04.09.03
Saddam’s archives in Moscow
If the open war in Iraq draws to a close as rapidly as seems to be the case at the moment, we’re going to see an awful lot of stories like this one in the future. Papers abhor a vacuum (even the Times of India), and dubious speculation reported at one remove quickly becomes a sort of truth. In this case, the claim is that the Russians lifted Saddam’s secret archives from under the noses of the advancing US troops, ‘a “Predator” drone […] hovering over it all along the way from the embassy in Baghdad transmitting live video pictures’.
It seems that the newspapers have a little yearning for the glory days of the Cold War, when you could rely on a superpower to be behind everything (via William Gibson).
Oh, and apparently President Jean-Bertrand Aristede of Haiti has officially recognised voodoo as a religion.