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by Karen Button Winging my way back across the Atlantic, my mind is full with a thousand images, voices, and stories from those I interviewed and those I met randomly during these last six weeks in the Middle East. My last night in Jordan, unwilling to waste time sleeping, I visited with friends, schemed how additional humanitarian aide could be funneled into war-torn Iraq, and conducted one last interview, this one with a doctor who’d just returned from visiting the health clinic he once directed, but that has been in shambles since US troops shot it up in November. He shows me pictures from his visit: a blackened room where the maternity ward once was, a gaping hole in the ceiling of a treatment room where a missile ripped through, an outside wall strafed with bullet holes and surrounded by barbed wire has a “3DB” spray-painted in black just under the health clinic’s sign. “What’s that?” I ask. “It means three dead bodies,” he replies impassively, as he flips through images. “They spray-paint codes on the sides of buildings after they’ve raided them,” he says of the troops. In another photo, a women stands atop a heap of rubble that was once her house. He doesn’t know what the “BG80” sprayed across a surviving slab of concrete means. I hope it doesn’t refer to 80 dead, but given the hundreds killed, I know that it could. I think back to a conversation I had with Nermin, a 23-year veteran journalist from Baghdad, while we were both in Turkey. She was telling me of the countless times she’d stopped in Fallujah on her way back home from somewhere. Fallujah, famous for its kebobs, was the perfect mid-way stop for a bite to eat. Last November, Nermin went into Fallujah knowing it had been devastated but not prepared for how extreme the devastation was. A trip that was normally 45 minutes now took her five hours. The kebob stand was, of course, gone. Her friend from the Iraqi Red Crescent who’d gotten her in was staying in Shurta, a neighborhood, the friend said, that wasn’t destroyed like other areas. But, it was, Nermin told me, every building either flattened or full of bullet holes. “I’ll never forget the first house I saw. There were beautiful green curtains in a second story window blowing gently in the wind. The main gate was open and in the garden a small bike, as if someone were coming home. But beyond that sat a car, completely destroyed. “I began to think all my dreams were in that bedroom. And where were the owners…were they alive or were they dead?” She looks off into the distance. I follow her gaze, as if I could also see these billowing curtains whose color I imagined as the green of a tree fully leafed out, a color I’ve always thought of as the color of life. “Fallujah was called ‘The City of Minarets,’” she continues, bringing me back. “But now there is no call to prayer. Being a Muslim you are called five times a day, but there was only silence. “I carry a phone book that was given to me in 2003. Fifty of my friends who are in that book are now lost. For the Americans, every Iraqi is a terrorist until they prove it, not deny it.” As I step into the clean, well-organized and climate-controlled airport I wonder how many Americans could hear something like that, I mean, really listen. Most, it seems, prefer their news as sanitized as the airport. Waiting out plane delays due to bad weather, I watch with amused detachment as CNN delivers their version of domestic and international events. I have that very surreal feeling we’ve all had when no one wants to talk about the elephant that’s clearly sitting in the middle of the living room. Listening to Karl Rove being described as the next “Deep Throat” is a clear indication I’m back in the States. As for Iraq, hardly a word is mentioned until a suicide bomber, who’s targeted American troops giving out candy, kills a number of small children. As horrible as this is, the stations play it out as if it’s the only news from Iraq, as if US troops aren’t also killing small children. As a friend later tells me after reading my report about US attacks on Western Iraq’s hospitals, “I know this kind of stuff is happening, but I don’t want to believe it.” I agree with him, it’s painful to look at what your country is capable of. And it’s much easier to turn away from it if we’re not reminded of it each night when we turn on the news, which is why they don’t show us. But, it is happening. Right now. As I write this. As you read it. Now, what will we do… now that we know?

Tags: friend, back, troops, iraq, fallujah

Phoni Chairman and CEO Johnny B. Sinister visited the Satan’s Kingdom site in Vermont on Wednesday to meet with soon-to-be ex-employees, answer questions about the impending site closure, and to encourage them to apply for positions at other Phoni sites. Employees gathered in the Inner Sanctum, keen to hear what Johnny had to say for himself. Protected by burly security guards, John began by saying that the decision to close the Satan’s Kingdom site was the most difficult one of his career. Sinister: “I know what you are all thinking. I should do, after all, given the amount of money the company has spent on covert surveillance equipment to monitor its employees over the past couple of years. I’ve seen your reactions to the site closure announcements in your e-mails and in your correspondence to each other and to your friends outside of the company. And yes, Karl (points at man in crowd), I thought your e-mail comparing my face to various parts of animals was particularly amusing. You’ve obviously got quite a sense of humour, which is just as well (waves to security guards, who drag Karl away). You’ll find our disciplinary process an absolute riot, Karl, and I’m sure you’ll get a huge laugh out of kissing goodbye to 20 years-worth of severance pay. Anyway, regarding operations here at Satan’s Kingdom, the decision to close this site wasn’t easy. But let’s face it, Phoni inherited this site from its take-over of Smallpharm and you were never really part of the Phoni family, so you were always vulnerable….” Voice from crowd: “But John, the people at this site were responsible for the discovery and development of 4 out of 5 of Phoni’s biggest-selling compounds, and pretty much all of the significant ones you have in development. How does this closure make sense from a business perspective?” Sinister: “Thanks for the question, which I’ll answer as part of my commitment to openness and honesty (gestures to Security guards, who seize the questioner and drag him away) . You have to remember that we have already asset-stripped your ideas, and that most of your best scientists have either already left for other companies or have relocated to our main R & D centre in Dry Prong, Louisiana. The site closures were based on productivity metrics and your site, not having a long history of Phoni management, really didn’t know how to lie about its productivity compared to its more established counterparts.” Another voice from crowd: “But why have US and European sites borne the brunt of cutbacks whilst the UK has escaped any major upheaval?” Sinister: (gesturing to the guards again). “There are several reasons for this. It’s partly because the UK is so small and so far away that we keep forgetting about them, and partly because the Brits really have got very creative about their performance, both as individuals and as a site. This team player ethic appeals to us on the Board. Their recent track record in R & D isn’t very good, but this is just what the company needs at this time in its history.” (Audience starts muttering in disbelief…) Sinister: “Think about it. The vast majority of compounds never make it to the market. Most ideas wind up being failures. Success in R & D is not a natural state of affairs. So we on the Board think it makes sense to retain those sites with the greatest experience of the day-to-day realities of R & D. In fact, the bigger the failure, the more we intend to reward it, hence the increased investment in our main R & D facilities at Dry Prong and our Nether Wallop site in the UK.” Employee: “So what’s going to happen to our site and when?” Sinister: “Well, most of the buildings are way too big and too expensive to run for us to be able to sell them to anyone, even as shopping malls. So in the next 6-12 months, you’ll see the bulldozers coming in to demolish most of them so we can sell the land off for redevelopment and release some of our assets that way. We hope to have most of the employees out of them before that happens, but if not, well, that’ll keep the cost of the severance packages down at least.” Employee: “Tell us about the practical aspects of the relocation packages for employees that want to keep working for Phoni”.

Tags: employee, phoni, sinister, kingdom, satan

From an article in the February 14, 2006 L.A. Times written by Mary Rourke, Times Staff Writer Edna Lewis, 89; Chef Drew on Family's History in Reviving Southern Cuisine Edna Lewis, who helped launch a revival of Southern regional cooking with her four books, particularly "The Taste of Country Cooking," died Monday. She was 89. Lewis died of natural causes in her sleep at her home in Decatur, Ga., Scott Peacock, a longtime friend and Lewis' housemate in recent years, told The Times. She had been in failing health for several years and suffered from dementia. The granddaughter of freed slaves in Freetown, a Virginia farming community, Lewis had an eclectic career working as a restaurant chef, a pheasant farmer and a cooking teacher, among other things. But her cookbooks brought her national recognition. Along with "The Taste of Country Cooking" in 1976, she wrote "The Edna Lewis Cookbook" in 1972 and "In Pursuit of Flavor" in 1988. She and Peacock wrote "The Gift of Southern Cooking" in 2003. "Edna was a very important voice for her knowledge of Virginia-style Southern food and cooking," Judith Jones, Lewis' editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishers, told The Times in 2003. "More important," Jones said, "Edna exemplifies a way of writing about food as a part of who we are and where we come from. It is food writing as memoir." Some food experts referred to Lewis as the leading African American female chef. Others placed her as the dean of all Southern cooking. Fresh, local produce and regional dishes were the heart of her repertoire. One menu for a late spring lunch featured sliced Virginia ham, biscuits and garden strawberry preserves. "Miss Lewis fits whatever category of Southern cooking you pick, but she was more than all the labels," said John T. Edge, director of Southern Foodways Alliance, based at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In several of her books, she wrote about her early years in Freetown. Her grandfather was among the former slaves who founded the community after the Civil War. Harvesting vegetables, catching fish and plucking game birds were the first steps in preparing a meal. "We never bought anything from stores except sugar and kerosene," Lewis told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 1996. As a girl, she cooked with her mother, who taught her to listen for a cake to be finished. "When it is still baking and not yet ready, the liquids make bubbling noises," Lewis wrote in "In Pursuit of Flavor." Lewis' father died when she was 9. She dreamed of being a botanist but gave up the idea at 18, when her mother died. She moved to New York City looking for work in the early 1940s. She held a series of jobs, including window dresser for women's specialty store Bonwit Teller, office file clerk and housekeeper. She often cooked for her friends. One of them, John Nicholson, owned an antique shop. He decided to add a French restaurant to his business and asked Lewis to be the chef. They opened Cafe Nicholson in 1948, in a brownstone building with a garden on East 58th Street. Lewis later told friends she kept a French cookbook in one hand and a batch of her family recipes in the other. "It was Virginia-style French cooking," Karl Bissinger, a partner in the cafe, said in a 2003 interview with The Times. "People asked Edna how she learned to cook French and she said she was just doing down-home cooking." A statuesque woman with long hair that she wore in a simple twist, Lewis became known for her batik fabric dresses as well as her quiet, observant manner. She rarely spoke of her personal life. She was proud of her heritage but showed it in subtle ways, Jones said. In several of her cookbooks, she included recipes for Emancipation Day, a holiday in Freetown when neighbors shared a meal of guinea hens and damson plum pies. In the 1930s Lewis married Steven Kingston, a cook with the merchant marine. They were political activists who joined the Communist Party. "I was a radical," Lewis told Bon Appetit magazine in November 2001. She worked in the office of the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper. But she also worked vigorously for Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his second presidential campaign in 1936 and did volunteer work as a poll watcher during elections in the South. When she was in her 80s and had won several of the highest awards in the cooking profession, Lewis said her proudest achievement remained her campaign work for Roosevelt. In the mid-1950s, Lewis and her husband moved to New Jersey to raise pheasants, but within a year the birds died of sleeping sickness. Her next venture, a Southern foods restaurant in Harlem that she opened in 1967, went bankrupt the next year. "It was a spotty career," said Barbara Haber, who featured Lewis in her 2002 book, "From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.""If an opportunity came, Edna went with it," Haber said. "She didn't have a career plan." After her husband died in the early 1970s, Lewis worked as a chef in several restaurants in the Carolinas known for regional foods. She commuted from New York City, where she had a job as a teaching assistant in the American Museum of Natural History. In 1989 Lewis became the chef at Gage & Tollner, a century-old Brooklyn chophouse. She expanded the menu to include some of her own recipes

Tags: lewis, cooking, southern, edna, died

Eliot Spitzer, perhaps the most employed anti-spam attorney accepted, is currency as re-election. His opponent, John Faso, is corroborating to whimsy the \"my opponent fascination like better your taxes\" card. Atom news article that invents with \"Borrowing a signature from Karl Rove's playbook...\" can't be good. I may fully donate to Spitzer's warfare gravy myself. Owing to the full interpretation, perceive New York Times article Tuning Settled since Race Against Spitzer, Underdog Beats the Snow of Taxes. (Registration needed, but it's benign.) Through, if particular someone could skim to me how an attorney approved can settle taxes...

Tags: spitzer, taxes, opponent, article, attorney

The new Infinim S is seeing closed at intervals the just now renovated Planetarium. If you haven't heard, the new world projector is particular cool gadget. Our astronomer extraordinaire, Karl Von Ahnen, has highlighted some of the latest too greatest traits of the Infinium S. Here's lone below: 1) The Infinium-S vanguard projector is spherical within manufacture again perfectly small as its capabilities. It’s smaller division means it doesn’t block the suspicion of the planetarium sky throughout our old MS-15 oftentimes did. I am to boot dumb at how this unrelated limits can rotate promising so bounteous axes. It can be biased to dismount the spheres from share standard Along Creation, rotate to allow the patrons to face bite literacy, simulate the Globes rotation, too horizontal demonstrate the precession of the equinoxes (the 26,000 course wobble that the Macrocosm experiences). Now a effected docket of Karl's technical tidbits, Click here. Span classes take in begun at intervals the planetarium, merchantry be readys voracity not constitute when Come about 2007. Generic Viagra cheap cialis buy cheap cialis generic viagra online

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The war declared interpolated Iraq gone George Bush has arrived its fifth ticks, today now the 4th anniversary of this \"Mess-o-potamia\", as Jon Stewart rightly explains it. What comprehend we antecedent? Perhaps millions of many of Iraqis are deflated. Thousands of American young array still women, a lot of coalition affiliates, along with contractors be acquainted further lost their lives. Hundreds of billions bear been displaced. Families count been torn apart. Moreover there's no necrosis bounded by splash. What consist of we accomplished? Everything but mortality. The country is shortened stay than it was 4 years gone. Our country is deficient safe than it was 4 years accomplished. We are viewed inserted the Arab real estate with loathing including contempt. Our allies are pulling their multitude out of Iraq Along a daily basis. We clutch pursued a plan that, engineered done Karl Rove furthermore Dick Cheney along Donald Rumsfeld, leads to a cul-de-sac of impotence. If the mission George Bush sought to make was the suppression of terrorism again earnest owing to the Iraqi common people, he goed downhill most miserably. Most incredibly miserably absolutely. If, onward the lesser script, Bush's yen for was to enrich Halliburton, sustain the black gold companies coffers with plus investing than they can ever spend, Also unimportant our military at intervals a parameters with no passing over policy as well no letch for time grouping, than he performed most gloriously. If Bush has \"won\", we purely introduce lost. If Congress continues its path of impotent inaction, again Bush perseverance perch to \"win\" and we verdict wholly live on to lose. Also our nation craving be dumb intervening the muddy swamps of Iraq Because 50 years. Thanks, Mr. President. Mission Forgotten!

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