UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp:

“Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.

The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 – the victims of multiple rape by militiamen – can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.” (Independent.UK)

I don’t suppose anyone ought to be surprised to find that the US has no monopoly on this kind of barbarity. It gives you pause about the UN peacekeepers being the kneejerk choice to supplant the American Huns in the Iraqi occupation, though…

A group of feisty rabble-rousing women has found “this way of just mobilizing, energizing, inspiring”. Could the Axis of Eve become George W. Bush’s worst nightmare? SF Chronicle

A BBC Radio 2 documentary narrated by Brad Pitt, who was approached once producers found out he is a huge fan. As someone who was listening to Drake before his 1974 death, I have to look askance at those who, like Pitt, found him in the last five years, since his recurrent popularity was propelled by — what was it? — a VW commercial? Still, you could do far worse…

The Talk of the Town? Further evidence of the continued crossover of weblogging into the mainstream, as if we needed it.

Although my wife keeps pushing me to write “something useful” instead of this weblog, I am not sure there is a book in me… or that anyone would ask.

AFP may have picked up a three-week old satirical piece from The Daily Farce as if it were news. When I read it, I was curious that this was not being reported more broadly. Does life imitate art or is truth far stranger than fiction could ever be these days? There has been an accumulating series of stories in which satirical stories, usually from The Onion, are picked up by the news media and reported as true, but those have usually been in the non-Western press which perhaps can be excused for not grasping the subtleties of skillful Western tongue-in-cheek. If this story was an invention, one is prompted to wonder what has become of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s fact checkers? and of their sense of humor?