What's up with the home destructions ?

I hardly believe the news when I read about court orders telling to destroy houses illegaly build (source Haaretz), to realize that it wasn't about illegal settlements in the West bank but just 20+ years old houses build in east Jerusalem... So it takes years, world pressure (american), dozens and votes and millions to destroy an illegal jewish house (if it is on the other side of the green line) and just a court order to do so with palestinians houses in Jerusalem.

Just so you understand this a little bit better, most houses in Israël have some kind of illegal extension, and many seem to never have gotten any form of autorizations to be build but they are quite old so they mostly don't get destroyed. So why destroying them now ? I thought this was a period where peace efforts were taking place ? Well maybe that's actually because of this, everyone that is unhappy about disengagement and current attempts towards peace is trying to piss of palestinians as much as they can to trigger a violent answer so they can later say, look Palestinians only want violence and strike back hard. Maybe it's not that and it's just bad luck it happens now, or it just happened all the time and got unnoticed, but it is a fact that it is typically the wrong time to do that kind of things.

NON

Is what France sayed to the European constitution... 55% vs 45% for the yes.

I am sad about this but also excited about what is going to happen, because the future after a yes would have been without surprise, but now we can expect some animation in the European politics.

X-rated X-rays

After being used on the Rafah border crossing (see Rafah Pundits here, here and here)The NYTimes reports now that the Homeland Security plans to use those new machines to screen people through clothes. They were supposed to be bad for health at that time, is it still the same machines ? Are frequent travellers risking something from exposure ? At least I guess that because of this directive the health impact will be for sure evaluated and we should have the answer finally.

Little Game (2)

Next little game, guessing what this picture is. I garantee that this is a real picture, totally unaltered, no photoshoping nothing. I took that last weekend and it's now on my desktop background :).

French wording

Libération points to a great new article of the french official journal reporting about their newest inventions. As you might already know, us French can't tolerate any english words in our language so our administration is finding replacements for all the new words. The latest in date is to replace blog (coming from a contraction of web log) by "bloc-notes", we already have "butineur" for browser, "cederome" for CDROM, "partagiciel" for shareware "mél" for e-mail... and in Quebec they already have "baladodiffusion" for podcasting.

Our politicians have long given up on understanding our suburbs talkin' but now they make sure that communication won't happen anymore.

Jewish terrorism in Haifa ?

Haaretz publishes this article about Jewish terrorist convicted of targeting Israeli Arab residents of Haifa. Like this country is not having enough problems to solve on the verge of the Disneygagement (Rafahpundits TM).

Israeli army has to face refuzeniks that do not want to evacuate settlers, others that don't want to destroy palestinian homes, right wing terrorists like this guy stealing explosives to blow up his neighborhood, and probably some more forms of smuggling. I think I've never heard of an army under such internal pressure.

Upgraded the PC

I haven't posted much in the past days. I was busy upgrading my PC with more hard drive capacity so I had to reinstall the whole system on the new drive (I was already at max hard drives on that box and the smallest one was the system one). Now everything looks fine, reinstalled. I invested into a wireless access point so I can stream movies to my bedroom without having that ugly cable on the floor. I'll see in the next few days how it works, but I'm pretty happy for now.

Mount Tabor

I promised you a picture of mount Tabor monastery last week, so here it is. It's the arch inside the Greek Orthodox church where Bishara's daughter Taleen was baptised. I was really impressed by how beautyfull the inside was.

Provocation ?

Yesterday the Sun published a picture of Saddam Hussein in his underwears with the following title "Tyrant's in his pants", and today's title is even more provocative "Bush probes Saddam's pants: I will get to the bottom of it". I have to admit that I laughed hard at the second title which is especially humiliating for Bush despite disagreing on the publication of these pictures. The Sun claims that it was given to them by american officials, that would make that leak some pretty bad PR for the americans, but unfortunately we start to be used to that.

After flushing Corans, applying fordism to torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo I really wonder what will be the next thing we'll uncover. They still try to make us believe that this is isolated cases of bad soldiers, but I am sorry when things come at this scale the hierarchy has to assume some responsability. Condemning one or two random soldiers to prison sentences is first not going to solve the problem, second an insult to the victims.

Le titre du Sun aujourd'hui en Francais : "Bush enquête dans le slip de Saddam. Le président promet d'aller au fond des choses". Forts ces anglais quand même.

Little game

What is this ? Please post your guess in the comments. I like this photo so I just found an excuse to post it :), and the subject is pretty uncommon so it's fun.

Hudna over?

Just a short post to say that the cease-fire that was progressively dying within the last weeks ended up today (unless something really new happens) in Gaza. There has been a heavy shooting in Rafah that resulted in the death of a man, israeli copter shooting at a group of hamas militants firing rockets (palestinian view at Rafah Zoo and israeli view in Haaretz). Even more recently Hamas has started a shelling of gush katiff and injured PA police officers that were probably attempting to stop them. I'll probably do a bigger press review tomorrow.

Stuffed vegetables

You all know how much I love middle-eastern food, so today I gonna try to bring my contribution to your food experience. As usual my recipe will probably have no exact proportions so just do how it feels good and blame me if it isn't because it should. I didn't find any matching recipe on my usual cooking sites so I'll give you more details.

Here I have eaten stuffed zucchinis, eggplants, cabbage leaves, wine leaves, bellpeppers and palm hearts. There are obviously many variations of each but the basics are the same. I'll base myself on zucchinis and cabbage because that's the two I know the best but by extension you can guess what to do. I think wine leaves and palm hearts need additional processing.

First part is to prepare the stuffing, ground lamb meat, rice (~1/5 meat weight, but you can put a lot of rice if you want it to be cheap), finely cut onion (1 big per 500g meat), comino, cinnamon (much less than comino), salt to taste. Put all this together into a bowl, I tend to add a little bit of hot paprika for zucchinis and eggplants.

For the leaves you need to boil them into water for 3-4 minutes, and remove the nerves.

Second part prepare the vegetables. In Europe we tend to slice them in two longitudinally and remove part of their heart, here they do it differently (and I prefer it). Choose small vegetables, ~3cm diameter and less than 15cm long, cut their "head" and empty them. That is the tricky part. Here they do have a special tool to do it without piercing the vegetable, but with a cooking knife I always manage to do it (just takes longer). Stuff them with the meat-rice-spices (make sure it is packed with a finger).

In a non sticking pot (or if it can stick just put some spare leaves at the bottom), put your stuffed vegetables, cover with water and cook for over 45 minutes (until the vegetables are cooked and the rice inside them is overcooked:). One good thing to do is to add tomato concentrate with some hot paprika to the water (for zucchinis, eggplants and bellpeppers at least).

You can add some fresh and finely cut mint and lemon juice just before serving. You can prepare them one day in advance it works pretty well.

Bon appetit !

Mini lexique pour les Francais : Eggplant = aubergine, zucchini = courgette, wine leave = feuille de vigne, cabbage = chou, bellpepper = poivron, ground = haché, comino = cumin, cinnamon = canelle, stuffed = farci, paprika = piment :p.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Yesterday evening I went to watch the hitchhicker's guide to the galaxy with Haggai. I read the books years ago and I remember enjoying the humour a lot. The movie was fun and when it finished I was disappointed by how short it was until I realized it had been almost 2 hours. Do not expect it to be a fantastic movie, but still it is very entertaining and quite well done and feels short (which in my book is a big plus, I remember being bored to hell watching the neverending action scenes of Matrix 2 and 3).

The only thing I wonder is how do react the spectators that haven't read the books nor watched or listened to the original series. I am not sure it is well made for those, please tell me if you're in that situation.

Pour les Francais je n'ai vu aucune traces de sa sortie :("Le guide du routard galactique").

Back in Israel

Et Voilà, I am back from France a little tired :). I left home Wednesday at 2 am flew to Marseille and arrived this morning at 6 am back to Haifa. France greeted me with 4 days of rain, just for me, as I heard the sun is shining now. Anyway I spent 4 days with my parents, thing I didn't really took the time to do in the past years and it was very nice despite the bad weather. The area where they stay is beautifully (and green) as you can see on this pictures. We hiked a little bit around when the weather permitted it, I took lots of flowers pictures, invited my parents to a great restaurant and slept a lot.

This morning after 4 long hours of sleep and a 13 hours travel (unfortunately no direct flight back), I came to work. I basically arrived for lunch. I insisted to read my e-mails before actually eating. What a good idea ! I had an invitation to Bishara's (co-worker) daughter baptism. I read the mail at noon, and it was starting at 1PM in mount Tabor. I rushed as much as I could, changed clothes and made it to the orthodox monastery of mount Tabor (a sister's monastery closed to the public) only 30 minutes late, it wasn't much of a problem as the priest arrived after me :). The church was absolutely gorgeous and that was the first time I was watching an orthodox ceremony so I was very interested. The ceremony happened in a small committee, and they used warm water to baptize her (how civilized !), so she didn't even cry (that was the priest first in 38 years :).

We ate a lot of great Arabic food, chatted a lot and I had a great time. But yesterday when I was in a farm in haute Provence I would never have thought that the very next day I would be on top of mount Tabor, participating to a very happy baptism in one of the most beautiful church I have ever been in (pictures later this week). Thanks again Bishara !

Weekend in southern France

Wednesday and thursday, Israël celebrates its independance day so I have a 4 days weekend. I'm taking advantage of it to fly to Marseille to visit my family. I'm leaving home in 4 hours, that's going to be a really short night.

See you all on sunday, à dimanche.

Terrorists captures and lies...

I just read this article (on Sabbah's blog from a Sunday Times article). It just points that the latest great capture of a Al Quaeda number 3 by the Pakistanese, which made a lot of noise in the medias, appears to be just another case of mistaken identity. "Funny" that this didn't made it to the news.
Few links reporting the capture (googlized) : USA Today, CNN, NYtimes, Christian Science Monitor (random search result),...
I haven't found on those sites links to the report that there is probably have been a mistake on the guy's identity (using the search engine on their sites).

I hope to hear more about this because I wonder how many times they are going to use that kind of "Al Quaeda number X" trick to raise their popularity (I don't deny the fact the guy is a terrorist, just the Buzz around his capture).

Local version without alcohol

I was a little tired yesterday when I posted the mojito recipe, so here is the follow-up. I have tasted a lemonade here that is based on the same idea, just without alcohol. You will probably not do it for just one glass, so take a hand full of mint, crush it with a dozen of tea spoons of sugar, squeeze 4 or 5 lemons, add a few drops of rose essence (very important for the oriental taste), add 1 litter of water and put all this in the freezer to get it really cold. Taste, adjust sugar/water according your preference. It is a very efficient thirst quencher, enjoy.

Favorite cocktail

This is how my favorite cocktail looks like. Those that know me already know that I have a big rhum weakness and that this one is called Mojito (yes capital M). It is the Cuban national drink and since the vacations I spent there with Jyby a while ago I'm addicted.

I am sure you all want to know how to make this fantastic drink (or at least please fake it). I've learnt to like a few versions. First the basics, you'll need some cane sugar, liquid or powder, it doesn't really matter. In Cuba they use powder but many use liquid cane sugar syrup and it tastes great. Next is fresh mint (ask for nana here) and a citrus fruit. The original is made with regular fresh squeezed lemon juice but I admit that the best mojitos I ever drunk were made with grapefruit juice, lime also works well. Finally you'll need rhum, good one, I personally recommend Havana Club, Dillon, La Mauny, 3 rivières or Charette, eventually some good Brazilian Cachaca, and in very last case if you are totally desperate use Bacardi (still better than using vodka, but don't do it please).

So now that you have the basic ingredients you want the proportions ? Are you sure ? Ok, per glass one tea spoon full of sugar (2 if you love ultra sweet and tasteless drinks), squeeze half a citrus, add 4-5 mint leaves and crush them with the sugar and juice, add 1/3 of a glass of rhum, some ice and complete with water. An alternative to water is to complete with sprite (you might want to reduce the sugar amount by half then), other alternative is to complete with just rhum.

Among other improvements you can add 1 drop of vanilla extract, or one drop of angustura (there is some in the original recipe, it is bitter orange alcohol), and I tried recently with a few drops of Amaretto (almonds liquor) and it worked well too.

Btw i can confirm that loukoums are soluble in Mojitos, it just takes a while.

Vlog Jerusalem

Ok, first attempt to videoblog (here). This is a xvid encoded video so you might need to download the codec. The internet archive is slow to accept my files so I'll try another host, please let me know if it works.

This has been taken from the David Tower looking towards the old city (towards SE approximately). On the left you have the 2 grey domes of the church of the Holy scepulcre, then the golden dome of the rock, on its right you have al Aqsa mosq grey dome and in front (invisible) the wailing wall. Left side is arab quarter, right side is jewish and rightmost is armenian.

[edit] Merci Valou pour l'hébergement ;).

For once, news that make you smile.

Yeah, today brought up a bunch of news that put a smile on my face. They're not necessary good news, but are just mostly fun.

The son and the wife of the chief Sefarade Rabi in Israel are accused of abducting (and eventually beating :( a 17 years old boy that happened to cyber with his 18 years old daughter through some kind of internet chat and mail service and eventually met each other. I was impressed, this could be a fantastic scenario for a successfull comedy. Oh well, it s true, then it's sad, come on she's 18 and in the worst case it was CYBER sex before mariage, not real one, so relax ! Haaretz link here.

Yesterday was the International Marijuana day (I didn't even knew it existed, I'm kinda sad I missed the fun of it:), and many pro-legalization activists and just regular people went on picnics in Tel-Aviv squares. Fun, after mothers, fathers, grandmothers, workers, now baba-cools have their very own day ! Haaretz link here.

Yet another live comedy going on, the Patriarch of the Orthodox church is getting dismissed by the other leaders of his church, on accusations of corruption. Wow, maybe some cardinals should think about that and dismiss a leader that has been in Hitler Jugend ? Nah I'm dreaming, Oriental tradition is so much more evolved than roman one :). Well anyway the Patriarch isn't pretty happy about it. You can follow it again on Haaretz here as Jerusalem Post is only reporting bad and sad news.

Finaly to close that day of news, as the Macabi Tel Aviv is playing the finals of the European Basketball cup, everybody left work at 4PM to go watch the game, so I am alone at work and blogging :). It's impressive everybody really left, and was so surprised I wasn't going to watch the game. So here this final is like the Superbowl in the US, life stops for it.

[edit] Tel Aviv won :).

More News

This time I'm going to try to do it in both english and french ;).

Municipal elections have been taking place all day in Palestine. It appears that the Fatah will beat the Hamas in this poll according a report from Reuters. I believe this is a good thing for several reasons, first a poll happened and there were uncertainty about the winner (at least it wasn't supposed to be a 80%/20% poll) which is usualy characteristic of democracy, second the Hamas wants to have a political role in Palestine (good thing because until recently they have been more involved in violent actions than talks), and third Abbas Fatah is more moderate and seeks actively for now a peacefull solution with Israel.

Something kinda frightening is that the IDF raises security concerns about the pullout because leaving the Rafah border control to the Egyptian army would cause a threat to Israel. Do you seriously think that Egypt is going to attack Israel 38 years later ? I doubt it, but I am probably overconfident... I hope this kind of concerns is not going to delay nor stop the pullout.

Je disais donc que les élections municpales se sont passé aujourd'hui apparament sans heurts puisque la presse ne rapporte rien, à part une présumée victoire du Fatah sur le Hamas. C'est plutot bon signe pour plusieurs raisons, tout d'abord le fait qu'un vote où le parti d'opposition a des chances de gagner est un signe de démocratie, ensuite le Hamas veut jouer un rôle politique en Palestine, alors qu'auparavant ils étaient partisans uniquement de la lutte armée, et enfin le Fatah de Abbas est réputé plus modéré et cherche activement une solution politique au conflit avec Israel.

Une autre nouvelle un peu effrayante est un rapport de l'armée Israélienne qui émet des réserves importantes quant à laisser les Egyptiens assurer la sécurité de la frontière à Rafah. Tout d'abord ils craignent de la contrebande d'arme et d'autres produits illicites (ça ils ont raison à mon avis:) mais la partie effrayante est qu'il pensent qu'une présence militaire Egyptienne trop importante dans le Sinaï menace la sécurité d'Israël. J'ai quand même un gros doûte que l'Egypte envisage de réattaquer Israël 38 ans après, mais peut être suis je trop naïf (que de trémas!)... J'espère qu'il n'utiliseront pas ce genre d'excuse pour retarder indéfiniment le retrait de Gaza.

Actualité en vrac et en français

La situation en Israël et en Palestine est préoccupante ces dernières semaines. Depuis la mort des 3 jeunes à Rafah la presse rapporte des incidents quotidiens. Heureusement pour l'instant je n'ai rien vu passer qui semble "majeur" et qui destabilise définitivement cette trève fragile. Je me plaignais dans mon dernier post politique de l'apparente absence de volonté de faire des avancées du coté de Sharon. Même si cela reste mon impression générale il faut noter quelques points moins négatifs ces derniers temps.

Le retrait de Gaza est le fer de lance de Sharon pour montrer au monde ca volonté de faire évoluer les choses vers la paix. Malheureusement beaucoup de monde doute sur le fait que ce retrait se fasse et que tout ne serait que promeses en l'air pour amadouer la communauté internationale, le delai de quelques semaines annoncé récement dans le retrait ne faisant que renforcer l'opinion de ces personnes. Aujourd'hui le gouvernement a annoncé qu'il allait accorder la majorité de leurs requetes aux habitants de Gush-Katif qui vont être évacués dans le cadre du retrait (article d'Haaretz). C'est un progrès majeur, et l'on peut espérer que cela calmera la plupart des anti-retrait (sauf probablement les plus virulents). De même ces derniers temps la police et l'armée israélienne sont intervenues à plusieur reprises contre des extrémistes qui s'en prenait violement à des palestiniens non armés en palestine, et la détention administrative ne touche enfin plus que des palestiniens (même si j'ai en horreur ce concept de détention sans règles).

Le ballet des chefs d'état étrangers continue avec Poutine et des ministres Turcs, mais malheureusement l'ensemble des discussions portant sur la Palestine semblent aboutir à des refus en bloc d'Israel (Sharon dit non à la conférence sur la paix de Poutine ainsi que non à l'assistance de Poutine à la police palestinienne qui en a portant bien besoin pour maintenir un semblant d'ordre). Le seul chose qui semble marcher c'est les ventes d'armes $$$$...

En revanche les morts hebdomadaires de soldats Israeliens et de militants Palestiniens ont repris, et il semblerait que plusieurs attaques suicides aient été déjouées. Les militants Palestiniens cessent t'il de respecter la trève à cause des violations israéliennes, ou Israel intervient il pour arrêter des attentats en cours de préparation, on en est revenu au cycle infernal de la violence ou chacun riposte pour se venger de l'autre, sans fin... Heureusement il semblerait que les plus gros mouvements s'en tiennent à leur parole.

De son côté Abbas me semble faire pas mal d'efforts, d'un côté il menace d'utiliser la force contre les militants qui brisent la trève, de l'autre il leur propose d'oeuvrer pour un état Palestinien organisé en les recrutant dans les forces de sécurité. Le Hamas semble abandonner de plus en plus la lutte armée au profit de la politique, ce qui serait un progrès fantastique si cela se concrétisait et généralisait. Malgré certains signes de faiblesses à certains moments il semble garder le contrôle, la communauté internationale l'encourageant et le soutenant.

De l'autre côté de l'atlantique, les néoconservateurs religieux semblent s'être lancés dans une croisade inquisitrice et purificatrice contre tous les partisans d'une amérique plus libérale. Libé rapporte cela dans un article d'aujourd'hui. Je sais qu'il n'est pas dur d'écrire des articles partisans en ne regardant qu'à un côté de l'information, et qu'il est toujours facile de trouver des [|[#@[{[|{# pour déblatérer des conneries mais j'ai quand même été choqué d'apprendre qu'il existait des gens qui pouvaient penser ça:

Tyrans. La Cour suprême, qui n'est pourtant pas le QG du gauchisme américain, est également prise à partie. L'un de ses neuf juges, Anthony Kennedy, nommé par Ronald Reagan en 1988, est dans le collimateur de la droite. Son dernier forfait : en mars, il a voté avec les quatre juges les plus progressistes pour interdire la peine capitale pour les mineurs. Circonstance aggravante : il s'est appuyé, dans son argumentaire, sur la «norme internationale», ce que l'inénarrable Tom DeLay a considéré comme «scandaleux».

Lors d'un colloque organisé le mois dernier à Washington sur le thème «Remèdes à la tyrannie des juges», Kennedy a fait l'objet d'attaques publiques répétées. Certains orateurs ont demandé à ce qu'il soit démis (impeached). L'un d'entre eux, Edwin Vieira, a même dénoncé ses principes «marxistes-léninistes, sataniques, tirés du droit étranger» !

En lisant cela je conclue que l'abolition de la peine de mort pour les mineurs est un principe marxiste-léniniste satanique, et que je suis donc un marxiste-léniniste satanique et fier de l'être. Il fallait la trouver celle là quand même...

Dans un autre registre (après le coup des satanistes je n'arrive plus a avoir un raisonnement politique modéré), j'ai fini d'écrire mon article pour Onversity avant de partir en Turquie et JF l'a publié. Si vous êtes interressés par les Pénalités de branchement et prédiction matérielle dynamique dans les microprocesseurs modernes vous pouvez toujours le lire.

Sunset in Haifa

Today was a beautifull sunset in Haifa, here are 2 pictures at 12 minutes interval. When I assembled both I realize that the hill from the top one and the cloud from the bottom one matched pretty well together.