Serial rabbit killer on the loose

Okay, this may seem funny, but to our family it's serious. Someone is killing pet bunnies in Germany, according to the BBC. Indeed, I was incensed while watching BBC World on television this morning and they cut away from this news story to cover Prime Minister Gordon Brown's statement at the G8 meeting.

Our family is the proud owner of a 6 year-old dwarf rabbit named Kiwi, which we bought for our daughter when she was 11. She is now more interested in boys than rabbits, but Kiwi is still an important member of our household (even if he can't be trusted alone for one second because he eats all the electrical cords.)

So all I can say is that I hope they catch that rabbit killer soon and shut him up in a hutch all his own.

PS--This photo, by Nancy Bea Miller, is not Kiwi, he is camera-shy, but a rabbit that looks a lot like him.

News Update: The July 7 issue of The Guardian, one of the U.K.'s leading dailies, features an article by writer Seumas Milne about Italy's campaign against its Gypsy (Roma) population. According to Milne, Gypsies are being singled out for fingerprinting and other discriminatory measures reminiscent of the country's Fascist past. Milne wonders why nobody, especially world leaders, is paying any attention. He adds:

It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as "evoking painful memories". The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it "must be stopped now". Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies.

Read the entire article, if half of it is true, very alarming indeed.

Obama Update: Glenn Greenwald again excoriates Obama for voting in favor of the new FISA bill giving immunity to telecom companies and authorizing warrantless wiretapping. Hillary Clinton voted against it. There is simply no way to explain away this turnaround by Obama on a crucial civil liberties issue. If we have to hold our noses to vote for Obama, it does not bode well for his chances if the race with McCain tightens, nor for his presidency. This really was a question of principle, and Obama has badly failed the test. I must quote the last paragraph of Glenn's post, which really says what needs to be said:

Will Democrats ever learn that the reason they are so easily depicted as "weak" isn't because they don't copy the Republican policies on national security enough, but rather, because they do so too much, and thus appear (accurately) to stand for nothing? Of course, many Democrats vote for these policies because they believe in them, not because they are "surrendering." Still, terms such as "bowing," "surrendering," "capitulating," and "losing" aren't exactly Verbs of Strength. They're verbs of extreme weakness --- yet, bizarrely, Democrats believe that if they "bow" and "surrender," then they will avoid appearing "weak." Somehow, at some point, someone convinced them that the best way to avoid appearing weak is to be as weak as possible.