I’M NOT SURE THAT BERKELEY HAS REALLY BEEN LIBERATED YET, but this is surely evidence that American columns can operate at will even in the heart of the city.

UPDATE: Here’s more from the L.A. Times. Excerpt:

BERKELEY — Borrowing a page from this city’s radical traditions, a boisterous band of 200 college Republicans demonstrated Saturday in the bastion of American liberalism, staging a pro-Bush administration rally on the UC Berkeley campus and leading a flag-waving procession down Telegraph Avenue.

As street vendors and merchants looked on in disbelief, delegates attending a state college Republican convention here marched two blocks to People’s Park, site of a widely publicized protest incident in 1969, where they chanted “Bush! Bush! Bush!” and sang “America the Beautiful.”

By Berkeley standards, it was a minuscule procession played out on a balmy Saturday afternoon on a mostly deserted campus. But to the hardy corps of young Republicans, uniting under the theme “Behind Enemy Lines,” it was a highly symbolic event. Even grizzled political warriors said they were impressed by participants’ moxie. Longtime Berkeley professors said it represented a political drift to the right at California’s pioneer state university.

“I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would see this,” said a buoyant Shawn Steel, former state Republican Party chairman from Rolling Hills.

Well, it’s a man-bites-dog story, for sure. Or maybe a man-bites-geezer story:

The difference is clear at the Free Speech Movement Café, an elegant coffee shop funded by a wealthy 1964 graduate at the base of the new Moffitt Undergraduate Library. One of the walls of the cafe is covered with an enlarged photograph of a Free Speech era sit-in. Almost all of the faces in the photo are white. Recent classes entering Berkeley, however, have been largely Asian, accounting for more than 40% of the entering freshman class.

“As a general rule,” said Leonard, “the increase in Asian Americans has pushed the student body more toward the center politically.”

In fact, Leonard said, opposition to the campus conservatives is more likely to come from the faculty or aging leftists in the surrounding community. “I get the sense the community is much more into protest than the campus,” Leonard said. “There is a culture of protest in the Bay Area that is steadily getting grayer and older.”

It seems to be that way everywhere.

THE WAR IS FINALLY OVER, and it’s an unconditional victory, according to Rand Simberg.

I like the reference to “bunkum-busting.”

ANOTHER WALL HAS FALLEN, this one in Cyprus. Christopher Hitchens writes:

I wish I’d been there to see it, having so often traversed this grim border in both directions as a journalist, but I was able to get cell-phone reports from my former sister-in-law, Manto Meleagrou, who was one of the first to make the trip. The sense of exhilaration and liberty was extraordinary, as if people indefinitely confined in a cramped cell had suddenly been allowed to stretch and exercise. And also as if a “no talking” rule in a barren jail had suddenly been relaxed: Conversation that had been impossible for decades was suddenly and volubly resumed.

Germans were Germans on either side of the wall, while Cypriots are either Greek-speaking and Orthodox or Turkish-speaking and Muslim. One of the few benefits of British colonialism is that English is widely spoken on both sides, and the temper of both communities is also heavily secular, but there has been enough mutual distrust in Greek-Turkish history for demagogues to work on. Nonetheless, Manto and others told me that they were greeted very warmly by the Turkish Cypriots and that the local police and army seemed to have taken the day off. The same was true reciprocally: Turks venturing south were embraced by former friends and by new ones. . . .

The fraternization among Cypriots — a people long written-off as hopeless victims of “ancient hatreds” and tribal feelings — is of course mainly a compliment to themselves. Those of us lucky enough to know the island are well aware that the majority is immune to fascistic rhetoric and maintains a long tradition of courtesy and coexistence. However, it must be emphasized that the idea of a democratic, open, law-governed society, represented in part by the “pull” of the European Union, does now constitute an alternative pole of attraction and a challenge to traditional, confessional, and nationalist modes of thought. And this has implications across the region.

Along with the slow but now unstoppable movement among the Palestinians for a democratic “civil society” approach to their common problems and their long battle for statehood, this sudden development in Cyprus shows that there is indeed a “wind of change” blowing in the Middle East.

I hope he’s right. It does often seem to be the case that “ancient tribal hatreds” stem from modern demagoguery more than actual longstanding history.

JOHN LOTT HAS RESPONDED to the Ayres/Donohue post below. I’ve added his email as an update, which you can read here.

HERE’S AN UPDATE ON WHAT’S GOING ON WITH SGTSTRYKER.COM.

MISSING TOURISTS UPDATE:

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) Algerian authorities found a vehicle in the Sahara desert that likely belonged to a German couple who are among 31 European tourists missing in the north African country, a security official said Sunday.

The discovery may provide one of the most important clues into the disappearances since the Algerian military began searching in mid-February, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The four-wheel drive vehicle was “practically buried under sand” near the remote town of Illizi, 930 miles southwest of the capital, Algiers, he said. Its battery had been removed.

Interesting.

THE PBS NEWSHOUR FOLKS emailed to tell me that there will be a program on weblogs on tonight. You’ll have to check your local listings for the time, but it should be around halfway through the program.

Originally, this was supposed to be a program about InstaPundit, but I persuaded them that InstaPundit had been done to death, and suggested that they branch out to some newer faces, which I gather they’ve done.

A transcript, etc., will appear here at some point after the show airs.

HERE’S MORE ON AN INSTAPUNDIT STAPLE: scandalous problems at the FBI crime lab.

The AP reported this month that FBI lab technician Jacquelyn Blake quit while under investigation for failing to follow required scientific procedures while analyzing 103 DNA samples over the past couple of years, and a second lab employee was indicted for allegedly providing false testimony.

Inspector General Glenn Fine expanded the Blake inquiry to examine the FBI lab’s broader practices in DNA cases. The FBI has been cooperating, the government officials said.

I wonder how many people were wrongly convicted? I feel pretty sure that some have been.

Here is an oldy-but-goody post on this, and here is another.

DAVID PLOTZ HAS A SURVEY OF IDEAS, all of which seem pretty good to me, on how to rebuild civil society in Iraq.

One useful thing to remember: unlike Russians, Iraqis had a civil society, more or less, as recently as 35 years ago. Iraq is more like Eastern Europe than Russia in this regard: there are still plenty of people who can remember a different way of living.

Here, by the way, is something I wrote on the subject a few weeks ago. And Jeff Jarvis has been all over this question (with special attention to the role the Internet can play) — just keep scrolling.

HERE’S MORE ON SARS and its impact on China.

DANIEL DREZNER POINTS OUT that there’s good news from Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon wonders if Tariq Aziz was our guy all along.

TALKLEFT is operational again. So is The Daily Kos, which unbeknownst to me was down for the same reason. SgtStryker, on the other hand, seems to be only halfway back. At the moment, I can see the template, but no entries.

PETER OBORNE WONDERS:

It is worth pondering this contradiction, made sharper by the military victory in Iraq. It raises two fascinating questions. Why do British armed forces, with their meagre £25 billion budget, always deliver? But why do the NHS and the education system, though in receipt of unlimited amounts of public money, continue to fail? To put the problem in another way: how come the simple British squaddie — though underpaid, overworked and forced to carry out his or her duties in conditions of appalling danger — always rises to any challenge? But how come so many British schoolteachers, rather better paid, with far shorter hours and long holidays, endlessly whinge and — as the teachers’ union conference demonstrated yet again — block even quite sensible reforms?

But it’s the paragraph after this one that demonstrates just how big a challenge Blair faces.

NOAM CHOMSKY AND HOWARD ZINN deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring movie. I’m pretty sure this is a parody, but, really, how can you tell the difference?

THE GUARDIAN reports on Internet Satire sites and gives Scott Ott’s ScrappleFace a lot of attention.

CLAYTON CRAMER NOTES ANOTHER DEFENSIVE HANDGUN USE, pointing out that “These don’t get much coverage nationally, but they happen frequently.”

IAIN MURRAY REPORTS on a poll suggesting that Brits are developing an astonishingly, well, American attitude toward crime.

SARS UPDATE: A friend in China sends a disquieting report, suggesting that things there are worse than I had realized:

Within the past week, it has finally become evident that the Chinese government’s failure to own up to the SARS problem when it began several months ago is coming back to haunt it, at the expense of many innocent people who had no idea that their government was (once again) lying to them. Although we have always known that we were visiting an authoritarian regime that lacks a free press, until this week, the police presence has been relatively low-key and the “news” in the China Daily has been a source of amusement to us. It is easy, in the capitalist mecca of Shanghai, to forget a key fact that the government here plainly wants you to forget but that is now quite clear: This is very much a police state. . . .

[Numerous anecdotes of coverups, “appearance-oriented” strategies, and so on follow. Example: a sick student showing up at a university clinic and being told “There is no SARS at the University. Do you want to be the first case?” after which he went home without treatment. Shanghai is reortedly quarantining anyone who enters the city from anywhere else.]

But for the facts that it is rapidly heading toward martial law and is infected with a contagious and potentially lethal disease, Shanghai is a fantastic city. . . . China is a growing world power with enormous political, military, and economic importance. But it will not be a full-fledged member of the world community until it meets its responsibilities to other countries and to its own people.

The report suggests that things are much worse elsewhere in China, particularly in Beijing and Guangzhou. I should note that my friend was until recently very optimistic about China, and very favorably disposed toward the direction that its government is taking. I suspect that the damage done to China’s reputation may, in some ways, do as much harm as the disease itself. China will have to work very hard to get out of this hole.

RACHEL BELTON WRITES THAT WE SHOULD KEEP THE UNITED NATIONS OUT OF IRAQ:

The United Nations and international allies promised to rebuild democracy in Bosnia. Seven years later, they have departed — only to hand over responsibility for the semi-state to the European Union. They failed again in Kosovo, where they are preventing a civil war but have brought little movement toward self-government in their four-year reign. In Afghanistan, international aid is coming too little and too late to support the fragile government.

The failure of these efforts to build autonomous, sovereign democracies lies in the very structure of international coalitions. Coalitions diffuse responsibility. When Bosnia failed to arrest war criminals, each coalition member could blame its compatriots. No one felt responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of the coalition — or the success of the country. Slow funding from a coalition is also inevitable, given the multiple money streams and organizations that must be coordinated. Yet lack of disposable funds causes pro-Western politicians to lose ground to more shady leaders, often funded by less-savory states and criminal organizations, who can deliver results to the citizenry more quickly.

Reconstruction efforts often become the battlefields for unconnected struggles between coalition members. To gain the upper hand, “internationals” dissipate their time and energy playing politics against one another.

This seems right to me.

“BUSINESS AS USUAL:”

Yes, conceded the defendant — a man named Yves Verwaerde — he had opened a $2 million Swiss bank account with the code name “Salad” in July 1991, when he was a Member of the European Parliament. It was his other employer at the time, the French oil company Elf, that asked him to open the account, he explained. The salad full of greenbacks was earmarked for Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader in Angola, where Elf was negotiating important contracts.

Listening intently in the wood-paneled courtroom of the Paris Tribunal last week, Judge Michel Desplan had some questions. If this $2 million was for Savimbi, how come Verwaerde had allegedly used about $300,000 of it to build a villa for himself on Ibiza? And why did his wife have power of attorney over the account? Verwaerde didn’t miss a beat. He claimed that Savimbi himself had said he could dip into the money. As for his wife, “she was usually the one who picked up the telephone when it rang, so she spoke to Savimbi several times when he called my home,” he replied. . . .

Why would Elf make potentially illicit payments to French politicians? Le Floch-Prigent’s rationale had a touch of paranoia to it: “Elf is a French company up against the Anglo-Saxon world,” he told the court. “We are David against Goliath. Our politicians had to support us everywhere. In Africa, for example, if we got into a war between Socialists and Gaullists, we wouldn’t know where to go. A certain number of French politicians were capable of destabilizing Elf. We had to shut them up or make sure they were with us.”

Those damned Anglo-Saxons! We needed those villas to compete with them!

SLATE IS MAKING MONEY: Cool.

A BLAIR/CHIRAC SPLIT WIDENS:

Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France’s Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president’s vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising. . . .

Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK’s least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country’s most reliable.

Blair would like to heal the breach, but with Chirac’s ambitions — and, now, obvious efforts on behalf of a military enemy — it’s hard to see how that can happen.