Desmond Tutu expresses his perspective that I find verbalizes some of the feelings that I have about the situation in Palestine/Israel. In a comment piece in the Guardian (a liberal, republican -- i.e., anti-monarchy -- newspaper in the UK), he writes about Apartheid in the Holy Land.

Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and a columnist for Information Week, arrives at some surprising conclusions in his article: "The Rise of the Creative Class" . He started out researching why initiatives to improve the economic lot of Pittsburg had come to naught and discovered an interesting demographic trend and set of markers for determining the economic success of a city. He offers a "Creative Index" for cities. Tulsa, by the way, made the top 10 (barely) of medium sized metro areas (500K-1MM pop.) DesMoines (!?) is number 2 in small sized metro areas (250K-500K). Austin and SanDiego are numbers 2 and 3 in the large sized metro areas (1MM+). This is great food for thought.

Suzy Hansen interviews Todd Gitlin on his views of Americans, the Media and Culture. I found this article in Salon via Cursor.Org which provides (at least) an alternative to the prevalent view of America as the unfairly aggrieved nation and Israel as acting always in justified self-defense. I don't think the real picture is so simple.

Is Islam to Blame? "As president of the American Muslim Alliance, political scientist Agha Saeed has spent much of his time since September 11 trying to answer one pressing question: Why?" This is an excellent article in the East Bay Express discussing living as a Muslim in post 9/11 USA.

A UK government agency charged with conserving and promoting British rural life: The Countryside Agency - Home page. In addition, the Rambler's Association provides lots of information about how to get out and about in the UK (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland).