Image ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff

The Guardian

It is a strange feeling: after working as a productive professional in Gaza for five years, I have become a black market junkie. I make several phone calls a day hunting for fuel for my car, diesel for the electricity generator waiting on standby to power the house, even cigarettes and vitamins. The only way to get hold of these things, to buy life-saving medicines, to purchase the essentials for a life of basic dignity, is through the black market, if at all. Today all Gaza suffers severe water shortages, with the fuel needed to pump and transport water (as well as sewage) dangerously scarce. The few cars seen on Gaza's mostly empty streets today almost invariably run on used cooking oil due to the lack of diesel.

=> Read more!

Xymphora

Reflections on the 'suicide' of Deborah Jeane Palfrey

It is heartening that no reputable commentator on this matter, or even most of the disreputable writers in the mainstream press, accepts this as a real suicide.

=> Read more!

USS Cole

Media Monitors

[This was written in December 2000]

Many in the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States are inclined to suppose that Israel may be responsible for the terror-bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemen port city of Aden on October 13. Although few Americans would suspect Israel, a trusted U.S. ally, of such a dastardly act, they may well be wrong while better informed and more experienced Arab and Muslim observers may be correct.

=> Read more!

From Tom Paine's Corner

I feel sick.
She says I’m sick in the head.
Actually I’m sick in the heart, sick in my viscera. My head reels, I feel chronic vertigo.
She says it’s only paranoia.
I tell her the old Polish joke popular during the military regime. He constantly felt spied on, tailed everywhere, his phone tapped, his mail read. His friends said he was nuts. His wife sent him to an analyst. As it turned out, his friends, his wife, his analyst were right: it was only the secret police.

=> Read more!

From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities.

=> Read more!

In this life there is one immutable truth. It is that there will be change, whether or not we may approve or desire that change. At this time, there is no place where this is more true than in the battle for the presidency of the United States. The people whom we thought we knew now appear to us as something different than we ever expected from their past performances.

=> Read more!

Let me begin as I had in a previous effort back in January 2006 entitled, “A Republican for Gore.” It was that piece, reflecting upon Al Gore’s excellent assessment of the criminal Bush administration’s destruction of our Constitution and our political system that had back then so impressed me. My apologies for this needed redundancy:

=> Read more!

Deir Yassin massacre

On May 14, Israelis will commemorate the 60th anniversary of their "War of Independence" and founding of the Jewish State. It also marks 60 years of Palestinian Nakba suffering. The web site alnakba.org recounts the history:

=> Read more!