Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leader on Wednesday rejected making major changes to the new Constitution, diminishing Sunni Arab hopes of amending the charter to avoid being shut out of the nation’s vast oil wealth.

Sunnis were reluctant to sign on to the Constitution last fall, fearing that provisions granting wide powers to autonomous regions would leave oil in the hands of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Sunnis dominate in western and much of northwestern and northcentral Iraq, but the oil lies beneath Kurdistan and parts of southern Iraq that one day may be subsumed in a semi-independent region controlled by Shiites…

“We will stop anyone who tries to change the Constitution,” said Mr. Hakim, whose party has close ties to Iran. “Many of the people who voted for us were promised federalism in the south,” he said, referring to the form of government allowing for semiautonomous regions. He said Kurds, who joined Shiites to form the current ruling coalition, “agree with us about this condition, and we will continue our strategic coalition with our Kurdish brothers.”

I don’t have any non-obvious comments, but I thought that this story deserved a little attention.

“Birgit Nilsson”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgit_Nilsson , the Swedish soprano famous, among other things, for her Brünnhilde in Solti’s pathbreaking Decca Ring cycle and her Isolde on Boehm’s Tristan, is dead at the age of 87. Her recordings speak for themselves, but there are also plenty of nice anectotes in the obits. From the “New York Times”:http://tinyurl.com/deo5r :

bq. After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland’s famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t pulled it yet.” After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies.

The NYT obit has some MP3s (including one of the Liebestod from Tristan). See also the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1980878,00.html and the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102475.html .

Bob Dylan, “1963”:http://bobdylan.com/songs/withgod.html :

bq. In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

The Vatican “2006”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1981591_1,00.html :

bq. JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan”.

Ann Althouse has taken issue with my post comparing the Plame leak to the NSA leak. In that post, I made, more or less, three points.

[click to continue…]