Iqrit
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Yesterday I really expected to get a woke up with a phone call from Todd Archer Hyundai after all that went on the day before in promise that they would contact me on Thursday. No phone call, no nothing. I am sure the next time I call the dealer I will have to start all over again. Hyundai makes a nice car but their customer service sucks.
I only have 3 more nights of work before I start working days. The bad thing is I only have one day of transition between nights and days. So I will get home on Sunday morning, and force myself to stay awake so I can sleep Sunday night for Monday work. Not a very well thought out schedule.
We have some storms moving through the area this morning, I hope we don’t get any hail. It was really humid out yesterday and we turned on the A/C so I could sleep. Tomorrow will be cool again, Nebraska weather sucks this time of year.
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TRUCE OFFER
Former Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud Zahhar said the truce would have to be mutual and include the lifting of an Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He gave the proposals to Egyptian negotiators, who were expected to pass them on to the Israeli government.
Hamas described the proposed truce as a “period of quiet”.
Israel said it was ready for “quiet” on its border with Gaza, but has demanded a stop to rocket attacks against Israelis and weapon smuggling into the coastal strip.
Gaza has been a focus of recent violence, with the Israeli military carrying out raids to target Hamas members, while Hamas has fired rockets at nearby Israeli towns.
Israel has all but sealed off the Gaza Strip since Hamas took control of the area.
On Thursday, the UN said that it had halted food deliveries in Gaza because it had run out of fuel.
More than 80% of Gaza’s population relies on aid, with UN food hand-outs going to about 1.1 million people - many them children.
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APRIL IS APRIL AGAIN
Turkmenistan’s President is abolishing the names of days and months introduced by his predecessor. Due to popular demand, the Turkmen calendar will revert to its Turkic and Russian-language names. Former President Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006, had named January after his own honorific - Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen.
Other months and days were named after his mother and historical figures.
“Names of months and days have to comply with international standards,” Mr Berdymukhamedov was quoted in state media as saying.
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THE IQRIT STORY
The three-dot symbol on the map is one of hundreds of such locations throughout this historically rich land - but this is no biblical or Roman-era relic.
Iqrit was an Arab Christian village vacated during the 1948-49 war, one of hundreds of villages in the former Palestine whose populations either went into exile or, as in the Iqritis’ case, into internal displacement in the new Israeli state.
While traces of many of these deserted villages have all but disappeared, the sparsely wooded hilltop of Iqrit continues to play host to its former inhabitants and their children and grandchildren.
On the first Saturday of every month, a priest comes to hold mass in the only permanent building left in the village, the blue-domed St Mary’s church.
Here Iqritis get married and christen their children, and they bury dead in the little cemetery at the bottom of the hill.
On Sundays and public holidays, youngsters play football on the hilltop’s only flat area, parents arrange picnics and old-timers reminisce or sit in silent thought.
One old man, 80-year-old Asad Mbada Daoud, says he remembers clearly the day Israeli troops captured Iqrit, in October 1948.
Initially, it seemed the 450 inhabitants might remain in their homes after surrendering to the troops and pledging to live in peace under Israeli rule.
After a week, however, they were evacuated by force to al-Rama, about 12 miles (20km) south, while the army “cleaned” the border area of Arab fighters.
“It was a very hard life,” says Mr Daoud. “All our food and resources were in the village, we had no work. We lived 60 to a room in schools, or stayed in empty houses of refugees.”
Assurances that they would be allowed to return after a fortnight were not honoured; weeks of exile turned into months, years. Despite several court rulings in the inhabitants’ favour, the Israeli military prevented their return citing emergency regulations.
On Christmas Eve in 1951, army officers took some village elders to a nearby hill and they watched as the old stone houses were blown up with dynamite and tank fire, as many other Palestinian villages had been.
Already however, the Iqritis’ persistence had started to become apparent, for one thing bringing their dead for burial here.
“We tried to bury Diab Sbayt here in 1949,” says Maruf Ashkar, another octogenarian. “But the police came and told us to disinter him and take him to Fasuta” (a still-populated Christian village nearby).
Villagers launched petitions, more court cases and parliamentary hearings, but the army remained adamant. Even Pope John Paul II took up their case on his historic millennial visit to the Holy Land, but to no avail.
They did win the legal right to bury their dead in Iqrit, but to date that has been their only concrete success.
The old men’s stories continue as we leave the shade of the high church walls and walk down rutted tracks past the piles of grey stones that were their old homes.
Mr Ashkar picks wild thyme from the rubble which he hopes will take root in his “temporary” home of many decades, Kafr Yassif.
Hana Nasser, who was 10 in 1948, sitting with his head in his hands. “I am here on the ruins of my house,” he says.
“I come here to sit almost every Sunday. I will never forget my home.”
The people of Iqrit are luckier than many of their compatriots living as refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territories - now numbering millions - who have not laid eyes on their homes since 1948.
Israel presents vigorous arguments for rejecting the Palestinian refugees’ right of return - pragmatically Israel argues that it needs to remain a Jewish-majority state and morally it points to the similarly large numbers of Jews who fled Arab countries after 1948.
But it is hard for the former residents of Iqrit and their descendants to understand why the authorities block them - full Israeli citizens - from re-establishing their community in the village, unless it is to avoid setting a precedent for other absentee Palestinians to return.
As Israel’s diamond jubilee approaches next month - a date marked as Nakba (catastrophe) by Palestinians, Iqrit is certainly a testament to the enduring Palestinian desire to remain in touch with life pre-1948, whatever the obstacles.
“I’m confident I will return to my home here,” Nemi Ashkar, one of the younger organisers of the Iqrit campaign, says with irony. “But I want to return alive, and not just to our cemetery.”
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“Look, this is a man. He’s got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the
calculator.”
George W. Bush
October 3, 2000
First Presidential Debate. Boston, Massachusetts.
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270 Days Left
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Number of Operations Iraq Freedom and Enduring
Freedom casualties as confirmed by U.S. Central
Command: 4520
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