be just

"More than 1,500 demonstrators took to the streets in the Baghdad Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah to demand his release. Al Zaidi was kidnapped in the same neighbourhood last year and was freed unharmed a few days later."

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 12/17/2008 | Iraqi shoe-thrower faces charges of attacking head of state University students rallied for Zaidi in Fallujah on Wednesday, drawing the attention of U.S. forces. Students raised their shoes and threw rocks at American soldiers, who reportedly opened fire above the crowd. Protesters said that indirect fire wounded one student, Zaid Salih. U.S. forces haven't confirmed the account. "We demonstrated to express our support for Muntathar al Zaidi, but we were surprised with the entrance of the U.S. military," said Ahmed Ismail, one of the protesters. "Unconsciously, we raised our shoes expressing our support for al Zaidi, but they attacked us." Dr. Thair al Jomaili treated Salih at a hospital and said that he was fine. The doctor said that the bullet went through one of Salih's feet. Zaidi's family remains proud of him for challenging Bush, his older brother said. "The feelings of the family are mixed between ha...

Gwynne Dyer: The U.S. and Ethiopia's blunder in Somalia | Straight.com Statesmen ought to have a special prize just for themselves, like fools have the Darwin Awards. The Darwin Awards commemorate very stupid people who did a service to human evolution by accidentally removing themselves from the gene pool. The statesman’s equivalent could be called something like the Cheney-Zenawi Award. I mention this because the shining stupidity of the US Vice-President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister are on special display this week, as the Ethiopian army prepares to withdraw from Somalia two years after its foredoomed invasion, leaving the country in the hands of precisely the people whom they wanted to eliminate. We need negative role models too, and you couldn’t ask for worse than this pair. I can’t actually prove that getting Ethiopia to invade Somalia was Dick Cheney’s brainchild, but it smells exactly like a Dick Cheney idea: crude, violent, and barking up entirely the wrong tree. Just ...