"Viva España!" (Guillermo Len Valencia, 1963, President of Colombia, during the official welcoming ceremony of French President Charles De Gaulle at Bogotá's international airport).
Source: Pedro A. Roa-Arboleda

Brazil's chief justice, Celso de Mello, turned down an invitation to dinner with Mr Clinton in protest at an American embassy document which dismissed the country's judicial system as "inefficient".
The American ambassador Melvyn Levitsky spent a week trying to undo "misunderstandings", apologising, too, for a reference to "endemic corruption" in Brazilian culture. The goodwill salvaged by this mea culpa was scuppered again at the weekend by a White House memo to the American press corps. This described Rio de Janeiro as "one of the most dangerous cities in the world". It said also that São Paulo commuters make love in their cars during traffic jams, and that Brasilia is "a dry and sterile city, just as soulless as its administration". Even President Fernando Henrique Cardoso showed a flash of irritation after hearing that the White House wanted to change the time set for a state dinner at his palace. "Who decides about what time I have dinner in my place?" he asked. "That's me." The Senate chairman, Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, referred to the "typical arrogance one can expect from Americans", and the Lower House leader, Inocencio Oliveira, said simply: "I hate Americans."

Speaking at the Givat Haviva Technological College and Jewish-Arab Center for Peace, Daniel Kurtzer was asked why the US is not doing more to pressure Israel. He responded that this is the job of the Israeli people - and urged them to start organizing demonstrations, rallies and letter-writing campaigns against the Sharon government's policies. Both Israelis and Palestinians, he said, should tell their respective governments "that the people have had it." He added that he chose to address students at Givat Haviva because he was confident that they would be willing to act on his advice. Kurtzer even reminded the students that "my generation used to take over the offices of college deans" in order to force change. Apparently realizing that inciting riots was going too far even for his privileged status as ambassador, he hastily added: "I don't recommend that" - but then, lest anyone take his non-recommendation at face value, he continued: "But it was a kind of political action that let the power structure know that we wanted to change and we wanted to see a different way of conducting the affairs of the university, the affairs of the state. We wanted to see political change. It worked over a period of time." This is not the first time Kurtzer has been guilty of grossly undiplomatic behavior. He also publicly declared that Israel should spend less money on protecting residents of the settlements and more on transfering payments to the disabled - a perfectly legitimate opinion for a private citizen, but not the type of budgetary decision one expects a foreign ambassador to become involved in.

U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone sent two leading members of the Philippine Congress into a fit with his remarks to foreign reporters in the capital, Manila.
 "The number one barrier is corruption, not just regarding the courts but also officials outside the judiciary," he said. "Foreign investors have complained about that to me and to other ambassadors here that we have a real problem."

"The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties they think it is their fault."
- Henry Kissinger