Hitchens interview (via MH):

In 1982 he backed Britain against the Argentinian junta in the Falklands. On this he ran against almost everyone else on the British left, and had sharp disagreements with James Fenton. “I had been in Buenos Aires,” he says. “I’d seen what the Galtieri regime was like.” He cites this as an early example of the British left taking reactionary positions. “If it had been up to them the junta would have lasted ten more years and destroyed the society of the Falkland Islands.” He likens the response of liberal friends to the reaction he would get 20 years later when he announced his support for George W Bush. “People would goggle at you as if you were an idiot. There’s no intolerance like liberal intolerance, no closed mindedness like the closed-mindedness of liberals.”

Something to cheer about for a change. The Chinese cargo ship An Yue Jiang is reported to be heading back to China after workers in coastal countries neighbouring Zimbabwe refused to handle its cargo of weapons.

A petulant sounding Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Jiang Yu, said:

“Some people in the US are always critical, positioning themselves as the world’s policeman, but they are not popular in the world.”

I dare say that’s true, but it’s a shitty job and someone’s got to do it. It would just be nice if the responsibility were shared out a bit more.

In this instance the US government has done absolutely the right thing in following up an international workers’ initiative with a diplomatic call to China to recall the weapons shipment. Zambia’s president Levy Mwanawasa urged African countries not to allow the arms to pass through their territories in case this should increase tension in in crisis-riven Zimbabwe.

So here’s to the dockworkers of southern Africa, and here’s to the president of Zambia and the US State Department. Oh, and a nod also to Gordon Brown, who recently mumbled something or other about an international arms embargo on Zimbabwe.

It’s a mad world after all:

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.