The Vangua's big front-page headline today refers to the "Iraqi resistance". There is no Iraqi resistance. There are a bunch of Fedayeen / Baath / Saddamites running around commiting crimes and terrorist acts within a small parcel of land to the west of Baghdad. These people are not patriots. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro keeps going on about the humiliation of the millenarian Iraqi people. The smart ones consider themselves liberated from a bloody dictator. And if I were Iraqi, what I'd feel humiliated about is that such a scumball had been governing my country for so long and that the native opposition to said scumball hadn't managed to get rid of him. Besides, what Iraqi people? Iraq is three old Ottoman provinces stuck together artificially after World War I as part of the worst peace settlement of all time. Would Tikrit Tommy have written a bunch of stories about the supposed humiliation of the Germans and the Japanese in 1945?

The Vangua is also trying to split the alliance by praising the British troops around Basra for being culturally sensitive while blasting the Yanks for being arrogant and imperialistic for driving around Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah with guns. There is a reason for that: as I said before, all of the violence is in a small area near Baghdad where the people are from Saddam's clan and served as his power base. There is no violence in the British occupation area in the south or in the American occupation zone of Kurdistan in the north, because all those people are thrilled beyond relief to be rid of Saddam. It's only the hardcore Saddamites, who were just as bad as he was, who are shooting at the Americans.

First major fire of the year in Catalonia; they had to evacuate a couple of thousand people up in Massanet. It's well under control now. This is going to be a very bad summer for forest fires, since we're still under the heat wave; in interior Spain it's well over 38ºC (100ºF) every day, and it's around 45º in interior Andalusia and Extremadura. There are no signs of a break in the heat for another week. The forests are dry and ready to burn. About the only good thing, speaking aguaficially, is that there's no threat of a water shortage except in the southeast, since the reservoirs got nice and filled up during the wet winter and spring.

Media feeding frenzy news story: two miners got trapped by a collapse in a coal mine in El Bierzo, a mining region of Leon. It took them more than two days to dig these guys out, but they made it and the two miners survived.

Everybody's blaming the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Ansar-el-Islam, a terrorist group with connections both to Saddam and Al Qaeda. Come on, people, it is NOT a wacko conspiracy theory to say that there is a loose alliance between Islamic terrorist gangs and Islamic rogue states.

The Vangua printed some crap that they got directly from the French Consulate on how the Americans are going into Liberia in order to get a stranglehold on West African oil. Uh, MM. les Grenouilles, that's like saying we went into Kosovo in order to corner the market on goulash. Liberia is an awful long way away from where there's any oil. That's Nigeria you're thinking of, the country with all the oil there.

There are also a couple of nuts from the Vangua, one of whom is the X-man, who say they see some weird shadowy shapes on the fuselage of one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center. They demand an explanation. How about this one: Those shapes are an optical illusion. You guys are crazy. Get a real life. I know there's August and not much real news but don't just make stuff up.