This is disturbing:

Spying Commonplace at the UN, Diplomats Say

It reminds me of a story one of my former professors used to tell. A native of Ceaucescu's Romania (one of the more paranoid Communist satellites), she was celebrating the new year with her family in Bucharest when she, knowing her phone was being monitored, said simply into the phone (without dialing or having it ring):

"Happy New Year"

and a man's voice on the phone responded:

"Happy New Year to you too."

and no, that last post wasn't an april fool's joke...

Happy April Fools Day!

This came out at least a week before but this is just too funny to be true...

Canada Could Ditch Winter Blues by Annexing Caribbean Paradise Some Canadians (including members of Parliament) are lobbying for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands!

Here's the site they put up to promote the idea

The Turks and Caicos is a small island group near the Bahamas, thousands of miles from even the closest point in Canada. They've got a population of not even 20,000 people and they're talking about making it a possible new province?!

Where I come from, life is unfit to be lived. Given the strong winds and poor public transport, whatever you plan to do turns into an immensely arduous undertaking. At the age of fourteen you are already incredibly weary, and you don't get a proper break until you're fourty-five. Very often people go out shopping and don't come back, or else they write a novel and on page 2,000, they suddenly realize how confusingly out of hand the whole thing has got and start all over again from the beginning. It is a timeless life, one of the gtreat achievements of which is the chance to die in one's own bed.

From Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer (Ebury Press; August 1, 2002)

With all the stories of crises and bad things happening throughout the world, I thought it would be good to post something positive for a change:

Participatory Government: A New Reality Slowly Emerges in Tajikistan (January 2004, from the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative of the American Bar Association)

According to the State Department,

"More democracy is the best antidote to terror."
-- Richard Boucher, State Department Spokesperson

Powell Offers Help in Uzbekistan Probe

Funny how our democratic freedoms in this country are continually eroded with things like the Patriot Act.....