August 5, 2002

Oops A British warship that had struck a reef and was stuck on for a month is now being towed backwards to a port in nearby Australia. The HMS Nottingham's commanding officer, Richard Farrington, faces a possible court martial over the incident. 11:27:39 PM

Waiting it out A Jerusalem Post article states that Israeli military officers wish to hold back in undertaking large scale operations, preferring to wait until next year when they expect the United States to remove Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat to be sidelined , and the security fence between Israel and the West Bank to be completed. 11:25:09 AM

LA Times Special Fiction Supplement In a letter to the editor of the LA Times, Matt Richards writes: Yossi Klein Halevi (Commentary, Aug. 1) claims there would be no Palestinian refugee problem if only the Palestinians had "not rejected the U.N. partition in 1947." There would also be no Palestinian refugee problem had the U.N. not given away someone else's land to foreign refugees (Europe's Jews) against the unanimous wishes of the indigenous Arab population. The 1947 partition was against the principles of self-determination and a colossal historic mistake for which the United States has paid dearly over the decades, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. will never be able to broker peace in the Middle East because the Arabs fear that we will not be fair and the Israelis fear that we will. I suppose the writer thinks it was the Arabs who built the Temple Mount. 2:11:06 AM