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Three Qassam rockets hit Israel in the first few hours after a truce between Israel and Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip.

This was a Good Surprise, Let's Hope Ceasfire Lasts, (S.C)
Last update - 14:38 26/11/2006 from Haaretz
PA security forces begin deploying in Gaza to prevent Qassam fire
By Avi Issacharoff, Aluf Benn, Jack Khoury and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies

Palestinian Authority security forces began deploying along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel on Sunday, in order to prevent Palestinian militants from firing Qassam rockets at Israel in violation of the cease-fire.

A short time earlier, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas ordered the heads of Palestinian security forces to ensure that Gaza militants respect the truce, Palestinian officials said.

Three Qassam rockets hit Israel in the first few hours after a truce between Israel and Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip went into effect, causing no damage or injuries. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday said that Israel would display "patience and restraint" in the face of Palestinian violations of a cease-fire that went into effect earlier in the day.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said all major militant factions in the Gaza Strip had reaffirmed their commitment to the truce, Reuters reported.

"Contacts were made with the political leaderships of the factions and there is a reaffirmation of the commitment of what has been agreed to," Haniyeh said.

The military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for continued Qassam rocket fire on Israel in the hours after the truce took hold.

Speaking at a high school in the Bedouin town of Rahat, Olmert said that Israel must give the truce a chance and pledged that "the government of Israel will not miss this opportunity for calm."

It was not immediately clear whether there was an explicit order by Abbas to use force to stop rocket fire by militants.

"President Abbas has given his instructions to security chiefs to implement the understanding of calm," one of the officials said.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said in response to the continued Qassam fire: "Let's hope that's just the problems of the beginning. But if Israel is attacked, we will respond. If there are Palestinian factions that are not part of the cease-fire, it's hard to see how the cease-fire will hold."

Hamas, Islamic Jihad fire Qassam rockets despite truce
Israel and the Palestinian factions in Gaza officially began the cease-fire at 6 A.M., following an agreement reached between Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian factions. Abbas called Olmert on Saturday to inform him of the deal.

But three Qassam rockets hit Israel in the first few hours after the truce went into effect, causing no damage or injuries.

One of the rockets hit Sderot, another fell in an open area north of the western Negev town, and the third landed close to a local kibbutz.

A senior official in Jerusalem said Israel would wait several hours to see if the attacks were isolated breaches or a full-scale violation of the agreement before deciding whether to respond.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Palestinian lawmaker Saeb Erekat, an Abbas confidant, condemned the new rocket attacks.

"This is a violation and [Abbas] calls it a violation, and urges all to abide by the agreement that should be honored for the interest of the Palestinian people," he said.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas military wings said the rocket fire was in response to the arrest of two Hamas operatives in Hebron, despite earlier pledges not to violate the truce in response to West Bank incidents and despite the fact that the arrests took place prior to 6 A.M.

Hamas officials also said that the Qassams were fired because Israel had not removed all of its forces from Gaza, a claim that Israel denied.

The Palestinian Authority later released a statement confirming that all Israel Defense Forces troops had indeed withdrawn from the Strip.

A spokesman for Islamic Jihad said his group fired rockets into Israel at 8 A.M., two hours after the start of the truce, and denied his group had signed on to the cease-fire agreement.

Despite the claims of responsibility, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian government, Ghazi Hamad, said all the armed groups had committed to the agreement, and any violations were rogue acts.

"There is a 100 percent effort to make this work, but there is no guarantee of 100 percent results," Hamad said.

The IDF said all troops were withdrawn from Gaza in the hours before the ceasefire began. Streets in northern Gaza were empty immediately after the truce took hold.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Sunday morning that any attempt to fire into Israeli territories would be considered a breach of the cease-fire and treated with severity.

According to Peretz, Israel is interested in quiet, but would not accept attacks on its citizens.

Palestinian militants in Gaza also fired at least three Qassam rockets at Israel in the minutes before the cease-fire went into effect. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks.

One of the first salvo hit a house in Sderot, causing damage but no injuries. The other two Qassams landed at the entrances to kibbutzim in the western Negev, causing no damage or injuries.

A senior security source said on Saturday that military pressure and increased military actions in recent weeks had led the Palestinian factions and terror organizations to agree to a cease-fire.

After his conversation with Abbas, Olmert consulted with ministers including Peretz and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and the security establishment, and told Abbas that since Israel had operated in the Gaza Strip in response to terror, Israel would stop its military activities and remove its forces from Gaza in response to the ceasefire in the hope it would hold and serve both sides.

Government sources in Jerusalem said Saturday that if the cease-fire held, it would bring forward a meeting between Olmert and Abbas.

Made me Mad 22/11/06 Shitrit

How Far can we go?
שר המשפטים: עורכי דין מתנכלים לי
מאיר שטרית הגיש תלונה בלשכת עורכי הדין, בטענה כי הוא סובל מהתנכלויות בגלל רפורמות שהוא מנסה להוביל בהוצאה לפועל. לדבריו, מופצות נגדו שמועות שהרפורמה נועדה לסייע לקרוב משפחתו
22/11/06 10:41
מאת: ספי עובדיה


"משמיצים אותי". מאיר שטרית (AP)


שר המשפטים, מאיר שטרית, אומר (22.11.06) כי עורכי דין מתנכלים לו ומשמיצים אותו בעקבות הרפורמה שהוא מנסה להוביל במערכת ההוצאה לפועל.

לדבריו, הוא הגיש תלונה בלשכת עורכי הדין נגד עורכי דין שמנסים לטפול עליו האשמות, לפיהן הוא מנצל את קשריו להשגת הקלות בהוצאה לפועל בעבור בעל חוב שהוא קרוב משפחתו. על פי השינויים שמנסה שיטרית להכניס, יוכלו נושים לפעול לגביית חובות ללא צורך בתיווך של עורכי דין.

המינוי הזמני של שטרית יפקע

מחר אמור לפקוע מינויו הזמני של שטרית לשר משפטים. שטרית מונה לתפקיד בעקבות משפטו של השר לשעבר רמון, שנאלץ להתפטר מתפקידו בשל כתב האישום שהוגש נגדו. כעת יצטרכו בלשכת ראש הממשלה למנות לתפקיד שר קבוע. בלישכה קיים חשש כי מינויו של שטרית כשר קבוע עלול ליצור מתיחות מול השר לשעבר, חיים רמון, שמקווה לשוב למשרה, עם סיום משפטו.

יחד עם זאת, בלשכתו של השר שטרית הבהירו כי גם אם הוא ימונה לתפקיד שר קבוע, אם וכאשר יוכל לשוב רמון לתפקידו, הוא יתפטר מיד.


- האם תיק המשפטים יועבר לאולמרט?
- "חיים רמון התנהג כמו נער שובב"
- "רמון נישק אותה עם הלשון

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. Saw Movie

I grew up with Leonard Cohen, Saw him in 1970 in Tel-Aviv. He came to sing to the Army in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The Movie is very heavy.
Got a hebrew copy of BOOK OF MERCY.
'Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man': A Documentary Song of Praise
By STEPHEN HOLDEN nytimes.com

When Leonard Cohen speaks, the elevated cadences of language are strewn with poetic images so precisely articulated in a rumbling bass-baritone voice that they all but erase the distinction between his song lyrics and personal conversation. Each word is carefully chosen and pronounced with oratorical flourish. Even when his sepulchral drone isn't bending itself around a melody, its sound is musical.

Here is one sample of his conversational style, from Lian Lunson's wonderful documentary portrait, "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man." Reflecting on the inspiration for his song "The Traitor," he muses that it is about "failing or betraying some mission you were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it but to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself."

If a strain of gallows humor didn't underlie many of Mr. Cohen's pronouncements, such observations might sound insufferably pretentious. But he continually undercuts his own solemnity. Here is he is on his own mystique as a silver-tongued Casanova: "My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly the 10,000 nights I spent alone."

"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" combines pieces of an extended interview with this Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and author, now 71, with a tribute concert organized by Hal Willner at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005. Titled "Came So Far for Beauty" (after a Cohen song), the event featured performances of many of Mr. Cohen's best-known songs by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Martha Wainwright and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), among others.

Some of the performers offer pungent personal comments. Mr. Cave recalls discovering Mr. Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate" album while living in a remote Australian town and suddenly "feeling like the coolest person in the world because it separated me from everyone and everything I detested."

Bono and Edge from U2, who did not participate in the Sydney event, offer extravagant tributes and near the end of the film are shown accompanying Mr. Cohen in a New York club performance of "Tower of Song." Edge likens him to "the man coming down from the mountaintop with tablets of stone having been up there talking to the angels."

Bono observes, "As dark as he gets, you still sense that beauty is truth."

Mr. Wainwright, who performs more songs than any other guest, sings "Everybody Knows," "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" (Mr. Cohen's self-deprecating and indiscreet reminiscence of a sexual encounter with Janis Joplin), and "Hallelujah" (the Cohen song Mr. Wainwright and Jeff Buckley have made something of a downtown standard).

He locates the dark humor at the bottom of "Everybody Knows," a bleak prophecy about the end of the world as we know it. Backstage he recalls the first time he met Mr. Cohen, who was in his underwear, cooking soba noodles and feeding bits of sausage on a toothpick to revive a baby bird. It wasn't until Mr. Cohen disappeared and returned wearing an Armani suit, Mr. Wainwright said, that he realized he was in the presence of a legend.

Two of the other more memorable performances come from Antony, who cries out "If It Be Your Will" in an eerie, shivering falsetto, and Teddy Thompson (son of Richard and Linda), who stamps the more obscure Cohen song "Tonight Will Be Fine" with the concert's most intense vocal.

Reflecting on his life and work, Mr. Cohen recalls first encountering poetry in the Jewish liturgy at a synagogue. Some of his more recent recollections are of a purgative sojourn in a Zen monastery during the 1990's on Mount Baldy, where he studied with a Japanese Zen master.

But a Zen-like austerity has always been present in his writing. A Zen spirit also informs his modest self-assessment of his life's work.

"I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while," he says. "Also the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune."

"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It contains some strong language.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

Opens today in Manhattan

Directed by Lian Lunson; directors of photography, Geoff Hall and John Pirozzi; edited by Mike Cahill; music by Leonard Cohen, performed by Nick Cave, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Antony, Linda Thompson, the Handsome Family, Beth Orton, Teddy Thompson, Jarvis Cocker, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen, Joan Wasser and U2; produced by Ms. Lunson, Mel Gibson and Bruce Davey; released by Lionsgate. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 104 minutes.