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Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Chapel Hill, Boston, Istanbul, Calgary, Washington DC, Austin, Tunis, Warszawa and counting

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

A Couple More Years

Jerry Lee Lewis:
A Couple More Years (with Willie Nelson)
&
That Kind of Fool (with Keith Richards)

The Killer has published a new album and even though he has resorted to that typical old-legend method of recording songs with co-stars in order to attract more and younger customers one just has to admit the he still lives up to his moniker. Cannot quickly recall another album by an aging star like him in the last couple of years except maybe Bobby Charles' Last Train To Memphis that would be able to compete with this one.


There was a really long article in LeMonde today about an American soldier who refused service in the army out of conscientious reasons. This article quoted a study out of the Air Force Times (of which I had admittedly never heard of before) that claims that 40,000 American soldiers have deserted since 2000. 40,000. If true, this would be a staggering number considering the US army only consists of around 500,000 men (and women). With consideration for my sucky math this means that 1 out of every 10 soldiers has deserted in the last few years. Crazy.

And while we are onto mind-numbing numbers I wanted to share a scientific study published in The Lancet with my worthy American readers because I am not quite sure how much coverage this has gotten in the USA. According to this study, performed by American scholars from John Hopkins in cooperation with Iraqi associates, over 600,000 Iraqis have died because of the American invasion. If anything of what I have read is true, this study is to be trusted more than any other regarding the number of deaths in Iraq (I cannot find the Zeit article which I base this on anymore sadly).

Consider the fact now, that according to the Bush administration deaths due to the invasion (directly and indirectly of course) number only around 30,000. Seems like someone conveniently ignores some kind of truth somewhere there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would just like to point out that the report that says 600,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the US invasion got significant coverage in US media. If you had been keeping up with your NYtimes reading, you would have seen a long article on it. Also, CNN which is mainstream and, in my opinion, incredibly crappy, also covered the report. There is no need to assume that European papers do a better job covering this aspect of the war than American papers.