9:42AM
New blog: Middle East Diaries
Issandr El AmraniCairo-based journalist Jeffrey Black, who is currently in Yemen, has a new blog: Middle East Diaries.
(Speaking of Yemen, a radio journalist friend of mine who left for Sanaa yesterday told me she was going to look into a Yemeni movement that aims to take the US to international arbitration courts because of the probes NASA has landed on Mars (the red planet). Their argument, you see, is that Yemen has prior claim to Mars and therefore NASA should have asked permission. Has anyone heard about this?)
Reader Comments (3)
I think that yemen story is old news:
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9707/24/yemen.mars/
Hilarious, though.
Thanks Blake,
I think the more recent news, from what I understand, is that a Belgian filmmaker is doing a documentary on them and their struggle since the Yemeni president intervened to squash down the affair. They found themselves under surveillance, etc.
It is typical of the thoughtless arrogant attitude of the Zionist imperialist neocolonialist press that they dismiss this claim out of their racist hands without ever enquiring into the documentation held by these three men!
Actually, it's kind of heart warming to be reminded - sitting here with the snow piling up on top of the car and the neighbors peeking through their curtains at each other - that there are still men, laying on a rooftop in Manakha, cheeks stuffed full of narcotics like big junkie chipmunks, who dare to dream big.
That said, the enlightening part of that story is that "an international treaty" (signed by who?) has already claimed the whole solar system "for everyone in the world." Now I'm sure that it's heartwarming for Ahmed in Mogadishu to know he's going to get his fair share of Saturn when and if NASA gets to it, and it's good to know we're thinking ahead (never know when we might have to take those Klingons squatting on Uranus to Galactic Court) but why do we have to go claiming everything we see like this? Whitey makes another land grab. Good news is that reach exceeds grasp for the time being and the Martians are safe hunting their little red buffalo and tending their little red olives for at least another couple of generations.