Dictator Turned Mediator?

And now the most intriguing two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine:

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Dictator Turned Mediator?
Moammar Khadafi, the Libyan dictator whose government is noted for its practice of abduction, torture and assassination, is offering himself as a mediator between Saddam Hussein and President Bush. In Ethiopia for a summit of African nations, Khadafi said, "I would like to save international peace." He may have been emboldened to offer his services by the fact that his country has been voted in as the new chairman of the U.N. commission on human rights. The United Nations, by the way, will also soon have its Commission on Disarmament presided over by Iraq which will then be followed in the chairmanship by Iran.

Investigating in Illinois
The FBI has been brought into the investigation of the vandalism of a fleet of seafood company trucks over the weekend in the Chicago-area community of Villa Park. The reason is that a group calling itself ALF has claimed credit for the damage, which involved cutting the refrigeration and brake lines of 48 trucks. The FBI believes ALF stands for animal liberation front, a loose amalgam of radical animal rights activists the bureau regards as a domestic terrorist organization. The Chicago Tribune reports that the group sent out an e-mail communiqué which blamed the seafood company for the deaths of more than a billion sea creatures over the past 25 years and said, "Their lives cannot be returned but we will continue to strike until future generations are truly free."

Leftovers From Losing
When ex-Congressman Gary Condit was defeated in the primary for re-election last year, he was left with $209,500 in the bank account of his political action committee. The Sacramento Bee reports that Condit paid nearly all of it to his children, Chad and Cadee. The two Condit children were classified on newly released records as campaign consultants, but The Bee quotes David Schecter, assistant political science professor at Fresno State University, as calling "unusual and downright misleading" to use PAC money to pay his children, but Schecter added that at the point Condit was probably having trouble getting anyone outside his family to work for him. Condit's primary defeat came after it surfaced that he had been having an affair with Washington intern Chandra Levy, who was found murdered in a crime that remains unsolved.