The North Korean foreign minister announced Tuesday his country will conduct a nuclear test, the Associated Press reports. We managed to get our hands on the English version of the nuclear test announcement put out by North Korea’s state-controlled media organ, the Korean Central News Agency. The release doesn’t appear to be posted on the KCNA’s Web site as yet. Reading the announcement gives one a sense of the regime’s propaganda style, and the paranoid, almost desperate, voice that characterizes it: DPRK Foreign Ministry Clarifies Stand on New Measure to Bolster War Deterrent Pyongyang, October 3 (KCNA) — The Foreign [...]
With the publication of his new book, State of Denial, the third tome he’s written on the Bush administration after Sept. 11, Bob Woodward is everywhere. The Washington Post Company is milking the Woodward book for all its worth, publishing two excerpts so far in the paper (see here and here) and another in Newsweek. (More on the content of Woodward’s book later). But Woodward is far from the only big-time journalist that’s helping to write the first-draft of the history of the Iraq war. An astonishing number of books on the conduct of war — examining decision-making in Baghdad [...]
Democracy is floundering in . . . Europe? An Iranian nuke stand-off may not be so imminent. Musharraf is playing the spin doctor; the United States made Iraq a magnet for terrorists; and tanks rolled through Bangkok but bullets are still flying in Southern Thailand. And why can’t something be done about genocide in Sudan? With so much going on this week, maybe you missed the quiet stream of articles questioning the relative peace and stability that exists across Europe. Ivan Krastev claimed in the Sept. 27 Wall Street Journal that Europe’s best kept secret is not that old Europe [...]
