A useful article on how to deploy a Turbogears application using FCGI if your hosting provider doesn’t allow you to do mod_proxy or anything else convenient.
http://www.thesamet.com/blog/2006/04/15/how-to-deploy-turbogears-applications-on-bluehost/. The paths and stuff are specific to bluehost but the content applies to almost anywhere where you have a shell acccount.

Israel’s treatment of a Palestinian Journalist who was the winner of Martha Gelhorn Prize for Journalism. The youngest recipient ever and one of the few non-Britons to get it. This is depressing.
Quotes from the article:

Eventually, Omer was transferred to a Palestinian hospital, but only after Israeli officials tried to force him to sign a paper absolving them from responsibility.

“In other words, if I died or was permanently disabled as a result of Israel’s actions, Israel could not be held accountable. One would think I was in a third world dictatorship rather than the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. One would think.”

A former body guard of the author has published a book about him which he claims is full of lies and inaccuracies. Salman Rushdie is planning legal action against the bodyguard.

Here are some nice quotes.

Sir Salman said the book was defamatory and is demanding that the offending chapters be removed.

He (Salman Rushdie) said: “I am not in the business of suppressing books. I just want the stuff taken out of which he knows to be untrue.
“Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.”

Complete article - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7538875.stm.

I guess freedom of speech even if it offends is fine as long as you don’t have to be on the receiving end.

Iraqis get a taste of American Freedom. An entire generation of Iraqis without primary or secondary education. This is horribly depressing. I can’t think of what’s going through the minds of the people supporting this ‘war’.

Videos of the late Palestinian American Professor and famous author of “Orientalism” - Edward Said. I especially enjoyed the series on Orientalism.
Four part video on Orientalism and A lecture critical of Samuel Huntington’s famous ‘Clash of Civilisations’ idea.

I picked up the book a year or two ago and stopped reading it halfway because of it’s density. I think I need to budget some dedicated time and get back to it one of these days.