is to kill or incapacitate the instigators. If Abbas cannot or will not do so, how can anyone fault Israel for acting in its own defense?”

How amusing: Castro led an anti-Europe march through Havana. After Iraq, he’s getting rattled.

Amusing: Yahoo news has a story about Spanish and Polish troops going to Iraq as peacekeepers under the heading “Australia”. I am of course delighted. Obviously, the equation: “Australia = U.S. Ally” has gotten into a lot of minds.

Good to see Colin Powell so outspoken about the thugs who run Burma. But why does it always have to fall to the United States to make the running in these matters? Are the U.S. and its Anglosphere allies the only moral countries left in the world? What about the self-righteous hypocrites of Canada and France? What are they doing?

And some things are happening in the campaign to bring North Korea into line.

Distinguished bacteriologist Hugh Pennington has an article here that tells you about all there is to know about SARS so far. He compares it with the spread of smallpox many years ago and comments: “It is easy to forget how important the isolation of cases was in smallpox control. Vaccination was made compulsory in Scotland in 1863 but indigenous smallpox was not eradicated until 1904, after the Public Health (Scotland) Act of 1897 facilitated the building of isolation hospitals”

Good news for economic progress in China: “China had convened a secret top-level body to draft sweeping changes to its constitution so the property of private enterprises had equal legal protection as state-owned ones, The Financial Times website reported yesterday.”