Fredo Finally Gives U.S. Attorney a Good Evaluation

And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, detecting a sliver of good news from Serbia, announced that she was rewarding the Serbian government with a cool $6 million in aid for doing not a whole lot to come to grips with its genocidal past. (Congress had suspended aid to Serbia for not turning over all those indicted for atrocities.) You missed this news? You weren't checking the State Department's announcements at 9 p.m. on July 3?

Rice was happy Serbia, after about a decade of stalling, finally sent a couple of lesser thugs to the Hague tribunal for war crimes, turned over some papers, said it would cooperate with investigators and "reorganized to effectively search for the remaining fugitives." (Reorganizing is invariably an important milestone.) Rice said, however, that the Serbs still must catch Ratko Mladic, the alleged "Butcher of Srebrenica," where 7,000 Muslims were summarily executed in 1995, and Radovan Karadzic, who in the early '90s allegedly helped plan and carry out the extermination of Bosnian Muslims -- the definition of genocide.

For years, the duo had been -- if not exactly on the Belgrade party circuit -- fairly visible, though of late they've been maintaining a more discreet profile.

"Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face . . ."

FEMA Ice Is Going, Going . . .

And from the gift that keeps on giving . . . FEMA, after paying $12.5 million in storage fees, announced Monday that it is throwing away the last 42,000 tons of ice it purchased after Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005.

FEMA bought 112,000 tons in all for $24 million, and kept the unused portions for future use, but no major hurricanes hit since 2005. Now it's going to pay $3.4 million to melt what's left.

FEMA said it didn't know the shelf life for ice; it just buys the stuff. The industry assumes one year, FEMA said, and it had to "consider the health risks" of using its stockpile. In any event, after searing news reports that FEMA sent truckloads of ice after Katrina on odysseys around the country because it could not keep track of them -- and eventually donated some to zoos for use by polar bears and other cold-weather animals -- FEMA is no longer in the business of buying ice for disasters. It will now rely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Hey! Maybe Rep. William J. "Cold Cash" Jefferson (D-La.) could use some?