Mahler's Prodigal Son

Credited to Mike Luckovich

Whilst the media concentrates on reporting on Syria, another tragedy has befallen the people of Yemen. As reported by AlJazeera , UNICEF has issued a report detailing the plight of the Yemenese, especially its children. "More than 400,000 children are at risk of starvation in Yemen, with nearly 2.2 million in need of urgent care, according to the UN children's agency UNICEF. New figures indicate that hunger among children has reached an "all-time high", with at least 462,000 suffering from severe acute malnutrition - a drastic increase of about 200 percent since 2014. In a report published on Monday, UNICEF said at least one child dies every 10 minutes because of malnutrition, diarrhoea and respiratory-tract infections."

With all the hubbub surrounding the Resolution of the UN Security recently condemning Israel for its establishment and expansion of so-called settlements, this piece from B'Tselem -The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories -provides a timely explanation of how Israelis take over Palestinian rural land. "This report tells the history of the process of fragmentation imposed on Palestinian rural land in the West Bank through a case study of three villages in the Nablus District – ‘Azmut, Deir al-Hatab and Salem. What these communities have experienced since 1980, when Israel established the Elon Moreh nearby, is but one illustration of broader developments taking place throughout the West Bank. Their story is similar to that of hundreds of Palestinian communities on whose lands Israeli settlements were established."   Continue reading here . Olive groves of the village of Salem on both sides of the bypass road to Elon Moreh, Pa...

There are those who make a splash about their good deeds - and then there are those who fly under the radar, but whose humanitarian work and generosity is so very helpful to so many.     Introducing Jim Estill, a Canadian in Guelph, who could well qualify as Canada's Oscar Schindler.    Toronto Life reports on this remarkable human being...... "When Jim Estill decided to sponsor 50 Syrian refugee families, he didn’t tell anyone about it at first—not his accountant, not his friends, not even his wife. It was the summer of 2015, and the death toll in Syria had reached a quarter of a million people, while another four million had fled the country. All summer long, the news reported horror stories of Syrians drowning in the Mediterranean. Humanitarian aid programs were being cut across the Middle East. As he watched the news, Estill got worked up. “I didn’t want to be 80 years old and know that I did nothing during the greatest humanitarian crisis of...

One can look askew at Trump, regard him as a buffoon, dislike his appointments to office with derision and dismay, but we should not overlook his attack on freedom of the press.  Consider these matters in this piece CommonDreams ....  "Historically, tyrants have tried to control the press using 4 techniques that, worryingly, Donald Trump is already using. 1. Berate the media and turn the public against it. Trump refers to journalists as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” When Trump lies – claiming, for example, “massive voter fraud” in the election, and that he “won in a landslide” – and the media call him on those lies, Trump claims the media is lying. Even televised satires he labels “unfunny, one-sided, and pathetic.” 2. Limit media access . Trump hasn’t had a news conference since July. (His two predecessors had news conferences within days of being declared president.) He’s blocked the media from traveling with him, and even from knowing with whom he’s meeting...

As Gideon Levy, writing in " The U.S. Is Finally Out of the Closet " in Haaretz , rightly points out, with Trump having appointed a far-right Jewish fellow as the next ambassador to Israel, the US Congress and Senate - and the American people - will, likely, not understand that with the position to be taken by the US vis-a-vis Israel, any pretence of the USA being an honest broker in seeking a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict will immediately disappear. "President-elect Donald Trump has decided to appoint an anti-Israeli and racist lawyer as ambassador to Israel. That is, of course, his prerogative. With David Friedman’s appointment last Thursday, the United States has finally come out of the closet. From now on, it officially supports the establishment of an Israeli apartheid state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Friedman is not the first Jewish ambassador to Israel – a matter that has always sparked questions of dual loyalty – but h...

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American writer. His books have been published in over 40 languages and his plays staged in more than one hundred countries. He is the author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).  Dorfman writes on CommonDreams how, given the interference by the Russians in the recent presidential election, Americans can now perhaps understand how Chileans feel about the US intervention in their democratic processes during the Allende period back in the 1970's. "On the morning of Oct. 22, 1970, in what was then my home in Santiago de Chile, my wife, Angélica, and I listened to a news flash on the radio. Gen. René Schneider, the head of Chile’s armed forces, had been shot by a commando on a street of the capital. He was not expected to survive. Angélica and I had the same automatic reaction: It’s the C.I.A., we said, almost in unison. We had no proof at the time — though evidence that we were right would eventua...