HIGH-CONCEPT INTERNATIONAL THRILLER

JUNK MALE. Special Agent Jack Goodman comes home from Guantánamo to attend his father's funeral. Turns out the old man died of an overdose of fake Viagra, sold by an evil Internet spammer linked to Al Qaeda. Posing as a replica watch enthusiast, Jack tracks the bad guys back to their lair in Afghanistan and blows them to bits. Flushed with success, he sets up the World Wide Web Fraudster Elimination Corporation. First of a series.

FASCIST PIG PASSES ON

Creepy plump mass-murderer, torturer and thief Augusto Pinochet (91), former usurper and dictator of Chile, finally went to his eternal reward on December 10th, 2006. His grieving family will continue to grow fat on his embezzlements. The Church and the Army gave him a suitable sendoff. But as the lawyer for some of his victims observed, when Pinochet arrives in Hell he will find it strangely familiar, resembling some of his own torture chambers.
The corpulent corpus of Henry Kissinger, Pinochet's erstwhile puppet-master, is 83 and still apparently alive. Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing - that sort of thing.
The odiousness of tyrants is not mathematical. Pinochet, in his gory days, killed only a few more than the amateur terrorists of Northern Ireland over three decades. Peanuts, compared to Stalin (20 million or so). Six thousand of Stalin's victims for every one of Pinochet's. So do we hate Stalin, or Hitler, six thousand times as much? It would be difficult. Augusto lacked charm.