Over at Teekay’s

Mellel, the only mature competition to the ubiquitous Word on Mac that has just the right balance of power and simplicity, today reached version 2.0. (I know I’m gonna get flak for that statement but it’s true.) It’s a terrific little application and a real bargain — one of the very few pieces of software that I’ve never regretted buying. If you haven’t done so already, head over and grab an evaluation copy. And please pay for it if you decided to use it. (No, I don’t own their stock.)

No, I’m not talking about the very real terror in Amman last night. I’m talking about the increasingly fantastic — fantastically thin, that is — case of the teenagers recently arrested in Denmark and Bosnia. The Copenhagen Post Online (whatever that may be) reported yesterday that they were linked to three suspects arrested in the UK:

Police fear that terror suspects arrested in Denmark are linked to a British plot to attack the US White House

A British police dragnet has raised suspicion that nine terrorist suspects arrested in Denmark and Bosnia are linked to a plan to attack the White House and other strategic targets in the United States. British police became interested in one of the suspects after they arrested three men in London and found they had had email correspondence with a man living in Bosnia. The man living in Bosnia had been suspected of running a network that sought to draw alienated youths to the rebellion in Iraq. Seven 16-20-year-olds are currently under arrest in Denmark along with two 18-year-old men in Sarajevo, one of Danish-Turkish heritage and the other from Sweden, in connection with the find of cache of weapons and explosives in Sarajevo. Two days after the two were arrested in Sarajevo, British police arrested three people in Great Britain on suspicion of planning a terror attack on The White House. The three men had apparently been in email correspondence with someone in Sarajevo who used the codename ‘Maximus’.

I don’t know where to start with this thing. First, it’s totally unsourced. It says, “A British police dragnet has raised suspicion…” but doesn’t tell us who is holding that suspicion. It says (in the hed, which probably wasn’t written by the reporter) “Police fear…” but never tells us who told the reporter. But let’s check the substance.

Police in Denmark and Bosnia arrest a bunch of people. Then the Brits arrest three more folks, apparently in an investigation that was at first unrelated. They find that the three new arrests had e-mail corrspondence with someone in Bosnia. That someone is “suspected” (but we don’t know by whom) of running a network that “sought to draw alienated youths to the rebellion in Iraq.” We are not told whether the network ever succeeded — the term “seek” seems to indicate it didn’t, and I wouldn’t know what it means to “draw” someone “to the rebellion in Iraq” anyway.

The sole connection between the UK arrests and those in Denmark and Bosnia seems to be this ‘Maximus’ guy — but the article doesn’t even tell us whether those arrested in Denmark and Bosnia were ever in touch with him!

I’m not denying the very real danger of radicalism in Bosnia, or the potential for terrorism there. But the fact is that all of it is so far just speculation — and I hope it’ll remain that way.

Not sure what her marital status is — for some reason I imagine her not to be married — but her relationship with the Times had certainly all the hallmarks of a stormy courtship of almost three decades turned sour in an instant.

Now, Judith Miller is leaving the paper of record — but not without a parting shot. Check tomorrow’s paper for her “rebuffal” of the accusations lobbed at her since she left jail in the ridiculous Wilson-Plame-Libby (-Rove?) saga.

Speaking of ridiculous, what’s your opinion on “stalemate” as an intransitive verb?

Thanks to K.:

Sozzled elks hound old folks home

It’s about a bunch of elks (or as we call ‘em, moose) that got drunk on fermented apples. Check it here.

This is an actual, genuine, real word that I totally didn’t make up, from today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

Massenvernichtungswaffenprogramme

It means “WMD programs,” though I’ll grant you that WMD isn’t such a great term either. (And we still haven’t found any.)

One needs to have a big brother in order to have one’s attention drawn to the fact that “Freibier im Augsburg” (”free beer in Augsburg,” though in perfectly utterly totally correct German the preposition should be “in”) is an exact anagram of “Freiburg im Breisgau.”

And he doesn’t even like beer.

Eric, it’s all your fault. Your comments in a recent disagreement got me thinking. (These processes do take long, mind you.)

According to the Transatlantic Trends for 2005 just published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and available here, Republicans and Europeans are the better Democrats: while 74 percent of Europeans support the idea that the EU should help establish democracy in other countries, only 51 percent of Americans agreed with the idea that the U.S. should do so. (I have a feeling the percentage might even be lower if they were asked whether the EU should promote democracy.) But here’s the interesting bit. Asked the same question — should it be the role of the U.S. to help establish democracy in other countries — 76 percent of Republicans but only 43 percent of Democrats said yes.

In other words, half of all Democrats think the U.S. should not promote democracy abroad.

This means two things: a lot of Democrats are jackasses who don’t give a damn about what’s going on abroad and would rather not do anything about improving people’s lives elsewhere than strengthen the president’s hand even marginally.

It also means that the Republicans have managed to give democracy promotion a bad name: they have turned it into the equivalent of “we’re about to whack you, buddy.” But at least they got the theory right — which is more than we can say about the non-Democratic half of the Democratic party.

Strange times we live in.