In response to Byron York's peeve at an Obama phrasing ("The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil"), Meteor Blades writes:

York's take on this not only begrudges other countries their loss, but also renders that loss a provincial, American loss. Obama is attempting, years after the fact, to remind the world of the opposite, of the universal horror of that day and the way that people from every corner of the globe - from France to Iran - stood in solidarity with New York and Washington on September 11. And, of course, by implication, how attitudes like York's within the administration squandered that sense of solidarity.

Meteor Blades and Obama speak for me here. More . .

Good news for Australian journalist Peter Lloyd, arrested last week for trafficking in one gram of meth in Singapore. He's been released on bail.

He's still facing 20 years and up to 15 lashes of the cane.

Schapelle Corby redux in Singapore....

Austrialian ABC Foreign Correspondent Peter Lloyd was busted in Sinagpore with one gram of meth. He faces 20 years in prison plus 15 whacks of the infamous cane.

He's charged with trafficking:

The ABC's South Asia correspondent was allegedly in possession of 0.8 grams of methamphetamine, or ice, a smoking pipe and six syringes when he was arrested by Singapore police on Wednesday. His urine tested positive to amphetamines.

More...

Apparently the U.S. isn't alone in shamefully detaining suspected immigration policy violators.

Latin American leaders on Tuesday voiced their "deep rejection" of the immigration policy adopted recently by the European Union (EU).

Presidents of the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) "member states and associate states reject any attempt to criminalize the irregular migration and the adoption of restrictive immigration policies, in particular against the most vulnerable sectors of society, namely, women and children," said a statement at issued Mercosur summit.

The EU policy goes into effect in 2010 and allows authorities to detain improperly or undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months before deporting them.[More...]

15 hostages, including 3 Americans have been rescued from FARC in Colombia.

French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three US nationals and 11 other hostages were rescued from Marxist FARC rebels Wednesday, freed from years in captivity by a daring Colombian military raid.

Betancourt, who was captured in 2002, and the three Americans held since 2003, were rescued along with 11 Colombian soldiers in dramatic fashion when the Colombian military infiltrated a rebel jungle camp and removed them by helicopter.

A plane carrying the Americans, Defense Department Contractors, is about to land in Texas.

Sen. John McCain was in Colombia today and said he was told about the rescue while there. He said it was a coincidence.

Amsterdam without marijuana coffee shops? Is nothing sacred?

On July 1, the Netherlands becomes one of the last European countries to ban smoking in restaurants and bars.

The Health Ministry says the ban will apply to cafes that sell marijuana, known as coffee shops. But this being Holland, which for centuries has experimented with social liberalism, there's a loophole: The ban covers tobacco but not marijuana, which is technically illegal anyway.

It gets more complicated. [More...]

Seymour Hersh heard this from an unidentified Democratic senator:

Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. ... Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

Despite warnings from the military and a National Intelligence Estimate "that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003," Democratic leaders agreed "to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran ... designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership." [more ...]

It figures that accountability would be a hang-up in the Bush administration's attempt to convince European leaders that their citizens' privacy interests are outweighed by the American government's desire to know everything about everyone everywhere.

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

A predictable stumbling point:

whether European citizens should be able to sue the United States government over its handling of their personal data, the report said.

Lawsuits? Accountability? Not a chance. [more ...]

A Japanese newspaper is reporting that China has declared that those suffering from leprosy, AIDS and other ailments may not enter the country during the Olympics. Yohei Sasakawa, a human rights activist, philanthropist and the World Health Organization's special ambassador for the elimination of leprosy, is asking China to change its policy.

According to Sasakawa, China has published a "guideline to Chinese law for foreigners coming to, leaving or staying in China during the Olympics," which states that, "anyone with listed diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, VD, leprosy, infectious pulmonary tuberculosis or AIDS will be prohibited" from entering the country during the games.

99% of the world population is believed to be immune to leprosy:

Leprosy is a chronic bacterial disease that mainly affects the skin and nerves. Left untreated it can result in deformity. It is cured using multi-drug therapy and is only very slightly contagious, and 99 percent of the people in the world have a natural immunity to it, according to the Nippon Foundation.

More...

2 years ago, we learned a good deal more about how untrustworthy the U.S. "ally" Pakistan can be, and how the Bush Administration has chosen to turn a blind eye about what Pakistan is up to. Today, the NYTimes drops another shoe:

Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world’s largest black market in nuclear technology, was put under house arrest and his operation declared shattered, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers. Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making it potentially attractive to terrorists.

It sure would be nice to be able to interrogate A.Q. Khan about this:

If the surge has worked as well as President Bush and his older twin John McCain would have us believe, why can't British troops leave Iraq?

Last week media reports said Britain could possibly pull all its forces out by the end of the year, but with the situation still unstable on the ground that appears unfeasible.

Gordon Brown must be thrilled about the prospect of having his picture taken with George "No Timetable" Bush.

Brown is battling against poor opinion poll ratings and Iraq is a divisive issue in Britain.

Birds of a feather.

Bush has been meeting with European leaders to stir up fear of Iran. The Times says Bush "was warmly greeted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel," who may simply have been anticipating another massage.

This is disturbing news from Venezuela:

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

. . . The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees. “We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us,” said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela’s top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. “I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers.”