International Run Down for Sunday January 21

At Least 24 Americans Died in Iraq Sat.
Today, January 21, 2007, 1 hour ago
At Least 24 Americans Died in Iraq Saturday - 3rd Deadliest Day for U.S. Troops Since 2003


Exclusive: Richardson Enters 2008 Presidential Race
Today, January 21, 2007, 42 minutes ago
New Mexico Governor Would Be Nation's First Hispanic President
Note: As an aside, I think Richardson would make a fine President, and if McCain stumbles I'm sure not voting for a boring governor just because they are Republican. McCain v. Richardson would be a match-up worthy of our nation.


Al-Sadr ends parliamentary boycott
Today, January 21, 2007, 1 hour ago
Talk of "new beginning" as Shia leader's move signals easing of factional tensions.
Note: Just posturing or a real change that signals a beginning to crack down on tensions?

Serbs voting for new parliament
Today, January 21, 2007, 8 minutes ago
Serbia is holding its first general election since becoming an independent state last year.


China Ups Ante in Space
Friday, January 19, 2007, 2:34:18 PM Council on Foreign Relations
January 19, 2007
The successful test of a Chinese anti-satellite weapon brought cries of foul from Washington and others.

Supreme Court to Revisit McCain-Feingold
Yesterday, January 20, 2007, 4:06:31 PM Andrew Roth
This will be interesting to watch.
Note: I for one would like to see it struck down entirely. It is an infringement on free speech. The fact that politics is mean, and requires cash to get out a message, doesn't give the government the right to abridge our freedoms. By the way, right now my endorsement for President is for McCain. See a blog featuring McCain news. His official site. And Explore McCain site.

by Benny Morris for the Jerusalem Post (picked up on www.pajamasmedia.com )
[At PJM the editors review thousands of articles per month. In recent memory we cannot think of a more alarming, prescient essay that this one published today by Benny Morris.
Morris is one of the most respected intellectuals in Israel and his conversion dove to hawk was widely heralded and criticized at the time. Morris, one of the "New Historians," wrote about this 'transformation' for the Guardian in 2002, saying, "I imagine that I feel a bit like one of those western fellow travelers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956." Today Morris goes even deeper into the darkening future of the Middle East as he looks at what is coming there, and to the rest of the world.]

THE SECOND HOLOCAUST will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye and ear contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them into cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where "Work makes free," separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into "shower" halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies and prepare the "showers" for the next batch.

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.