An Unsealed Room

How Do You Tell Men and Women Apart in Israel Tonight?

By what they're watching on TV.

The big, huge, important gigantic soccer/football match between Israel's national team and England is on.

So is American Idol.

(You've got to love the British soccer fans as tourists. Now that's the kind of crowd we like to see, enough of these sanctimonious UJC missions and Holy Land pilgrims. These guys come to party...)

The fans in my house are going wild, without the aid of alcohol. I let my ten year old invite a bunch of friends to cheer and run wild in my living room. What drove me to this madness? My kid wanted to spend ten bucks to go watch the game on a large screen TV in town with a crowd. I figured that this was the lesser of the two evils.

(I just locked them in the house -- they were running out the door and ringing the neighbor's doorbells.)

Isn't This Charming? Heartwarming Hamas Family Moments

Hamas TV shows daughter telling suicide bomber mother she will 'follow her path'

A 'music video' broadcast on a Palestinian Hamas TV station on Wednesday had a simple message for its viewers: Carrying out a suicide bomb attack is more important than raising one's children.

The video, broadcast on al-Aqsa TV, was made available by Palestinian Media Watch and can be viewed on YouTube.

It features a young Palestinian girl singing to her mother who is preparing to carry out a suicide bomb attack.

"Duha, daughter of suicide bomber Reem Riyashi, sings to her mother," the caption on the video read. In 2004, Riyashi killed four Israelis after blowing herself up on a border crossing between Israel and Gaza.

Just when you think it can't get any worse....

Yay! Comments Are Back Up!

After many months of disabled comments, this blog is finally interactive once more. If anyone is still reading me, please leave a comment.

It's not healthy how excited I am about this....

My current Internet obsession is following the saga of Cathy Seipp, with whom I didn't always line up politically, but who I respected as a writer and a strong opinionated woman, and am sorry I never got to meet.

There's a line in the title song from the show Cabaret -- "I made my mind up back in Chelsea...when I go, I'm going like Elsie."

I made my mind up as a reader of Cathy's blog over the past few months. When I go, I want to go like Cathy, with such incredible dignity, wit, humor, and such devoted friends and a truly wonderful daughter.

The Calm Between the Storms....

Check out my latest piece over at Pajamas:

The spring forecast in Israel – utterly unpredictable. Cold, wind and rain one day, sunny and warm the next. Sun to thunderstorms to hail and even snow, all within hours.

Oh, yeah, and possible war expected in coming months.

You've Gotta Love the I-Rack

The Hummus Blog

I don't know why this strike me as so incredible, there are blogs on every subject, but a blog devoted exclusively to hummus?

Why not, I suppose?

(Remember, it's only hummus in English. In Hebrew it's "hoomoose." My kids have taught me that accents determine which language you are speaking in. For example, my name is Allison only in English. My Hebrew name is "Elleesun."

When my two-year old daughter wants to watch an English "Dora the Explorer" DVD, she asks for "Dora." If she wants to watch one of the Hebrew DVDs, she specificially requests "Dorrrhhhha," rolling her gutteral "R.")

In Case You Thought I Was the Talented One in My Family...

My brilliant brother is quoted in the New York Times today!

He's a regular in the Boston press -- the journalists love him. I tell him all the time that he gives good quote...

March 7, 2007

As the Climate Heats Up, Lawyers Sharpen Their Wits
By BARNABY J. FEDER

LAWYERS are looking at climate change and seeing visions of new business. They are showing up at meetings to discuss the legal implications of global warming, and a growing number of law firms are advertising expertise in climate change issues. The subject seems well on its way to becoming the next big thing in environmental law.

“There is definitely a surge of interest among lawyers in this kind of work,” said Seth Kaplan, a senior attorney in charge of clean energy and climate change issues for the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston. “A lot of it is brand extension, like lawyers who arranged deals to finance shopping malls now are doing it for wind farms.”

But there are also more politically charged questions, like those posed before the Supreme Court in November when a group of states and environmental groups argued that the Environmental Protection Agency, despite its protests to the contrary, had the power and obligation through the Clean Air Act to compel the auto industry to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

J. Kevin Healy’s talks about environmental litigation at professional meetings are another indication of the growing interest. Mr. Healy, a co-chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s climate change group, said that about 250 lawyers attended sessions on the subject at the association’s meeting last year, and that more than 200 heard him speak at another association meeting last fall.

“There was one person in the room when I gave my first speech in the early 1990s, and I can’t remember if he stayed until the end,” said Mr. Healy, a partner at Bryan Cave in New York City.

The biggest growth area for climate lawyers involves new emission-management tools — like credits for reducing carbon emissions by investing in technologies that reduce power consumption — and the markets that trade them. The markets are regulated in countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol and, so far, voluntary in the United States, but each has a mind-numbing amount of legal questions to settle.

“You can accidentally create a lot of work for a lot of lawyers when you design a market for a particular need,” Mr. Kaplan said. “You are binding together a lot of resources and obligations, and getting the rules right is very tricky.”

So is the bottom line of this article that my brother should leave his noble Al Gore-ified non-profit save-the-bunnies work and go out there and make some big bucks so he can buy his sister a yacht? I think so.