A braided leather whip, a sniper rifle, six jars of fertilizer and a copy of the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook were among the presents foreign leaders have given US President George W. Bush. They are clearly trying to tell him something.
The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published this week by the US State Department, reads like the wish list of the sort of paranoid survivalist who holes up in his log cabin to await Armageddon, having long ago severed all ties with the rest of the world.
The president received a startling array of weapons, including assorted daggers and a machete from Gabon. He got the braided whip with a wooden handle from the Hungarian prime minister. The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, has some tips on how to use some of these implements in a tight spot.
The paperback also explains how to wrestle with an alligator, escape from a mountain lion and take a punch. But the small arsenal of guns presented by Jordan's King Abdullah, including a US$10,000 sniper rifle, would presumably render much of that advice unnecessary.
The king also gave Bush six jars of "various fertilizers" on a rotating wooden stand. It sounds like the sort of present likely to cause offence when coming from a mother-in-law or sibling. But according to the Jordanian embassy, the jars contained neither manure nor the sort of chemicals that can be turned into homemade bombs, but rather an array of fertile volcanic soils found around the country.
In each instance listed by the state department, the acceptance of the gift is justified by the phrase "non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and US government". But acceptance clearly has its own embarrassments.
President Bush was reminded of his problems with language by a vocabulary-expanding game called "Forgotten English," from Brunei.
Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine no-nonsense US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld summoning much enthusiasm for the gold bracelet he got from the Egyptian minister of defense, or the aromatherapy gift set from those cheeky Jordanians. There will, however, be no calming scents wafting around the Pentagon in the near future as the gift was passed on to the general services administration, a government department that disposes of unwanted presents.
If the top members of the administration met to compare gifts at the end of the year Rumsfeld would no doubt have been looking enviously over the president's shoulder at some of his weapons, or at the special presentation edition of The Art of War US Vice President Dick Cheney got from the Chinese vice-president.
But Cheney also received presents clearly intended to enhance his gentler, fun-loving side: a "Happy Day" clock from the Swiss president, gold silk pillows, scented candles and a pottery incense burner (the Jordanians again).
It is apparent that a lot of the foreign dignitaries do not do much research before buying gifts. Bush, a reformed drunk, was given a cellarful of wine over the course of 2004.
CIA agents seem to get a lot of presents, although the recipients (other than then director George Tenet) are not named. Nor are the donor governments, although it is usually easy enough to guess from the gifts, many of which are from the Middle East or Pakistan.
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
COMMUNITY CONFLICT: Concerns about disease spread from corpses has run up against friends and families’ desire to bury their dead as infection spreads in the area Angry residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) attacked and burned a tent that was part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus, the staff there said Saturday. It was the second such attack in the region in a week. No one was hurt in the attack, according to reports but as patients ran out to escape the fire, 18 people with suspected Ebola infections fled the facility and are unaccounted for, a hospital director said. Angry residents arrived at the clinic in the
INSURGENT ACTION: A local independence movement in Balochistan, alleged by Pakistan’s government to be backed by India, claimed responsibility for the strike A suicide bomber detonated an vehicle-borne IED near a railway as a passenger train passed through the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta yesterday, killing at least 23 people and wounding over 70, officials said. The explosion caused two of the train cars to overturn and catch fire, according to footage shared online. The attack happened in an area where security forces are usually stationed, badly damaging several nearby buildings and smashing more than a dozen vehicles parked along the road, according to witnesses and images circulating on social media. Doctors at local hospitals said they had received the wounded, with 20 in critical
RSS