ninme

There’s nothing going on out there. I’ve spent the last 20 minutes reading articles I don’t care about between hitting reload on Chrenkoff, waiting for Good news from Iraq. Come on people. Talk about something! If it’s not happening in the news, by all means deliver a rant about your favourite TV show! (Like Lileks on the Simpsons and me on ER.)

Oh thank god. He updated.

Good news from Iraq, Part 21

What would the world be like without Arthur Chrenkoff? Very blah indeed.

Update:

Reading this:

Read how increasingly the Shias, too, are warming up to the idea. The task of writing the country’s new constitution and thus determining the shape of Iraq is in the hands of the newly-elected National Assembly. We won’t know for some months what that shape will be like, but so far there are plenty of positive indications that the process will be broad based. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the top candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance, says: “We don’t want anyone to be marginalised. We want everyone to take part in writing the constitution… We will defend the rights of all minorities and all groups no matter how small they are… We want to work with [the Sunni groups]… Even those who didn’t take part in the elections, we are ready to cooperate with them. We will work to make them part of the political process, in writing the constitution and also to take part in the responsibility of running Iraq.”

I cannot help thinking, isn’t it strange how much an Iraqi, living with thirty years of tyranny and violence, can sound like a Liberal, but an enlightened European (Balkans) can easily switch on the genocide at the same time his fellow Europeans, only a few hundred miles away, are discovering Starbucks Coffee?

Update II:

haha:

Canada, meanwhile, is providing assistance towards building free and robust media sector in Iraq: “Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew…

Pierre Pettigrew! Isn’t there a Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter novels?

Update III:

Hah! Make way for Ikea and Habitat:

The resulting decrease in price has been accompanied by a rise in wages in some sectors. Before the war, low-ranking civil servants would have been content to earn the equivalent of $20. Now, they complain at anything lower than $300, observers say.

The result, according to carpet importer Ahmed Haji Rasul, has been a radical change in consumer taste. “In the past, people made do with what they could afford,” he told IRIN in the Sulaymaniyah bazaar. “Now they want colour-coordinated house interiors, European stuff. We’ve had to start importing from further afield.”

And:

Iraq welcoming foreign investment with a five year tax holiday, followed by a tax rate of 3.2%.

“Incorporate in Nevada Iraq!”