A whirlwind tour of news, analysis and opinion from around the world. An "Open Intelligence" source for the masses ( Well, maybe for friends and family.)
posted by Mondcognito at 3:53 PM
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The Basque Parliament approved a measure on Thursday that says the Basque region has the right to secede from Spain, a move analysts described as the most serious threat to national unity since the establishment of democracy here nearly 30 years ago.
"This is the clearest push for independence that the Basque country has made," said Antonio Caño, a senior editor at the newspaper El País. "It is a very clear challenge to the unity of Spain. I'd say it places the country in its biggest crisis of unity since democracy began here."This shows the weakness of the Socialist government in the eyes of the Basque Seperatists. Mr. Aleman gives historical, political and social context in his commentary. He also provides links for background information on the Basque Seperatists:
Oh, and just as and end note: don't buy the crap about 'moderate nationalist' as several of the linked items define Ibarretxe and his party. True, they don't use guns or kill people, but they masterfully play a good cop, bad cop routine; while Ibarretxe and his ilk talk relatively nice, the radicals and ETA do the dirty job. And both sides profess an extreme nationalism based in ethnicist principles, celebrating the 'father' of the Basque Homeland, Sabino Arana. If you want to learn about the ideology, just read this post by John Chappell at Europundits, commenting some texts by English journalist John Hooper about the philosophical basis of Basque nationalism ("It's closer to Fascism than you might think"), and with some 'unvaluable' translations of Arana's doctrine. Be sure you don't miss it.This is a significant development and I am convinced that this could have an impact outside of Spain. France is not exactly a disinterested party in this dispute. It will be interesting to see how "European Unity" works out in this situation. It is also quite likely to increase the terrorist activities of ETA. (It worked for the Islamo-Fascists, so why not for ETA?) We will see if the Socialists can muster the will and competence to deal with this. Go read this article!
posted by Mondcognito at 2:25 PM
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posted by Mondcognito at 7:29 AM
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posted by Mondcognito at 6:21 AM
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But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized Christianity in America. By ''politicized,'' I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing ''Silent Night'' if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out, it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: What's more important? Winning a victory over the New Jersey kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?
In Britain and Europe, by contrast, the formal and informal symbols of religious faith remained in place in national life and there were no local equivalent to America's militant litigants, and the result is the total collapse of Christianity: Across the continent, the churches are empty. In attempting to sue God out of public life, American liberals demonstrate yet again that they're great on tactics, lousy on long-term strategy.
Oh, well. 'Tis the season of goodwill to all men, so in that spirit let me wish the ACLU a Happy Boxing Day. Yes, I know. Dec. 26 is Boxing Day only in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., not in Illinois. But I don't see why America's fetishization of multiculturalism shouldn't extend to white, English-speaking cultures. And at least you won't get sued for saying it.
posted by Mondcognito at 10:05 PM
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* "It's pure propaganda, and I fully support it because I oppose the war." -- 60 Minutes reporter Richard Carleton reviews Fahrenheit 9/11 (In a past life he was Leni Riefenstahl's agent. - Mondo)
* "Viewers may come away from Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true." -- but that doesn't matter, according to Paul Krugman, because the film tells "essential truths" (Mr. Krugman used this analysis once before in his review of "Triumph Of The Will". - Mondo)
* "The fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia." -- Margo Kingston (Ms. Kingston, ever the good Australian leftist, plagiarized this from "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion". - Mondo)
* "Truly, America is the most bloodthirsty nation on the face of post Stalin earth. It's military, it's government, its corporate carpetbaggers are sinking into such a swamp of deceit, denial and depravity that fair minded people the world over, including its own better informed citizens, can but recoil in horror." -- constant ABC and Fairfax presence Richard Neville (An Australian leftist channels Michael Moore - Mondo)
* "I assume Saddam, a ruthless, ambitious fan of Stalin, did bad things and killed a lot of people in his time. But kill them pointlessly? I don't think so." -- pointless ALP fetishist Bob Ellis (This man is a graduate of the John Kerry School of Nuance. -Mondo)
* "The angriest man at the convention turns out to be a Democrat: who'd have thunk. He's brutal. He's hammering Kerry like a blacksmith; if Kerry was a horseshoe he'd be thinner than aluminum foil." -- James Lileks on Zell Miller
* "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims." -- Abdel Rahman al-Rashed in The Arab News
* "To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation. Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes." -- Abu Mujahed, one of Michael Moore's brave Iraqi minutemen (No doubt Mr. Mujahed will be the headline speaker at the next Nation of Islam national convention. -Mondo)
* "I was tired of Sudan being on the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. I was tired of dictators with Swiss bank accounts, like Castro and Arafat and Mugabe, masquerading as men of the people. I was tired of Europeans picking on cowboys, everybody picking on the Jews, and the whole supposedly civilized world of gutless wonders, including the dinosaur graveyard called Berkeley, picking on America and Israel. As I write this, 1.2 million black Christian and Muslim Sudanese are starving to death thanks to the Arab government in Khartoum and the worldwide mafia of France, Germany, China, Russia, and practically every Islamic country on the face of the earth. What happened to the little boy who cried when Adlai Stevenson lost? He died in Darfur." -- lifelong Democrat Kinky Friedman explains why the Democrats lost his vote in 2004
* "On Saturday night the giant, lumbering road train known as the will of the people, aka the democratic process, smashed through the pretensions, delusions and manipulations of the unelected and unaccountable who presume to tell Australians what to think and who to be." -- the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul Sheehan
* "I know a great deal about the Middle East because I've been raising Arabian horses." -- actor and intensely informed Bush opponent Patrick Swayze
* "Those little bastards betrayed us again." -- Hunter S. Thompson condemns the youth vote
* "All Iraqis were Republicans on election day. We are confident he will finish the job and wipe out terrorists from the region during the next four years." -- Ahmed, an Iraqi in Australia
* "Here's a newspaper article on blogs, pointing out that they can be inaccurate. It mentions my name: Dave Berry." -- Dave Barry
* "To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom." -- actor Rowan Atkinson on the UK's proposed don't-mock-Islam law (Mr. Atkinson, one of the funniest men alive, puts his finger on one of the problems of democracy. If you create a right to not be offended, then you will curtail free speech. Speaking from experience as a Baptist, you can get used to the main stream media kicking you around the block. -Mondo)
* "Look, guys, you got the benefit of the doubt with the 'butterfly ballots' in 2000, but we can't dumb it down for you much more than this." -- Free Will's Aaron after a Minnesota Democrat mistakenly awarded an electoral vote to John Edwards instead of John Kerry
* "It is not permissible to stand and urinate as this is now the culture of the Kuffaar." -- the Imam orders his followers to sit down for Islam (What, you can stand and do that? -Mondo)
posted by Mondcognito at 7:10 AM
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* "How are we supposed to find hidden and buried WMDs in Iraq if, wherever one digs there, we just keep finding mass graves?" -- poet Nelson Ascher
* "For a week I managed to persist in the happy belief that I was not living in a brutal police state. I fled home the next week, leaving all my illusions of the Arab world in my Cairo flat. I couldn't wait to be in America again. On the long flight home, I promised myself I would never accept anything less than full democracy for my fellow Muslims in the Arab world or apologize for the tyranny that now masquerades as Islam." -- US-born Muslim Murad Kalam (It really is true that foreign travel is educational. - Mondo)
* "I think I finally understand why Kerry underwent the botox treatments. It's so he could say all the things he does with a straight face." -- reader Dan G.
* "In general, I'm pro-life -- excuse me, I'm pro-abortion rights." -- Wesley Clark explains his position. Other Clark comments on the subject included 'I don't believe in abortion' and 'I have always been and always will be pro-choice'. (The General missed John Kerry's instructional video series "Nuance In The Lexus-Nexus Age". - Mondo)
* "They are the Klan without the sheets. Worse: they don't have the inbred moonshine-addled mah-pappy-hated-nigras-an-I-hate-'em-too dense-as-a-neutron-star stupidity of your average Kluxer. They didn't come to this level of stupidity naturally. They had to work at it." -- James Lileks on the extreme anti-liberation, anti-Bush Left
* "Americans are polite and friendly when you speak to them. They are not rude like Afghans. If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer - or an American soldier." -- teenage former Guantanamo Bay inmate Asadullah. As The Guardian's James Astill wrote: "This might seem to jar with the prevailing opinion of Guantanamo among human rights groups" (Further proof that foreign travel is enlightening! -Mondo)
* "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies." -- hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi refuses to yield to his Saddamite captors. Al-Jazeera declines to run footage of his murder, declaring it "too gruesome" (This is unlike how the French live: "Here are our weapons and our Jews - do with them as you please."; or the Spanish: "Bomb us and we will punish you by pulling out our troops." Mark Steyn has written most eloquently on the limp-wristed response of the English press and public to the murder of a British citizen by the Islamicists and points to the heroism of Mr. Quattrocchi for comparison. (I apologize for not providing a link - look for it.) It is of special significance that the mouthpiece of Islamo-Fascism chose not to show someone who died like a man. Mr. Blair points out that "too gruesome" as a criteria seems unique to this case - Mondo)
* "In my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a 'pendejo,' an idiot. Tillman, in the absurd belief that he was defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation devastated by the previous conflicts it had endured, decided to give up a comfortable life to place himself in a combat situation that cost him his life ... this was a 'G.I. Joe' guy who got what was coming to him." -- University of Massachusetts undergraduate Rene Gonzalez (U Mass can be proud of this example of intellectual achievement. See Lileks above. No doubt this young woman is a future Democratic presidential candidate! -Mondo)
* "Tommy Rødningsby volunteered to make life better in a country far away, in a conflict he could have stayed out of. That was brave, and worth our respect and admiration. Our politicians and pundits are soft and confused, but our professional soldiers stand comparison to anyone." -- Bjørn Stærk on Norway's first casualty in Afghanistan
* "Using artificial insemination to get pregnant, lesbians are four times more likely to have children than gay men." -- Reuters uncovers a shocking statistic
* "When the old fella said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' I laughed at his blustery naivete, as I did whenever he uttered the phrase 'Evil Empire.' Needless to say, I was wrong about that, and he was right, and I'm still ashamed about it." -- Matt Welch
* "In Berlin there used to be, like, a communist country and there used to be a big wall between East Berlin and West Berlin, where, like, the people on the West, I suppose, couldn't come to the East, or was it the other way around, because the East was where the rich people lived and the West was where the poor people lived." -- Australian reality TV contestant Wesley (See! It's not only the American educational system that produces "historicus idioticus". Or may he is just channeling Noam Chomsky. -Mondo)Watch for Part 2.
posted by Mondcognito at 7:01 AM
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posted by Mondcognito at 11:02 PM
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posted by Mondcognito at 8:52 PM
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Women of course are not interested in lagrangian libration points, which are points of stability in the combined gravity fields of the earth and moon and sun, where junk collects. But there's an analog if you don't dust for a decade or so, where giant dust balls form at points of habitually rising air, the dust following the horizontal negative flow divergence to that point and then staying behind as the air rises, a fascinating event unfolding that a woman would never tolerate even the beginning of. A man remains calm, even fascinated, in the presence of natural events that need explaining, in his view, and not fixing. Like huge balls of dust. ``I wonder how big it will get.'' A man looks forward to seeing in a couple of years more what will have happened. NASA may want to send a mission there, he thinks.Just one more reason to love the Australians!
These giant dust balls can be broken up however by a dog chasing some object into an undisturbed area once in a while, which is their eventual fate. This is the analog of a large comet.
Men are unaffected by the story ``Dust Balls, a New Menace? More at Eleven'' but women are, and women are the product of the news businesses. These women (said to be 40% of women; not all, but it's all you can get) are sold to advertisers. News busineses(sp) would like a more general audience, but there usually isn't anything to attract a more general audience except for one-offs like Princess Di's funeral or JFK Jr augering into the sea, where the comman(sp) man is tuning in to see if the entire world has gone crazy or if it's just his wife. Women you can attract daily!
Blogs come and go on interest alone, both writer's and readers', and so needn't pander to the biggest homogeneous audience available no matter how moronic.
Similarly men who are married sometimes clean up, with a view towards future favors. This is said to be the civilizing influence of women.
posted by Mondcognito at 8:31 AM
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posted by Mondcognito at 6:52 AM
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Lawrence O'Donnell, a leading party strategist and former aide to Sen. Pat Moynihan...complained on MSNBC that "the segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government." Mr. O'Donnell added for good measure, "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare client states of the federal government."Given the penchant of the Democrats for redistribution, this is irony of the highest order!
Of course, many conservative Republicans have a similar complaint on the tax side of the ledger, noting that the top 1% of taxpayers pay 37% of the federal income tax while the bottom 50% pay just 6%. Of course, both points are related. Rich people pay disproportionately more taxes than do other people. Blue states have higher average incomes and more rich people, and therefore pay higher taxes, than do red states.So then, LET'S RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH!
...(E)nacting John Kerry's proposed tax hike on high-income earners would only have made things worse. Using the Kerry campaign's $200,000 income cutoff, four times as many Connecticut residents as Oklahoma residents would have seen their taxes go up.
What to do? One obvious point is that if you have a federal income tax, you can't have tax rates that vary by state. However, this leads inescapably to the mathematical fact that flat taxes are not only simpler by most measures, they are also the only way to deal with the type of unfairness that Mr. O'Donnell complains about. Flatter is fairer. Flat rates coupled with lump-sum credits, for children for example, are a lot closer to producing a "fair" result by what seem to be Mr. O'Donnell's standards than the current multi-bracketed system he has been schooled to think of as "fair."It was often stated after this election that red state voters voted against their economic interest by voting for the party of lower taxes. It would appear that quite the opposite is true and that "the federal-tax playing field is tipped against the blue states because of the past political preferences of blue-state voters."
posted by Mondcognito at 9:39 PM
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Why was BuyBlue.org started?(It might be petty of me to ask why they never leave when there are already so many socialist utopias to relocate to. Perhaps Sweden, where they can ponder how the good socialists of IKEA can exploit cheap Taiwanese labor to sell inexpensive goods to middle class Americans.)
On the morning after the 2004 election, half of the country woke up in disbelief and disgust. Shortly afterwards it turned to anger and bitterness and many were entertaining moving to another country. It didn't take long for all of us to collectively realize that we had lost our country to the other side and we wanted, no needed to do something about it. It was at that moment that the original idea for BuyBlue.org was born.
What is BuyBlue.org all about?Oddly enough, there isn't much that I would disagree with here. This, at least, gives the appearance of being a market-based solution. It strikes me as fundamental that purchasing decisions should (and do) include a "Values" component. I do wonder how "vast" the boycotts will be.
Mission Statement: BuyBlue.org supports businesses that share our progressive values and ideals. BuyBlue.org uses our power as consumers to vote with our wallets, supporting businesses that abide by sustainability, workers' rights, environmental standards, and corporate transparency. At the same time, BuyBlue.org organizes vast boycotts against businesses that violate the essential values of a sustainable, fair and profitable society through their policies and the politicians they support.
Vision Statement: BuyBlue.org will become a powerful tool used by a community of millions dissatisfied with the ineffectiveness of our elected and appointed leaders. We will form strong coalitions with stockholders, shareholders, corporations, small businesses and communities which share our values to gain strength through numbers. We will influence the political landscape, stimulate economic growth among participating businesses and industries and use the American dollar as an incentive for corporate transparency and responsibility.
ValuesSubstitute "conservative" or "free market" for "progressive" and try this on for size. Now, you must look at the list before you read the next section.
1. We believe that most politicians no longer serve the public's interest and instead pander to influential corporations and special interests.
2. We believe that America can be great and united again, but first we must embrace progressive ideals that work in the interests of all of our citizens, not simply those in the majority or those who are privileged.
3. We believe that the best way to encourage our political leaders and corporations to enforce progressive ideals is to vote for those ideals the only way those groups understand; with our collective buying power.
4. We believe that as a community we can, will, and must make a difference
What if I want to Buy Red?Did you notice the Orwellian moment in that passage?
This too is a very common question we get asked, although it is usually more inflammatory or a threat of some kind. Those are always amusing reads. Our answer: more power to you! By doing so you are helping us to achieve our ultimate goal and you are helping to get the attention of corporations. Thank You!
However, the people that write us and tell us they are going to "buy red" don't understand the vision of the web site and don't understand that we control the definition of "buying red". Currently, our information is politically based, but when it becomes comprehensive I think these same people will find that "buying red" is an untenable position. "Buying red" will no longer mean supporting corporations who donated to the Republican party, it'll mean supporting corporations that pay sub-standard wages, have unethical business practices, destroy the environment to make a buck, and discriminate against minorities, women and homosexuals. In fact there is a chance you might even find corporations who contributed to Democrats declared "red" or at the very least borderline.
This isn't about politics, it is about positive social change and bringing about a sustainable, fair and profitable society.
"Buying red" will no longer mean supporting corporations who donated to the Republican party, it'll mean supporting corporations that pay sub-standard wages, have unethical business practices, destroy the environment to make a buck, and discriminate against minorities, women and homosexuals. In fact there is a chance you might even find corporations who contributed to Democrats declared "red" or at the very least borderline.It is an interesting propaganda technique to morph the symbol. On the other hand, one could read this passage and conclude that corporations who donate to the Republican Party are not those which "pay sub-standard wages, have unethical business practices, destroy the environment to make a buck, and discriminate against minorities, women and homosexuals."
posted by Mondcognito at 8:51 PM
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The second and rather long article by Brian Moynihan in the Sunday Times is so consistently spot on that it is almost scary.2. I See A Red Button Rising (Just press it)
It is also somewhat embarrassing when it comes to picking quotes, frankly.
So here's a, well, pot-pourri of course:
« Going, going... the old man of Europe
(Chirac) the great survivor is on his way out, leaving France in a state of decline »
What do you call a great survivor at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
I know, you're not in for easy jokes but I just couldn't help it. And because I'm the one pulling all the work here doesn't mean I should climb the walls, does it?
« Gaullism, tetchy in its defence of French interests, pining for grandeur, has moulded him.
One of its principal features is to lump Americans and the British together as "les Anglo-Saxons", and to mistrust both. Another (...) is the general's dictum that "with the English one must bang on the table and they will submit". »
Right. Tell that to Napoleon's horse, Charly.
« Forty years ago, de Gaulle described the Americans as "the greatest danger in the world today to peace". »
1. Now you know where Lefties and their Islamofascist allies borrowed their pathetic rhetoric.
2. Now you know why I regard de Gaulle as a great man up until, say, June 18th, 1940. Tops.« Chirac is more circumspect. But he went out of his way to praise the philosopher Jacques Derrida, (...) as one of the "major figures of the intellectual life of our times". Derrida was notorious for calling America the "world's leading rogue state". »
1. Now you know where Lefties and their Islamofascist allies borrowed their pathetic rhetoric.
2. Now you know why I regard Chirac as a great man up until, say, November 28th, 1932. Tops.
And as a side note, I'll had that being called 'a major intellectual' by somebody like Mr. Chirac tells you a lot about what Derrida was, and was not. If you get my meaning, wink, wink.
« As to the British, the general once said that Churchill had told him: "Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt." »
Which is one among many reasons why Churchill still is a great man.« There is a tangible fear that the French vision of the EU, politically integrated, socially conscious, is being replaced by an English- dominated collection of loosely linked states with a liberal, free-market economy hostile to Gaullist notions of state-backed industries and étatisme. »
Fear? What do you mean fear? Gee, I can't wait for that glorious day.
All right, this is just an appetizer really. I do insist you go and read the whole thing, as it is addressing some key French issues, above and beyond Jacques C., King of the Thieves -- from de Gaulle to that quarter of the French workforce made of public sector employees rushing the country on the road to bankruptcy.
However, as the French expression goes, here's a last one for the road:« The socialists under François Mitterrand misused public funds on a scale undreamt of by Juppé. They created a building consultancy, Urba, with 16 regional offices, in order to siphon money from public works contracts into party coffers. It contributed £2.4m to Mitterrand’s re-election campaign. Police and investigating magistrates were stymied when Mitterrand announced a grand amnesty for those being investigated for financial misdemeanours. This applied to all elected representatives, including himself. »
That's the French way: bribe and swindle your way to the top, and then pardon yourself.
Where it says: "Fermeuh ton Bush".4. I Want The T-Shirt
If you were culturally superior enough to be born French, you'd already understood this dainty bon mot, and would already be jesting heartily at President Bush's obvious stupidity.
However, you're probably not, so I have to explain: it's a pun that can be understood as "shut your mouth" and it is very funny because 'Bush' sounds like 'Bouche' in French, which means 'Mouth'.
But wait, there's more. Here it gets extraordinarily intellectually superior: for some extra witty fun, the French Intellectual Humorist Philosopher behind this very funny de l'humour motto wrote 'Fermeuh' instead of 'Ferme' ('close' or 'shut').
Now it's not because he can't spell and conjugate his own language, although any contact with French emails and forums is enough to grant him the benefit of the doubt on this one, but because it looks just like he's writing as a kid would speak in a mocking way.
Which is so extra funny when he you think of it.
Okay, that's enough French de l'humour culture for today.
Quote of the Day:« Supporting Socialism for fear of Fascism is suicide for fear of death. »
--
Samizdata Illuminatus
posted by Mondcognito at 7:54 AM
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July 05, 2004For some reason, I can't imagine the French Foreign Minister saying something like this regarding the US.
Day 91
Ten years ago today: When asked U.S. opinion on the French's apparent about-face on the mandate of Operation Turquoise, a State Department spokeswoman said,
Since we don't have an in-country presence, I'm not sure that we would be in a position to evaluate or make a judgment on every action or activity that has taken place.
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SPAIN'S SOCIALIST PRIME MINISTER Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is proud to portray himself as a hard-core feminist.But wait, it gets better!
In order to prove that he is a real feminist, what a better way than opening the Palacio de la Moncloa -prime minister's office and residencial complex, that is, the equivalent to the White House or No. 10 Downing Street- for a photo spread of the eight women ministers modeling in Vogue?
Look how Socialist, and how feminist, they all look posing in front of Moncloa's main entrance, clad in chic designer clothes (not as modest as the San Francisco Chronicle says; they're an average $6,000 each, according to Spanish media reports), and sitting, or standing by, two sofas covered in... fur! Where's PETA when you need them?And the Grand Finale:
The editor said that the ministers accepted to pose "only if pics were not frivolous and didn't make them look like top-models". Take a look, for example, at Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, deputy prime minister, and tell me if this requirement was a token of the minister's arrogance, or if there was indeed any risk that she could be mistaken for Claudia Shiffer:Read the complete story (with pictures!) here.
What sort of idiot would make the centrepiece of his presidential campaign four months of proud service in a war he's best known for opposing?
For a bewildered American, the key in squaring the anti-American rhetoric with the Valley Girl reality is simply to understand Western Europeans as elite Americans.
Jihadists have realized what happens when they attack Big Satan; they get real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (so far). And they know what they get when they attack Little Satan, that is, Europe: appeasement all over the place, and yes to anything they want. So, why not going for more?
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Japan fury over abductee remains
Megumi Yokota as a young woman (file photo)
Megumi Yokota's parents believe she is still alive
Tokyo has expressed "extreme regret" at North Korea, after DNA tests showed that remains provided by the North were not those of a missing Japanese woman.
Pyongyang has admitted kidnapping Megumi Yokota in 1977, saying she committed suicide in 1994.
But Japan remained sceptical, and had called for proof that she was dead.
Japanese Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said the issue was now a "major obstacle" to ties, and said food aid to the North should be re-evaluated.
The remains were brought back by a Japanese delegation last month after a fact-finding mission about kidnap victims who have gone missing in the North.
Pyongyang admitted in 2002 to abducting 13 Japanese nationals, who were to be used as cultural trainers for North Korean spies. Five were allowed to return to Japan, while North Korea said the others had died.
The DNA test results were made public on Wednesday.
JAPAN'S MISSING
Hitomi Soga during a press conference by the five former Japanese abductees at a Tokyo hotel Saturday, May 22, 2004
Snatched in the '70s and '80s
Used as cultural trainers for N Korean spies
Five allowed home in 2002
Five children now freed from N Korea
Eight said to be dead, others missing
Heartbreak over Japan's missing
"The bones belonged to a number of other people," Mr Hosoda said.
"It would be difficult under such circumstances to provide further assistance to North Korea," he said.
Megumi Yokota's mother, Sakie, said the results showed North Korea was not telling the truth.
"It's good that the results let everyone in this country know how Kim Jong-il's country is cruel, cold-blooded and inhumane," she said.
Tsutomu Takebe, secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, called North Korea's latest move "extremely insincere".
The latest twist will fuel suspicions that Megumi Yokota is still alive and being held in the North.
Some believe she is being detained because she knows too much about the secretive country.
The confusion is also likely to be a major hindrance to Japan's normalising relations with North Korea, which is keen for economic aid.
North Korea has handed over remains before which did not match the supposed deceased.
In 2002, Japanese investigators were handed human remains which North Korea said belonged to Kaoru Matsuki, who supposedly died in a traffic accident in 1996.
But a jaw fragment studied by a dental professor in fact resembled that of a woman in her 60s.
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posted by Mondcognito at 6:56 AM
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April 04, 2004
100 Days of Rwanda Project
On April 6, 1994, ten years ago this week, the small African nation of Rwanda began a journey down one of the darkest roads in human history, when the death of its president sparked the start of a virulent genocide that claimed over 800,000 lives... while the world stood by and watched.
Frontline aired an excellent program last week about the indifference shown to Rwanda by the Clinton Administration and by the United Nations, among others, and the efforts of other Westerners to try and save lives. (Alison Des Forges' Leave None to Tell the Story, Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You..., and Romeo Dallaire's recent book Shake Hands with the Devil are all also out there and are invaluable resources.) The genocide in Rwanda lasted "only" 100 days. Three months where an average of 8,000 Rwandans were killed every day. It's occurred to me that one way to attempt to begin to understand, in a small way, the un-understandable, is to at least experience 100 days of being conscious of Rwanda, of what happened there, over the same stretch of time that it took hundreds of thousands of people to die.
We talk about "blogging" as a sort of ongoing thing... but it can also be an act, a finite effort with a beginning and end. I thought of creating a blog called 100 Days of Rwanda, where I would set out to present links to stuff (historical and present-day) about this country that Americans still don't know much about, and about what happened there ten years ago. It would be a learning process for myself, at the very least.
In the next 100 days I hope to learn a lot more about Rwandans of all backgrounds and their ongoing story. I encourage people to also remember Rwanda in their blogs and .sigs this spring. Further commentary on this project is posted at my personal blog.
July 14, 2004
Personal note:
The "100 Days" is a somewhat arbitrary period, but it is the most commonly cited approximate time period for the catastrophe known as the Rwandan genocide.When I started this project, I wondered if the experience of digesting the Rwandan genocide and civil war in "real time" chunks (at least, day by day) over the same period of time that it unfolded, would provide some sort of added insight.
It's been a long three months, but it seemed to go by fast, until I sat there the other night and tried to remember everything I'd written down since April 6 and all the various emotional reactions I had. I would have to say that the single thing that affected me the most emotionally was what occurred at Benebekira convent on Day 25. But there were many other things I learned that will stand out in my mind about what happened in Rwanda.
In the village of Ruganda, the New York Times reported, sympathetic Hutu families were still hiding Tutsi from officials.This is a large project and will take some time to read. It seems to be well documented. I have concluded that the author is a Democrat from a cursory look at the personal blog, but the author doesn't seem to be an apologist for the Clinton administration or the United Nations.
Despite the ferocity of the propaganda and the violence, bonds of loyalty and friendship have survived among Hutu and Tutsi. Here in Ruganda, one Hutu family has been harboring Tutsi since April -- 30 at first, now 8, mostly children whose parents were killed. "I had no problems with Tutsi; they were my neighbors, and I am a Christian," said Anne-Marie Mukarukaka, 31, a court stenographer. Other Hutu in Ruganda know that Tutsi are hiding in Mrs. Mukarukaka's house, but they have not betrayed them. Mrs. Mukarukaka has even informed the village authorities, who are all Hutu. For these villagers, being a Hutu or a Tutsi never really mattered.
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