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President Bush's 'Toilet Note' and Other U.N. Oddities
Report by Stewart Stogel, at the United Nations building in New York As the U.N. High Level World Summit entered its second day, was the talk about the fight against terrorism? The war on poverty? An attack on illiteracy? No ... Talk among the diplomats and the media was George W. Bush's "toilet note" alert to Condie Rice during Wednesday's Security Council meeting. The hand-scribbled note warning the U.S. delegation of an impending bathroom break was photgraphed and later distributed by Reuters.
Story Continues Below Today reporters were asking, "Did Bush want to make numnber 1 or 2?" Others were busy researching past bathroom "breaks" at U.N. headquarters. This reporter remembers a Security Council ambassador who, during the 1991 Gulf War, conducted an ad hoc press briefing in the men's room. "I am working on the story for tomorrow (Friday)," exclaimed James Bone, the U.N. reporter for The Times (London). The intrepid Mr. Bone spent the morning in "intensive" research on the subject. Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again, on-again visit of mercurial Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has totally confused the U.N.'s protocal office as well as the U.S. Secret Service. Chavez, who complained that the White House was trying to force him to "walk the streets of the Big Apple, alone, unprotected," by denying the visas of several bodyguards, decided to take a chance and literally hopped a last-minute flight to New York Thursday morning.
Privately, diplomatic sources tell NewsMax that Washington was annoyed that some of Chavez's bodyguards were in fact Cuban nationals on loan from Fidel Castro. Chavez has publicly called Castro his "mentor." He also paid a high-profile visit to Havana last month, where both leaders railed against "efforts" by the Bush administration to bring down their governments. While the Venezuelan mission to the U.N. has refused to release details of Chavez's visit, intrepid reporters have begun to "stake out" all the men's rooms at U.N. headqurters ... just in case.
Editor's note:
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