Yet another piece of good news from the Middle East:
JERUSALEM — Israel freed 500 Palestinian prisoners in a goodwill gesture Monday and President Bush pledged to support efforts to resolve the conflict, saying peace based on a two-state solution was within reach.
“Our greatest opportunity, and our immediate goal, is peace in the Middle East,” Bush said in Brussels, Belgium, on the first day of a fence-mending trip to Europe…
The prisoners were welcomed as heroes in the West Bank and Gaza. Near the West Bank town of Jenin, a 30-year-old bystander was killed accidentally by celebratory gunfire, and four people were wounded.
But, even so, tough talk is still being heard, from the usual suspects:
“There will be no peace as long as there is a single prisoner in Israeli jails,” the Hamas leader in the West Bank, Hassan Yousef, shouted through a bullhorn.
In addition, look at this.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.