Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from The Great Debate:
George Bush and Iraq: ‘Shoe’denfreude?
Salim Adil is an author for Global Voices Online, a website that aggregates, curates, and translates news and views from the global blogosphere. The opinions expressed are his own and those of the bloggers he quotes.
Will this become one of those moments in history? In years to come will you recount to your grand children where you were when an Iraqi journalist, Montather Al-Zeidi, threw his shoes at the president of the United States? For me I was at home just getting my kids ready to sleep when my father called me insisting that I simply had to switch on the television immediately.
Iraqi bloggers reacted in much the same way with a number who wrote their first new post in months just to make their comment. Abbas Hawazin went as far to predict that shoe throwing will now be part of mainstream culture and has gone to look for a good-sized shoe to carry in his pocket, “in case I need to make any public expression of anger should the case arise.”
Last of Iraqis broke his once-a-week frequency to share his opinion on the incident. “In the Iraqi traditions or may I say Arabic traditions in general; it's the maximum insult a man can do…it's the maximum humiliation no word can accomplish”, he writes. And he gives his view of the Iraqi Street:
New U.S. embassy: symbol of U.S.-German relations
The ferocity of the reaction in the German media to the fortress-like new U.S. embassy in Berlin, which former U.S. President George Bush will inaugurate on Friday, strikes me as a reflection of the strains in German-U.S. relations since 2003′s Iraq conflict.
It underlines just how long gone the days of the Cold War really are. Then, when Berlin was the front line in the Cold War, America was West Germany’s best friend and U.S. soldiers were welcome across the country.
Has U.S. slipped nuclear bombs out of Britain?
U.S. nuclear weapons in Britain – out with a whimper, not with a bang?
It was once one of the most contentious issues in Europe, inspiring mass demonstrations, “peace camps” and a movement that shaped the politics of a generation. After more than half a century, there are no more U.S. nukes in Britain.
On Thursday, the Federation of American Scientists, a group set up by former Manhattan Project scientists alarmed by the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reported that the United States had removed the last of its nuclear bombs from the Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath in eastern England.

