The big news today comes from Haiti, where former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has fled to the Central African Republic after a popular uprising overthrew his government. The UN security council has approved the use of multinational peacekeepers, with US marines arriving after a Canadian special forces secured the Port-au-Prince airport. It will be up to these peacekeepers to restore order to a now chaotic society, a condition which several European newspapers have warned might continue for some time.

On Oscar weekend The Passion topped the box office with sales of about $76 million, resulting in a total of $117.5 million since the movie was released. This represents the 7th highest box office opening weekend in history. If you live in France though, you will need to do some traveling to see it, as French cinema chains are refusing to screen the film because of the fear of an outbreak of anti-Semitism. As for the Oscars, many movies might feel bad being crushed by the Lord of the Rings, but they should remember that they could have been Gigli, which won the most awards at the Razzie awards this year -- an award that recognizes the worst films of the year.

The Pope has reaffirmed his opposition to same-sex marriages and called on both Catholic and non-Catholics to oppose legislation favoring the practice, though at the same time Evangelical Christians seem to be somewhat ambiguous on the issue. Meanwhile same-sex marriages continue to occur in San Francisco, where the Washington Post writes about a gay couple getting married after being together 51 years. In two examples of how things could be worse, or possibly end up if Christian conservatives get their way on this issue, we have a story from Saudi Arabia where 50 people were detained and questioned after being suspected of attending a gay wedding. Another story about a recent Human Rights Watch report talks about how homosexuals are routinely sought out, arrested and tortured in Egypt.

And in other news:
- Scientists at the Max Planck Institute have published a paper on the profound effects of forest fires on climate change.
- MIT has come out with a study showing that although the Atkins diet might help you loose weight, it's also much more likely to make you crabby.
- Researchers at the Harvard Medical School have successfully regrown optic nerves. This could lead to a treatment for those people with permanent optical nerve damage.
- Spain has announced plans to build the second most powerful supercomputer in the world.
- Current plans to educate teenagers about sex and STD prevention may have to be revamped because of a generational difference in the definition of sex.
- Two books, one by Kevin Phillips and the other by George Soros, have come out critisizing the Bush administration.
- Bush, in the meantime, has dismissed two members on the government's Council on Bioethics who did not agree with his policies and replaced them with two people who do.
- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has vowed to continue his governmental reforms despite being hammered in a recent state election.
- A story by the Christian Science Monitor about the recent soul-searching by the media about what it chooses to air.
- Human rights groups have praised the conviction of an Israeli soldier who killed a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank after he used live fire to disperse stone-throwing youth.
- The Israeli supreme court has ordered the construction of the wall between Israel and the West Bank to halt temporarily to examine the proposed route around eight Palestinian villages.
- India has will be completing its own wall along the Kashmir border this summer.
- The EU has imposed trade tariffs on the United States after the Bush administration failed to obey a WTO decision.
- The Economist gives an overview of the latest spying controversy at the United Nations.
- NATO has gone public with its intentions to expand into more former Warsaw Pact countries.
- India has announced a date for the upcoming national elections.
- China has struck back at the United States about human rights violations, this time citing America's own problems on the issue.

Finally, French children seem to have a very different perspective of the United States than many Americans do, although the author of the article sort of ruins the effect on at the end -- not questioning what it means for schoolchildren to have such a negative opinion of American policy, but just listing European political failures and calling this trend a distraction from their own problems. I'm not personally convinced that young children are really up on the problems of the European constitution or whether they have a cohesive foreign policy, but I'm fairly sure they can figure out whether attacking another country more or less because you feel like it is wrong or not. He also seems to forget the widespread and deep support America garnered in Europe after the 9/11 attacks, with the major French newspaper headlining "We are all Americans now," or how that support was squandered away by basically being jerks on the world stage. It's this type of mindless superiority that gives the United States a name on the world stage that it probably doesn't deserve given the nature of most of the people living here.