Fifty percent of Americans believe Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new memoir Living History should be filed in the history section of libraries and bookstores, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Twenty-two percent believe it belongs in the fiction section. * At a speech in Washington, D.C., PBS’s Bill Moyers stated that the Republicans are planning the “deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America.” * A proposed mural at the University of California, Riverside has offended some at the campus. Academic affairs director Elisa Haro saw the images of Shakespearean actors as “pilgrim invaders” that reminded her “of my colonization, and I don’t like that.” There were also complaints that the cranes in the mural were white, and that there were no same sex couples. * A UCLA study found no significant correlation between secondhand smoke and death due to coronary heart disease or lung cancer. * The European Central Bank predicts the European Union’s economy will grow by only 0.7 percent this year. . . . Unemployment in Germany has risen to 4.49 million. Germany has a population of over 82 million and is the biggest contributor to the E.U. budget.

An exiled Burmese girl wrote a letter to the Bangkok Post asking George Bush and Tony Blair to “please eliminate the Burmese dictators immediately. We need only one missile. Help us, please.” * The number of terror attacks in the world fell sharply in 2002, according to the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report. There were 199 terrorist attacks last year, a 44 percent drop from 2001. This is the lowest figure in over 30 years. * In Western Europe, 35 percent of software is pirated, in Eastern Europe it’s 71 percent, concludes the Business Software Alliance in its annual survey on software piracy, estimating the global cost of software piracy last year at $13.08 billion.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, decreed that the heads of companies, unions, and other organizations may not call themselves “presidents.” Only Lukashenko himself may have that title. * The Rift Valley Institute reported that, over the last 20 years, more than 11,000 people have been kidnapped in slave raids in the Sudan. Only about 500 have made it back home. . . . Musician Bob Geldof, oragnizer of the 1980s Live Aid charity, told the London Guardian that “the Bush administration is the most radical--in a positive sense--in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.” Geldof described former President Bill Clinton as “a good guy, but he did f--- all” to help Africa. * The  New York Times reported that incest is a serious health concern in Saudi Arabia, noting that in some parts of the country “more than half of the marriages are between close relatives.” Inbreeding can produce such genetic disorders as sickle cell anemia, spinal muscular atrophy, diabetes, and possibly deafness and muteness.

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Qatar, issued a fatwa permitting women to carry out suicide attacks, “even without the permission of her husband, and the son without the consent of his parents.”. . . An Australian and a German caught kissing in Dubai were sentenced to six-month jail terms, which were suspended under condition they not do it again. * After weeks of striking and a halt to garbage collection, city cleaners in Marseille, France resorted to spraying the streets with lemon-grass perfume to diffuse the stench from mountains of festering trash. * Sales of French wine in the U.S. dropped 13 percent over the last year.

Two thirds of Israelis believe Israel could co-exist with a Palestinian state, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Only 17 percent of Palestinians think that is possible. . . . “I’m making a conscious decision to take this whole Judaism thing seriously,” Geraldo Rivera told the Washington Post. “I think the Jews need me right now.”

--BB