What the hell? I went to the — I assumed — stu­pen­dously bor­ing Ahmed Cha­l­abi press con­fer­ence this after­noon and it went some­thing like this:

Cha­l­abi: I was attacked this morn­ing, but I’m fine, thanks.
Ques­tion: Can you tell us about the coun­ter­feit­ing charges against you and the mur­der rap against your nephew?
Cha­l­abi: Oh, those… (chuckle.) They were reduced to a sum­mons. I went to the judge (al-Malaki) today and all charges have been dropped against us.

This was in Ara­bic, and I’m obvi­ously para­phras­ing, but that was the gist of it. But jeeze; what the hell? Dropped charges? I’ve got a call in to al-Malaki, but so far, no response on this. I won­der if it’s just a trans­la­tion error. Very weird.

[UPDATE: Ho, ho. Turns out Cha­l­abi asked that the charges be dropped — not that they were.]