Across Difficult Country

A disturbing story from Mexico alerts me to a major donkey safety flaw : A Mexican woman says she fought a 226kg lion with a machete near the resort city of Acapulco and scared him away. Celsa Aleman said she and her seven-year-old niece were riding a donkey along a road when the lion went after the animal's legs. The 35-year-old woman said she found the courage to fight the lion because she thought it would attack her niece. She said she hit the animal with a machete until the beast ran away. If donkeys attract lion attacks, even in  Mexico where wild lions are nearly extinct, then there really is no place safe to ride them. I regret urging everyone to buy one .

In May of 1981 children across America were reporting  clowns who would try to force or lure them into vans . Though the encounters were frightening, the clowns never successfully kidnapped a single child. Soon the reports stopped, and the sinister clowns were never heard from again... until now .

Democracy has one brilliant moment, but it is a moment and it must pay dearly for it. The great days of Athens might, I agree, inspire desires in the subject of a monarchy, languishing in such and such a period under an inept or wicked king. Nevertheless, we would be greatly mistaken if we claimed to establish the superiority of democracy over monarchy by comparing moment for moment, because, in this way of judging, we neglect among other things the consideration of duration, which is a necessary element of these sorts of calculation. In general, all democratic governments are only transitory meteors, whose brilliance excludes duration....  -  Joseph de Maistre, Study on Sovereignty .

“The Bulgarian banks do not have a single penny or dollar invested in risky financial instruments, like the ones, which caused the financial crisis in USA,” the Governor of BNB Ivan Isrkov said, Trud Daily reported. Iskrov together with the Head of the Association of Banks in Bulgaria – Violina Marinova, explained that the banks in Bulgaria are not investment banks, but are commercial banks. According to Iskrov, that was why the banking systems in the region are stable, but he said that a slowing down of the growth rates of the economies was possible.  - " The Bulgarian banks do not have risky financial instruments ", FOCUS Information Agency.