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This is hard to credit:

A father-of-two has admitted sending 35 e-mails telling friends and relatives of people missing in the Asian tsumani disaster they had been confirmed dead.

Christopher Pierson, 40, from Ruskington, Lincs, sent the e-mails in the early hours of Dec 31 to the worried families after they posted their details on the Sky News website.

Appearing at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court in London, he pleaded guilty to a charge of causing a public nuisance and a charge under section one of the Malicious Communications Act.

Olive Assien, prosecuting, told the court the e-mails claimed to be from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Thailand.

They stated that the British Government “regretted to inform the victim that the missing person they were inquiring about was confirmed dead”.

y” in the wake of the East Asian disaster, and now the Archbishop himself shares his thoughts with us:

The Asian tsunami disaster should make all Christians question the existence of God, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in The Telegraph today.

In a deeply personal and candid article, he says “it would be wrong” if faith were not “upset” by the catastrophe which has already claimed more than 150,000 lives.

Prayer, he admits, provides no “magical solutions” and most of the stock Christian answers to human suffering do not “go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us”.

Dr Williams, who, as head of the Church of England, represents 70 million Anglicans around the world, writes: “Every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up in comfort and ready answers. Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged – and also more deeply helpless.”

He adds: “The question, ‘How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?’ is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t – indeed it would be wrong if it weren’t.”

I have little respect for Rowan Williams at the best of times, but this is just is surely just headline-grabbing – a sad attempt to engage with “contemporary issues”, and come up with something deemed appropriate. You would surely possess a very superficial faith if it was shaken by this latest catastrophe: as though the existence of earthquakes, epidemics, famines, diseases, and all the potential horrors of the natural world had somehow escaped you before. A child dying from cystic fibrosis, say, or born without sight, or bitten by a poisonous snake: just one of those things? Or maybe they deserved it in some Glenn-Hoddle-type paying-for-past-sins way? But somehow the sheer scale of the death and destruction now makes it different, because they can’t all have deserved to die? One would hope the leader of the Church of England would have a slightly more sophisticated view. From a theological point of view it’s difficult to see what the difference is between one person dying in a natural accident, and thousands dying.

Julie Flint in the Daily Star reports on the failure of the international community in Darfur, one year after Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, first talked of “the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” to describe the situation.

At that point, according to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians had been killed, more than 600,000 people had fled the countryside to seek safety in towns, and tens of thousands more had taken refuge in Chad.

Today, according to the UN’s conservative statistics, 2.2 million people are affected by the conflict, including 1.6 million displaced and 200,000 refugees in Chad. Sudan analyst Eric Reeves, one of the few to attempt a serious analysis of mortality in Darfur, estimates that approximately 370,000 people have died since the rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) came to international attention in February 2003. Reeves puts the current mortality rate at approximately 35,000 per month and warns that this figure is likely to grow rapidly in light of food deficits forecast for early 2005, increasingly weakened populations that are only very partially served by current humanitarian operations, and accelerating violence that is severely curtailing humanitarian access and transport capacity.

She goes on to blame the UN Security Council for its pathetic response:

The council passed its first, feeble resolution on Darfur on July 30, 2004 – 16 months after the crisis erupted – and ever since then has failed to back up earlier ultimatums with strong action. Wholly meaningless sanctions have been placed on a few leaders of the government-backed Janjaweed militia, but no sanctions were ordered against Khartoum for organizing, directing and participating directly in the conflict – with its air and ground forces and continuous logistical support for its local allies and proxies. The buck has been passed to the AU, which hasn’t been given the resources to deploy even an adequate monitoring force, far less a peacekeeping force.

Perversely – presumably with her Arab audience in mind – she goes on to criticise the US for talking of “genocide”, as this “seems likely to make [the conflict] more intractable, and more entrenched, by widening the already lamentable divide between the West and the Arab world”. As she admits, “genocide” is in fact an appropriate description, and if the Arab world rallies round the Sudanese government in a display of Arab solidarity, they are, disgracefully, turning a blind eye to mass murder.

The death toll from Aceh alone may now reach 400,000, according to Indonesia’s Ambassador to Malaysia Drs H. Rusdihardjo:

He said the estimate was based on air surveillance by Indonesian authorities who found no signs of life in places like Meulaboh, Pulau Simeulue and Tapak Tuan while several islands off the west coast of Sumatera had “disappeared”.

He said the latest death toll of more than 40,000 in Acheh and northern Sumatera did not take into account the figures from the other areas, especially in the west of the region.

“Aerial surveillance found the town of Meulaboh completely destroyed with only one buiding standing. The building, which belonged to the military, happens to be on a hill,” he told reporters after receiving RM1 million in aid for Indonesia’s Tsunami Disaster Relief Fund here Thursday.

Rusdihardjo said there were about 150,000 residents in Meulaboh, which was located 150km from the epicentre of the earthquake while Pulau Simeuleu had a population of 76,000.

The inexorable rise in the death toll reflects one of the most pervasive features of this whole tragedy: the way that the full enormity of the disaster has taken so long to sink in. The Swedish government’s response is fairly typical: “we didn’t fully understand the scale of how many people would be injured and dead.” I was certainly guilty of this: my first post was almost light-hearted, complaining about the poor quality of the footage we were seeing. I had the excuse that I’d just received word from my son in Thailand that he was safe: a colossal relief of course, but looking back I never really expected it to be otherwise. It seemed like just a handful of tourists had been caught. Now, well, I read about the father who flew out to look for his son, in time to identify the body….

I wonder if there’s not some kind of protective mechanism at work here. It’s the sheer excitement of it – the awe-inspiring vision of nature doing its worst – that grabs you at first. Wow, you think, just look at the power of that. I’m sure something similar would have been the response of many of those who saw the waves approaching: before self-preservation kicks in and you run like hell, there’s an overwhelming urge just to stand and gawp in amazement, like the tourists in the series of pictures in the Times today, from Hat Rai Lay Beach, near Krabi in southern Thailand (I can only find one on line – no. 16 in the picture gallery “pictures of the disaster” from the Times front page). Some are running, but some are just staring, transfixed, in awe.

Update: that same photo – which in the Times print edition is the third of three – features here, in the blog of an American in Phuket describing what happened when the tsunami hit.

Clive Davis links to a long Hitchens interview at FrontPage, with the man, promoting his latest book, on great form.

FP: Mr. Hitchens, it was a real privilege to speak with you. Congratulations on your new collection of brilliant essays and I wish you all the luck in the future. I hope you will not be shy to visit us again soon.

Hitchens: Shyness is not the problem.

Indeed.

In the wake of Susan Sontag’s death, the most quoted of her writings is this paragraph penned in the New Yorker just after 9/11 (see Tim Blair or LGF):

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing America bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

For Marc Cooper, jumping to her defence, “Sullying Sontag for this postulation was, in itself, an act of cowardice.” Marc goes on to say how poorly Sontag fitted the stereotype of a kneejerk leftie:

In 1982, Sontag raised a storm at a New York Town Hall rally for the Polish Solidarnosc movement. Saying that Communism was but Fascism with a human face, Sontag angered the liberal audience by arguing that if anyone had read only The Nation or only the Readers Digest over the previous 20 years, the one who read the Digest would be be better prepared to understand the revolt in Poland.

During the 1990’s Sontag made the Balkans and opposition to Milosevic’s form of facsism her personal crusade, making serveral perilous visits to Sarajevo and — somtimes alone among American intellectuals- calling for armed Western intervention.

Which is all true. Nevertheless her New Yorker remarks were offensive. She’s claiming to be stating uncomfortable facts whereas she is in truth condoning – “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions” – and even lauding, comparing the hijackers favourably with pilots bombing Iraq. Despite the pretence that courage is morally neutral, it is no such thing. To ascribe courage to someone is to praise them. That’s why her contention that the attackers were not cowards – in effect, that they were courageous – grates so much, and intentionally so. She claims to be just giving the facts, which the general hysteria of the moment had obscured, which people of lesser integrity (and, yes, courage) than herself were too scared to utter, intimidated as they were by the herd requirement to condemn. But to ascribe courage to the 9/11 hijackers, or to suicide bombers generally, is simply perverse. Yes, it’s clear why someone might wish to say that: in a sense the decision to pull the pin and end your life along with other innocents around you requires a certain determination which is also required by acts of courage; but that’s as far as it goes. Courage is not a word we should be using in such situations. Perhaps cowardly is not much more appropriate, but at least it manages to convey some condemnation of a despicable act: a condemnation which Sontag was at pains to distance herself from.

Update: Roger Kimball provides a typically jaundiced but amusing overview of Sontag’s career. Going to Sarajevo in 1993 to produce Waiting for Godot–“surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time”.

as the Spider’s Web conspiracy article published in Kayhan newspaper. The bloggers were told that they would be freed once their confessions were printed in daily newspapers. Some of the bloggers had accepted the terms, but those whom we met today had not given up.

7- The bloggers were individually asked to write lies about the sexual and sometimes political corruptness of a number of different politicians. All of them were asked to write about Mostafa Tajzadeh and myself [Abtahi] amongst others.

Here’s a blog devoted to the SE Asian earthquake crisis. “News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts”. Lots of helpline info, emergency numbers, etc.. Latest death toll 34,000, though the Indonesian figure alone could increase by 20,000. Also this:

An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists have said.

The 9.0-magnitude temblor that struck 250 km southeast of Sumatra island on Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 metres, according to one expert.

“That earthquake has changed the map,” US geological survey expert Ken Hudnut said.

“Based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 metres. That is a lot of slip.”

NK Zone contributor Andrei Lankov takes a wry look back at Russian attitudes to North Korea in the Asia Times:

Back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut.

The magazine was heavily subsidized by Pyongyang, so its annual subscription rate was dirt-cheap while its content was both bizarre and funny. Thus the magazine, which was published to inspire worldwide love and admiration for the Great Leader and his son and successor, the Dear Leader, was often (I would say from my experience, in most cases) subscribed to by people who saw it as a laughingstock and opened its pages only to make fun of the Great Men. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians – not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects.

This remarkable magazine is warmly remembered by ex-Soviet people of middle age, many of whom still can easily quote more weird sentences from memory. Sets of this venerable monthly are kept by some Russian families, and there are even a couple of Russian websites where sarcastic webmasters have collected particularly bizarre and/or comical quotations from Korean propaganda materials.

The last message we got from our son in Thailand, on Christmas Eve: I’ve had enough of Bangkok so I’m off to the beaches in the South to relax. Mmm, good timing. He’s fine, we now know, but it meant that I spent more time than I wanted yesterday watching the 24-hour news channel. You’d think, what with all the thousands of people lounging on beaches armed with cameras, that someone would have managed to get some decent shots of the tsunami approaching, but instead we had the same tired footage of flooded streets in the Maldives, and interviews with journalists taking their holidays there or in Thailand, who managed to provide uninspired comments on their own little experiences. Pride of place must go to the hack on a beach in Thailand who saw the wave in the distance and rushed into his hut to get his camera, couldn’t find it, rushed back out, and just had time to pick up his 5-year old son before they were swept off into the mangrove swamps. Very scary, he reckoned. Give that man a Pulitzer!

In fact the tsunami didn’t fit the classic image of tiny figures fleeing in terror before a huge wall of water. It was more of a surge: relatively low, but just as relentless and devastating. The death toll will surely keep on rising.

Tim Blair has details, plus links to aid organisations.