News of the World!

Four significant bits of international news going on today, 8/8/08:

• The 2008 Olympic Games (or the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, seriously) opened in Beijing, China today. I haven't seen any video of the opening ceremonies yet but I've heard they were orgasmatacular.
  
  
• Russia and Georgia are at each other's throats over the Georgian province of South Ossetia. Russian tanks are being rolled out, Georgia's shooting down Russian planes, it's getting messy. The two countries have been arguing over this area for a few years. There are separatists in South Ossetia that want to break away from Georgia, and since Russia likes to stick it to former parts of the Soviet Union for some godforsaken reason the Russians are supporting the separatists.
  
  A few months ago a Russian MiG-29 shot down a Georgian spy plane over Georgian territory, and the video made it all over the internets. Back in 2005 Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin most likely while eating dinner with Ukrainian officials, three of which have now fled to Russia. There was the former FSB (KGB) agent in the UK that was poisoned and killed with polonium by another former FSB agent. Russia... well they're kind of a bunch of dicks.
  
  
• The current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, is being impeached. The guy is completely unpopular now and was already supposed to have stepped down. He's said he will fight the impeachment. It came out recently that the country's security forces had been infiltrated by Taliban leading to the assassination of Perv's former successor Benazir Bhutto. NATO has been dipping into the northern part of Pakistan (called Waziristan) to fight Taliban/al Quaida, and that's been a whole can of sovereignty worms since Pakistan has been trying to control the province too. This is all an interconnected web of news between Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States, NATO, India, Benazir Bhutto's political party, terrorists, Iraq, etc. and can affect any players at the drop of a hat.
  
  
• The Large Hadron Collider starts initial testing tomorrow so you might want to prepare for the end of the world. This is one of those Samuel Jackson in Jurassic Park flipping a switch and saying "hold onto your butts" moments. Here's the weather forecast for Europe tomorrow.
  
  Oh wait, scratch that, seems they pushed it back to September 10. Better get cracking on that bucket list, eh?