Etc...

Ahh, we've heard it all before

News reports haven't confirmed this yet, but there may be a new job opening in the Albanian government: speechwriter. If so, that would be because of an important address on proposals to deal with the chronic energy shortage that conservative Prime Minister Sali Berisha delivered one recent night on national TV. He was on a roll, too, until he came to a three- paragraph section - on "solving the system of equations" - that sounded more than a little familiar to reporters as they followed along. Or, as one broadcast news director put it, "He was speaking a language that struck us as not naturally his own." So, in the best tradition of investigative journalism , they set out to try to find where those words had been uttered previously. The search took them back three years - to Berisha's predecessor, Fatos Nano, a Socialist noted for enjoying the sound of his own voice. From the archives, the reporters dug out videotape of a speech by Nano on the same subject ... and played the relevant segments back-to-back for the benefit of viewers. With only minuscule differences, the two were identical. It's not known whether the idea to borrow Nano's prose came from Berisha himself or was that of a subordinate. The prime minister's office declined to comment on the matter.