news monkey

t US ATTACKS. With little or no support from either the public or the UN, the American government has launched another all-out effort to topple the evil regime of Bill Clinton. Impeachment proceedings have already begun to backfire, as the new Speaker of the House, Bob Livingstone, was forced to confess an adulterous affair of his own, three months after the chairman of the House judiciary committee, Henry Hyde, admitted to one. Sickening as it is, the embarrassing inability of US politicians to keep their sexual indiscretions to themselves makes one proud to be governed by a shadowy cabal of closet homosexuals.

t PINOCHET RULING. It's been a lazy, crazy autumn for the pilot of General Pinochet's escape plane, who has very probably read all the magazines in RAF Brize Norton's newsagents by now. Thanks to Judge Hoffmann's failure to disclose his shameful bias towards human rights, the pilot will get another chance to rev the engines next month. Meanwhile, if he's bored, there are some leaves in Wentworth that need raking.

t WEAPONS HANDOVER. In Northern Ireland, arms decommissioning has started off as coyly as a game of strip poker, with the LVF turning in a few old guns and detonators they were probably going to bin anyway. Next we can expect the IRA to pitch up grudgingly carrying pen-knives and spent Mace canisters. It may sound like a slow start, but footage of the process, which shows two men laboriously cutting up some rifles with a couple of saws, proves it can't be done much faster.

t STRIKE ENDS. Barry Horne, or to give him his full title, "jailed animal rights extremist Barry Horne", has finally ended his hunger strike after 68 days amid allegations that it was actually more of a diet. While hunger strikes rarely have a good outcome - chickening out or dying are really the only two choices - starving oneself for animal rights seems particularly inappropriate. It's hardly the sort of thing the animals would do for us. You don't see many cats missing a meal over this whole Pinochet thing.