News is spreading now (via the usual media – Twitter at the forefront) that Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeiden, seized earlier this morning from what was supposed to be one of the most secure locations in Tripoli (the Corinthia Hotel), has been released.

Now that things are all right in that regard – for now – perhaps we can look back at a peculiar previous tweet from the BBC:

So “detained legally,” eh? And indeed, if you want to click through to the article (go ahead, you can do it right above on the tweet itself), there is some scattered talk of the militants who seized the PM operating to fulfill some order – to arrest the head of government, mind you – from the “prosecutor general.”

Hmmm, maybe we see here an interesting technique for getting certain US legislators out of the way, and thereby getting the US Government funded once more and in a position to fully pay all its debts, and on time?

OK, on second thought forget that – this governmental paralysis, instigated by a radical Republican faction, is already coming to resemble far too much the America of just before the Civil War.

Avast Daniel Craig! Avast Marc Foster (film director)! Avast the Broccoli family! And especially avast to the corps of James Bond scriptwriters! Move out smartly! Quantum of Solace, the 22nd and latest entry in the long-running James Bond series of movies, may have set a box-office record (at least for James Bond films) in its opening weekend, but now is not the time for the powerful Bond movie juggernaut to be resting on its laurels. Somali pirates are running rampage, having just captured their biggest prize yet, a fully-loaded supertanker, and the adventure-movie possibilities are just endless!

“They have the most beautiful women, the fastest autos and the best weapons.” Now, doesn’t that sound like the sort of challenge to Bond and his equipment supremo, the enigmatic Q, that just cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged? That quote starts off coverage of this Somali pirate phenomenon in an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel (“The pirates have hit the jackpot!”). (more…)

Don’t get too alarmed: it happened back in January, 1968, when a US B-52 bomber with four nuclear bombs on board crashed a few miles from an airbase near Thule, Greenland – then, as now, a self-governing province of Denmark. The first real problem was that there weren’t supposed to be nuclear weapons there in the first place, as the Danish had only approved the base for use in monitoring for a possible Soviet ICBM attack on the US over the North Pole, not as having anything to do with nuclear weapons themselves. And secondly, only three of those bombs were recovered from the crash site, but US authorities kept quiet about that, instead maintaining that all the weapons had been destroyed in the crash. In reality, three months later they sent a submarine to the area to look some more for the weapon, but with instructions for the officers in charge to lie about their mission to the Danish authorities, stating instead that they were there simply to survey the sea-bottom. (more…)

The Nouvel Observateur has an interesting report today: Survey: Obama the preferred candidate in 22 countries. “Twenty-two countries out of how many?” you may ask. Actually, that’s all the countries the BBC World Service ran this survey in: twenty-two of them, and among 22,531 respondents in all. (To be honest, I couldn’t find anything about this on the BBC World Service website, even though these results are supposed to be published today.) On average, 49% of respondents preferred Obama, while 12% preferred McCain (and yes, 39% had no opinion). Further, on average 46% of resondents thought that Obama’s election as president would help improve America’s relations with the rest of the world, while 20% thought that of McCain’s being elected.

I know: All that doesn’t matter a bit. America might get most of its oil from outside its borders; it might overwhelmingly be foreign money which funds the federal budget deficit, the debts (and therefore the continuing existence) of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and the countless other debt obligations of American private business and all levels of US government; but it doesn’t follow that there is any need for – as one colonial writer put it long ago – a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, or for any concern about improving America’s relations with the rest of the world.

(By the way, the maximum polling-difference between Obama and McCain that that BBC World Service recorded was 82% – in Kenya, of course. The minimum was 9%, in India.)

UPDATE: What’s more, opinion pieces like this one (in English, from The Guardian), which seem to bear the message “Elect Obama as your next president, or else!”, naturally can have no other effect (if indeed they are noticed at all) than to erode Obama’s support among American voters further. After all, as its writer Jonathan Freedland rightly points out, “that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the ‘candidate of Europe’ and making him seem less of a patriotic American.” Still, it is a viewpoint well worth checking out.