Nothing new under the Earth and Sky

Google has a new add-on feature for google earth - the sky! I've only been able to get the demo to run. Google seems to be having several problems today, including keeping blogger up and running.

Interesting story in the in International Herald Tribune yesterday - seems Moscow runs out of hot water in the summer time.

Also in Moscow, another painful penis story. What is with all the penis stories this week?

Bushie is backing away from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq.

However, Gordon Johndroe says otherwise:

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the president's words were not intended to signal a withdrawal of support for al-Maliki. As a result of the heavy media coverage of his remarks at the North American summit in Canada, Bush will insert a direct line of support for al-Maliki in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference, Johndroe said.

"Prime Minister Maliki knows where the president stands," Johndroe told reporters ahead of Bush's speech. The spokesman said that after Bush's comments in Canada, the White House had tried to make clear Bush was not distancing himself from Maliki.

"It appears that did not come through for whatever reason," Johndroe said.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is also "disgusted" with al-Maliki, apparently. Bush backing away from al-Maliki is probably a good thing for the Prime Minister, Sistani being disgusted is not. I hope al-Maliki's bodyguards are well paid and like their client.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told France's RTL Radio from Baghdad that Europe must play a bigger role in Iraq because "the Americans will not be able to get this country out of difficulty alone." Kouchner is wrapping a three-day visit to Iraq.

Not just Europe, but the UN and a Pan-Arab league needs to go in and fix the nightmare we created.

In other cheery news, A new push for change in the war on terror, in the Christian Science Monitor:

The US is losing the war on terror. That's the assessment of the nation's top foreign-policy, intelligence, and national-security leaders from across the ideological spectrum. In this year's Terrorism Index, a survey released Monday by Foreign Policy magazine, 84 percent of these experts believe the nation is losing the war on terror, while more than 90 percent say the world is growing more dangerous for Americans.

That's prompted a variety of leaders to call for a complete rethinking of the nation's strategy. And some are looking back to the cold war's battle against communism to find models for the ideological struggle against terrorism.

Um... no one won the Cold War. Russia just collapsed. Is that the strategy? Fight a boogey man for 50 years until it just goes away?

Another is a call for a Middle East Marshall Plan to help develop the region's economies and confront the alienation of the young.

This actually makes some sense and it's something many humanitarian groups have been talking about for more than a decade - long before 9/11 and the US War on Terra. Terrorism, terrorists, flourish in poverty; the people they recruit have nothing to lose and their families have everything to gain.