markfromireland

If you try to imagine a very easily made jam that tastes like a spreadable mulled wine. Tastes very good and makes a good Christmas present — if you can bear to give it away.

One of my favourite fruit curry recipes. The quantities here are for one. The recipe multiplies up nicely.

Colonel Patrick Lang wants to know whether Americans have given up believing in the principle of civilian control of the military.

Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres that would turn the hair of a newborn white used to bring tears to my eyes and wound me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. In the past years, I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and hear with my own ears the screams of the bereaved and the orphans. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless

In response to massive blasts that shook the country in August, resulting in hundreds of casualties in Baghdad and elsewhere, the ICRC rushed emergency supplies to medical facilities. This is an update on these and other ICRCactivities carried out in Iraq in August 2009.

So there I was chatting with Siun last night when I revealed that I'd spent the day making jams and marmalades. Some hasty calculations produced a recipe adapted for American measurements. The whole thing takes about an hour.....

The whole Obama program will have gone up in flames. And the Republicans will make hay with it. They will call U.S. defeat in the Middle East "betrayal" and it is obvious now that there is a large group inside the United States very receptive to such a theme.

The town hall protesters are a symptom of something very dangerous of a long tradition of extreme right wing American militancy that, should it be allowed to once again flourish unchecked, will make the misdeeds of Timothy McVeigh pale into insignificance

That's the title of a study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association. The study attempted to determine whether the "considerably greater" US health expenditure of US$5274 per capita vs the UK percapita expenditure of US$ 2164 resulted in a better health outcome for Americans. Not even slightly surprisingly it doesn't. It's bad, shockingly bad. How Bad? This bad: The top of your American society is as unhealthy as the bottom of their British one.

If you're one of those Firedoglake readers who donated money to International Committe of The Red Cross' here's their latest newsletter and report for July of what you helped pay for.