London After Dark

She said that Sonny agreed and he and the other accused went up the hill towards the mausoleum. Sonny was carrying a knife and latex gloves, she said.

Rice Krispies

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before Sept. 11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats. And Rice's assertion this week that Bush had told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Outside Schliemann's Walls

The gates of Troy couldn't be locked shut; they were not the outer defenses at all, but served to mark off the inner city: "Korfmann may have just put the nail in the coffin of the doubters."

And yet—

I know that what Nietzsche said is true,
And yet—
I saw the face of a little child in the street,
And it was beautiful.

This previously uncollected poem of Ezra Pound appears in Poems and Translations, now published by the Library of America. The link is to a review by the great Guy Davenport in Bookforum. With Kenner gone, Davenport is, I suppose, the leading Poundian scholar and critic, at any rate one I have admired for many years. To his edition of the scientific writings of Louis Agassiz I owe my understanding of what Charles Peirce meant by Scotistic Realism, an understanding not particularly welcome to the outside reader of my dissertation, who happened to be the department chair...

Islam on the March

PRIZREN, Serbia-Montenegro - Bishop Atanasije Jevtic dusted ashes away from the base of the fresco in the 14th-century cathedral gutted during recent mob violence in Kosovo.

He then softly placed two fingers on the image of Virgin Mary in the soot-covered fresco. But his visit to the cathedral to assess the damage would last but four minutes: a U.N. police officer acting as his bodyguard, a semiautomatic shotgun at the ready, hustled him away, shouting, "It's not safe! It's not safe!"

The endgame of one of the Clinton-Bush wars against Christian civilization.

(Note: For Clinton's use of Islamic terrorists in the Balkans, see here -- thanks to digbydolben for the link. I believe that the encouragement of Islamicism and the demonization of the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans began during the Republican '80s, but I can't document this at the moment.)