I thought this was an interesting article, even though I don’t drink wine.

According to Agence France-Presse:

New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents, an Italian daily said on Wednesday.

The Corriere della Sera said that the documents found by the German government indicated that the KGB ordered Bulgarian colleagues to carry out the killing, leaving the East German service known as the Stasi to coordinate the operation and cover up the traces afterwards.

Bulgaria then handed the execution of the plot to Turkish extremists, including Mehmet Ali Agca, who pulled the trigger.

Umm, excuse me, but didn’t we already know this? Isn’t this what Tom Clancy wrote in The Red Rabbit.

From the Telegraph:

A spectre is haunting Europe – and terrifying the President of France. Jacques Chirac last week pointed the finger: “Ultra-liberalism,” he warned, “is the communism of our age.” By “ultra-liberalism” Mr Chirac means the sort of market economics that has made America the world’s strongest economy, rescued Britain from 40 years of decline and brought prosperity to countries ranging from New Zealand to Singapore. The fact that the leader of the French centre-Right can equate this with communism is a sad illustration of how France is stuck in the political dark ages.

Mr Chirac is in a panic because the barbarians are at the gate. He sees Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic and other new members of the EU all knocking on the door of Old Europe (Proprietors: Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr

Howard Kurtz in today’s Washington Post writes about a new an possibly real (or possibly fake) memo. Kurtz writes:

Bloggers are swarming around a new target: the Terri Schiavo “talking points.”

Fresh from declaring victory over CBS News and its discredited National Guard memos about President Bush, some of the same bloggers are raising questions about a strategy memo, first reported by ABC News and The Washington Post, that cast the Schiavo right-to-die case as a partisan opportunity for Republicans to stick it to Democrats.

“Fake but Accurate Again?” says the Weekly Standard headline on an article by John Hinderaker, an attorney and conservative blogger who had challenged the CBS documents.

While there is no hard evidence that the memo is fake, there are several strange things about it, including the basic fact that no one seems to know who wrote it and that the noncontroversial part of it is lifted from a Republican senator’s press release.

While there is no hard evidence the memo is fake, there’s no hard evidence that it is real. I’m not sure why there is a presumption than the memo is real. But it gets worse.

ABC and The Post say their reports on the Schiavo memo were accurate and carefully worded. The document caused a stir because it described the Schiavo controversy as “a great political issue” that would excite “the pro-life base” and be “a tough issue for Democrats,” singling out Florida’s Sen. Bill Nelson. Two days after the memo was reported, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a bill, signed by Bush, to transfer jurisdiction of Schiavo’s case from Florida courts to the federal judiciary in an effort to restore the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube.

“There’s nothing on the face of the document to identify a source — not only is it unsigned, there’s no letterhead, no nothing,” Hinderaker said yesterday. “This is literally a piece of paper with stuff typed on it that could have been written by anyone.”

The controversy erupted March 18 when veteran correspondent Linda Douglass reported on “World News Tonight”: “ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.”

Two days later, a Post article by Mike Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia said: “An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party’s base, or core, supporters.”

…

The Post’s Allen said “the blog interest has been stoked by secondhand accounts” that the paper’s story referred to Republican talking points. “We simply reported that the sheet of paper was distributed to Republican senators and told our readers explicitly that the document was unsigned, making clear it was unofficial,” he said. “We stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo. The document was provided by an official who has a long record of trustworthiness, and this official gave a precise account of the document’s provenance, satisfying us that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators.” Allen said that under the journalistic ground rules, he could not say whether the source was a Democrat or a Republican.

Wrong Mike Allen. You obviously did not “simply report” that it was a sheet of paper. You wrote that an “An unsigned one-page memo” had been “distributed to Republican senators.” There’s a difference. The difference is that how you wrote your story, you glossed over the fact that the memo was quite possibly a fake. Not that accuracy matters to the Washington Post.

If you use Firefox, and you should, you should use this configuration tip to speed up Firefox.

How will Lance Armstrong fare in the this year’s Tour de France? Fine question. Tomorrow (March 29) he will race in the Paris-Camembert race and on Sunday he will race in the Tour de Flanders.

Here’s an interesting article from Eye Magazine about Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. Johnathan and Tobias are probably the two bigest names in fonts and topography in America today, and while I realize that isn’t much of a hook to get you to read the article, the article was strangely interesting.

This is pretty amazing. Bill Dan creates art by balancing rocks.

Here’s what Tigerhawk has to say abou thte Palestinian Arabs:

As much as I believe that the world would be better off if Israel would define its borders clearly and settle up with the Palestinian Arabs, I have very little sympathy for Palestinian Arabs. They sided with our enemies, or the enemies of our allies, in every war since the beginning of the 20th century. They sided with the Ottomon Turks during World War I, their primary religious leader was a Nazi ally during World War II, they supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they were just about Saddam’s only friend during the Gulf War. They publicly cheered on September 11. Even if you don’t like Israel, it is hard to think of the Palestinian Arabs as anything other than America’s enemies. Indeed, their hostility to the United States long ante-dates American support for Israel, which did not begin in any meaningful way until 1967.

Via Glenn Reynolds comes fake romance novel cover here and here. Here are some choice titles, “He Was So Pretty I Felt Like a Lesbian,” “I Can Like Feel Your Chest Bones and Stuff,” “Lord of the Tube Socks,” “Sheriff of Gay County,” “I Married a Sissy-Boy,” and “For the Love of Scottie McMullet.”