From the San Francisco Chronicle…..
Berkeley’s public library will face a showdown with the city’s Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city’s nuclear-free ordinance.
Public sector workers – from schools, hospitals, the Post Office and publicly-funded media – will join forces with car factory workers, helicopter pilots and even ski-lift operators from the private sector, to leave much of the country paralysed.
The show of force is backed by all of France’s main unions, the opposition Socialists and 75 per cent of the public see it as justified, according to one poll.
According to François Chérèque, leader of the moderate CFDT union, the strike is a “cry of anger” from workers who feel the government has given billions to banks and industry but not protected their jobs or “purchasing power”.
Not much is going to come of this. The French government is going to back down so fast that there will be no need to prolong the strikes.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a blow by blow account of Israel’s diplomatic moves. But all you really need to know comes from the first line…
The political goals of Operation Cast Lead were not formulated until a few days after the fighting in Gaza began.
If the word “war crime” had any real meaning, the above would be grounds for prosecution. It reveals a criminal level of incompetence that would be punished by death if Israel was not so much stronger than Hamas. War is always a horrible thing, but to engage in it without even knowing what you want to accomplish is no better then random killing.
It would be one thing if the operation had been a fast reaction to a sudden attack. But Israel endured the increased rocket attacks for weeks without doing anything. For the political leadership to have no idea of what they wanted to accomplish after waiting all that time is inexcusable.
Edit: A different article from Haaretz has the military perspective….
An officer who was in contact with the political echelon during the Gaza operation says he now understands what went so horribly wrong in Lebanon: “It was weird, to put it mildly.” Another senior figure adds: “It is difficult to conduct a war when an election campaign is under way. Two of the ‘kitchen cabinet’ members were interested in the operation’s implications for the elections. The third [Olmert] was busy with the question of what it would all mean for his legacy.”
Roughly 150 politicians, ex-military officials, journalists and powerful demimonde characters stand accused. State prosecutors suspect the group of being behind plans to overthrow the government. As members of a secret network, called Ergenekon, named after a mythical valley celebrated by ancient Turks, the group allegedly planned to assassinate members of the country’s political and cultural elite.
The idea, as prosecutors see it, was for Turkey to sink into fear and chaos before being rescued by an army coup that would reinstate peace and order. The armed forces, after all, see themselves as protectors of the nation they inherited from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern-day Turkey. The Turkish military has staged coups three times in the country’s recent past: in 1969, 1971 and 1980.
That is your thriller from Turkey. If tearjerkers are more to your taste, The Belmont Club has a story about a 1600 old Christian monastery in Turkey that is under threat from rising Islamic fervor in Turkey.
Holland’s national suicide note by Ezra Levant is this week’s rant of the week.
If history is ever worth studying, then it is doubly valuable to read the source documents upon which history is based. For when we read other people telling us about history, we are only hearing what other people want us to hear. But when we read the documents that were written by our predecessors, we hear their voice and come to understand their concerns.
To be sure, reading the words of our predecessors has some limitations. Without knowing the context of the times we can sometimes mistake the meaning of what we are reading. Moreover, since we have limited time, it can be hard to know what would be most profitable to read. But even still, it is better to try to hear the words of those now dead than it is to listen to those who try to interpret them for us.
For we are all familiar with the childhood game called telephone. We all know that when a message is passed from one person to another it can become easily garbled. History is no different. The further you are from the source documents, the more garbled the message you are going to receive.
That is why one should take the time read Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address. It was given shortly before he was nominated to be the Republican presidential candidate. He had just lost the previous year’s election contest with Stephen Douglas for a senate seat. His name had been made, but there was no clear sign that he was going anywhere. Yet even though the speech was given in a lull in his frantic personal history, it still gives us one of the best insights we have into his reasoning process.
You can improve your understanding of this speech by brushing up on the Dred Scott decision and the Kansas-Nebraska act.
Instead they have Gillibrand, who voted against the Wall Street — as in New York — bailout bill. And who introduced a bill to balance the federal budget annually, which suggests she would oppose the $825 billion in deficit spending that President Obama proposes to rescue the country, not least New York.
Actually, this is all meant to be insults and not praise. And sadly, it is not true. I doubt that Gillibrand will have the guts to oppose anything Obama does, regardless of what she has said she believes in the past. Still if this is the best dirt that Maureen Dowd can throw at Gillibrand, it speaks pretty well of her.
Western powers believe that Iran is running short of the raw material required to manufacture nuclear weapons, triggering an international race to prevent it from importing more, The Times has learnt.
Diplomatic sources believe that Iran’s stockpile of yellow cake uranium, produced from uranium ore, is close to running out and could be exhausted within months. Countries including Britain, the US, France and Germany have started intensive diplomatic efforts to dissuade major uranium producers from selling to Iran.
Before Christmas, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent out a confidential request for its diplomats in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Brazil, all major uranium producers, to lobby governments not to sell uranium products, specifically yellow cake, to Iran.
Iran’s stock of yellow cake, acquired from South Africa in the 1970s under the Shah’s original civil nuclear power programme, has almost run out. Iran is developing its own uranium mines, but does not have enough ore to support a sustained nuclear programme.
Perhaps the western nations will be able to keep yellow cake out of Iran long enough for the nation to collapse. But otherwise trying to enforce a blockade is doomed to failure.
One of the biggest problems in this case is that acquiring atomic weapons is in Iran’s national interests even apart from religious/ideological questions. Given their strategic location, the nation would be transformed into one of the big cheeses of the world the instant they got the bomb. And most nations feel that becoming big cheeses is in their national interests. Thus, temporary setbacks are unlikely to stop Iran from marching toward the bomb even if there is a change in political leadership.
By contrast, the bomb was relatively unimportant to South Africa because nobody in the world really cares if anything in Africa gets blown up. Thus, having the bomb did not increase South Africa’s power or prestige by any appreciable amount.
“The Chinese are probably one of the few people in the world who were sorry to see President Bush go, and are nervous about his successor,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked on China policy for the Clinton administration.
You can’t use “few” to refer to the Chinese people. There are more then twice as many people in China as there are in Europe.
More to the point of the article, if Obama repairs relations with Europe, but America’s relations with China deteriorates, it will be a net loss for America. This is largely outside of Obama’s control regardless of what he says. So I am not trying to blame him.
But people who are celebrating the fact that America’s image is improving all around the world should take a good hard look at who is important and who is not. In the real world, some opinions matter more than others.
We are in a crisis in the western world. As a result, it seems silly to take note of the minor problems swirling around in the world. Still, it does not seem totally healthy to only pay attention to the big picture.
So here is a story about Palestinians who are made at Hamas.
Here is a story about a growing shortage of a critical industrial solvent.
Here is a story about the death of the iconic flight simulator.