our six-legged friends are in trouble
-
We’ll know in the future. But the take home message is: Honeybees are not healthy and we, at this moment in time, have no way to make them healthier.

50 years ago:

An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico.
Researchers aboard the Wecoma, an Oregon State University research vessel, also discovered that this corrosive, acidified water that is being "upwelled" seasonally from the deeper ocean is probably 50 years old, suggesting that future ocean acidification levels will increase since atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased rapidly over the past half century.

Science Daily

soft evangelism:

"It's brilliant," says Dennis Hoffman

Chrysler will give customers a card linked to a Visa or MasterCard, which will adjust charges to account for the $2.99-a-gallon offer. Chrysler will honor the offer for up to 500 gallons per customer per year, equal to about 12,000 miles of driving. The card can be used for any automobile owned by the customer – not just the newly purchased vehicle.
Chrysler, which is using sophisticated hedging of prices on the futures market, says the promotion is pulling in potential buyers. Sales leads are up 25 percent, and showroom traffic rose as much as 20 percent last weekend, when compared with the weekend before, said Jim Press, president of Chrysler, in a press conference Monday.
"It has clearly resonated with the needs and concerns of our customers," he said.

"People were coming out of their houses in their Pj's and with no shoes on to get to the gas station," recalls Tony Whittingham, an elder at the church

CSM/Yahoo 22.May.08

"Taken together, the inspector general found that the defense department did not properly account for almost USD 15b dollars," Waxman said.

That's $15,000,000,000 US dollars.
$7,957,560 a day from March 23, 2003 to May 23, 2008.
Unaccounted for, not just spent, essentially missing.
It didn't disappear of course, it went somewhere.
We just don't get to know where.

these days even the bad news is recursive
-
The disaster area is home to China's chief nuclear weapons research lab in Mianyang, as well as several secretive atomic sites
-
Pol Brennan is collateral damage in the war on "terrorism"

I would also bring to your attention the plight of other Irish Republican ex-prisoners who have made their homes here in the US, who are, like myself, being harassed by Homeland Security and are living under the constant threat of similar treatment as myself.

Support Pol Brennan

You want a diagnosis

If we won't do it, no one else will.
-
Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.
-
Guyana
-
No evidence exists, so they invent it.
-
He stated that the group recruited, trained and financially supported the terrorists from inside the United States via the internet.
-
Kathy Kelly: None of the three US presidential candidates are dealing with issues facing the poor
-
“The only thing they contribute to is local discos and prostitution,” Jiménez explained bitterly.
-
Fun fact
-
"It is bittersweet to learn about frog origins in this Year of the Frog, dedicated to informing the public about the current global amphibian decline," continues Anderson.

Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke is on youtube, or most of it is, I couldn't find the ending.
via w/b.t. link.
Also a snippet of Lee on Bill Maher's erstwhile progressive-left talk thing.
He was chastised for mongering conspiracy-fears by not denouncing the "levees were bombed" idea which is evidently pretty popular, or was at the time, all of 2 years ago.
Coming to that after seeing the documentary made it less bizarre.
Does it really matter if they were bombed or not? A little I guess. But the arrogance behind the caused disaster of Katrina's aftermath, the cold heartlessness of the President's mother's affluent-alcoholic throwaway comment - how so many of the displaced were suddenly better off, sheltered and fed in the Houston Astrodome, than they had been in New Orleans - the obvious disregard in the posture and speech of Bush and Cherthoff compared to the tears and outrage of Nagin and Compass, it adds up to something like a bomb.
Much joy and confirmation in the Judeo-Christian mystic camps as disaster strikes everybody but them, so far. There's this weird background noise that never made it to the overt screen, of New Orleans as an evil place, punished and cleansed by the stern hand of the Almighty, even as many of the survivors testified to their faith confirmed. That many of the lost died praying doesn't enter into it.
And China gets whacked by the same hand. Ha-ha China. Take that you godless jerks.
Some of us have speculatively shifted the scene's particulars to the coming collapse of systems built on the foundations of a stable world, foundations those systems have undermined past repair. How long 'til the next one?
Logically the next step is to avoid getting caught in the chaos. I keep imagining all these second-sighted visionaries piling up and smashing into each other as the limits of their abilities bring them to the same place, like fans lunging toward a foul ball. The near-future.
The central Jewish story is the Passover, which basically involves the good guys walking out of a disaster unscathed, while the bad guys suffer and die. And Christianity it becomes increasingly clear is a kind of watered down Judaism, with the good guy badges and uniforms retailored to fit. This is not about the actual moral teachings of either religion, which line up well with non-religious humane morality. It's about the organization as organism, with its own senses, that distant vision being primary. Prophecy.
The moment occupied by an organism that's semi-immortal isn't as fixed on the timeline as an individual's. And these organizations as organisms would be immortal, so far.
The ability to see the future comes up all over the place - Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Paracelsus, the psychedelic nastiness of Revelations, Polynesians drinking kava and seeing great ships coming over the horizon years before they did, the Scots Gaels have traditions of second-sight that are too common to be based on nothing but wishful thinking, Meyer Lansky was notorious for being able to avoid trouble as if he could see it coming.
It seems probable that humans can tap something that provides a clear enough picture of future events that given other skills can be put to advantage. It would for sure come in handy in the investment sector. But who can see the whole thing? What would it look like if you could? And how do all those partial visions work to create what they see? That's one of the quantum theory spookinesses. That merely looking divides reality, choosing anything creates a new path, another world that wouldn't have been without that looking, and choosing.
As always the selfish have the upper hand there - when you're all that matters the only important thing is how it affects you. Deferring responsibility to divine agency gets selfishness out of the way, but it's not hard to find certainty on both sides of completely contradictory views of the divine. And too much of the common view of the divine is a selfish vision to begin with.
As the global warming debate sputters to shocked silence many turn toward hard pragmatic responses. The carbon footprint of your community would be much smaller if your community itself were much smaller. Eugenics, genocide, Holocaust. FEMA.
The linkage is even more outlandish than the theory of the levees being bombed to flood the 9th Ward of New Orleans. But the logic of it is simple enough - you know lots of the men who run things, men who choose the larger paths we all get carried down, have worked those dark corners for what they could gather for themselves.
George Bush's God killed a bunch of innocent people during and after Katrina, through Bush's agency whether incompetent or callous, but that same God has killed, through that same agency, over a million innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each day's rise in the world population cheapens the price of human life, lessens the abstract horror. As the truth gets even more inconvenient, where we are, how fast we're headed for what can only be an awful correction, accelerates that degrading of human worth. The competition for survival increases, hardening hearts. Behind the gaudy veils of the television's stage the sound of that heartlessness whispers louder. But Sean Penn was down there in the flood, doing what he could to help. Spike Lee put his heart to the wheel to make that documentary.
Whatever drove them we all need now, and we'll need a lot more of it before this is finished.

Sheldon and Bush in Israel:

I saw a gambling tycoon from Las Vegas who bought my country's birthday with three million dollars. I thought with sorrow: Is the country worth so very little?

Nahum Barnea
at Laura Rozen's War and Piece

Cuba’s gay community celebrated unprecedented openness - and high-ranking political alliances - with a government-backed campaign against homophobia on Saturday

soils under organic cultivation have more fungi to help plants take in water, more microbes to help plants absorb nutrients, and more earthworms to assist in making those nutrients available in the first place

One of the buildings was entirely filled with chairs. The other was entirely filled with bicycles. Birds flew in and out of slumping holes...

Forty-eight thousand. But other than that they were hardly touched at all!

The exhibition was taken down because it was about Palestine, the dispossession of Palestinians and what's going on in Hebron

Sydney library abandons Palestinian refugee display after police visit
via

I'm so honored that you all would take time to be here, as I am
-
What we don't need now is more instant noodles
-
The sand isn’t clean
-
tramping its plain provisions underfoot
-
as the president says, we don't need diamonds or gold, or coal
-
I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school
-
All the irrelevant books in the world should be burned away. I cannot tolerate books that belong under the leftist ideology.
-
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul

Eleven minutes later:

It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.
This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil.
[...]
In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty
[...]
There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously.
[...]
Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed.

think about what we have witnessed in our own time

GWBush Addresses Members of the Knesset 16.May.08

in recent years, we have moved beyond finger-pointing:

We understand and acknowledge that the Government of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people are concerned with the perceived negative health effects of exposure to Agent Orange and its contaminant, dioxin. At the same time, the United States does not recognize any legal liability for damages alleged to be related to Agent Orange. We continue to stress that discussion of the effects of Agent Orange needs to be based on credible scientific research that meets international standards.
-
Examples of our ongoing bilateral cooperation on Agent Orange include:

Formation of a Joint Advisory Committee composed of U.S. and Vietnamese government officials and experts to review possible joint activities...

Scot Marciel, Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
US State Department
ScoopNZ

it can happen again if enough people with enough good will and enough sense of morality...

our only hope for true peace and security

Underneath the western skies

the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003

When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Who you gonna believe?

Visiting US President George W. Bush paid a 60th anniversary tribute to Israel as a democracy challenged by "terrorists" on Wednesday just before a rocket attack wounded 14 people in a shopping mall.
ADVERTISEMENT
Bush called Israel a "thriving democracy" which "like other democracies, is being challenged by extremists and terrorists."

Yahoo/AFP 14.May.08
-
Me, or that terrorist?

A report published last summer by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure -- roads, settlements, military bases and so on -- largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls (including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).
[...]
Although Olmert says he believes in theory that Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that "every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."
[...]
What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic "problem."
[...]
Even among its citizens, Israeli law grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the imagination is Israel a genuine democracy:
It is an ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.
To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with -- rather than continuing to battle against -- the Palestinians.
They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful one."

Saree Makdisi/counterpunch 13.May.08
emph. add. ed.

They add that a tourism model based on huge resorts and golf courses is also unsustainable.

crankenstein:

Federal authorities charged that a methamphetamine laboratory was operating at the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and that employees carried weapons to work.

The charges were among the most explosive details to emerge following the massive raid Monday at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa.

JTA 13.May.08

not a whisper but a desperate shout, a shout that made desperation thrilling, a new way of singing the song so undeniable...

...like looking at Hell as a fractal. You zoom in, and there’s more Hell. Zoom in again, more Hell. Zoom in again, GPS tracked students. Zoom in again, breakfast stick.

"I have a better idea", Aya said.

The first blow is against truth:

Among those who were extradited Tuesday were several top leaders, like Salvatore Mancuso, Diego Murillo, alias "Don Berna" -- the heir to late druglord Pablo Escobar -- and the commander of the paramilitary militias on the north coast of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Hernán Giraldo.
Iván Cepeda, spokesman for the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), complained to the press that the extraditions would "seriously affect" the rights of survivors, and said they were aimed at keeping the paramilitary leaders from continuing to provide the names of military, political and business accomplices and allies.

Constanza Vieira - Helda Martínez/IPS 13.May.08

He got richer faster than anyone else in history
-
Sheldon’s got it fixed
-
Freedom's Watch
Freedom’s Watch Bears Watching
via Jim Lobe
founders, funders and key personnel:

• Sheldon Adelson
• Bradley A. Blakeman
• Matt Brooks
• Ari Fleischer
• Richard J. Fox
• Mel Sembler

In case you're keeping track each one of those guys is Jewish.
But then so's Jim Lobe.
Mel Sembler, well oh well. Mel Sembler is one sick son of a bitch.
He gets his own set of links.
Sembler:

Ambassador de Sade
-
Sembler, founder of Straight Inc, taken down by Montel Williams
-
They put stuff up my butt
-
Sembler founded Straight after a congressional investigation determined that the last detox program he oversaw, The Seed, was using mind-control tactics similar to those used by North Koreans during the Cold War.
-
Tough love has become a billion-dollar industry

Adelson - Sands, Vegas
Lansky - Sands, Vegas
Lansky:

Asked why all the gangsters were tolerated in Cuban casinos, the U.S. ambassador Earl Smith reportedly explained, "it seems to be the only way to get honest casinos". Lansky's days in Cuba, however, were numbered when Castro took power in Havana. In October 1960 the Riviera Hotel and 165 other American enterprises were confiscated and nationalized.

Lansky:

Even Al Capone realized they were more powerful than he.
In remarks attributed to Luciano, he once explained, "I learned a long time before that Meyer Lansky understood the Italian brain almost better than I did. . . . I used to tell Lansky that he may've had a Jewish mother, but someplace he must've been wet-nursed by a Sicilian." Luciano often said Lansky "could look around corners," or anticipate what would happen next in underworld intrigues, and that "the barrel of his gun was curved," meaning he knew how to keep himself out of the line of fire.

Lansky:

The Lanskys and Traficante organized a pipeline of Peruvian cocaine from Cuba to the US with an associate named George Zarate.

Somewhere in all this is the reason and cause drugs are so viciously illegal and at the same time so readily available; the cause of the constant unquestioned hysterical condemnation of the Cuban revolution; the reason for US nurturing and maintenance of the fascist Columbian government (and recent extradition of key witnesses in Columbian corruption cases to the US , where they can be silenced); and the war in Iraq.

I could have supported a lousy treaty and everybody would have went, `Oh, man...'

In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the Gene Giants are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as climate saviors.

"They've taken away all the witnesses," she said Tuesday.

A happy slave is the biggest threat to freedom

Settlements at this juncture are not helpful:

And, speaking in a kind of code Jews readily understand, Obama also made sure to mention that he was fond of the writer Leon Uris, the author of Exodus.

the idea of returning to a homeland
...
my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone
...
if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens
...
One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished
...
I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives
...
My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
...
that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.
...
When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional.
...
JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?
BO: I strongly reject the characterization.

You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel’s security.

Goldberg/Atlantic 13.May.08
-
I'm sorry to offend any readers who still find sexual metaphors distressing but this is Obama with Goldberg's dick in his mouth.
The raging arrogance behind Goldberg's questions, not in them but working them up out of the Semitic zeitgeist toward expression, is beyond metaphor for me, I literally don't know how to describe it except technically.
I wish for a chorus of mutilated children, women frozen in the postures of grief, men whose faces have gone white with horror, all around these two scamming opportunists.
Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba Naqba.

350.

Monday's quake was caused by the Tibetan plateau colliding with the Sichuan basin, Zhigang Peng, an earthquake expert at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, told CNN

It’s impossible to know at this point.

the most obvious duty humans have ever faced
Bill McKibben/TomDispatch
-
350

James Fallows, June 2003:

For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the decided camps - the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the revisionists who are equally sure - the case will remain in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood.
-
The Israeli policy of creating settlements in occupied territory, and the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect.

Those paragraphs don't make Fallows' bias and skill at innuendo clear as day to most readers in America. They sound, as they're supposed to, unprejudiced and plain, the words of a thoughtful man who will follow reason wherever it leads, with no agenda but a desire for the truth, from which he intends to make a moral judgment once he's found it. But it's evident he went into the story on a slant that was neither unbiased nor truth-seeking, and used his craft to create a deception, an illusion.
This is my premise, that most readers won't see the duplicity and cleverness that created that illusion.
This is why scorn for intellectuals, especially intellectuals who can translate to the vernacular, is damaging to the common American, because no one else will explain this horseshit to them. And it's why that scorn has been so encouraged.
And from that premise this, that there is a responsibility we bear to those less able, that we have to bridge these isolating differences, because they're being exploited. Let alone the obligation we have to speak for the victims of injustice.
Fallows wears the uniform, he carries the tools, but he isn't doing the job.
He says "the Arabs who are sure they know what happened" as if there were no one else in that "decided camp". He says "the revisionists who are equally sure" which places the Arabs, with all the color and fullness of living human beings who have had their portraits drawn consistently as hate-filled irrational beasts, against "revisionists", an abstract group with no location, no ethnicity. Not Arabs against Jews, not Arabs and their sympathizers against Jews and their sympathizers, which is the actual polarity he's drawing on. Arab is to Palestinian as Jew is to Israeli.
I caught that but set it aside as I read the article because I went into it with a kind of mild liking for Fallows as a writer. But on the next page I read the second paragraph.
The Israelis have a "policy of creating settlements", the Palestinians a "policy of terror".
Look, Ma, it's Davy Crockett fightin' with the devil!
Settlement is a word that means home, houses, gardens, good things. Terror, in 2003, was at its height as an electrically shocking word. It was a Pavlovian trigger. It had been redefined in the aftermath of 9/11, stripped to immediate horror, it meant senseless violence motivated by uncaused and unjustly felt hatred. It still does, for too many, but by now lots of basically decent folk have begun to understand that the causes of terrorist acts go much deeper and are far less black and white than we were being led to believe.
Fallows says the event wouldn't have happened "...if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect". What could be more noble than protecting homes?
What's missing is everything. The settlements are built on the rubble of Palestinian homes. On stolen Palestinian land. The Palestinians were removed from those homes by violence, terrorist violence that continues to this day.
It's not hard to make the case that the Palestinians are the ones trying to protect their homes, desperately against a terrifyingly more powerful adversary. That power is coming from the people Fallows wrote for and to. Which is why he writes this the way he does.
What he lays out is a simple thing, a stage with two groups at opposite sides and caught in the middle a man and his young son. The son is killed by a bullet, the death is caught on film. Sympathy in normal human hearts is great, coming naturally from the image of the two helpless figures trying to hide, get down, be small, and the smallest one is killed.
Fallows says - without saying it too directly, because he has to make it sound like he's still searching for whatever truth is there - that research, scientific study, work by professionals whose skills are in the uncovering and clarifying of what really happened in events as chaotic as armed combat, appears to show that Mohammed al-Dura was killed by his own people, and the logical jump is they did it in order to have an image of a martyr to show the world and dishonestly gain its sympathy.
He says this because the recreation of the landscape, and the positions in it held by the two sides, shows that the Israeli soldiers could not have fired the bullet that killed the boy from where they were. Therefore it was someone else somewhere else, therefore it was the Palestinians killing their own.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to him, as it would to anyone with an unbiased view, that a sniper shooting from somewhere other than the building occupied by the IDF might have done it.
Is there a precedent for that kind of inhuman disregard for Palestinian lives in the behavior of the Israelis? There are hundreds of such precedents. Not just Palestinian lives either.
Rachel Corrie, an American, was run down by an American-made bulldozer driven by an Israeli in the act of destroying the home of a Palestinian family, which Corrie put her body and her life on the line to stop.
Canadian Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener was killed when the Israelis bombed a marked United Nations post in Lebanon on July 25, 2006. His wife says shortly before he was killed he had sent her an email "reporting that Israel was bombing schools and waging 'a campaign of terror against the Lebanese people'".
These incidents are distinct because they involve lives that were not driven by a "policy of terror". Rachel Corrie was a pacifist, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener and the other UN observers killed with him were peacekeepers. They were all in the way of the Israeli campaign which describes itself as wounded and in defense, but looks more like ruthless aggression toward empire.
Here's Fallows in October 2007, still crowing from the top of the fence:

Richard Landes, of Boston University, is (to my knowledge) the leading advocate of the idea that the death of Mohammed al-Dura was an elaborately-staged hoax. His blog TheAugeanStables is full of references, updates, videos, forensic reports, and other links supporting his argument that this was in its entirety a "Pallywood" production (Hollywood + Palestine, get it???). A related blog is here, and Natan Sharansky's essay about the latest twists in the case is here.

Charles Enderlin, the long-time Jerusalem correspondent for the TV network France 2 has his own running commentary, in French, at the France 2 blog site. He is a central figure in the story because his initial reports established the idea that the boy Mohammed had been killed by Israeli soldiers. The Landes camp believes that the scenes in his report were staged, and they have pushed relentlessly for release of the full footage France 2 shot that day. Enderlin and France 2 have refused.
My general experience in life makes me skeptical that large-scale conspiracies can be pulled off - and kept secret for seven years, which is how long it has been since the original event. So based on what I have personally seen (not having devoted myself to the story for the last few years), I am not ready to say: Yes, for sure, this was a huge, big-lie, blood-libel, conspiratorial hoax.

Except that there's a conspiracy either way it happened. Except that if it isn't a conspiracy by the Palestinians, it's a conspiracy by the Israelis to blame them for it.
These second paragraphs seem to be a balanced presentation of two disagreeing sides. Except most english-speaking readers, even sophisticated readers of James Fallows, aren't going to get much from commentary in french, if they bother hitting that link in the first place. Except he brings the pro-Israeli voice down from the first paragraph and uses it to set up Enderlin and France 2's refusal to release their "full footage".
Fallows says "I am not ready to say: Yes, for sure, this was a huge, big-lie, blood-libel..."
Which is like saying "I'm not ready to say: You're a lying sack of shit."
Sensible folks with enough self-discipline to not over-react will withhold judgment, if they want to know what really happened they'll examine as much information as they can from both sides. Fallows, in his role as information-bringer, acts as if he's done that for his readers, but there is no voice from the other side in any of his writing about the al-Dura case, except in french, once. The 2003 piece has at its center quotes and colorful endearing descriptions of Nahum Shahaf (strongly built; smiling, joking, having fun; hang gliding instructor), an Israeli physicist whose work was at the center of the IDF investigation of the affair.
The Palestinian voice, the Palestinian side, as consistently as ever, goes unheard.

Hinky, maybe:

D'Angelo Barksdale
-
Deborah Jean Palfrey

No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Anna, a young woman who was paid $65,000 by the FBI to befriend and entrap Eric and his codefendants...
{..]
Eric met Anna in August 2004 and the two remained in contact after that time. It was made clear during trial that Eric had fallen in love with Anna and that she used his feelings to keep him hooked and, eventually, to entrap him. Anna manufactured this "crime" by providing the means for it to occur and by manipulating the three into doing things that would allow her employers to arrest and prosecute them. She constantly pushed and cajoled Eric, Weiner and Jenson when they showed resistance to her plans. She paid for their entire existence - the cabin they lived in, their travel across the country, the car they used, the computers they used (which the FBI later confiscated), groceries and supplies. Weiner testified that Anna pulled $100 bills out of her pocket and gave them to Eric so that he could purchase groceries and supplies...

EarthFirst! 13.Jan.06
-
Eric McDavid support site
-
The wikipedia entry on McDavid is very poorly written.
-

She paid for gas. She paid for groceries. She paid for the cabin they lived in. She paid for the computers they used. She paid for supplies. She was apparently the only one able to actually acquire “recipes” for bombs.

Indybay article on informant Anna(no relation) 03.May.08
-
When your job is to catch people doing bad things, or about to do bad things, then the danger is that you will come to want people to do bad things. Even though you hate bad things. Even though your life is dedicated to stopping bad things. Because when the most fulfilling thing you have is stopping bad things, you need them.
Another danger is that you won't be all that concerned about any bad things that happen while and because you're stopping bad things, because the bad things you're stopping are all that matters. Collateral damage. The mathematics of fascist terror.

these fantasies have lethal purpose:

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Pilger/NewStatesman 24.Apr.08

Long live the element of surprise:

The so-called “final offensive” against Venezuela (the purpose of which is to take President Chávez out of power) is being planned presumably from Colombia, and would be executed by that country’s army, according to agreements between Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and “the known agent of the intelligence services of the United States,” William Brownfield.

VA 08.May.08

“I want the market to work if it can, and most of the time it will, but not without some pain,”
Shelby said in an interview.

Richard C. Shelby has more say over the revamping of housing finance laws than almost anyone else in Congress.
[...]
He will soon play a major role in deciding the fate of one such bill, to help struggling homeowners, that the House passed, 266 to 154, on Thursday.
Over the years, his critics say, Shelby’s ties to the mortgage industry and the Alabama real estate market, and the generous campaign donations he receives from financial services companies, have distorted his perspective and led him to delay critical legislative remedies.
[...]
His stubbornness over housing laws, he said, stems from his free-market philosophy and opposition to using tax dollars to bail out people who acted recklessly.
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The U.S. treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, defended on Sunday[16.Mar.08] the Federal Reserve's decision to help rescue Bear Stearns, the teetering Wall Street investment bank.
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you can’t do $2.4 billion for homeowners, but you can do $29 billion for the people who did business with Bear Stearns.
Barney Frank

Some sources believe that Olmert is being targeted by a right-wing religious group which used to back him when he was with the Likud party as a right-wing activist.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants.
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food riots in distant lands will soon be coming

The so-called "D.C. Madam" apologized to her mother and sister in suicide notes released Monday, telling them she couldn't bear going to prison for running an elite Washington prostitution ring....

No, CBS, she didn't tell them she couldn't "bear going to prison for running an elite Washington prostitution ring".
You're telling us that because you're possessed, and the spirit that possesses you wants us to think that. But that's not it.
She told them she couldn't bear to go to prison for this "modern day lynching".
She was facing a sentence that required her to go to prison, because the spirit that possesses you hates, and fears, sex.
It's the spirit that possesses you that drove her to suicide.
And it is the spirit that possesses you that forgives and excuses her customers while it gloats over her suicide.
That Henry Kissinger still walks the earth while Deborah Jean Palfrey's life was thrown into the pit says all that needs to be said about the earth as it is now, and the pit, and Henry Kissinger, and Ms. Palfrey.

This man looks like Mao, police not even search his bag.

Someday baby:

I learned of the Holocaust as a child. When I was 12 or 13, a friend's father, all of whose family had been killed, told us sitting on his lawn one night what it felt like to be whipped at Auschwitz. In the Jewish Day School I attended, we saw Nazi documentary footage of the Warsaw Ghetto, including piles of starving bodies. When my grandfather died, my great aunt found letters in Yiddish in the basement informing his father (after whom I am named) of the death of his sisters...

Barnett R. Rubin/Informed Comment

It is not with any great faith in the integrity of politicians elsewhere in the world that Irish people tend to regard their own leaders as among the slipperiest characters ever to put on a suit.

with its painful history:

Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey has expressed disappointment that no one from the Swiss government has been invited to Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations.
[...]
Among those invited are President Bush, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger...

swissinfo 04.May.08

The rally also celebrated a decree by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez increasing the minimum wage by 30% giving Venezuela the highest minimum wage in Latin America.

"This package will help American families increase their purchasing power and help offset the high prices that we're seeing at the gas pump and the grocery store," Bush said.

Well, sometimes God's signs are not always the ones we look for. And we learn in tragedy that His purposes are not always our own...

Ha ha, oops!