FARC'd Off

Surfer has just got back from Colombia, and is glad about it, because ten batallions of Venezuelan tanks have since moved up to the border.

Fortunately, on this occasion there is no worrying alignment between the diplomatic crisis and the World Cup qualifiers fixtures list, so nobody is expecting a full-on military bust-up between Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, but things are getting muy tenso nonetheless.

A couple of VIP dodgies have been taken out in the past seven days and have crucially been survived by their laptops.

First to go was Las FARC's Raúl Reyes, killed by Colombian forces while he was on the Ecuadorian side of the Putumayo river. The Colombians claim to have fired at him from their side, yet somehow they managed to pick up his laptop afterwards, on which were apparently saved records of Hugo Chávez's donations of $300m to the guerrillas and evidence of liaison between them and the government in Quito.

Meanwhile the Venezuelans claim that the hard disk of another laptop found on the dead person of a Caracas narcotraficante will in turn incriminate the Colombian government in some way or another.

Washington, fresh from dumping a load of missiles on a Somali village, came out strongly in support of Álvaro Uribe. It probably helped that the Colombian President has also accused the now defunct FARC No2 of attempting to buy uranium in order to sell it at a profit.