!كل سنة وانتو سالمين

Happy New year!

Bonne année!
Guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!

!שנה טובה (shana Tova)

Buon anno!

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Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual

Mark Twain

Christmas Appeal: Hope for the children of Bethlehem

The Independent

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The Village Voice's film critics poll- Best films of 2005

What are your top films?

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Reviews of Munich:

The Morality of 'Munich'

Catch Them If You Can

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Best books of the year

Picked by:

The Village Voice

The New York Times

Salon

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The Coming Meltdown

"The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet... More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means"

T-shirts in December here...read on..

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The year is turning...If you celebrate Christmas, New year, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Bodhi Day, or Eid!...it's the time for remembering that we are all in this together folks..
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Some ideas for making your gift giving more ethical this year..
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Oxfam Unwrapped
You can plant 50 trees for 7KD, feed a family for a month for 12KD, feed 100 schoolchildren dinner for 3KD! and so much more..the site is worth a visit.
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Shop at Ten thousand Villages, Natural Collection or Global Exchange
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Give other gifts that don't need wrapping:
Sponsor a child in someone's name: Here, here or here..
Preserve part of the rainforest for someone: here and here
Help our fellow travellers on this planet here and here..
Clear a minefield, Give the gift of clean water, get essential medicines to people in need, or get yourself over to Artizana at Zahra center, or to KACCH or Bayt Abdullah or the Red Crescent...
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The week in news..

In Lebanon another bomb ...another set of human lives sacrificed for whatever shadowy inexplicable purpose the mercenaries and the powers that be have agreed upon...
Truth postponed Al-Ahram
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In the US, another life was taken by the hand of the self righteous state... And a self-righteous governor played the part of a merciless god ..
Sneering at Redemption: Why Arnold Killed Tookie by Dave Zirin
Quiet death of a man condemned Dan Glaister in San Quentin
Why do we kill people who kill people to show killing people is wrong
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In Iraq...as we passed the 1,000 days of war...the numbers are out...over 30,000 civilians dead...66 journalists dead...251 Foreigners kidnapped ...25-40 per cent Estimated unemployment rate...70 per cent of Iraqi's sewage system rarely works...47 per cent Iraqis never have enough electricity ...

'It's an awful way to exist, without hope... We've gained nothing but endless deaths'

By Kim Sengupta

"There is no sign yet of the thousand-day war ending. Every month up to a thousand fresh corpses arrive at the mortuary in Baghdad. A new Iraq is emerging but it is already drenched in blood."

Patrick Cockburn

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The WTO talks in Hong Kong are, as usual, met with protests and people who know what it's like to feel the heavy boot of indifference and exploitation...On Thursday Korean farmers and labour unionists performed a bow (sujood) every three steps on their protest march...On Friday the US Consulate in Hong Kong was pelted with eggs...And Hong Kong protesters declared a hunger strike...This is the BBC's take on the key issues at the talks....Here is a slideshow of the protests...here are short videos you can watch..

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Coca Cola is banned from some US campuses...

NYU to Killer Coke: F-U!

'Most Wanted' Corporate Human Rights Violators of 2005,"

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Iraqis went to the polls, again...Salaam Pax reports from baghdad, for the Guardian...

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Ah! Every morning the war gets up from sleep.

So I place it in a poem, make the poem into a boat, which I throw into the Tigris.

This is war, then.

Fadhil al-Azzawi

Today is the deadline set for the murder of 74 year old British peace activist Norman Kember American Tom Fox, 54, and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32...Yesterday the Muslim Brotherhood joined Hamas and Hizbollah and many other organizations and individuals worldwide to call for the release of the Christian Peace Activists who are in Iraq to act as advocates for the human rights of all Iraqis...to act as 'witnesses for peace'...
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Watch Democracy Now's broadcast which informs us that "The Christian Peacemaker Teams which is is a non-missionary organization that has been documenting the abuse of Iraqi detainees and working with the families of prisoners"
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"These men, Tom Fox, Jim Loney, Harmeet Sooden and Norman Kember, joined other members of Christian Peacemaker Teams convinced that people calling for a peaceful resolution to violence and political unrest must engage situations of violence taking the same risks as military personnel."Brian Martin Burkholder
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Christian Peacemaker Teams
"Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) arose from a call in 1984 for Christians to devote the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war. Enlisting the whole church in an organized, nonviolent alternative to war, today CPT places violence-reduction teams in crisis situations and militarized areas around the world at the invitation of local peace and human rights workers"
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Today is Human Rights Day..irony of ironies...it's a day when Amnesty encourages 'write for rights' writeathons that you can join/look at here....Bahrain is having walkathons and rallies and events all week long...Rights groups put the spotlight on the prohibition against torture and the countries that are trying to get away with it....60,000 Hit the Streets all over the US to protest the fact that workers have had their rights stolen from them...
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On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted andproclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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Amnesty's Make Some Noise (music for human rights by lots of people you know)

• It's called Apophis. It's 390m wide. And it could hit Earth in 31 years time
• Astronauts push for strategies, spacecraft to prevent calamitous asteroid strike

Of course it's a 1 in 5, 500 chance that it will hit, but those headlines got you to read about it...and the point is that disaster planning has to be perfected in advance just in case, because this would be 100,000 times worse than Hiroshima...and you don't want 'Brownie' style disaster management when/if it hits...
Apophis...the Destroyer, in Egyptian mythology...he used to try to devour the sun god as he rode his chariot across the sky every day...if he succeeded the world would be plunged into darkness..which explains eclipses...then the sun god would have to be rescued by cutting Apophis' belly...and then it all begins again..
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The third part of the story about fawlty parts on Boeing planes is up on MoJo's site
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The Egyptian playwright Alfred farag has passed away...

الفريد فرج: علينا أن نخلق حوارا مع العالم عبر المسرح
Egyptian Playwright Alfred Farag Analyzes Decline of Arab Theater
Mahmoud El-Lozy's revival of Alfred Farag's Sulayman El-Halabi at the AUC
Nehad Selaiha finds magic and enchantment in Alfred Farag's The Princess and the Vagabond
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Rice continues to battle to get everyone to swallow the idea that they do "not tolerate, permit, or condone torture under any circumstances". Hey maybe she should say "read my lips" or better..."we did not have torture relations with those suspects"..y'think that might help?
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Forced child marriage tests Pakistan law
Apparently in some parts of Pakistan there is a tradition called 'vani' in which child brides are offered to the sons of an enemy or feuding family to settle the score...Razi Azmi writes : " it is a centuries-old practice in Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan in which women are given in marriage as compensation in cases of murder, territorial disputes or other serious disagreements. Males of the “aggrieved” party seek young virgin girls as compensation for crime and to permanently tarnish the honour of the “guilty family”. In exchange, the accused men escape prosecution and punishment. This custom is also known as swara in the northern areas of Pakistan"
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And at the Saddam "I'm not afraid of execution" Hussein..erm..what do we call it?...Trial? Can we say that when there are questions over whether it satisfies international standards, whether trying him for his smaller scale crimes (some say to protect the other countries that aided and abetted his worst campaigns) is legitimate considering the fact that he would be executed for it before he can implicate anyone else in any later trial...Here are ten reasons from Global Policy why justice may not be served by this trial.. Due process and not revenge is the basis of fair trials, and a fair trial means that no one can come back and say he was a martyr, or that he was innocent but tried unfairly..a fair trial means that his vicious atrocities get a full airing and he and his allies get the punishment served by international standards..anyway at his trial, the papers say chaos reigned supreme yesterday..
There is a blog devoted to the trial
Jurist's coverage of the trial
Raucous episode of Saddam show chips away at court's credibility
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هو كان الرمز.. إبن الرمز

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الإنسان الراحل

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انا لله وانا اليه راجعون

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"And what he greatly thought, he nobly dar'd" (A. Pope)