Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement Oct. 1 declaring that the Georgian government’s arrest of seven Russian officers was needlessly provocative, and suggesting a U.S. hand in the incident. “There seem to be some powers which specialize in creating a new crisis every day, thinking it will distract attention from the old problems,” Putin said. “In the short term it might have some effect, but it absolutely will not help in resolving old and very serious crises around the world.” Putin compared the Georgian government’s actions to the paranoia of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin and his secret police chief [...]
BUDAPEST, Hungary — In parts, the May 26 speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany gave to his Socialist party was something of a grand mea culpa. “I almost died when I had to pretend for one and a half years as if we were governing,” he said on tape. “I am through with this. We either do it and then you’ve got your man, or you pick someone else.” At other times, the speech seemed a sweeping political treatise delivered in the belligerent incoherence of a taxi driver stuck in traffic. “Since they know my mother’s name . . . [...]
As a joke, he once called the Saudi Arabian soccer team “terrorists,” something Arab states found not so funny. And as a jab at an older politician he was replacing, he said “every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman,” something women found not so funny. And last month an audio tape surfaced that was not a jab and not a joke, but an admission of lies, lies, lies about the economy, something the people of Hungary found not funny at all. Hungary’s hip Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurscany has never been in hotter water, but he has [...]
