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The weather in Philadelphia can be bad. If it rained more, they could call it the Schuylkill Bay instead of the Schuylkill River. Though the nearby Delaware River is bigger, the Schuylkill has its own history, some yet to be made.

A distance from the river, centered at the bubble end of a lane, Anton Evers’ home stood as a kind of beacon. The builders of the houses on the lane used red bricks for every house except Evers’. His are white.

Evers opened the second-floor front door and peered out into the morning rain, which produced a pleasant cadence on the lids of the cans on the sidewalk below. Rain made it a bad day to collect trash, or deliver the newspaper.

But Toby Wallace didn’t mind, because today was his last day throwing the paper as he walked. A boy turns 16 only once, and that was today. Tonight, he’d pilot a car that used to belong to someone else. After tonight, it belonged to him.

He was most excited to show his new wheels to his two friends, his only friends, B-drop and Tick. But the trio rarely saw each other, because B-drop and Tick were in a gang known as the Front Street Boyz.

Many Palestinian intellectuals and political analysts find themselves in the unenviable position of having to declare a stance on whether they support or reject upcoming Palestinian elections which are scheduled for May 22 and July 30. But there are no easy answers.

The long-awaited decree by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last January to hold legislative and presidential elections in the coming months was widely welcomed,  not as a triumph for democracy but as the first tangible positive outcome of dialogue between rival Palestinian factions, mainly Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas. 

As far as inner Palestinian dialogue is concerned, the elections, if held unobstructed, could present a ray of hope that, finally, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will enjoy a degree of democratic representation, a first step towards a more comprehensive representation that could include millions of Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories. 

“The United States of America has open wounds.”

Ever since its founding, the United States has been attempting to build a society around those wounds, on the belief that hyped-up language — “all men are created equal,” and so forth — can paper over deep wrongs. If you put the ideal in writing, you can ignore its absence in real life.

Fukushima Daiichi’s multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns started ten years ago. They are not over. They are not even close to over. Nuclear disasters don’t ever end. The radioactive danger slowly decays over decades, during which it needs constant safety management until radiation measurements are below “acceptable levels.” That’s still not safe.

Fukushima continues to be a low-level nuclear disaster, as it has been for ten years. The initial explosive accident has been mitigated, but the danger has never been fully contained. Recent news from Fukushima is hardly reassuring.

It is now going on a year and a half since “financier” and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died, allegedly by hanging himself in a New York City prison. Since that time it has surfaced that there were a number of “administrative” errors in the jail, meaning that Epstein was not being observed or on suicide watch even though he had reportedly attempted to kill himself previously. The suspicion that Epstein was working for Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad or for its military intelligence counterpart also seemed confirmed through both Israeli and American sources.