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/ 13 November 2006
Days before the election George W Bush told journalists that there was no way Donald Rumsfeld would leave his job during the president’s administration. But, as Rumsfeld famously once observed, ”Stuff happens”. What happened was a sudden shift in the terms of trade in American politics; Rumsfeld became too heavy a liability for a president struggling to salvage a legacy.
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/ 13 October 2006
The Pennsylvania school in which five Amish girls were shot dead and five injured this month was bulldozed before dawn on Thursday and the rubble buried, as a small rural community attempted to erase all physical traces of the murders. The grave of the killer, Charles Carl Roberts, a local milk lorry driver who shot himself after the murders, has been vandalised.
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/ 7 September 2006
If you think today’s reality television shows go on forever, you have seen nothing yet. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox television is planning a new variant of the cut-price phenomenon called Forever Eden that might literally never end. Julian Borger gets square eyes.
A braided leather whip, a sniper rifle, six jars of fertiliser and a copy of the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook were among the presents foreign leaders have given United States President George W Bush. They are clearly trying to tell him something. The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published recently by the State Department, reads like the wish list of a paranoid survivalist.
An angry George W Bush rounded on the two remaining members of Washington’s ”axis of evil” recently, as he dismissed ”absurd” suggestions that the United States presents the greatest threat to world stability. At a summit with the European Union in Vienna, President Bush made it clear that he believes that Iran and North Korea pose the most serious danger when he warned them not to test his patience.
The George W Bush administration has yet to decide on a clear plan B for Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But military planning is progressing to fill that policy vacuum and may create a momentum of its own, say former administration officials and political observers.
After being reviled for more than 2 000 years as the embodiment of treachery, Judas Iscariot’s side of the story was finally published last week. Thanks to a newly discovered gospel in Judas’s name, we now know what his excuse was: Jesus made me do it.
Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of United States and Israeli scientists. Their study argues that salty springs along the Galilee’s western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells, lasting up to 200 years, in biblical times.
The Pentagon is trying to develop "insect cyborgs" able to sniff out explosives, or "bug" conversations, by lurking unseen in enemy hideouts with micro-transmitters strapped to their bodies. Their most immediate task could be spotting and identifying the location of roadside bombs in Iraq.
She may not be able to work out a Middle East peace settlement (just yet), but she can tell you how to lose those extra kilos and keep them off. Condoleezza Rice has gone the Jane Fonda route and decided to share her dogged commitment to fitness with the rest of the nation.