Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Jackie Northam produced a powerful and tragic story (hear audio) for NPR today about a single Lebanese family from the southern Lebanese village of Srifa and their displacement and the town’s wholesale destruction. She interviewed the family at a Beirut school which housed many other families seeking refuge from the fighting. The mother, [...]

Funeral of Yiftah Schreier, killed at Maroun al-Ras (photo: Jini)
NPR’s Israel correspondent, Linda Gradstein, conducted a heart-wrenching interview with the father of a 21 year-old IDF soldier killed yesterday in southern Lebanon. Ami Schreier [Haaretz spells the name 'Schreier' and NPR, 'Shreier], the father, beseeched prime minister Olmert to continue to prosecute the war [...]

It surely must be a mark of how rudderless and flailing the Republican House caucus is that they’d let a small rump group of white Southerners led by the likes of ‘charming’ Lynn Westmoreland hold hostage the Voting Rights Bill. It was supposed to have had smooth sailing through Congressional passage today. But [...]

NPR’s Adam Davidson reports tonight (audio) that many U.S. ports lease terminals to foreign companies and that some of these companies are in turn owned by their respective governments. In addition, he points out that the New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook in Staten Island is operated by a Chinese company owned by [...]

For the life of me, I don’t understand the relative uniformity of opposition among the progressive blog and media community to the Dubai ports deal. The only bloggers besides myself whom I’ve found who support the deal are Dennis the Peasant (a conservative with heart–he detests Pajamas Media and that earns him points in [...]

I’ve been following the CPB scandal involving Ken Tomlinson for the past eight months or so. It’s developed quite nicely and fits in comfortably with all the other Republican scandals involving Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, et al. But my interest really piqued when I read that Cheryl Halpern, CPB’s board chair [...]