Israel will make it much harder for Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories who are married to Palestinians (or presumably to Jews?) in Israel to get residency permits. For now, they have frozen new family reunifications, and will sextuple the fee. Israelis (and I should say Israeli Jews, or perhaps Israeli fascists, since it’s a bad habit to refer to Israeli Jews as Israelis, as I told my 4th grade teacher during the 1973 war) are worried about demographics for obvious reasons. And for some reason the number of new immigrants under the Law of Return is way down--and the majority of those aren’t even real Jews.

William Webster, former head of both the CIA & the FBI (which means he’s not even supposed to talk to himself) wants Al Qaeda POWs injected with truth serum. This assumes that they aren’t doing that, or worse, now. I trust no one who reads the article in the Sunday NY Times that contained that tidbit really believes that questioning consists solely of good cop-bad cop and mind games. Given--I say again--that the progress and consequences of the hunger strike begun in Guantanamo 2 1/2 months ago have not been reported, nor is there any indication that any reporter or Congresscritter in the whole country gives a shit, much less the people at large, the only thing preventing torture is the goodness and purity of heart of the CIA/FBI interregators and Marine guards. Good luck, guys, hope none of you are innocent. This country manages to execute innocent people after trials, with lawyers and all the trimmings, and appeals and such, as opposed to being swept up by random military patrols--god knows we blew up a lot of convoys and wedding parties and friendly forces and arms dumps that weren’t what we thought they were--so, um, good luck, you’ll need it.

A story that I may have sent a couple of months back, probably in the Stop the Week section of the London Sunday Times that I used to send, before Rupert Murdoch got greedier and started charging for access, was that the Poetry Society had forgotten to renew their website URL and lost it to a Hong Kong company which sells online gambling and impotence cures--and URL’s back to their original owners. The New Statesman ran a competition asking for famous poets on the subject. Here’s one entry:

Cyber-Tiger, virtual blight,
With your online gambling site,
What e-portal, bland or sly,
Could claim domain o’er poetry?

Who, in odists’ dotcom guise,
Peddles cream for flaky thighs?
And, when our manhood’s in retreat,
Flogs us handy Groin-Deep-Heat? .....