Jerusalem—A number of former Israeli army and
security officials have told the government they
support indirect talks with Hamas and are
opposed to any large-scale military assault on
the Gaza Strip, the Haaretz newspaper reported
on Sunday. The officials sent a letter to Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and other top ministers
urging indirect negotiations to reach a
long-term ceasefire with Hamas, the Islamist
movement which seized control of Gaza almost a
year ago.
London—Envoys from around 100 countries are to
gather in Dublin on Monday for a 12-day
conference aimed at clinching an international
treaty banning cluster munitions. The
negotiations should hammer out a wide-ranging
pact that would completely wipe out the use,
production and stockpiling of cluster bombs by
its signatories. But notable absentees from the
Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster
Munitions, which concludes on May 30, include
China, India, Israel, Russia and the United
States: all major producers and stockpilers.
Washington—A quarter of a century since the
virus that causes AIDS was identified, a vaccine
against the deadly disease remains frustratingly
out of reach despite a well-funded global effort
to find a cure. “Nearly a billion dollars is
spent globally on HIV/AIDS research annually,
and yet the sobering reality is that at present
there are no promising candidates for an HIV
vaccine,” Bruce Walker of Harvard Medical School
wrote in the May 9 edition of the journal
Science.
Manila—Tropical storm Halong battered the
northern Philippines with 95 kilometre
(59-miles) per hour winds on Sunday, triggering
floods and landslides and displacing about 6,000
people, relief officials said. There were no
immediate reports of casualties but the civil
defence office in Manila said huge waves known
as storm surges destroyed 10 houses and
displaced 780 people in and around the coastal
town of Botolan, about 145 kilometres (90 miles)
northwest of the capital.
ON MY bookshelf, I have a curious book that I
bought at the height of the Afro-centric 1990’s;
it’s called Your History: From the Beginning of
Time to the Present. Written by James Augustus
Rodgers in 1940, this hand-penciled comic book
is an attempt to instill pride and fill in the
gaps of so much of world history that excluded
many persons of African descent. Curious
descriptions such as the man of Danish and
African heritage, pure African blood, run-away
slave, attempts to tell the hidden truth of not
just American history, but world history. Most
of this book is pretty funny, if you don’t
understand the complexity of race and especially
race in America.
