My son Arik was murdered when he was a soldier by Palestinian fighters. He was not murdered because he was Jewish, but because he is part of the nation that occupies the territory of another.
I know these are concepts that are unpalatable, but I must voice them loud and clear, because they come from my heart – the heart of a father whose son did not get to live because his people were blinded with power.
— Yitzhak Frankenthal, I Would Have Done The Same.
[Via Lawrence of Cyberia]
I just stumbled upon an interesting article called “The Price of Arrogance” by Fareed Zakaria for Newsweek.
He writes:
“America is ushering in a new responsibility era,” says President Bush as part of his standard stump speech, “where each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make in life.”
“I take full responsibility,” said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been “responsible” to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words “I take responsibility.”
Zakaria goes on to talk about the stance the Bush administration is taking regarding the Geneva conventions. He writes:
Within weeks after September 11, senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House began the drive to maximize American freedom of action. They attacked specifically the Geneva Conventions, which govern behavior during wartime. Donald Rumsfeld explained that the conventions did not apply to today’s “set of facts.”
Last week he said again that the Geneva Conventions did not “precisely apply” and were simply basic rules.The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been “We’re at war; all these niceties will have to wait.” As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure.
A great read. I suggest you check it out: The Price of Arrogance.
Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a UK government study has found.
Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of ‘intimacy’ such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse, it was revealed.
A sex education course developed by Exeter University trains teachers to talk to teenagers about ‘stopping points’ before full sex.
Now an unpublished government-backed report reveals that a trial of the course has been a success. Schoolchildren, particularly girls, who received such training developed a ‘more mature’ response to sex.
Let me get this right. By doing this, we’re telling teens that it’s not ok to have full sex, but that it’s perfectly ok and normal for them to practice oral sex?!
So the message is: Have as much oral sex as you want, just don’t have full sex.
Interesting strategy…
[Source: The Guardian]
So Blogger have relaunched themselves in a new look and with a bunch of new features.
Blogger is the place where I seriously started blogging, even though the first blog I created was at Blog City, but I never wrote anything there.
My wife still uses blogger and all of a sudden, I kind of feel jealous because she’ll be enjoying all the new stuff 😛
Among the goodies are a ton of new cool templates by design Gods Zeldman, Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, …etc.
They also added comments, individual post pages, blogger profile page and email blogging.
For more details, go here.
The blogger site re-design is a collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path, and well the least I can say is that it rocks.
It’s cleaner, friendlier and well simply delicious.
Definitely a lot of nice CSS in there.
The logo and visual identity have also been slightly modified.
I think it’s better this way.
All in all, I think this is a truly great thing that Blogger have done.
I think it’ll push them even further ahead of their competition.
About 500 Iraqis met in Baghdad on Saturday to set up a national political force free of US influence to push for a handover of sovereignty under the auspices of the United Nations.
The United Iraqi Scholars Group – which appointed a 16-strong leadership panel – has vowed to boycott any political group set up by the US and called for a stronger army than the small force envisioned by the US-led coalition.
After a five-hour conference, the group said its agenda was based on “legitimate resistance to end the occupation” and keep Iraq united.
The group of moderate Shia and Sunni Muslims as well as Kurds also demanded the US-appointed Governing Council should be sidelined.
Shaikh Jawad al-Khalisi, a senior Shia cleric who will head the group, said it wanted the handover of power to Iraqis on 30 June “done under the umbrella of the United Nations and not the CPA”, the US-led occupying authority since last March’s invasion.
[Source: Al Jazeera]
Today, we woke up and found some really nice weather outside which made us feel like going out, so we called some friends and suggested we go out somewhere to enjoy the weather.
We suggested we go to either the Friguia Park or Hammamet or Korbous, although we felt more like going to Friguia Park because we heard a lot about it, but never got to check it out.
Anyway, we ended up going there.
Friguia (meaning Africa) is another zoo that opened last year in Tunisia, and almost everyone who ever checked it out said that it was really nice.
And well, I agree.
It doesn’t have more animals than the Tunis zoo (Belvedere), in fact it has less, although it has some animals you won’t find at the Tunis zoo.
But the setting is really nice and they’re taking better care of it.
There is a nice souvenirs shop that has some really nice stuff but which I thought was over-priced, especially that I saw some of the same stuff in other places at really cheaper prices.
We had lunch in a restaurant inside the park which actually had some good food despite all the jokes I made about it before tasting the food.
It’s quite big and by the time we finished, our feet were aching and we were dying to get home and rest.
It was really fun discovering the place, seeing the animals and catching up with our friends.
A 12 year old girl was stripped and beaten by U.S. military personnel in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq.
Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days.
Mr al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November.
He said: “They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells.
“She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.”
Mr al-Baz claims the guards at the prison were keen to take photographs of the abuse and turned it into a competition.
“They were enjoying taking photographs of the torture. There was a daily competition to see who could take the most gruesome picture.
“The winner’s photo would be stuck on a wall and also put on their laptop computers as a screensaver.
This is so disgusting. These people are animals and should be executed!
Even that would be too little for them!
A group of online freedom of speech advocates in France have launched a “response logo” as a reply to the campaign that the French Phonographic Syndicate organization launched.
The response logo says: “Culture has no price / Don’t buy any CDs.”
Weblogs throughout France are displaying the logo as a gesture of solidarity against the French Phonographic Syndicate organization’s anti-P2P campaign.
“You sell us mediocre music at exorbitant prices,” the banner exclaims in French, “Reduce the price of CDs, and start placing a higher priority on the quality of artists instead of the quantity of money you’re cramming in your pockets.”
[Via Boing Boing]
Adidas says it has created the world’s first “smart shoe” by mating it with a computer chip that adapts its cushioning level to a runner’s size and stride.
The Adidas 1 is the product of a three-year secret project the German company developed at its U.S. headquarters in Portland, Oregon.
The microprocessor is located in the arch of the shoe, and drives a tiny screw and cable system that adjusts the heel cushion depending on the signals sent back by an electric sensor coupled to a magnet.
It is powered by a battery that conserves power by adjusting the shoe while it is in the air during a runner’s stride, avoiding resistance from the ground.
The entire assembly weighs no more than 40 grams — just 10 percent of the 400-gram total weight of the shoe, to keep it light enough for distance runners.
Very very interesting, beautiful even.
A true work of genius.
