The transcript of the above Olbermann rant can be read in the next link but you should really should listen to him. After seeing the movie Good Night, and Good Luck I despaired over the lack of a modern Edward R. Murrow. I despaired over the lack of a literate commentator who would expose the abuses of power. Who knew that an ex-sportscaster would fill those shoes?
Before Congress recessed, it passed, amid much criticism, the Military Commissions Act (MCA). The Act has consequences for citizens and non-citizens alike. Among it's worst features, it authorizes the President to detain, without charges, anyone whom he deems an unlawful enemy combatant. This includes U.S. citizens. It eliminates habeas corpus review for aliens. It also makes providing "material support" to terrorists punishable by military commission. And, once again, the military commissions procedures allow for coerced testimony, the use of "sanitized classified information" (where the source is not disclosed), and trial for offenses not historically subject to trial by military commissions. (Terrorism is not historically a military offense; it's a crime.) Finally, by amending the War Crimes Act, it allows the president to authorize interrogation techniques that may nonetheless violate the Geneva Conventions and provides future and retroactive immunity for those who engage in or authorize those acts.
Given the troubling new broad powers Congress has given the President, what will happen now?
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan
If there is one book to read that gets to the history and passions of the Jews and Palestinians, it is this one. It will rip your heart out. It's the story a Palestinian who was driven from his home and the Israeli who moved in and their meeting in 1967. It's simply written but manages to put their lives into the context of the history going on around them. It starts with the building of a house in Palestine in 1936 and the survivial of a Jewish family in Bulgaria during WWII. It becomes clear that the Palestinians were the victims of forced ethnic cleansing and that they have no intention of leaving the land that they love. From Aamzon:
To see in human scale the tragic collision of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, Tolan focuses on one small stone house in Ramla--once an Arab community but now Jewish. Built in 1936 by an Arab family but acquired by a Jewish family after the Israelis captured the city in 1948, this simple stone house has anchored for decades the hopes of both its displaced former owners and its new Jewish occupants. With remarkable sensitivity to both families' grievances, Tolan chronicles the unlikely chain of events that in 1967 brought a long-dispossessed Palestinian son to the threshold of his former home, where he unexpectedly finds himself being welcomed by the daughter of Bulgarian Jewish immigrants. Though that visit exposes bitterly opposed interpretations of the past, it opens a real--albeit painful--dialogue about possibilities for the future. As he establishes the context for that dialogue, Tolan frankly details the interethnic hostilities that have scarred both families. Yet he also allows readers to see the courage of families sincerely trying to understand their enemy. Only such courage has made possible the surprising conversion of the contested stone house into a kindergarten for Arab children and a center for Jewish-Arab coexistence. What has been achieved in one small stone building remains fragile in a land where peacemaking looks increasingly futile. But Tolan opens the prospect of a new beginning in a concluding account of how Jewish and Arab children have together planted seeds salvaged from one desiccated lemon tree planted long ago behind one stone house. A much-needed antidote to the cynicism of realpolitik.
I’ve read the book during the last Israeli War on Lebanon, and to be honest, it has changed my life. It has shaped and reshaped many thought I had in my mind since I learned the word “Palestine” (Falasteen) in my childhood, and corrected many others I had toward the “good” Zionist.
Very few in the West can honestly claim to have been able to appraise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an objective point of view that takes into account nothing but the facts. In all fairness, until quite recently, it has been tricky to find complete information that was not deformed and manipulated by heavy ideological filters. Surprisingly, that same claim can be made for many who live in the heart of the land itself, neighbours to an “enemy” who has a destiny that is entwined, but without an idea of who this “enemy” is and what motivations drive him.
Our beliefs and any actions we might take regarding the conflict are influenced by the version of the story that was made available to us, often without our being aware of how simple it is to distort facts, and usually out of good faith, we in the West have accepted almost entirely the veracity of the version that is dominant in our society. Not going into all the reasons behind the monolithic embracing of the Israeli narrative, we Westerners are only now beginning to see the holes in the thesis that Israel is the home of the “good guys”; that it is just a small, weak country formed from Holocaust survivors who had built an island of democracy and sanity in a sea of blind Arab anger. In part, this is the effect of identification with those who we perceive to be similar to us and who we think share our same values. Perhaps we never took the time to look at the conflicting versions of the same events and stopped to ask ourselves why the narratives are so dramatically different. It boils down to a question of ignorance or indifference. It is possible that the key to coming to a resolution of the conflict will only happen when we are able to suspend our “automatic affiliations” and look objectively at what has actually taken place.
"The Lemon Tree" In the summer of 1967 three Arab men return to their birthplace of Ramla and find themselves in an unrecognizable homeland.
The young Arab man approached a mirror in the washroom of Israel’s West Jerusalem bus station. Bashir Khairi stood alone before a row of porcelain basins and leaned forward, regarding himself. He turned his head slightly, left to right and back again. He smoothed his hair, nudged his tie, pinched his clean-shaven face. He was making certain all of this was real.
For nearly two decades, since he was six years old, Bashir had been preparing for this journey. It was the breath, the currency, the bread of his family, of nearly every family he knew. It was what everyone talked about, all the time: return. In exile, there was little else worth dreaming of.
Bashir gazed at his reflection. Are you ready for this journey? he asked himself. Are you worthy of it? It seemed his destiny to return to the place he’d mainly heard about and mostly couldn’t remember. It felt as if he were being drawn back by hidden magic; as if he were preparing to meet a secret, long-lost lover. He wanted to look good.
“Bashir!” yelled his cousin Yasser, snapping the younger man back to the moment in the bus station men’s room. “Yallah! Come on! The bus is leaving!”
The two men walked out into the large waiting hall of the West Jerusalem terminal, where their cousin Ghiath was waiting anxiously.
It was nearly noon on a hot day in July of 1967. All around Bashir, Yasser, and Ghiath, strangers rushed past: Israeli women in white blouses and long dark skirts; men in wide-brimmed black hats and white beards; children in side curls. The cousins hurried toward their bus.
They had come that morning from Ramallah, a Palestinian hill town half an hour to the north, where they lived as refugees. Before they embarked, the cousins had asked their friends and neighbors how to navigate this alien world called Israel: Which bus should we take? How much is a ticket? How do we buy it? Will anyone check our papers once we board the bus? What will they do if they find out we are Palestinians? Bashir and his cousins had left Ramallah in the late morning. They rode south in a group taxi to East Jerusalem and arrived at the walls of the Old City, the end of the first leg of their journey. Only weeks before, these walls had been the site of fierce combat, leading to devastation for the Arabs and the occupation of East Jerusalem by Israel. Emerging from the taxi, the cousins could see soldiers stationed at Damascus Gate, the northern entrance to the Old City. From there the three men turned west and walked away from the ancient walls and across an invisible line.
Fresh Air from WHYY, May 15, 2006 · Sandy Tolan talks about his book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East. The account grew out of a 1998 NPR documentary in which Tolan reported on a friendship between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman that served as an example of the region's fragile history.
IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?
That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.
The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.
This YNET report is a quite a typical example of the mainstream Israeli media coverage of the Occupation's atrocities and war crimes. Much (though by far not all) the information is open and accessible to the public. Every Israeli can now know that Israel runs a concentration camp near the allegedly no-longer-occupied Gaza, with large numbers of Palestinians, including children, abducted from the Strip and held there for unknown periods of time, some released, some moved on for further "treatment." But this piece of information – to which the article dedicates approximately 50 words – is flooded by more than 200 words of pure propaganda, like in the darkest dictatorships, which frames the news item in a safe way and silences in advance any critical questions or thoughts. The impression the reader gets is that there's some camp out there where Palestinians get more than a fair treatment.
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
This book is a monster. For one, it's over 1,000 pages. I ran out of time to read it and had to return it to the library with 200 pages unread. I put it on hold and waited my turn again to finish it. It was worth it. If you want to know why the Middle Easterners might just be a teensy bit upset with America, look no further. He covers the history of the Middle East from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI to present time. The amazing thing is that, from the late 1970s on, he was in the middle of it. He was in Kandahar when the Soviet tanks rolled in during their invasion of Afghanistan. The only think he skimps on is Lebanon, but he has another book about that, which I ordered, and is on it's way to my local library branch. Anyway, what more can I say? It's just fucking incredible. From Amazon:
Combining a novelist's talent for atmosphere with a scholar's grasp of historical sweep, foreign correspondent Fisk (Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon) has written one of the most dense and compelling accounts of recent Middle Eastern history yet. The book opens with a deftly juxtaposed account of Fisk's two interviews with Osama bin Laden. In the first, held in Sudan in 1993, bin Laden declared himself "a construction engineer and an agriculturist." He had no time to train mujahideen, he said; he was busy constructing a highway. In the second, held four years later in Afghanistan, he declared war on the Saudi royal family and America.Fisk, who has lived in and reported on the Middle East since 1976, first for the (London) Times and now for the Independent, possesses deep knowledge of the broader history of the region, which allows him to discuss the Armenian genocide 90 years ago, the 2002 destruction of Jenin, and the battlefields of Iraq with equal aplomb. But it is his stunning capacity for visceral description—he has seen, or tracked down firsthand accounts of, all the major events of the past 25 years—that makes this volume unique. Some of the chapters contain detailed accounts of torture and murder, which more squeamish readers may be inclined to skip, but such scenes are not gratuitous. They are designed to drive home Fisk's belief that "war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death." Though Fisk's political stances may sometimes be controversial, no one can deny that this volume is a stunning achievement.
Blood and betrayal After four years of the badly botched "war on terror," are we ready to hear the hard words of Robert Fisk -- a gutsy war correspondent who says the West has wronged the Middle East?
Knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn't. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.
A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought, when Major General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British Empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don't forget. "Farangiano," the driver shouted and pointed down into the gorge and grinned at me. "Foreigners."
It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of the mountain.
An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at once from our last meeting in a ruined village. "I am sorry Mr Robert, but I must give you the first search," he said, prowling through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad, it is easy," he said, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time, lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see us," he said.
After an hour, two armed Arabs - one with his face covered in a kuffiah scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank rocket-launcher over his right shoulder - came screaming from behind two rocks.
"Stop! Stop!" As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head on the windscreen. "Sorry, sorry," the bespectacled man said, putting down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another search. The road grew worse as we continued, the 4x4 skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. "Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising slogan the Toyota company would probably forgo.
There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas - the first Arab fighter in the battle against Moscow - was back again in the mountains he knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt. Then Bin Laden himself appeared, in combat uniform f and wearing shades. He carefully patted my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. "Salaam aleikum," I said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied "Aleikum salaam" to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He was a machine, checking out another machine.
Riverbend is one of the most eloquent bloggers out of Iraq. She is a young woman in her 20s. Her blog has been silent for 2 1/2 months which has concerned many in the blogosphere. She is back.
This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
It's very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.
The latest horror is the study published in the Lancet Journal concluding that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war. Reading about it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a reasonable figure. It wasn't at all surprising. On the other hand, I so wanted it to be wrong. But... who to believe? Who to believe....? American politicians... or highly reputable scientists using a reliable scientific survey technique?
The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis…)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).
My question to myself, in other words, is like Thoreau's famous question to Ralph Waldo Emerson when Emerson came to visit him in jail after he was arrested for not paying his poll tax as a protest against slavery:
Emerson: What are you doing in there, Henry?
Thoreau: No, Waldo, the question is: What are you doing out there?
It's easy to think up excuses now -- we were in the minority, the media was against us, the country was against us. We didn't know how bad it would be. [...]
We were all complicit. I was complicit. Because I was afraid -- afraid to sacrifice my comfortable middle class lifestyle, afraid to lose my job and my house, afraid of the IRS, afraid to go to jail.
But not nearly as afraid, of course, as the thousands of Iraqis who have been tortured or murdered, or who, like Riverbend, are forced to live in bloody chaos, day after day. Which is why, reading her post today, I couldn't help but feel deeply, bitterly ashamed -- not just of my country, but of myself.
I just hope that in the next life I don't run into Henry David Thoreau.
I have stopped writing on my website for a while now… And the reason is perhaps; because I was occupied working with the Iraqis who fled the hell of life inside Iraq, or perhaps that I was bored from the same talk about the painful reality that is going on for more than three years, until I no longer like to talk, as if repeating the same words, uselessly. Iraqis are still dying everyday; killed by trapped cars, sectarian militia, and death squads who carry out random assassinations on the streets. Or they die by assassinations organized against every nationalist or cultured Iraqi, against every scientist, doctor, or university professor… There is someone out there who decided to assassinate everything in Iraq, everything that moves on the land of Iraq, and bears the Iraqi identity… A Sunniey or a Shia'at, rich or poor, a Muslim or not a Muslim, cultured or not, with or against the occupation; all these are targets, and dead bodies are filling the streets, eaten by dogs… And Bush is still living in his delusions, giving speeches about imaginary victories in Iraq. Is he fooling himself, or his people? Perhaps both. This is what tyrants do, all over the world. If Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, this Bush is no less a tyrant… Currently he is imposing his viewpoint upon the American people, depleting the tax payer's budget to finance an unjust war, a war that destroyed Iraq, dislodged its people, and deprived the country of its national unity, peace, and security. All for what?
Disarm the militias? How? They have totally infilitrated the military and police. They are the power behind the throne. He can no more disarm them than Bush can endorse gay marriage.
If he tries, they will kill him and his American guards, in the Green Zone. Bush is frighteningly detached from reality here. Maliki serves not one day longer than Sadr and Sistani wants them to. There is no Iraqi state, no reason for Iraqis to step up beyond their own personal motivation. Bush is literally asking the impossible and all the sloganeering or time tables won't solve that.
The only thing to do is to talk to the clerics to plan a peaceful exit over the next few months. The Iraqi civil war is going to blow up, we can't stop it and we can't control the outcome.
All Governments Lie!: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone by Myra MacPherson
I. F. Stone is the patron saint of bloggers. I came across I. F. Stone late. I didn't turn against the war in Vietnam until 1968 and I. F. Stone folded his I. F. Stone Weekly in 1971. I wasn't aware of anything but mainstream press. I had heard of the I. F. Stone Weekly but had not read it. In 1974 a documentary on I. F. Stone was released and I saw that. That was when I became a big fan of I. F. Stone. Not only was he a lefty but he was an outsider. He read everything and found the government's lies in plain site. He was the original blogger. He was also a big influence on much of the left wing of journalism today. Not only is this book I. F. Stone's story but it's also the story of the left wing in this country. From Amazon:
With painstaking research, MacPherson offers a penetrating look at one of the nation's most respected journalists and a tour de force of five decades of challenge to the principles of press freedom in a democracy. A man of astonishing energy and intelligence, Stone began his career at 15 as editorial writer in 1923 for the Philadelphia Record and later the New York Evening Post. He went on to write for the Nation, PM, and his own I. F. Stone's Weekly. Suffering poor vision and eventual deafness, Stone eschewed coziness with high-placed sources, relying instead on meticulous research and low-level government workers who had a better feel for what was actually happening. A descendent of Russian Jews, Stone was born too late for the height of the radical socialist era but maintained progressive ideals and was highly skeptical of government policies. He opposed Joseph McCarthy's Red-baiting, the Vietnam War, and FBI surveillance of citizens. He himself was a lifelong target of the FBI. MacPherson chronicles the internecine strife on the Left during and since the cold war era, with Stone battling away at the excesses of capitalism. Interviews with friends, family, and colleagues offer a personal look at a complex man: demanding, prickly, passionate, and iconoclastic.
Here is Myra MacPherson's forward to All Governments Lie!:
In writing this book it has not been easy keeping up with the fast-breaking news about a man who has been dead for seventeen years. Lest you think I jest, reflect on this.
In 2004, Philip Roth gave I. F. Stone a walk-on part in his masterful work of fact and fiction The Plot Against America. In Roth's mesmerizing "it can happen here" tale of fascism triumphant, Charles A. Lindbergh, in real life the international aviation ace and Hitler admirer, has defeated FDR. On page 316 of the novel, I. F. Stone is carted off with FDR New Dealers Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, and other real famous men by President Lindbergh's gestapo-style FBI as pogroms begin in America. Roth's novel vividly relates the fear among American Jews in 1942 when fascism was a real threat. Back then, journalist I. F. Stone was among the alarmed who excoriated isolationist Lindbergh's coziness with the Third Reich.
Uncanny echoes of Stone are heard in concert halls, on radio, or on CDs of the Kronos Quartet as his distinctive voice dips in and out of the music. With a continued war in Iraq, the Kronos Quartet and composer Scott Johnson found new poignancy and symbolism in Stone's antiwar lectures for peace taped decades ago and incorporated into "How It Happens," Johnson's 1993 work for amplified string quartet. Stone's twenty-two-year-old words punctuate a world that remains as frightening as when he spoke them -- a combustible Middle East, North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats, and a messy, unnecessary war in Iraq -- "How much bloodshed, cruelty, suffering? How many survivors to wonder? Was it a Canadian goose, or a real ICBM heading one way or the other, that set off the great conflagration? Think what would have happened if -- " Stone's voice is deliberately and dramatically ended in midsentence.
What appears to be a fleeting apparition of owl-eyed Izzy rushes by in the background of real footage of a McCarthy hearing in George Clooney's award-winning 2005 movie on Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck.
The twentieth century's premier independent journalist, known to everyone from the corner grocer to Einstein as Izzy, is honored on campuses that award I. F. Stone chairs, fellowships, and scholarships. Institutions rank his tiny one-man Weekly in the Greatest Hits of twentieth-century journalism. In one major study, Stone's Weekly placed number 16 in the top 100, behind coverage of Hiroshima, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, and the work of early-century muckrakers. As an individual voice, he placed ahead of Harrison Salisbury, Dorothy Thompson, Neil Sheehan, William Shirer, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Murray Kempton, and other worthies. Some who once ruled Georgetown and political society, such as columnist Joe Alsop and the acerbic H. L. Mencken, did not make the cut. Walter Lippmann placed 64. Such are the vicissitudes of life for journalists who once stood so high. "This kind of list is needed in journalism,'' said Mitchell Stephens, of NYU. "Nobody thinks of journalism in terms of decades or centuries.'' It is important to examine why some endure.
"All Governments Lie" Radical journalist I.F. Stone spent his career challenging government deception and press complicity. This new biography shows why his legacy matters.
I.F. Stone, the great radical journalist who died in 1989, no doubt would have objected just as vociferously to comparisons between his small but influential weekly newsletter and today's buzzing blogs as does Myra MacPherson, author of the wonderful new biography "All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone." Yet he surely would have sympathized with the wired idealists whose self-appointed mission is to correct the mainstream media, chastise the right-wing propagandists and excavate the critical information that officialdom prefers to keep buried.
It was, then, part of Izzy's charm that he never accepted the idea that in order to be a heretic, a maverick, a solo practitioner, it was necessary to be a martyr or a monk. As Peter Osnos, who had worked briefly for Izzy at the start of his own distinguished journalistic and publishing career, pointed out, it was not only on The Nation's ticket that he danced his way across the Atlantic. He and Esther used to go out dancing twice a week. More significantly, his insistence on his perks had less to do with hedonism than a sense of dignity, of self-confidence, of earned entitlement. He wasn't about to allow a priggish journalistic establishment to marginalize him. He once said, "You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." He embodied the romantic idea of one man pitted against the system.
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.
Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.
"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.
"If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.
To keep the peace we made sure no-one ever said anything bad about General MacArthur when Velasco was around. In fact we thought it best that you didn't mention anything about general MacArthur at all.
As I said in my piece today 'Vets Group Proves GOP Does Not Support Troops,' careful scrutiny by the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) shows that by a ludicrous margin, it is Senate Democrats, not Republicans, who truly support active troops, Veterans and military families.
Of all the statistics to emerge from Israel's recent war on Lebanon, the most shocking concerns the number of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on or fired into Lebanon.
A cluster bomb is made up of a canister that opens and releases hundreds of individual bomblets, which are dispersed and explode over a wide area, showering it with molten metal and lethal fragments.
About 40 percent of the bomblets dropped by Israel (many of which were American-made) did not explode in the air or on impact with the ground. They now detonate when someone disturbs them--a soldier, a farmer, a shepherd, a child attracted by the lure of a shiny metal object.
Cluster bombs are, by definition, inaccurate weapons that are designed to affect a very wide area unpredictably. If they do not discriminate between civilian and military targets when they are dropped, they certainly do not discriminate in the months and years after the end of hostilities, when they go on killing and maiming anyone who happens upon them.
When the count of unexploded cluster bomblets passed 100,000, the United Nation's undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, expressed his disbelief at the scale of the problem.
"What's shocking and, I would say to me, completely immoral," he said, "is that 90% of the cluster-bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution, when we really knew there would be an end of this."
I didn't get back to posting as soon as I had planned. I've been busy finishing up a couple of projects and being a little ill. Today Zoe and I received an envelope full of cheer.
That is my oldest, Jenny, and her husband William. William is currently on his way from Kuwait to Sadr City in Baghdad. This was taken just before he left for Iraq. And their kids Evan and Robyn.
Robyn will be 8 in January and Evan turned 2 in May. We hardly know Evan anymore. William came back from his first tour in Iraq a year ago in August and immediately moved to Fort Carson, Colorado.
But we've spent a lot of time with Robyn. We are planning for her to fly up for spring break. While Zoe isn't Robyn's grandmother, they have a very special bond. Please read what Zoe has to say.
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”
To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”
The work of Grünewald expresses the torment of the early sixteenth century more fully than that of any other artist. Dürer was too steeped in Italian culture to have much use for the tortured Gothic forms which Grünewald twisted to suit his expressive purposes in his masterpiece, the Isenheim Altar, of about 1515. This was painted before Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, but it is painted by a man who, like Bosch, used his great technical powers to express a simple, unmistakable message of emotional intensity and terrible realism. These visions are entirely in the spirit of St Bridget of Sweden, whose Revelations were one of the most popular devotional books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; they would have been repugnant to all but a very small number of Italians, of whom Savonarola would certainly have been one, and Botticelli might well have been another.
