Ruh-roh, Kim Jong-Il is sick, what happens when he dies? Hell if we know!! And will we truly know tomorrow or whenever this guy gets back to the executive assistant charged with Explainer-ing it for Slate? Not really! As literary Tumblrer Keith Gessen pointed out while trying to make sense of the whole Ossetia mess, you know there's a redundant "inadequacy" to the international news in our dying newspapers when even bloggers with the attention spans of Piper Palin feel it. But isn't that because our dying newspapers have mostly killed their foreign bureaus because there's no money in it?Yes! Which is why, as readers, we are happy these guys from Boston have founded the Politico of international news. (It is already poaching people from Politico.) And those newsroom cutbacks may enable Global News Enterprises LLC.* to put together a pretty strong team. From an announcement in March:

Samak Sundaravej, the Prime Minister of Thailand, has been forced out of his position by a Thai court for violating the Constitution. Allegations of "gigantic corruption," as the New York Times puts it, "surround other government figures." But it was Samak who got busted, with a nine-judge panel finding him guilty of violating a ban on private employment in office. "His position as prime minister has ended," they said. The private employment that ended Samak's rule? He appeared on a cooking show. Called Tasting and Complaining. This is just like when Nixon was forced to resign after appearing on Laugh-In. [NYT]

"It was February 2006 in Munich, and John McCain's eyes were flashing with the mischievous spark that comes when he's about to fire a verbal rocket. 'I've got a zinger coming,' he told me, referring to a speech on Russia he would give a few hours later at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy." Wow! What sort of zinger did McCain have planned for the Munich Conference on Security Policy? Did Gunther Beckstein, Minister-President of Bavaria, look like a painted trollop? Or was it the one where a gorilla rapes Richard Holbrooke? Tell us, David Ignatius, what was this zinger you've set up so thrillingly?

So. The Georgians sorta instigated this nutty war but the Russians were apparently looking for any old excuse to swarm in and take charge. The U.S. is stepping up the rhetoric but lord know what we'll actually do to stop the Russians from toppling the Georgian government. Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili is now waging a second war—a public relations war! He knows one of his better bets is to turn United States public opinion toward his beleaguered nation and against those terrible Russians, so he plays up how Western his country is all the time. They love America! Hot dogs! Johnny Cougar! In this clip, Saakashvili goes off on an incredible tangent about how Georgia once had amusement parks and Dolby Digital movie theaters (seriously!) but the Russians destroyed that, because they hate fun. How can anyone be against surround sound? Those filthy Russians!

Ohh, Georgians. It will be hard to maintain your current favorable coverage in the US press if you do things like this. The attached clip shows a Fox News reporter running from gunfire from Georgian troops. The absoltely amazing thing is that as he's running from them he's still, like, totally on their side? They are exhausted and humiliated by those Russians (those baaad Russians!). Also who hasn't wanted to make a Fox News correspondent dance a little, right? Totally understandable! (For balance, the clip is followed by a clip of a Georgian journalist getting shot in the arm on-air by a sniper. Presumably a Russian sniper? Who knows. Fog of war!)

"Medvedev announced agreement to a French-brokered proposal for both Russian and Georgian troops to stop fighting and move back to their initial positions." [Washington Post, Previously]

Click to viewTake a look at the front page of crazy-huge crowdsourced web aggregator Digg today and you'll see a totally different portrait of the war in Georgia than you'd find on the front of the New York Times. It's not the scary specter of Russia asserting its dominance over the region and thumbing its nose at the West, gambling that we won't respond with force. It's not tanks rolling toward a soverign nation's capital in the hopes of overthrowing its pro-American leader. No, it is, as usual, a conspiracy by George W. Bush and the Mainstream Media to confuse and deceive you. A false story propagated by those terrible, biased gatekeepers. Also-Russian tanks are fucking awesome!!!! Why the hell would typically nerd-news and cute photo-obsessed little Digg take such a counterintuitive view of a war being waged on the other side of the globe? Three simple reasons.

This link to a ridiculously slanted Russian news story about the war in Georgia has 1,194 Diggs, but please don't pay it any mind. Pravda.ru is a joke, a web-only repository of mistranslated hilarity and boob pictures unrelated to any print publication. Russian newspapers can still be oppositional and independent—it's the TV Putin controls. We should probably worry less about wacky Engrish propaganda and more about the return of the Cold War! Russia's intention just might be to actually topple the democratically elected, adorably pro-American government of Georgia. (They say they won't go to Tbilisi, but they also said that about Gori!) George W. Bush's intention is to not get involved and hope a ceasefire happens soon. That funny little dance he did is not so cute anymore! If it spreads to Ukraine, what then? NATO gets involved at some point. That's a big problem. A big problem called the Cold War! Then what? Then we get President McCain. Because he's still stuck in the Cold War. And Obama dithered and hemmed and hawed in his response to this mess, while McCain said he would personally go to Moscow and deck that paper-hanging sonuvabitch Putin (more or less). Which is dangerous crazy rhetoric. And what does America like to hear during times of international instability in far-off places? Dangerous crazy rhetoric! Also fun to ponder right now: Russia's growing friendship with Iran, Georgia's oil reserves. Surprisingly, Dealbreaker of all things has a terribly informative roundtable on the entire situation that will allow you to sound reasonably intelligent at a cocktail party until you finish your third cocktail and find yourself unable to pronounce any of the names involved. And finally, if the John Edwards scandal had been reported on by the MSM back in 2007, none of this would've happened.

George W. Bush has been celebrating the twilight of his disastrous presidency by seemingly spending the entirety of 2008 overseas. Right now, as NBC constantly reminds us, he's in Beijing, enjoying the Olympics. Also with him is internationally beloved teddy bear war criminal Henry Kissinger! (Read on to learn why this is yet another example of how terrible NBC is.)

Our economy is tanking and our super-wealthy are in trouble because all their money is tied up in poor people's mortgages, or something. But in the rest of the world, there's a whole new generation of oligarchs benefiting from the booming commodities market. One of them, Victor Pinchuk from the Ukraine, is doing something terrible and unheard-of with his billions of dollars—buying status and influence. Amazingly, his deep pocketbooks have even bought him the ear of former President Bill Clinton! That incorruptible public servant hanging out with sketchy billionaires is one thing, but sketchy foreign billionaires? According to the Times, the two men have bonded over "a fondness for blending high policy with kitschy celebrity gatherings." Unmentioned: private jets full of models and coeds? [NYT]

A show about depressed industrial workers ruled by a unfunny megalomaniac is headed for its natural demographic — Russians. The BBC has just sold Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's mega-hit sitcom The Office to the country, which plans to adapt its own version as over 70 other countries have already done. (Slave labor being the high concept that unites us all). This might give Slavic fans of Belle and Sebastian something to do with their free time now that the Russian state legislature has decided to outlaw emo. The reason? Unlike anything else you might associate with the land of nihilism and revolution, it "encourages anti-social behaviour and glorifies suicide." [Guardian, NME]

America's best friends the Saudis are throwing a party in Spain today where they will all celebrate how tolerant they are of other religions or something. So the folks at the Center for Religious Freedom decided to translate some official school textbooks from the Saudi Ministry of Education into English so that we may all shudder at what they teach their children and also maybe kind of laugh, because it honestly reads like a Shouts & Murmers piece. We all know the Jews control the banks, but did you know they also run the nightlife?

You are pretty much everything that is wrong with everything. Read a goddamn book. You are seriously the worst. [The Tumblr That Represents All That Is Wrong and Evil In This World]

A rare, isolated, never-before-seen tribe photographed from a plane high above the Amazon! Dressed in red warpaint and shooting arrows at the camera! What a story! Well... you know us, we love to call bullshit on things. Just last weekend we were ready to call bullshit on the guy who made the "self-portrait" with DHL and a GPS device-equipped suitcase (honestly, people!) but then the dude called himself on it before we got the chance. (Stupid holiday weekend!) Anyway. Is this tribe shit for real?

Ever since Rome elected a straight-up neo-fascist mayor, they've been a little on edge about things. So when Google sent their magic creepy photo-van around town to capture every block for their wonderful Street View feature, Italians naturally fled "into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera's lens." Because they thought it was government surveillance, not the good, benevolent private surveillance we Americans know and love. Or at least don't give a shit about. Silly Italians! [Times of London]

Internet nerds became terribly excited recently when Twitter sprung a man from jail, but it's worth noting that in most of the world, blogging is much, much more likely to send you to to clink. While there are a number of bloggers whose eternal imprisonment—possibly in the Phantom Zone—we fantasize about daily, we grudgingly admit that throwing bloggers in jail for blogging is probably bad. So as a public service, we're here to tell you where not to blog if you value your freedom. China and Iran probably get the most press for their blogger crack-downs, and Malaysia just arrested a blogger this week, but if there's anything we learned from skimming the site of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, it's this: don't Tumblr in Egypt.

Earlier this year, Matt Drudge saved the life of Prince Harry, the UK's adorable ginger-haired lunkheaded Nazi ruler. Harry, you see, had been deployed to Afghanistan, where there are lots of people who'd like to blow him up. But Drudge revealed the deployment, breaking a media embargo, and then they were forced to send Harry back home, where he's more or less safe. For some reason this enrages the English. So the Mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead, whose name is probably spelled "Higginbobotham" but pronounced "Higgins", has demanded an apology from Drudge. The apology is probably not forthcoming. [UPI]

In Italy, amusingly corrupt right-wing media mogul Silvio Berlusconi has just returned to his old position of Prime Minister, after a bitterly contested election that also put a straight-up fascist in charge of Rome. Berlusconi welcomed the country's rightward turn by invoking the name of Francisco Franco's Spanish fascist party. On the way out of power, the departing center-left government "published every Italian's declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet." They didn't even play it off as an accident, either: "The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency." Hah. Stay classy, Italy. We'd check to see what an Italian professional blogger makes, but we're kind of terrified of the whole country. [BBC]

GQ sent supermodel Naomi Campbell to interview Hugo Chavez. Hugo says Fidel Castro is "the most stylish world leader." Ahmadinejad: snubbed. HuffPo offers: "Keep reading -OR- See pictures of Naomi Campbell's bikini beach vacation."

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 19-year-old son of assassinated Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and co-head of her political party, had a Facebook page! Except it was a fake. The fellow behind the fake profile says he used it to meet "a ridiculous number of hot Pakistani girls." (Coincidentally, this is the same reason Nick Denton made all of Gawker Media join the site.) [Radar]