Watching CNN today, 11:14 am Pacific Time, as they’re coming back from a commercial.
"Three of the stories we’re working on…" the anchor intones, deeming these the most worth highlighting:
- Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
- Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
- "Eight search warrants have been served in the death of Anna Nicole Smith…"
Do we have to? Annalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, again splashed across literally hundreds of newspapers and TV stations? Thankfully, it’s hardly the wall-to-wall all-else-annihilating festival of eight months ago (see this cartoon video for more — and shouldn’t all media commentary be done in cartoons with cool background music?). But still. Aagh.
As to what we might be missing today, amid the wasted minutes of Anna Nicolitude: you’ve probably heard that the US and Russia are getting tense. So are the US and Turkey, just as Turkey and the Kurds could blow up any minute, with large implications for Iraq. To the good, Israel and the Palestinians are making headway for once, but in Sudan, things blew up again in Darfur the other day, and peace talks in South Sudan have gone wobbly, after decades of war there which have killed at least 1.5 and probably 2 million people.
(Sadly, the likelihood of this last was fairly predictable; turns out southern Sudan has been in a state of civil war since the 1950s, with the exception of one 11-year break that ended in 1983 and this fresh flail at peace starting in 2005. None of which I recall even hearing about until writing Who Hates Whom. Despite the death toll. Depressed sigh.)
