Israel said the attack was a “grave violation” of a truce in Gaza between Israel and the militant group Hamas.

Israel had been allowing more imports into Gaza since the truce was agreed, but officials said the crossings would now remain closed until further notice.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, said the closings violated the truce agreement.

Well, of course it violated the truce! But so did shooting rockets into Israel! Or did it?

The rocket attack on Sderot on Tuesday was carried out by Islamic Jihad, which said it was to avenge an Israeli raid in the West Bank, in which two died.

So it looks as if one Palestinian militant group committed an act of violence against Israel, in retaliation for which Israel punished the entirety of the Palestinian population in Gaza. So why doesn’t Hamas try to stop Islamic Jihad from committing these acts of violence?

Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya said the group remained committed to the six-day-old ceasefire with Israel and it had called on all Palestinian groups to respect it.

However, he said that Hamas would not act as Israel’s “police force” in confronting militants who breached the truce.

I’m confused. Complain about violation of the truce after Israel imposes collective punishment on Gaza, but don’t commit to holding up the other end of the truce by taking any concrete action to stop other groups from violating the truce? Hamas is using Islamic Jihad as a proxy to commit terrorism while appearing to keep their own hands clean. If Hamas won’t act as the “police force” in Gaza, but will blame Israel for violating the truce when it takes unilateral action, who will keep those other militant groups from committing terrorism and getting away with it? And how can Israel avoid the heavy-handed and inhumane response of shutting down the Gaza Strip entirely when something like this happens?

Ad matai? Will it never end?

The president of the Gambia—supported by one of the countries leading newspapers—has called for all the gays to leave the country immediately. The ultimatum seems to have been directed at “homosexuals, drug dealers, thieves and other criminals”—what esteemed company the gays seem to be keeping these days, but I can’t really think of anybody who fits all these categories besides possibly Omar from The Wire.

Seriously though, this is scary shit. The ultimatum includes “a mass patrol” to “weed bad elements in society”, including hotels and other lodgings where “this kind of individual” takes refuge. And the Daily Observer a leading newspaper, is fully behind this effort:

Yes, here they go again at the Daily Observer jumping on the President’s bandwagon—we hear some of you moan. Well, moan some more because we think this President of ours keeps saying exactly what we think here at the Daily Observer.

We have said it before and we will say it again. This is a Muslim and Christian country. Both the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible condemn homosexuality—pure and simple. So I hear you say that both the Koran and the Bible also condemn theft, adultery, lying, etc.

Correct – but we do not pass laws to make theft, adultery, lying and all other evil deeds acceptable. But we tolerate them, I hear you say. Yes indeed we do, to an extent.

Tolerance is indeed a virtue and without tolerance we would have much conflict in society. But I do not want anyone to abuse that tolerance either.

Unfortunately, homosexuals do by demanding that non-homosexuals should accept their life-style. Well, the life-style in The Gambia is one based around Family and Religion. Like God’s Adam and Eve, the Family is based around Mother (female), Father (male) and the rest of the extended family. Tony Blair’s definition of “marriage” and “family” as being of whatever conjecture (even man and goat!) does not apply in our religious context.

Look, we are not interested in stoning anyone, even homosexuals. What our President is saying, and we agree with him totally (”as usual” I hear you moan!) is this: Ours is a society guided by religious principles.

Those religious principles leave no room for homosexuality. Sex and marriage in our culture is between man and woman. Sex and marriage between a man and a man, a woman and a woman, is viewed as irreligious and gross by the vast majority of our people here (just as in the West they would view sex and marriage between a man and a goat)!

So, please respect our religions, cultures and traditions by keeping your homosexuality out of our country.

I seriously can’t think of what I could say after this besides offering, for what little it’s worth, my own personal fuck you to the Gambia, its president, and its newsies—at least, those responsible for this crap.

• A dispute over a parking space between a security guard and a private citizen in Colorado leads to a Taser duel.
  

  “(The guard) pointed a stun gun at my mother’s face and I immediately responded with my personal Taser,” Epstein said Sunday evening, within an hour of being released from Boulder County Jail. “And we shot each other at the same moment.”

• But it’s not all bleak news: the RCMP says it would be “willing to change its Taser policy”, partially in response to the Robert Dziekański Taser incident at Vancouver Airport a while back.

The old policy, adopted a year ago, caused a public outcry after it was learned through a Freedom of Information request that transit police had deployed a Taser on non-violent passengers, including a person who had not paid his fare and tried to run away from an officer.

The old policy stated: “A Taser may be deployed…to gain physical control of a non-compliant, suicidal or potentially violent subject.”

But it’s not at all certain just how much real change this alteration of terminology is really going to bring about:

Inquiry counsel Art Vertlieb asked [deputy transit police chief Ken] Allen if the new policy would allow a Taser to be deployed on a person fleeing police during a “fare blitz”—a check to see if passengers had paid fares.

“It would depend on the extenuating circumstances surrounding why the individual was fleeing,” the deputy chief replied.

In other words, Canada’s only armed transit police force not only gets to keep its Tasers, they get to keep using these potentially deadly weapons on “actively resistant” human beings who make the bad judgment not to pay their transit fare and the misfortune to get caught. If TransLink is so concerned about revenue loss from non-compliant individuals, they should install some fucking turnstiles on the SkyTrain instead of Tasering their riders.

Senator Lieberman stated his belief, in a letter sent today, that all videos mentioning or featuring these groups should be removed from YouTube — even legal nonviolent or non-hate speech videos. While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds. Of course, users are always free to express their disagreement with a particular video on the site, by leaving comments or their own response video. That debate is healthy.

Good on Google for not letting themselves get bullied by Joe Lieberman, and for striking a blow for free speech and open debate. How did Lieberman turn into a despicable douchebag?

Hat-tip: Think Progress

So. When will Bush and McCain denounce Israel, just like Bush denounced Barack Obama—on the floor of the Knesset, no less—as an “appeaser” for declaring his intention to talk to America’s enemies? Israel is actually doing it. Where’s the condemnation?

Oh, right. Talking to and “appeasing” terrorists is okay when the American government or its allies does it, but when their political opponents even suggest it, they’re morally equivalent to Hitler.

“[The provision] clearly deprives young people of the benefit of the presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness based on age,” the ruling read.

“By depriving them of this presumption because of the crime and despite their age, and by putting the onus on them to prove that they remain entitled to the procedural and substantive protections to which their age entitles them, including a youth sentence, the onus provisions infringe a principle of fundamental justice.”

Thank goodness—another sudden breakout of common sense. Of course, this ruling has the Tories hopping mad, and Harper’s government is making lots of noise about doing a complete overhaul of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. This is part of a larger trend of laws imposing “reverse onus”—that is, forcing defendants to prove why X should not happen or apply to their case, rather than the prosecution—being passed by the government and found unconstitutional by the courts. The Tories went ahead with passing such laws despite testimony from experts that such laws would be found unconstitutional in legal challenges in the court system. Anyway, this one has been overturned, if only by a slim margin in the court, paving the way for more rulings of this type.

Via TPM/Veracifier and Think Progress.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when it takes effect in 30 days.

It’s about damn time. California has had domestic partnerships for a while, but these don’t carry all the benefits of marriage when it comes to taxes, immigration, medical benefits, and so forth. The California state legislature had passed two laws allowing gay marriage, and Schwarzenegger (remember him? the Governator?) vetoed both of them. Yet this is the man who also has said that he’s against a citizen-driven initiative to amend the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage, which looks like it’s going to be on the ballot before voters in November. Hopefully the presidential election in a “blue state” such as California will drive up the number of people who turn up not simply to vote for a president but to vote against this homophobic ballot proposition. A massive, well-funded, and well-organized effort to get voters to do both these things will be necessary starting very soon.

But for now, let’s rejoice in this ruling from a Republican-dominated court. Thank goodness there are still a few people out there who recognize that human rights should not stop with heterosexual couples.

David Froomkin’s special column in the Washington Post is a must-read, full of excellent invective, highlighting the hypocrisy of this generous and selfless act on the part of a president who still bikes, works out, goes on vacation more than any president in history, and has no trouble sleeping nights. And also, Keith Olbermann’s latest Special Comment is absolutely right on the mark. His analysis is thoughtful, provocative, and a must-watch. He doens’t even stoop to the low level—as well he could have done—of playing that idiotic clip of Bush saying “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.”

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you, six-and-a-half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people but the war in Iraq is Not. About. You.

Crooks and Liars has a full transcript plus downloadable video, or just watch the YouTube version:

Part 1:

Part 2:

This level of disappointment is perfectly ridiculous. Both Clinton and Obama are strong on choice, strong on women’s issues, and strong Democrats. Yet the race for the Democratic nomination has gone on way too long and is, thank goodness, almost over. The Democratic Party should start to corral its support and start the battle against McCain. Clinton said today that it would be a “terrible mistake” if voters chose McCain over Obama, a muted recognition of the fact that earlier comments she made implying McCain’s preferability over Obama may not have been in the general interests of the party. And that’s what it’s really about at this point: the interests of a party that should be focussed on beating the other party. The Republican Party has been there for a while already; the Democratic Party is lagging far behind.

The astute reader will note that I have not said Clinton should drop out. On the contrary, there are several compelling reasons for Clinton to stay in the race, at least until the primary elections are over, the most convincing of which is that it would look extremely bad for Clinton to drop out and then win several of the remaining primaries, especially Kentucky, which she has been predicted to win for a long time now. However, the Democrats as a group need to focus on what is going to bring victory to the party in November, and right now that means starting to coalesce behind one presidential candidate. NARAL’s endorsement is right in line with this, as is John Edwards’s recent endorsement of Obama. And if you’re a Clinton supporter who is too affected by the sour grapes of not being in a winning position, let alone not winning NARAL’s endorsement, chill out. It’s not personal.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.” Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

What a relief. And here I thought that admitting the existence of aliens would be an admission that the human race was not the most important thing in creation. Not sure about this whole “brother” thing, though…

I’ll post a link to the interview once it comes through in English; here it is in Italian.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.

Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.

This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.

Palestinian lawmakers probing the death in custody of a preacher from the
Islamist Hamas movement said on Thursday he had been “tortured to death” by security men loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.

A self-appointed investigation team comprising six independent lawmakers determined that Majd al-Barghouthi died as a result of torture and said the head of the Fatah-run intelligence services, Tawfiq Tirawi, should be held to account. Another commission which Abbas appointed in late February to investigate the matter has not yet delivered its verdict, although a pathologist working on behalf of Fatah said he had not found signs of torture on Barghouthi’s body. …

Human rights groups accused Hamas of torturing to death four Palestinians in Gaza since it took control of the Strip. Both Fatah and Hamas accuse each other of arresting and torturing their supporters in the enclaves.

I hadn’t heard of these last incidents, but as far as I know, this is the first independent accusation and confirmation from Palestinians of this sort of thing happening on an intra-Palestinian level. The BBC is also reporting on this. I wonder if these incidents will bring back to light the conflict between the two different Palestinian societies: the West Bank, dominated by the old-guard, better established, (mostly) secular nationalist, and internationally acknowledged as the ‘legitimate’ representative of the Palestinian people, against the younger, militantly Islamic, and poorer Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

“Yesterday has been a very good day for Liberals,” Mr. Dion announced at a Toronto news conference.

Okay, sure, that’s where the spin is going, I see that. But it gets crazier:

Mr. Dion seemed particularly pleased about the win in Vancouver Quadra, B.C., where former provincial environment minister and onetime tree planter Joyce Murray took the vote, despite heavy losses to the Green Party.

Conceding that “the main point in Quadra has been the Green vote,” he dismissed suggestions the increase in Green support was a concern for the Liberals, who have sought to distinguish their environmental policies as more far-sighted than the Conservatives’.

Just have another look at those numbers from yesterday’s elections returns. The Liberals scored 36% of the vote, down from 49% when they last took the riding in 2006. Meanwhile the NDP and Greens took 13–14% of the vote each. The whole platform of the Greens has been that neither the Liberals’ nor the Conservatives’ positions on climate change and the environment were far-sighted or aggressive enough enough. Joyce Murray’s laughable assertion that ‘The public has spoken and it’s about the environment’, as we discussed on Monday, is flatly contradicted by the polling numbers. When 13% of the voters choose the Green Party over yours, you can bet your boots it’s about the environment. Just not in the way you think.

The Liberals saw their share of the vote in Vancouver Quadra fall to 36% from 49% in the 2006 election, despite devoting weeks in the House of Commons to questions on the Cadman affair, which the party hoped would resonate in the riding.

Oh, so that explains why the Liberal leadership have been wasting time during each and every Question Period to asking the same questions and getting the same non-answers from Harper and Moore and other Conservatives about the Cadman affair. I’d wondered about that: why were they letting the Bloc Québécois and the NDP ask real question about real matters, such as NAFTA-gate or, y’know, the environment. These then end up looking like pet political issues because the official ‘opposition’—if the Liberals truly deserve that moniker—won’t take them up. Instead, they devote their time to making the Conservatives repeat the same half-truths about ‘financial considerations’ because they think this will resound in Vancouver Quadra.

Well, the Cadman affair didn’t resound in Vancouver on Monday. The environment did.

The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.

By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…