Last week when the UN offices in Baghdad were bombed, I remember reading that the US was to blame because we hadn’t provided the same level of security for UN facilities that we provide for our own. TNR’s weblog dug up a bit of news with a quote from a UN official stating that the UN had actually declined higher security so as to be more available to the Iraqis.

TNR also has another item about a lawsuit against “all the Jews of the world” asking for compensation for treasure that was allegedly stolen when Jews escaped from slavery in Egypt around 6000 years ago. Clearly such a lawsuit is an absurdity on just about every level, but one interesting note is that were such a lawsuit to actually make it to trial (and I sure hope that it doesn’t), the defense attorneys for the Jews may be best served by arguing that the captivity never actually happened at all. The current state of the archaeological record seems to indicate that there was no Jewish captivity in Egypt, and that in fact the story was written by Jewish scholars during the Jewish captivity on Babylon in order to give them hope that they would escape that predicament. Such a defense, would, of course, upset apple carts of all kinds.