> First off, Milosevic. He is, without doubt, the evilest, most sardonic, masochistic excuse for a human being in the whole of the last fifty years.

I'm on the same opinion, but of course my warning, in these situations, is to focus our attention not on the trial but on the undergoing situation in the Balcans.

What's happening in the Balcanic area is similar to what's going on in Middle East: civil war caused by the clash between different ethnical groups, different cultures, different religions. I don't expect, and don't believe that NATO or other military task forces may resolve in a few weeks a problem of coexistence that's six-centuries old (the first religion war in Kosovo, in fact, happened about in 1380).
Anyway, what we should care for is to avoid that another person takes the power and turns the situation into another ethnical war for his personal economic interest.
What Milosevic did, actually, was a large-scale speculation (in which some countries in the EU and Asia may be involved) which purpose was to drop down the local economy (and consequently the currency exchange rate). Doing this and signing agreements with foreign industrial tycoons (to rebuild what the war has destroyed) produces a flow of "strong" currency (for example USD, DM, GBP) directly in the hands of the dictator.

Now the trial should determine everyone's responsibility, both in war crimes and economical speculation; not only those of the Milosevic's clan, but also those of EU and non-EU countries that helped or used Milosevic to make their own economical interest or in some way speculated on the Balcanic civil wars.

> he denounces it as a "False Tribunal" and that > it was actually NATO that comitted all the
> warcrimes in Yugoslavia.

Of course we see, because as you suppose our view is somehow biased, Milosevic as the 'bad' - so the NATO is the 'good' because defeated Milosevic.
But if the NATO in some way helped to replace Milosevic with other economical speculators or acted only on the political purpose of preventing former USSR to enforce their control of Eastern Europe, then the whole argument of doing war to defend poor people's human rights is false.

Anyway, we should always keep our eyes open and try to not bias our opinion on what the international media want us to believe, in this and other similar situations that continuosly happen in the world.

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> Having never taken a narcotic, legal or otherwise, in my life, I am probably not the best person to talk about whether cannabis and other "soft" drugs should be legalised or not.

We can easily find a background to our opinions by looking to scientifical/medical data about the real danger of taking cannabis or 'soft' drugs; by considering how repression or legalization may change the whole situation of drug traffic and all the consequent criminal facts; by looking to the experience of countries that legalized soft drugs against those that repress their use.
Given these start points, everyone of us should be able to build an opinion by his own.

At any rate, I agree with you also on drug legalization.

AP.