Mediawatch World Apr 07: Robert Fisk, War Crimes, Tibet & CIA, Mitchell Baker, Solzhenitsyn, Kurt Vonnegut, Rushdie, Solar Elec., Szep, RealNews

I was given the chance to talk to 600 Muslim Canadians a few days ago. The dinner was in an Ottawa banqueting room and the guests also included the imam of the Ottawa mosque, the Ottawa chief of police and sundry uniformed Canadian army officers. I warned the audience they might not like all they heard from me. And sure enough, when I told the audience that they were perfectly at liberty to condemn Israel and America – indeed, that they should condemn both when they abuse human rights, occupy other people's countries and shoot innocent civilians – but that I wanted to know why I so rarely heard them condemn the vicious police states in the Middle East and other areas of south-west Asia from which they originally came, I was greeted with silence. A smattering of Muslim diplomats sat like statues, thus identifying the cruelty of their regimes. The only immediate applause came when I remarked that the moment Western soldiers started shooting at Muslims in Muslim lands, it was time for the soldiers to withdraw. Robert Fisk: The Fearful lives in a land of the free

About 100 police officers have been sent to investigate the incident

Vandals have desecrated 148 Muslim graves in France's biggest WWI cemetery, officials have said.

A pig's head was hung from one headstone and slogans insulting Islam and France's Muslim justice minister were daubed on other graves.

President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the attack as a "hateful act" and the "most inadmissible kind of racism".

French Muslim war graves defaced

Media coverage of the disclosure of the "torture memo" authored by Bush Justice Department official John C. Yoo has been mostly a deafening silence. But on this morning's Chris Matthews' show, someone finally fired a shot. As we mentioned in this morning's liveblog, credit goes to The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, for taking the opportunity to ensure that this matter got out into the televised discourse somehow. SULLIVAN: The latest revelations on the torture front show the memo from John Yoo...means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes.

Andrew Sullivan: Bush Administration Officials Will Be 'Indicted For War Crimes'

For the first time since 1968, the Pentagon has charged a civilian contractor under military law. But the individual in question is not one of the Blackwater "shooters" alleged to have gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square last September, nor is it the Blackwater contractor accused of shooting to death a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president inside the Green Zone on Christmas Eve 2006. In fact, the contractor is not even a US citizen. Nor is he an armed contractor. And the crime in question was not committed against an Iraqi civilian. An Iraqi Translator Gets Prosecuted While Blackwater Gets Another Year in Iraq

Given the historical context of the unrest in Tibet, there is reason to believe Beijing was caught on the hop with the recent demonstrations for the simple reason that their planning took place outside of Tibet and that the direction of the protesters is similarly in the hands of anti-Chinese organizers safely out of reach in Nepal and northern India. Similarly, the funding and overall control of the unrest has also been linked to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and by inference to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his close cooperation with US intelligence for over 50 years. Indeed, with the CIA's deep involvement with the Free Tibet Movement and its funding of the suspiciously well-informed Radio Free Asia, it would seem somewhat unlikely that any revolt could Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA
By Richard M Bennett

Earlier this year, I interviewed Mitchell Baker in London for an article in the Technology section of the Guardian. We chatted on too long, and because she was so interesting, I thought I'd put a rough transcript of the rest online for Mozilla's 10th anniversary on March 31. Ahem. But Mitchell said the idea was to celebrate the anniversary all year, so it's still timely.... There's around 3,000 words on why Mozilla doesn't want to get into a death-spiral with Microsoft, and has more important things to do than chase market share, such as moving the whole web forward. Also, why Mozilla isn't using Firefox to plug Thunderbird more heavily, and why Firefox is finally taking a serious look at the mobile business. Firefox's Mitchell Baker -- the anniversary interview in full

Russia's greatest living novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is working feverishly to complete his collected works and is writing every day despite failing health, a missing vertebra and being unable to walk, his wife, Natalia, revealed yesterday. In a rare interview, Natalia Solzhenitsyn told The Observer that her Nobel prize-winning husband - who turns 90 in December - is still working on several major literary projects in his west Moscow dacha, and is determined to oversee the publication of a 30-volume edition of his selected works. Solzhenitsyn battles illness to complete final volumes

April 7, 2008 | On May 29, 1945, Pfc. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sat down at a typewriter in the Red Cross Club of the POW Repatriation Camp in Le Havre, France, and wrote his family a letter. "I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than 'missing in action,'" he began. "That leaves me a lot of explaining to do." The 22-year-old proceeds to detail his capture by the Germans, his imprisonment in Dresden and his subsequent liberation in a mordant brand of prose that would eventually become his literary trademark. How "Slaughterhouse Five" was born By Steve Almond

Acclaimed novels, a knighthood and, most tellingingly, the fatwa which forced him into hiding have made him one of the most celebrated, and controversial, authors of our age. His latest book returns to the tortured relationship between East and West; its other obsession is with the power of female beauty. Here he reveals how writing it helped him escape the painful break-up of his marriage to Padma Lakshmi. Salman Rushdie by Andrew Anthony

The Border Police last week allowed settlers to return to an illegal outpost on Palestinian land in the West Bank and force out left-wing activists who had been authorized to guard the place.
Officials at the Yesh Din human rights group say they had warned authorities of the settlers' plans ahead of time. The Border Police say their forces were unable to gain control over the settlers due to "numerical inferiority." Border Police let settlers retake illegal West Bank outpost

Solar photovoltaic modules or panels convert beams of energy from the sun -- photons -- into electrons, which we can then use as electricity. According to Dan Berger, senior project designer at SPG Solar, we can expect to generate about 6.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square meter of solar panels per day, or 2,373 kWh per square meter per year. The average American used 12,000 kWh in 2003, so each person would need around 5 square meters of solar panels (about 54 square feet). At 12,000 kWh per capita, electricity demand is roughly 3.6 trillion kWh, or the equivalent of 1,200 coal-fired power plants running full-time. To generate 3.6 trillion kWh per year, we would need to install about 1.5 billion square meters of solar panels, or around 586 square miles. This is clearly a lot higher than the number that you had heard and equivalent to one-third of Rhode Island. Could the U.S. meet its energy needs with solar panels alone? By Pablo Päster

To assemble this collection of jokes, The Post contacted dozens of comics, ranging from top-dollar headliners in Vegas to regulars on "Late Night" and "The Daily Show" to up-and-comers who do alt-comedy at local bars. We asked them to tell us the best gag they'd written in the past year and their favorite punch line delivered by another comedian. So according to some of the funniest people on earth, these are the 50 most hilarious jokes of the last 12 months, whether they were told in nightclubs, on television or around a platter of fries at a late-night diner meal. Feel free to incite your own laugh riot. Killer Jokes

Free download from Internet Archive A gazetteer of the territories under the government of the viceroy of India (1886)

File this headline under Irony
Housing Crisis Hits Its Own
Mortgage Bankers Group Faced With Tougher Terms

From Paul Jay of the RealNews

McCain & Obama on foreign policy Aijaz Ahmad discusses the differences between Obama's and McCain's foreign policy. view Hilary Clinton on Martin Luther King Jr. AP: Clinton remembers Dr. King on the 40th anniversary of his death in the city where he died view John McCain on Martin Luther King Jr. AP: McCain says he was wrong to oppose making Dr. King's birthday a holiday view Barack Obama on Martin Luther King Jr. AP: Obama says country has yet to heal from Rev. King's assassination and still needs to heed his words view The Daily Szep: U.S. Pledges to Bolster Afghan Fight