Joshua Keating's blog

The France-Ireland dispute over Thierry Henry's handball is getting all the international press, but the tree-way diplomatic dispute between Egypt, Algeria, and Sudan over violence at a recent World Cup qualifying match looks more serious:

Egypt has recalled its ambassador to Algeria after World Cup qualifying football matches between the two countries resulted in a number of outbreaks of violence..

Egypt says a number of its fans who travelled to Sudan for a match on Wednesday to decide which of the sides would go to next year's World Cup finals in South Africa were assaulted by Algerians.

Algeria beat Egypt 1-0 with local police saying that there was little violence due to the massive security operation mounted.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government summoned the Egyptian ambassador in Khartoum to complain about the insinuation that Sudanese security personnel were to blame for the violence. Egyptian authorities claim that Algerian fans throwing rocks wounded 21 Egyptian fans. This was in retaliation for an earlier game in Cairo in which Algerian players were wounded by Egyptian fans throwing rocks at their bus. 

Some are comparing the dispute to the famous 1969 "football war" fought between El Salvador and Honduras. That's probably a stretch -- relations between Egypt and Algeria are, for the most part, pretty good -- but here's hoping that this dispute, and Henry spat, aren't a preview of what to expect in South Africa this summer. 

Hat tip: Nightwatch

CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images

A new study from the University of Haifa finds that animals on either side of the Israel-Jordanian border exhibit different characteristics and behaviors:

The first study inspected the reptile population and revealed that the number of reptiles is similar on both sides, but the variety of species in the sandy areas of Jordan is significantly higher than the variety found in the sands of Israel. A second study revealed that Israeli gerbils are more cautious than their Jordanian friends, while a third study showed that the funnel-digging ant lion population in Israel is unmistakably larger than in Jordan.

According to the researchers, the differences between Israel and Jordan are primarily in the higher level of agriculture and the higher number of agricultural farms in Israel as opposed to Jordan's agriculture that is primarily based on nomadic shepherding and traditional farming. The agricultural fields on the Israeli side of the border not only create a gulf between habitats and thereby cause an increase in the number of species in the region, but they also hail one of the most problematic of intruders in the world: the red fox. On the Jordanian side, the red fox is far less common, so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.

This follows an amazing Wall Street Journal story from two weeks ago describing how red deer still refuse to cross the German-Czech border, 20 years after an electric fence was taken down. The U.S.-Mexico border fence is also proving disruptive to migration patterns several species. 

Arbitrary political constructions though they may be, national borders are becoming natural ones as well. 

Looks like Blackwater/Xe has joined the list of Al Qaeda's favorite boogeymen. Mustafa Abu Yazid, the terror group's chief of operations in Afghanistan, is blaming the contractor for the recent violence in Peshawar:

The Mujahedeen, as Yazid called the militants, target only security forces who are far from civilian gathering places, he said.

"Today, everyone knows what Blackwater and the criminal security contractors are doing after they came to Pakistan with the support of the criminal, corrupt government and its intelligence and security apparatus," Yazid said.

"They are the ones who commit these heinous acts, then accuse the Mujahedeen of their crimes."

A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images

With President Obama scheduled to visit Beijing on Monday, city authorities have banned souvenir vendors from selling a popular t-shirt depicting the president as a Mao-era red guard:

Since he was elected the US president last year, the T-shirt has had a ready market. According to some business owners, they got calls last week from Beijing Municipal Government demanding them to stop the sale of this kind of T-shirt immediately. And inspection officers even came to stores to make sure the T-shirts are off the shelf.

Business owners have been notified that after Obama ends his visit to China, they can resume the sale.

Posters and shirts depicting the president as a communist aren't uncommon at anti-Obama rallies in the U.S., but I'm confused about what exactly this shirt means when a Chinese person wears it. Are they pro-Obama, anti-Obama, or just all about the LOLz?

Also, while I understand that the authorities are anxious not to offend Obama on his high-profile visit, I have a feeling that the president's seen way more ridiculous images of himself if he's ever looked out the window of his limo on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Thankfully, beyond a few muggings, last night's massive Brazilian blackout seems to have caused little lasting damage. But the international coverage of the event is probably a good preview for the Olympic host country's next six years:

Questions remained about what happened and what the fallout would be in Brazil, a nation seen as an ascending economic and political power.

"The image of Brazil, of Rio, is bad enough with all the violence," said 35-year-old graphic designer Paulo Viera, as he sat in a restaurant a block from the sandy arc of Copacabana.

Standing in an open-air restaurant where patrons were drinking quickly warming beer, Viera said he worried about how the outage might look for a city that last month was picked to host the Olympics and will be the showcase city for soccer's World Cup in 2014. "We don't need this to happen. I don't know how it could get worse."

The blackout comes on the heels of a wave of gang fighting in Rio's slums that led to violence fears ahead of the games.

"It's sad to see such a beautiful city with such a precarious infrastructure," 22-year-old law student Igor Fernandes said. "This shouldn't happen in a city that is going to host the Olympic Games."

This is a little unfair. Even Rio's mayor acknowledges that the city has a long way to go in terms of safety and infrastructure before the games, but they do have another six years, and the IOC knew what they were getting when they awarded Brazil the games. 

The problem with developing coutries hosting events like the Olympics is that while the intention is to highlight the enormous progress they've made, they're just as likely to highlight the shortcomings. . Every crime wave or infrastructure failure, or corruption scandal Rio suffers in the next six years will now be covered in the context of whether the city is ready for the games.

Just ask South Africa or Russia. 

This Wall Street Journal article is trying really hard to find something sinister in the story of a recently constructed mosque in Nicaragua. The piece leads by reporting that the "ever-present Managua rumor mill" is suggesting that the Iranian government may have paid for it, since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a close ally of President Daniel Ortega. 

On the other hand, no one is able to corroborate these rumors, no evidence is presented to suggest that they are true, and the reporter finds a Pakistani businessman in Honduras who says he paid for it. About the only shady dealing the article reports is a dispute with the contractor over pay, which proves that it is... a construction project. 

On first glance, New Gingrich's editorial describing Obama's decision not to attend the anniversary of the Berlin Wall a "tragedy" (more here) seems like simple concern-trolling:

The message of human dignity that led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago is a true message of hope rooted in the spiritual nature of man and the freedom to know God.

And so it is a true shame that the president of the United States — this man who cloaks himself in the rhetoric of hope — won’t be pausing to remember.

But this argument actually makes a lot of sense within Gingrich's view of Cold War history, which overwhelmingly emphasizes grand gestures and statements. At a talk I went to at the American Enterprise Institue last year, Gingrich made the case that Ronald Reagan's speeches calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and announcing the creation of Strategic Missile Defense, turned the tide in the Cold War. (Christian Caryl does a nice job on the mythology of Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech here.)

In this weekend's editorial, it is Pope John Paul II who gets credit: 

The crack in the wall that would become a torrent that day was made 10 years earlier during Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to his native Poland.[...] As he spoke, one by one, he punctured the lies of communism. During his first Mass in Poland, 1 million people who lived under a regime that said there was no God affirmed in spontaneous song, “We want God!”

Just 14 months after the pope left Poland, widespread strikes forced the official recognition of the trade union Solidarity. And from there, the dominos began to fall.

In Gingrich's worldview, evil empires are destroyed by uncompromising stands of moral fortitude and powerful rhetoric from world leaders. But as Caryl writes, Western leaders deserve a lot less credit than "the crowds on the streets in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest that fused inchoate anger at the regimes into an immediate and urgent challenge to the apparatchiks' power and legitimacy."

It's certainly fair to critique the adminsitration's commitment to promoting democracy, buthe Wall didn't fall because Reagan or the Pope said it should, and Obama's decision to send Hillary Clinton instead of going himself is quite a bit less important than Gingrich seems to think it is. 

And it's not as if Obama didn't have anything else to do today.

This could very well be the most ironic act of hopejacking yet. Some British bloggers have noticed a striking similarity between the Websites of the xenophobic British National Party, which banned nonwhites from joining until a court order this year, and BarackObama.com.