Harry's Place

This is a Cross-Post by Dave Rich at the CST Blog
Last week Mehdi Hasan, political editor at the New Statesman, wrote a column about the activities of pro-Israeli lobbyists in Washington D.C., which he sees as the cause of the current impasse in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. This paragraph, in particular, caught the eye (emphasis added):
The [...]

Nat Fraser, who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife, has won his appeal to the UK Supreme Court on the grounds of significant evidence which could have acquitted him was not known to his defence. The Crown Office is seeking a retrial.
Alex Salmond is less-than pleased that a body created to unify an [...]

This is a guest post from Mahmoud Jabari, a young photojournalist based in Hebron.
Palestine, Israel, Israelis, Palestinians, settlements, wall, 1967 borders, refugees, and a dictionary of words of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been going on for sixty-three years. Each side wants the other to give up something, and each side believes that it is [...]

I suppose Bill McKibben would fit some people’s definition of an “environmentalist wacko.”
And he does have a sometimes-annoying tendency to hector– on display in this op-ed piece in The Washington Post in the wake of the tornado Sunday that devastated large parts of Joplin, Missouri, and left more than 120 dead.

I think environmentalists do [...]

This is a guest post by Peter Tatchell
For the sixth year running, the Moscow city authorities have banned the Gay Pride parade, scheduled this year for 28 May. In recent weeks, four separate applications for different Gay Pride events have been turned down by Mayor, Sergei Sobyanin.
I will march with Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and [...]

In a post about the 2009 decision by the West Dunbartonshire Council in Scotland to boycott goods made or grown in Israel, ModernityBlog raised the perfectly reasonable question of whether this applies to Israeli computer and medical technology.
Cllr Jonathan McColl of West Dunbartonshire replied in the comments:
You think we should replace all of our computers [...]

The Guardian has published an article on its website by Richard Hillgrove. He argues that “Facebook and Twitter must be reeled in” and that “they are going to have to introduce a delay mechanism so that content can be checked before it goes up.”   He goes on to say that there needs to be “some [...]

Paul Bogdanor has brought to my attention an article that he has uploaded to his website which he thought would be of interest to me for my series of From the Vaults posts. He was accurate. I copy below the short article, one which speaks for itself:

HITLERITE RIOT IN BERLIN
Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares [...]

Hint: It’s not the American or Israeli flags.
In Hama Syrian protesters burned Iranian, Russian and Chinese flags. (Russia and China blocked a UN resolution condemning the Syrian regime’s use of violence against peaceful demonstrators.)

And while some in the West proclaim that they are all Hezbollah, and wave Hezbollah flags, in the Syrian city of Homs, [...]

This is a cross-post from Just Journalism.
The French news agency AFP today reported on a series of arrests in Iran of members of the Bahai faith for ‘propagating their faith’:
‘Iran has arrested a “number” of Bahais for running an “online Bahai university” aimed at propagating their faith, the government-run Iran newspaper reported on Monday.’
The article [...]