The Irish Examiner (registration required) reports a new book is coming out on UN peacekeeping missions, and that the UN tried to block publication.

THREE United Nations fieldworkers are publishing details of sex, drugs and corruption inside UN missions, despite a UN attempt to block their book.

'Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth' chronicles the experiences of a doctor, a human rights official and a secretary in UN operations in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia.

The controversial volume, due out next week, charges that some UN officials demanded that 15pc of their local staff's salaries go directly to them instead; that Bulgaria sent freed criminals to serve as peacekeepers and that incompetent UN security has cost lives.

.    .    .

Particularly galling to them is the murder in Mogadishu in Somalia of a young American colleague, shot dead as he rode in a UN convoy.

Kenneth Cain, an American human rights official, complains bitterly that the board of inquiry ignored failings in UN security.

"The board is stacked with UN officials who oversee security," he writes. "I don't trust these f***s for a second to truly investigate and hold one of their own accountable."

After he is evacuated from Haiti because of worsening violence, Dr Thomson advises readers: "If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run."

Zoe Williams, in a Guardian piece on the Tories, starts out this way:

The Tories have already unleashed their centrepiece election conceit upon a waiting public. You will probably have seen the poster - "Let Down By Labour?" it quizzes. "Vote Conservative". It's like putting up a sign saying "Hungry? Eat these eyeballs!"

Everyone knows the little poem from Longfellow

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

But when they aren't being horrid, they go ahead and call a Scrabble tournament with a bunch of literary types. The outcome is pretty funny.

"What the hell is that word?" Robin Cook exclaims in horror. He's talking about "PXCLAIM" - a result of board slippage - and once this is remedied, the former minister sinks quickly into silent, brow-furrowed thought. Here, it's clear, is a man who thinks deeply about the decisions he must take in his life. Eventually, after an internal struggle lasting some minutes, he reaches a conclusion, and plays FEINT. "I've only got the one vowel," he says, apologetically. "Good political word," someone says.
.    .    .
And so to the historian Andrew Roberts. Roberts, who arrives with his partner Leonie Frieda, also a historian, seems convinced that there is an obscure rule in Scrabble whereby, if somebody has played a blank, you can replace the blank with a tile showing the letter it was intended to represent, and then claim the score for yourself. He scours the rules on the box for proof. There is no such rule, we assert. "If you're Andrew," Frieda says under her breath, "the rule is that you can do whatever you like because you're Andrew." Eventually Roberts capitulates. "Maybe, just because I've done it before, that doesn't actually mean that it's allowed." He stares at the board. "Not for the first time," he says drily, "Robin Cook leaves an impossible situation behind him."

Eventually he puts an S down to spell CODES and IS, because the other options, he declares, "aren't clever enough." At 252, the authors are a mere seven points behind the Guardian, which has started flailing around with low-scoring embarrassments such as AGE. With things so close, the tension persists through to the next morning, when the comedian and actor Dylan Moran arrives to play the final move for the opposition.

"My word doesn't have to connect with the other words, does it?" He pauses. "Or is that one of the fundamental principles of the game?"

Finally, the Guardian gets a headline right. Gary Younge rambles on in shock about the death of innocents in Iraq, something that did not happen in the good old Saddam days. And here is the Guardian headline for the piece:

The Washington Times reports that the U.N. Human Rights Commission (I tried, but I couldn't keep from laughing when I wrote that) is issuing a report on human rights in Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority. No doubt they will discover that living in post-Saddam Iraq is less pleasant than the life led in New York by toadies of the Sudanese butchers. The report was commissioned by Bertrand Ramcharan, acting high commissioner who worked under Mary Robinson. What more need be said?

But I am more curious about the Reuterizing of the Washington Times.

Washington has staked out an increasingly moral and, in many quarters, unpopular stand in the HRC by aggressively seeking the censure of China, Zimbabwe, Cuba and other dictatorial regimes, even as it defends Israel.

I was working away at home when the dog started barking. The Monsters From Sinn Fein were out passing around their leaflets, shoving them through mail slots. I thought of letting her out, figuring she might bite one of them. It would be legal, because although dogs are not allowed to bite people, they are allowed to bite rats, even shake them to death, and rats are less of a threat to public health than the Monsters From Sinn Fein.

Then again, if she bit one, she would get rabies. I kept her inside, because I am not willing to sacrifice my dog for the common good.

John Yoo explains when the Geneva Convention applies, and when it does not.

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. The treatment of those detained at Abu Ghraib is governed by the Geneva Conventions, which have been signed by both the U.S. and Iraq. President Bush and his commanders announced early in the conflict that the Conventions applied. Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention, which applies to prisoners of war, clearly states: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever." This provision would prohibit some interrogation methods that could be used in American police stations.

Irish Eagle picks up another case of the cretinous Irish left indulging in its usual selective indignation. If an Iraqi was tortured by American troops at Abu Ghraib, it is torture. If an Iraqi was tortured by Saddam, well, it just did not happen.

Not anti-war, just on the other side.

Nicholas Kristoff chokes on it a bit, but he gives the Bush administration credit for easing some of the slaughter in the Sudan. The genocide in Darfur, however, remains unabated.

I'm still haunted by what I saw when I visited the region in March: a desert speckled with fresh graves of humans and the corpses of donkeys, the empty eyes of children who saw their fathers killed, the guilt of parents fumbling to explain how they had survived while their children did not.

The refugees tell of sudden attacks by the camel-riding Janjaweed Arab militia, which is financed by the Sudanese government, then a panic of shooting and fire. Girls and women are routinely branded after they are raped, to increase the humiliation.

One million Darfur people are displaced within Sudan, and 200,000 have fled to Chad. Many of those in Sudan are stuck in settlements like concentration camps.

I've obtained a report by a U.N. interagency team documenting conditions at a concentration camp in the town of Kailek: Eighty percent of the children are malnourished, there are no toilets, and girls are taken away each night by the guards to be raped. As inmates starve, food aid is diverted by guards to feed their camels.

The standard threshold for an "emergency" is one death per 10,000 people per day, but people in Kailek are dying at a staggering 41 per 10,000 per day — and for children under 5, the rate is 147 per 10,000 per day. "Children suffering from malnutrition, diarrhea, dehydration and other symptoms of the conditions under which they are being held live in filth, directly exposed to the sun," the report says.

"The team members, all of whom are experienced experts in humanitarian affairs, were visibly shaken," the report declares. It describes "a strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation being enforced by the GoS [government of Sudan] and its security forces on the ground." [report here]

.    .    .

Demographers at the U.S. Agency for International Development estimate that at best, "only" 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease. If things go badly, half a million will die.

This is not a natural famine, but a deliberate effort to eliminate three African tribes in Darfur so Arabs can take their land. The Genocide Convention defines such behavior as genocide, and it obliges nations to act to stop it. That is why nobody in the West wants to talk about Darfur — because of a fear that focusing on the horror will lead to a deployment in Sudan.

Islamic leaders abroad have been particularly shameful in standing with the Sudanese government oppressors rather than with the Muslim victims in Darfur. Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?

Via Internet Commentator, I found this map showing how the US is divided up by whether people call soft drinks "coke", "pop", or "soda". It is, as Frank says, pretty:

It also clears up a puzzle for me, which is why I use "soda" and "pop" pretty much interchangeably. Most of the northern half of the US uses "pop", but there are two exceptions. One is the strip of Wisconsin that runs along Lake Michigan. So even though I grew up in Chicago, my mother's relatives all lived in Wisconsin, so I spent a lot of my youth there (met "she who is without equal" there too). That is about as close as I get to being bilingual. Actually, in this case, I am trilingual. In Ireland, I say "mineral".

UPDATE: Irish Eagle has more.

Blogging has been slow because of heavy exam pressure and a revision for a paper due Monday. I am at war with the editor over this bit: "there is evidence that a substantial proportion of their customers approves of them". He tells me it should be approve, not approves. But the noun is "proportion", which is singular. Phooey. I would be less warlike, except his comment was "Grammar!" I am not sure whether I am more unhappy about being wronged by the reprimand, or by the exclamation remark. As one writer put it, the exclamation mark is to be used only in conversation, and then only by someone who has been recently disembowelled.

Years ago, okay, more like decades ago, when I was an undergraduate, word went around about a student asked a question in class by a distinguished historian about the battle of Thermopylae. The student's reply was to say that he did not know because he was not there. The historian replied that the difference between man and elephants was that man could know something about an event without being there.

I recalled that incident while reading through a Washington Post piece on the travails of teaching high school in Russia.

Although not one of the students was old enough to remember the Soviet Union that collapsed when they were preschoolers, many heads nodded when Tanya [a student who admires Stalin and whose father works for the successor to the KGB] said the communist past was more suited to Russia than the capitalist present.
.    .    .
Tanya said she "loved" the chance to speak her mind freely in Irina Viktorovna's class and knew she wouldn't have been able to do so in Stalin's time. "It's a plus," she allowed, "but only a very little one."

Or, as Thomas Sowell puts it today:

This is an academic community where indignation is a way of life. Those engaged in moral exhibitionism have no time for mundane realities.

Quentin Tarantino denies that giving Michael Moore the Palme d'Or at Cannes had anything to do with politics. Morning Ireland, RTE Radio's morning show, interviews Jerry Sherlock, director of the New York Film Academy and typical movie business lefty, to ask whether anyone should believe him. Sherlock says that of course the award was about politics, and that Tarrantino only said what he was supposed to say.

Tomorrow, Morning Ireland interviews a physicist to explain that gravity really does pull you toward the earth rather than making flying easy.

With over a thousand essays to grade, and a paper revision due, all within the next ten days, I have had little time for blogging. But Rafah is worth a break. I am still trying to make sense of the events at Rafah (I use the blandly neutral "events" because it is not all clear what happened). I had little time for newspapers yesterday, but the Irish Times (subscription only) declined to even mention that the Israeli Army had described the events differently from the PA. RTE News did the same, although this morning RTE finally got around to mentioning the Israeli claim that part of the crowd was armed and that civilians were killed by a warning shot that went all the way through an empty building. I did not see a lot of news, but what I saw was pretty much variations on "Israel: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty" and they knew so because the PA said so. The Guardian, in its coverage, offers up this strange sentence.

However, no weapons were visible as the crowd walked through the heart of Rafah trailed by children.

My guess: Kofi Annan rushed to condemn the Israelis, so this story will end up another Jenin scam.

My wife and I know a couple, friends of ours, who are very nice and we like them, but they are, well, maybe a little odd. She is a vegetarian who eats meat. (Don't ask. Irish electrical outlets have on-off switches on them, and he is always switching them off. He believes that the electricity is sending some sort of dangerous aura into the room, and he needs to protect himself. Nutty, but at least his delusion is harmless, except that I have to keep remembering to turn on the outlet switches when he leaves.

Thomas Sowell writes about people who know nothing, believe they do, and are very dangerous.

The fashionable solution is called "family reunification services." The severity of little Angelo's injuries would have made it legally possible to simply take him away and put him up for adoption by one of the many couples who are hoping to adopt a baby.

But no. Through the magic of "family reunification services" parents are supposed to be changed so that they will no longer be abusive.

A social worker told the court two years ago that the San Mateo County Children and Family Services Agency "will be recommending reunification services, as the parents are receptive to receiving services." The fact that little Angelo's sister had already had to be removed from that same home did not seem to dampen this optimism.

At the heart of all this is the pretense to knowledge that we simply do not have and may never have. There are all sorts of lofty phrases about teaching "parenting skills" or "anger management" or other pious hopes. And children's lives are being risked on such notions.

Little Angelo himself apparently knew better. After months in a foster home, he was allowed back for a visit with his parents and "had a look of fear in his eyes" when he saw them.

But "expertise" brushes aside what non-experts believe -- and little Angelo was not an expert, at least not in the eyes of the social workers who were in charge of his fate. The fact that he had returned from a previous visit with bruises did not make a dent on the experts.

Social workers thought it would be nice if little Angelo could have a two-day unsupervised visit with his parents at Christmas. It was a visit from which he would not return alive.

Now, more than 16 months after the baby's death, Angelo's father has been convicted of having literally shaken him to death.