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Stairecase Village of Ancient Persia
Ahmadreza Tavassoli
Masouleh; inarguably, is one of the most ancient, civilized villages in the world with a number of near to 1000 years of recorded history, 150,000 square meters surface area and less than 4 thousands people residing in, situated in the northern parts of Iran, adjacent to the world's largest enclosed body water, Caspian Sea.
The fluctuation of temperature in Masouleh makes an enjoyable weather in summers and cold winters; moreover, the annual average of precipitation is 713 millimeters which has helped to the emergence of many rivers all around the village where "Masouleh" Rud could be mentioned as the longest one of all; it has got two branches merging into it; Andareh and Nilikhali.
Unnecessary Concerns: Democratic Leadership Should Have Little Fear of an Obama Administration
by Walter and Rosemary Brasch
Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) flexed their muscles, shook their rattles, and told President-elect Barack Obama not to tread upon them.
"I don't believe in the executive power trumping everything," Reid, the Senate's majority leader, told the political newspaper, The Hill. He said he believed "in our Constitution, three separate but equal branches of government." For emphasis, he warned, "If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. . . . I do not work for Barack Obama, I work with him."
THE TOWER OF BABEL OF THE EUROPEAN LEFT or I SAW JEAN JAURES ON BOULEVARD STRASBOURG
Gaither Stewart
C’est la lutte finale
Groupons nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.
(The Internationale in its French version)
(Paris) The great tower stands like a beacon over Europe. From the top one can see the Chartres Cathedral seventy kilometers away, on a rare clear day. Evenings from my bedroom window I watch the magnificent tower illuminate. Gradually. Gracefully. As day ends the searchlight at the top at 1000 feet altitude begins sweeping the sky. During last year’s French EU Presidency, as daylight departed and night fell, the gigantic iron structure progressively turned blue, bit by bit, nearly unnoticeable. At first it was a faint, very faint, shade of blue, before, when winter night arrived, it assumed its luxuriant cobalt sheen.
A magic moment for prescient dreamers fascinated by towers and overviews. Nostalgic views, too, which might also end in illusion, in mirage and chimera.
Or in pipe dreams.
Children of Gaza, Run to the Angels
Suzanne Baroud
Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?
This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.
Is Israel Winning the 'Media War' over Gaza?
Ramzy Baroud
"We are all Hamas," screamed a scrawny Mauritanian, repeatedly, as he determinedly drew his face closer to a TV camera. Behind him, thousands more tunefully chanted similar words, chants that were heard in different Arabic dialects, in fact in many different languages all across the globe.
Yet, Israel, somehow is claiming victory in the media war, which it calculatedly unleashed weeks before its most violent attack on Gaza yet. Thousands have been reportedly killed and wounded in the first two weeks, starting Dec. 27, in the tiny stretch of land (roughly 140 square miles), yet densely populated Gaza Strip of 1.5 million people.
Will Maryland see a more enlightened justice system?
Mary Shaw
A recent report by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment found numerous flaws in that state's use of the death penalty.
Dan Rodricks of the Baltimore Sun summed it up thusly:
In its report, the commission concludes that, over the past 30 years, the death penalty in Maryland has been expensive and ineffective, riddled with error and tainted with racial and geographic disparities beyond reform. It should be abolished.
The commission arrived at that recommendation after careful review of research into the familiar points of debate - the alleged biases that make the administration of the death penalty unfair, the costs of death sentences over life without parole, the benefits of executions to the state.
Consumers Have the Ultimate Power to Save the Economy
Joel S. Hirschhorn
When I was young talk about millions of dollars impressed me. When I was older talk about billions of dollars dismayed me. Now, regular talk about trillions of dollars, especially government spending, nauseates me. People never seem to learn that they control the fate of the American economy.
It is far too easy to blame in bad times or thank in good times Wall Street, the government, or super-rich and powerful financial entities. In actual fact it is always the spending of money by the general population on consumer products and services, housing, cars, or investments that drives the economy. The core problem is that the public does not act in concert to serve its own interests but, instead, takes its cues from the external world and puts its trust in the wrong people and entities.
Eye Witnesses in The War on Gaza
eileen fleming
I have only been as far as the Erez checkpoint, but I have four eyes in Gaza.
On December 9, 2008, I introduced Sam Habeeb, a twenty-something photo journalist and humanitarian worker in Gaza: www.wearewideawake.org
Yesterday, Sam received three death threats against him and his family because of his reports from Gaza: www.gazatoday.blogspot.com
I spoke with Sam today. His life is in danger from death threats and also the bombs that are very close to his home.
Fact- and Law- Checking the Wall Street Journal and Alan Dershowitz, Part II: Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents, and Misapplies the Law
Franklin Lamb Beirut
"There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances. The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable." - Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Iran: Revisiting the 1979 Revolution
Jalal Alavi
The 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution is nearing. The revolution of 1979 was not only an act against the US domination of Iranian politics, which began with the US-British coup of 1953 against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, but also an act that was supposed to place Iran amongst the countries that made the transition to electoral democracy [1] as part of what the late Samuel Huntington and others have called the “third wave” of democratization.
Thirty years later, it seems fair to say that neither of the above objectives has been achieved to the satisfaction of the majority population in Iran, of course, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, as of the time of the revolution, may be said to be actor-based in nature: those who promised a more sovereign Iran and a more open society decided to establish a manifestly anti-Western theocracy instead, which eventually engendered not only a more interventionist Iran policy on the part of the United States and other Western powers, but also a clerical regime that turned out to be more reactionary than the secular autocracy it replaced.
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