Mahler's Prodigal Son

From the TimesOnLine : "The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change. If the forecast — based on 95 years of data tracking the retreat of the Kilimanjaro ice — proves correct it will be the first time in about 12,000 years that the slopes of Africa’s highest mountain have been ice-free. Since 1912, 85 per cent of the glacier has disappeared and the melting does not appear to be slowing down. Twenty-six per cent of the ice has disappeared since 2000. The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that the primary cause of the ice loss is the increase in global temperatures. Although changes in cloudiness and snowfall may also play a role, these factors appear to be less important. Even intense droughts, including one lasting about 300 years, did not cause ...

As the US Congress is about to debate whether it ought to adopt a resolution in effect denouncing the UN initiated Goldstone Report on the Gaza War - why in heavens name the US ought to be involved in such a deplorable consideration, especially given the distortions of the report before members of Congress, God only knows! - perhaps some pertinent facts in relation to the Report are called for. Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report. Travers is a retired Colonel of the Army of the Irish Defence Forces. His last appointment was as Commandant of its Military College. He also served in command of troops with various UN and EU peace support missions. Ken Silverstein, of Harper's Magazine , interviewed Travers with 6 important questions. Read the Q & A here .

There is no denying that when push comes to shove, the US just cannot help itself in going to bat for Israel 150%. Just witness the turn around in the last 24 hours of the US with respect to the ongoing building of no less than 3000 settlements in the Israeli occupied territories and East Jerusalem, when only a few months ago it was said by the Americans to be a no-no. Al Jazeera reports on the state of play here. In effect, any settlement negotiations appear to be now dead in the water - again! Meanwhile, Gideon Levy writing in Haaretz " America, stop sucking up to Israel " makes a powerful case for the US taking a stand against Israel's policies: "Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occu...

The debate whether those reading newspapers online will pay for the free access they now enjoy is hotting up. If surveys are anything to go by then the online publishers ought to be wary of going down the path of trying to charge for online access. MediaDailyNews reports: "The latest plan to save newspapers -- charging for online content, perhaps with a system of micropayments -- has been slightly deflated by a new survey from Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD, which found that over half of online readers said they wouldn't pay for online content. This is due partly to their conditioning over the last decade of Internet use, when they grew accustomed to getting online content for free. That's an irony, considering that free delivery was the newspaper publishers' own online strategy. Specifically, the survey of 2,404 American adults by Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD found that 55.5% of respondents said they would be very unlikely to pay for online content from newspaper or magazin...

Michelle Obama flew to New York to see a World Series game. Her husband, late at night, went to be in attendance as the bodies of US servicemen killed in Aghanistan were off-loaded at a military base. Maureen Dowd , writing her regular op-ed piece in The New York Times ,on this occasion not being acerbic, contrasts the two trips and what confronts Obama, the President : "But it was also a genuinely poignant moment. It is how we want our presidents to behave, doing the humane thing especially when it’s hard. And Obama, who called it “a sobering reminder” of sacrifices made, signaled to Americans that he will resist blinders as he grapples with the byzantine, seemingly bottomless conflicts he inherited. Leave it to Liz Cheney, in her continuing bid to out-Cheney her scary dad, to suggest that Obama is a crass publicity-seeker. “I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras,” she told a Fox News radio host. She’s right: There were no press camera...

Tony Judt is regarded as one of the finest historians of our time. He is the author of many well-received books. All too sadly he is now afflicted with a debilitating disease. Thankfully that has not blunted an acute mind and a sense of morality and justice [and in the case of what he is writing about, Jewish approach] he has always articulated - as he does in this piece " Justice Goldstone and the Jews " on The Huffington Post : "We Jews should be very proud of Richard Goldstone. In an ancient tradition of Jewish self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling, the author of the recent report from the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict has braved personal vilification and institutional mendacity to describe the crimes committed by Israeli forces in the course of their invasion of Gaza in December 2008. To be sure, the Goldstone Report also itemizes the crimes of Hamas, notably in its campaign of rocket-firing into Israel. But the scale of human right...

9 November will see the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in effect, the end of communism. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev was President of the USSR. "On September 23, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and her husband, Stephen F. Cohen, a contributing editor, interviewed former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at his foundation in Moscow. With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaching, we believed that the leader most responsible for that historic event should be heard, on his own terms, in the United States." Read the interview, in The Nation , with Gorbachev here .