This is particularly frightening if it turns out it the material is in fact enriched uranium as some have reported:

Slovak and Hungarian police seized a kilo (2.2 lbs) of radioactive material and arrested three people in a joint operation on Wednesday, a spokesman said.

Slovak police spokesman Martin Korch said the material was being examined and did not confirm a report carried by the Slovak news agency SITA that it was enriched uranium.

“This one kilogram should have been sold for one million U.S. dollars,” Korch said.

These cases are not uncommon in and around the former Soviet Union. It is truly just a matter of time before terrorists get their hands on enough material to make a radiological weapon.

He’ll be in China another day so it will be interesting to see what happens this evening:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy will summon senior aides to a security meeting when he returns from China on Wednesday, after a second night of violence in Paris suburbs left around 80 police hurt.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon and Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie would be among officials at the meeting, Sarkozy’s spokesman David Martinon said in a statement on Tuesday.

Sarkozy will first visit a senior police officer seriously hurt in Villiers-le-Bel, Martinon said, referring to the suburb north of Paris where the deaths of two youths in a crash with a police car on Sunday sparked the latest unrest.

The guns came out overnight in Paris:

A crowd of youths set police barricades on fire and threw stones and Molotov cocktails at officers, who retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets. In Villiers-le-Bel and surrounding areas, youths set fire to 36 vehicles, the area’s prefecture said.

Youths were seen firing buckshot at police and reporters. A police union official said 38 officers were wounded, including three seriously — one of whom had a shoulder wound after a shot from a hunting rifle pierced his bullet-proof vest. One reporter also was injured.

Talk in the blogosphere mainly centers around the media’s fear of the “M word”. James Joyner:

Interestingly, those without background knowledge of the 2005 riots would have no idea from reading these stories that the “youths” killed, those perpetrating the riots, and the suburbs in question were predominantly Muslim and that ethnic unrest was the tinder sparked by the incidents.

Pam at Right Voices mocks the mainstream media with a headline:

Youths of undertermined ethnic extraction burn Paris for a second night.

While The Transatlantic Conservative hears nothing but Newspeak from the media:

Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an Appendix[1] in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suited the totalitarian regime of the Party [of political correctness - ed.], whose aim was to make any alternative thinking (”thoughtcrime”) or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

Wolf Howling takes a look at the violent ‘burbs:

The riots are just the most visible symptom of a violent subculture in the suburbs, much of it associated with Wahhabi / Salafi Islam. Other notable examples of this violent subculture are here and here.

Snaphanen has more on the touchy neighborhoods:

The euphemism for these enclaves — “quartier sensible”—bears a nugget of truth if correctly translated as “touchy neighborhoods.” Villiers le Bel is in the administrative district of Sarcelles / Garges-les-Gonesses about 20 km north of Paris. Not so long ago Sarcelles was the home sweet home of Jewish refugees from North Africa; today it is their nightmare. They endure constant attacks and harassment from the permanently enraged African-Arab-Muslim residents who live cheek by jowl with their still neat clean streets.

Not surprising is it? Jews suffer, the police suffer, and perhaps most horrifically Ronald McDonald suffers:

Not to make too much light of of a serious issue, but why do the rioters in Paris always target McDonald’s? Yeah I know it is a symbol of evil American imperialism. But so is KFC, so is Burger King and Starbucks, of which there are plenty in Paris. Yet time and time again only McDonald’s is attacked by the mobs. Wonder why that is.

I think Ed answered his own question - unless it turns out that Muslim youths are really just enraged over the presence of trans fats in their fries. Whatever the reason, Girl on the Right is looking forward to a Sarkozy crackdown:

It was hoped by many - myself included - that once Sarkozy was elected he would put a stop to this nonsense. He obviously has little patience for the “scum”, which is how he was elected in the first place. I do hope that on his return from Beijing he actually puts his foot down and squashes this ridiculous intifada. Now they’ve started attacking the cops - it’s time to end this.

Sarkozy is out of town (China) but he did issue a statement:

President Sarkozy, who as Interior Minister two years ago was criticised for appearing to provoke weeks of copycat violence, interrupted a state visit to China to appeal for calm. “Let everyone cool down and let justice determine who is responsible,” he said.

If the violence spreads, and he has to return early, he’ll probably be a bit more animated. We’ll know more in a few hours.

This is going to piss off Berezovsky’s hosts:

Exiled Russia tycoon Boris Berezovsky said Friday he is funding underground groups to “prepare people to go to the streets” to overthrow President Vladimir Putin’s government.

Berezovsky said Putin had violated the constitution and therefore his ouster was legitimate — and forecast a possible uprising like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution between elections in December and March.

“I don’t fund parties which are openly presented on the Russian political scene because it’s absolutely useless, but I (fund) people who are underground and that are trying to fight against the regime,” he told reporters.

“They are doing what underground movements all around the world are doing, they prepare people to go to the streets, to fight, to use force power against a criminal government.”

He said such an uprising could come after parliamentary elections on December 2 and before presidential polls three months later.

“I think it will be very dangerous months for Russia,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Berezovsky has made statements like this. I doubt that there’s much substance here but it’s still interesting to watch it play out.

The video is gross but very cool. I’m just getting over a bug, and I’m still a little queasy, so watching this wasn’t easy. Bear Grylls really earns his pay.

Many believe that land developers are behind the fires but that doesn’t seem like a logical explanation for more than thirty fires breaking out within such a short timeframe:

Forest fires raged out of control in Greece for a fourth day, killing at least 63 people and scorching the grounds of Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic games.

Authorities detained 32 people on suspicion of setting fires deliberately or through negligence and offered rewards of up to 1 million euros ($1.37 million) for information leading to arsonists. European Union nations were among those providing fire-fighting planes as heat and strong winds contributed to the spread of about 250 blazes across Greece since Aug. 24, the deadliest in the country’s recent history.

“We have every reason to believe it won’t stop here,'’ Health Ministry official Panos Efstathiou said yesterday in a phone interview. The ministry said today that the latest casualties include about 60 injured people who were hospitalized. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, the fire service said.

Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis mobilized the army to battle the flames after declaring a state of emergency that allows the government to requisition private property and labor. Karamanlis, who faces an election on Sept. 16, called on citizens to assist firefighters.

“This is an indescribable national tragedy, and my pain and my anger are as deep as yours,'’ he said on Aug. 25.

Flames trapped people who tried to flee in their cars, save their homes and crops or rescue others. Several villages in central and southern Greece were evacuated.

“Many people were surprised, panicked or refused to leave their homes,'’ fire service spokesman Nikolaos Diamantis said yesterday at a televised news conference.

There are some hints that motives beyond mere greed may be behind these fires:

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis declared a national state of emergency on Saturday. “Our country is experiencing an indescribable tragedy,” he said in a televised address.

Karamanlis made it clear that his government believes the unusually high number of fires was evidence of plans by arsonists to create mayhem.

…However, Public Order Minister Vyron Polydoras backed Karamanlis’s claim. The minister said last night that Greece faced an “asymmetrical threat.”

He did not expand on what he meant by this but echoed the prime minister’s thoughts that the evidence pointed to a concerted effort by arsonists, without suggesting what might be their motives.

What a Cold War flashback. Putin going old school isn’t really an immediate threat. Actually the attempt, using his aging bombers, is rather sad.

This is political correctness at it’s absolute finest:

A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.

Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass.

The Dutch are having no part of it:

“Sure. Lets call God Allah. Lets then call a church a mosque and pray five times a day. Ramadan sounds like fun,” Welmoet Koppenhol wrote in a letter to the newspaper.

Gerrit de Fijter, chairman of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, told the paper he welcomed any attempt to “create more dialogue”, but added: “Calling God ‘Allah’ does no justice to Western identity. I see no benefit in it.”

A spokesman from the union of Moroccan mosques in Amsterdam said Muslims had not asked for such a gesture.

Funny how the mosque’s spokesman wanted no part of it isn’t it?

Iran has serious self-confidence issues:

Expediency Council Chairman Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said here Wednesday that undoubtedly, Europe owes its scientific development to Muslims scientists especially Iranians.

“Unfortunately, the world of Islam is today in need of western science. The Islamic Revolution is determined to return that glorious era to the world of Islam. This is why enemies of Islam are hurling obstacles on the way under different pretexts,” said Rafsanjani in an address to a group of the short-term students of the World Center of Islamic Sciences.

Rafsanjani said two scientific centers, i.e. Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin and the World Center of Islamic Sciences in Qom, were established in the early years of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in order to foster unity in the world of Islam.

He added that knowledge about different aspects of religion and its teaching to the public is a scientific duty for those who are capable of learning and teaching.

According to the EC Chairman, real science would always bring unity and affection while division would always deepens under the shadow of ignorance.

The only surprising thing about this statement is his admission that the Islamic world is currently lagging the West. This topic was recently covered by Steve Paulson for Salon:

Today, it’s something of an impediment for the Muslim world to continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to obscure some very important differences between modern science and medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense.

In other words, the glorious era, wasn’t quite so glorious.

Intelligence gained from the investigation into the recent UK attacks is troubling:

E-mail addresses for American individuals were found on the same password-protected e-mail chains used by the United Kingdom plotters to communicate with Qaeda handlers in Europe, a counterterrorism official told The New York Sun yesterday. The American and German intelligence community now believe the secure e-mail chains used in the United Kingdom plot have provided a window into an operational Qaeda network in several countries.

“Because of the London and Glasgow plot, we now know communications have been made from Al Qaeda to operatives in the United States,” the counterterrorism official said on condition of anonymity. “This plot helps to connect a lot of stuff. We have seen money moving a lot through hawala networks and other illicit finance as well.” But this source was careful to say that at this point no specific information, such as names, targets or a timeline, was known about any particular plot on American soil. The e-mail addresses that are linked to Americans were pseudonyms

That folks tied to al Qaeda are operating in the United States isn’t really news. Most of them are probably functioning at the support level and not directly carrying out operations themselves. Otherwise, things would be a lot more violent around here. All we can do is hope the security folks get the breaks they need, find them, and roll them up.