No thanks

 War, it has been said, is God's way of teaching Americans geography.  With our blinkered disregard of most of the planet most of the time, it's good to spend another session on The World Elsewhere.  And boy howdy, it's a compost.

The French take mask-wearing seriously, and their police are reveling in the new powers granted them by legislators.  Also they are some sick racists.  All this came together when a music producer known only as Michel was spotted unmasked in Paris.  Three flics sprang from their car and chastised him with truncheons and racial epithets, the third such incident in a week.  When Michel ducked inside his studio, they smashed the window and continued explaining the importance of wearing a mask until someone shouted, "Camera!"  Then they hauled Michel off to the station where he was charged with insulting police, probably because the tear gas was inflaming his vocabulary.  The charges were dropped.  Last January police held a delivery driver on the ground as he cried, "I'm suffocating," and eventually died.  It's not clear why the name of Cedric Chouviat is not as well known as George Floyd -- maybe America is just better at getting the story out.

Extreme weather and tree pests brought on by climate change are threatening London's Highgate Cemetery.  Apparently its most popular resident is Karl Marx, but others include Ralph Richardson, Christina Rossetti, Douglas Adams, Eric Hobsbawm, Bob Hoskins, George Eliot and her partner, Beryl Bainbridge, Stella Gibbons, Peter and Anthony Shaffer and Jacob Bronowski.  Global warming is even bad for the dead.

In other mortality news, Denmark slaughtered millions of minks to prevent them spreading a mutated form of the coronavirus.  The wee cadavers were buried but not deep enough; as they decompose, gases are causing them to be pushed out of the ground.  And of course, the mutated virus is now in the soil and making its way to a nearby lake.

France again.  Anyone who has tried to communicate with a Parisian in well-meant high school French and encountered stony incomprehension will appreciate a proposal to ban discrimination on the basis of accents.  It's not just tourists and immigrants who have faced this but people from anyplace but Paris, apparently.  I can't say I'm surprised, given the way the Academie francaise polices the language to keep out foreign words and coinages.  Now the Kiwis and Ozzies will want to outlaw British jokes about their pronunciation.  Good luck, mate.

Attention hunters in the Czech Republic:  Police need you to watch for a deer which stole a gun in the woods near the Austrian border.  The rifle is unloaded and is wedged in the deer's antlers, and the hunter would like it back so he can try again.  Snork.

In response to increasing crimes against women and children in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan is pushing for a law that would provide for the chemical castration of rapists.   Unless it somehow prevents men from achieving erection or using a foreign object, I don't see this solving the problem.  

Faced with the same problems, women are occupying the Human Rights Commission building in Mexico City.  They've been there for two months, we were just too preoccupied to notice.  So Islam is not the only source of violent misogyny?  Shocking.

President Xi Jinping of China called Joe Biden to offer his congratulations.  That leaves Jair Bolsonaro, Manuel Lopez Obrador and Vladimir Putin as the last sorehead holdouts.  Come on, guys, even Erdogan is on board with this.  Do you want to look as silly as Trump?

Tokyo is alarmed over sixty serious cases of covid.  If we ever get down to 6,000 serious cases it will be time for the fireworks.  The Supreme Court and its zaniest new member are not helping.

Canada is making plans to distribute the covid vaccine.  No, Trudeau will not be tossing it to people like paper towel after a hurricane.

All the news in Argentina is about the death of Diego Maradona.  All of it.