A few articles jumped out from the morning Chronicle:
• Police fire rubber bullets at anti-war protest at port in Oakland:
Police open fired Monday morning with rubber bullets at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland, injuring several longshoremen standing nearby.
Police were trying to clear protesters from an entrance to the docks when they opened fire and the longshoremen apparently were caught in the crossfire
• Chilling Accusations Of A Jewish-Inspired War
Anti-Israel feelings, particularly heightened by the war of Iraqi liberation, are now triggering a new surge of anti-Semitism. For the first time, negative attitudes toward Israel and concern that American Jews have too much influence over U.S. Middle East policy are helping foster these beliefs. Slightly more than half of Americans (51 percent) said the United States has been tilting too much toward Israel, while three-quarters of the most anti-Semitic Americans said they felt this way. And who are the most anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli people in the United States? Surprisingly, it's the very minority groups that Jews have helped the most throughout the past few generations: blacks and Hispanics.
According to the survey by the ADL, 17 percent of all Americans hold strong anti-Semitic feelings. However, such sentiment is twice as strong among certain ethnic groups: The survey found that about one-third of Hispanics and one-third of African Americans are strongly critical of Jews. "
• There could be an unexpected beneficiary of the war in Iraq: the environment.
More specifically, the late, great Mesopotamian marshes -- a decade ago, the largest wetland by far in the Middle East, and a site considered by many religious scholars as the inspiration for the Garden of Eden in the Bible and Koran.
Located at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers near Basra, this vast watery substrate sprawled over 20,000 square kilometers, providing sustenance and shelter for a wide array of wildlife. They were also home to 200,000 "ma'dan," or marsh Arabs, a group of hunters and fishermen who trace their habitation of the region back five millennia.
The marsh Arabs lived in singular harmony with their watery environment, building elegant boats and elaborate houses out of reeds.
But Hussein considered the swamps a haven for Shiite opponents of his regime. So in the mid-1990s, he drained the marshes, broadcast pesticides to kill the fish and wildlife, and attacked the villages of the ma'dan. Today, the once verdant network of reed beds and waterways is mostly a sere and lifeless plain.
• A lot of cooks in the MRE kitchen:
There is a seriousness of purpose here in the Department of Defense test kitchen these days.
In a sprawling, 1960s-style building set alongside a lake in this Boston suburb, two men in lab coats and hair nets bend over a stainless steel table covered in pale orange food bars each the size of a pack of cards.
They're figuring out how to cram 2,100 calories into each bar, at the same time making sure the slightly sweet, grain-based rations will survive a drop from an airplane. The bars will be distributed as humanitarian aid, and might keep fleeing war refugees alive.