After more than a week of fighting and one failed cease-fire, Russia and Georgia signed a revised cease-fire agreement, but Russian troops remained within 25 miles of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev promised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who negotiated the agreement, that Russian forces would soon withdraw from Georgia. He also insisted that troops would remain in the breakaway Georgian territory South Ossetia. "The superpower showed that she was able to defend her people," said Marina Katayeva, a 30-year-old Russian doctor. "Now we will be more respected." Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russians were "21st-century barbarians" who had essentially raped his country; "Can you say that, you know the victim of a rape is to be blamed for the rape because she wore a short skirt?"
While reporting live from Gori, Tamara Urushadze, a 32-year-old Georgian TV reporter, was shot in the arm by a sniper. Urushadze looked down at the bloody scratch, collapsed onto the ground, then, moments later, resumed her broadcast. In response to the crisis, President George W. Bush postponed a vacation trip to his Texas ranch by one day. Vesti FM, a Russian state-run radio station, reported that the South Ossetia conflict was part of a plot by Vice President Dick Cheney to prevent
Barack Obama from being elected president of the United States, while in the United States, it was suggested that John McCain's speech on Georgia was partly cribbed from Wikipedia. Aides to McCain said there are only so many ways to state historical facts.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned. The United States and Poland finalized a deal that would allow the United States to build a missile-interceptor base on Polish territory, and Ukraine offered the United States use of its missile-warning system. Poland, said Russian Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, "is exposing itself to a strike -- 100 percent." The musical designer for the Beijing Olympics admitted that Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old Chinese schoolgirl who, suspended on wires, performed "Hymn to the Motherland" at the games' opening ceremony, lip-synched the song after Chinese officials decided that the actual singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, was too ugly and bucktoothed to perform before billions. Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who won eight gold medals in Beijing, revealed that he consumes more than 12,000 calories a day by eating three egg sandwiches with fried onions, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, three chocolate-chip pancakes, two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, two pounds of pasta and an entire pizza.
|
