"We got him!"

What you mean we, white man? --Line from an old Lone Ranger joke.

Yeah, we got the sucker. Saddam. Maybe because our guys did the squeegeeman diagrams on him. And maybe the Kurds led us to where he had been put. But where did they get him? Maybe from a traditional Arab blood feud...

First item:

American forces took Saddam into custody around 8.30pm local time, but sat on the news until 3pm the next day.

However, in the early hours of Sunday, a Kurdish language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace.

"Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day; but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"

-- Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Baghdad

Second item, courtesy of ratbastrd:

Saddam was betrayed to the Kurds by a member of the al-Jabour tribe whose daughter was "defiled" by Uday, the report quoting a senior British military intelligence officer said.

The tribe threatened to take revenge. As soon as he heard the news, Saddam visited the family of the dead man and paid them 7 million pounds in blood money with the chilling warning: "If you try to take revenge you will force me to wipe out the al-Jabour tribe."

-- Sify, a webportal for the Indian Diaspora with a focus on the Persian Gulf.

I will think twice before messing with the al-Jabours. Right about now it looks like they are the real Brooklyn Guidos, and the Husseins a bunch of Jersey wannabees.

Unless this story was made up by their PR people. Stranger things have happened.

Clement August, Cardinal Graf von Galen

'Not one of us is certain, though he be the most loyal, the most conscientious citizen, though he knows himself innocent, I say that not one of us is certain that he will not any day be dragged from his house and carried off to the cells of some concentration camp. I know full well that this may happen to me, perhaps now or on some future day. And it is because I shall then no longer be able to speak out publicly that I do so today. I openly warn them not to pursue these actions which I am firmly convinced will call down God's punishment and bring our people to misery and ruin...

'We demand Justice! If this plea is unheard and unheeded, if the rule of true justice is not brought back, our German nation will, notwithstanding the bravery of our soldiers and their splendid victories, collapse from internal corruption and uncleanness'.

The other day I posted some links to a number of men who represented a kind of virility of spirit which needs to be acknowledged and fostered in the young.

I did not realize that the same day the Vatican was already acting on the cause of one of the men I linked to, the venerable Charles Francis Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia, publicly approving the miracle necessary for his beatification.

At the same time there was proclaimed the heroic virtue of a man who was an undoubted inspiration to the the student propagandists of the White Rose, whose leader was on my list as well. The new "venerable" is Clement August, Cardinal Graf von Galen, whose words I quoted above; clicking on them will take you to more on Hitler's most public adversary within Germany. I find it truly amazing that the Nazis didn't do away with him. Perhaps they were afraid that his disappearance might have led to open rebellion.

The Heart of a King

The desiccated heart of the son of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette is to be buried in France's royal crypt, ending a 200-year-old mystery over the boy's fate after the French revolution.

...

Historians accept that the dauphin was taken to the Temple prison in Paris, with the rest of his family, in 1792. The following year - in January - his father, the king, went to the guillotine and the dauphin was separated from his mother. In October she too was guillotined.

The dauphin spent the remainder of his life in prison, held in isolation in harsh conditions - at best neglectful, according to historians; at worst, brutal - until he died, aged 10, of tuberculosis. A doctor, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who took part in the autopsy, hid the child's heart under his coat, smuggled it out and preserved it in alcohol.

In 1830 Pelletan handed the heart over to the Archbishop of Paris, who in turn passed it on to the Comte de Chambord, a member of the Austrian royal family. It was later given to members of the Italian aristocracy, who finally returned it to France in 1975, where it was placed in a crystal urn in one of the chapels at the Basilica Saint-Denis.

...

Three years ago, modern scientific techniques appeared to settle the matter when two sets of independent DNA tests compared fragments of the heart with samples of Queen Marie-Antoinette's hair.

-- Kim Willsher in The Telegraph

The Longest Night?

Can't say that I understand this calendar thing very well. Tell me it's the Solstice, I'll take your word for it.

I went to Sunrise, Sunset and printed out December and January. It seems that the sun will keep rising later every day until it reaches 7:20 on New Year's Eve, and then stays there until January 11. I would guess if the breakdown were in seconds it wouild be seen to start getting up earlier some time around Theophany (or, if you prefer, Epiphany, or Three Kings Day, or Twelfth Night -- Old Style Christmas Eve). But it's already setting a little later, and has been for at least a week. So as of today we are probably gaining more in the evenings than we are still losing in the mornings.

What inspired this? We ran out of paper and I borrowed the keys to the supply room, and while there I liberated a date book, since, not being on a regular salary line, I didn't get one in my mail cubby.

I'm glad I don't have to go out and build Stonehenge or anything.