Welcome to Morning Coffee, brought to you by Lindsay Beyerstein with additional links from the UN Dispatch team. Every morning we survey foreign affairs and foreign policy news so you don't have to. We begin with the "Starting Five" items of the day -- these may not always appear on A-1, but they *are* the kinds of stories that will be buzzing in foreign capitals, the UN and wherever foreign policy minds roam.
Starting Five
I SAID I LIKED THE THE BAND, NOT THE TALIBAN - Canada's defense minister has ordered an inquiry into allegations that Canadian military interpreters misidentified innocent Afghans as Taliban supporters because they didn't understand what they were saying. Thomas Hammes, a retired U.S. Marine colonel told the CBC that U.S. forces were experiencing similar problems. "We're willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure ice cream and steak is there. And I would trade all of that for my entire tour if I could have one decent translator," he said.
Link TRISTES TROPIQUES - Celebrated anthropologist and public intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss died yesterday at the age of 100. Strauss wrote numerous influential works of anthropology including Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind, and The Raw and the Cooked. He did fieldwork among Brazilian tribes and founded the structuralist school of anthropology.
Link GUINEA GOLPISTA GOING HOME - A British mercenary who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea is going home. The president of Guinea, Teodoro Obiang, pardoned Simon Mann in an elaborate ceremony today. Curiously, Mann was not allowed to attend his own pardoning. He had to sit on a bench in the notorious Black Beach prison and listen while the president absolved him of his crimes. The 57-year-old had been sentenced to 34 years in prison after he and a group of other mercenaries were busted on an arms shopping spree in Zimbabwe.
Link SHANGHAI CRACKS DOWN ON PUBLIC PJS - Many denizens of Shanghai are accustomed to wearing pajamas in public, but the local government is cracking down on this kind of casual chic ahead of the 2010 World Expo. The campaign has sparked controversy. The pro-pajama faction argues that the local government is revealing its own deep-seated sense of inferiority by trying to sanitize the city for foreigners.
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