Worth reading today

* YNet (Hebrew) has profiles of the six IDF soldiers killed in Gaza this morning

* Iowahawk satirizes the non-existent Arab acceptance of President Bush's apology for Abu Ghraib:

"Now was that so hard?" joked Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in an email to Bush. "Now get out of here ya knucklehead, before we have to do one of those awkward man-hugs."

Tom Friedman also makes an appearance at the end.

* Columnist Eric Margolis joins the crowd making spurious connections between Abu Ghraib and Israel (though Margolis isn't as direct as Neil Macdonald was). Published in the Toronto Sun:

The process of inflicting pain, humiliation, and degradation on captives -- dehumanizing them -- has been perfected by CIA psychologists and psychiatrists. These tortures, based on Israeli techniques, were designed more to break Iraqis' will than to elicit information. The sexual humiliations were designed to inflict maximum mental punishment on Muslims.

* The BBC reports Jordan arrested the editor of a weekly paper for making comments that harmed Saudi relations. Fahd al-Rimawi accused the Saudi gov't of being "lackeys" to the US. Money quote:

In an opinion poll published on the same day as Mr Rimawi's editorial, some 65% of journalists in Jordan "cast doubt over the independence" of the press, and considered the government intervened (sic) in press coverage.

Perhaps the Jordanian government had the names and addresses of the other 35%.

* Boston Globe reports that bloggers will receive 15,000 press credentials at the Democratic National Convention. Got yours?

Posted at 08:50 PM