'israel determined to be fair' shock

Perhaps in a bid to prove itself an equal opportunities slaughterer of civilians, Israel has decided that the wholesale butchery of palestinians and lebanese is not a sustainable policy - hurrah!
it is conscripting reservists presumably to try and equalise the non-military casualties - boo! I'm not sure quite what Israel hopes to gain by this - it could be a bid for international symapthy:
'look what those nasty hamas/hezbollah are doing to our innocent youth'
'err so are we'.

Sorry chaps - apart from the highly dubious logic, you must realise that virtually every nation on earth is against you - arab nations on principle and the rest of us because we just don't like your foreign policy (for which the usual british pro-israel journalists will trot out the usual tired accusations of anti-semitism, holocaust denial and err leaves on the line).
The one honourable exception - America - is perfectly happy to see you do their dirty work of making life unpleasant for whichever bunch of nasty islamists (or maronite christians for that matter - well they're all the same, really) they bump into. Maybe the fragrant Ms Rice believes that if al quaeda and related nasty islamist purveyors of death hate Israel more than the US they'll start crashing planes into whatever the Israeli army/hezbollah haven't bombed to rubble and leave god's chosen people alone (nice irony there, I think).
Well it's a plan...and Mr Quaeda and his bomb-toting chums seem to have bought it, because they have announced that they will indeed turn their attentions to Israel. You'd have thought they would already be keeping their hands in as it were by being beastly to Israelis, but hey... So; more joy for the poor bloody Israeli man/woman/child on the street/in the gutter/in bits/bleeding to death on the Tel Aviv omnibus. Nice one boys! What have you for us next???

very special forces

Israel has promised to make 'the sky fall in' on those who recently kidnapped one of their young soldiers. This blog can exclusively reveal they have sent in an elite team to rescue the unfortunate youth. In an encircling movement Chicken Licken will work deep undercover in Gaza while Henny Penny and Turkey Lurkey kick in the front door of various civilian dwellings. Strategic backup will come courtesy of Ducky Lucky sitting back home on the duckpond. Any Hamas supporters indentified will be taken by Foxy Loxy to tell the king all about it. And then Hamas will blow up some buses cafes shops etc peopled by the usual crew of innocent and unconnected Israeli civilians. And we thought the original was a pointless story that ended in meaningless slaughter.

view from a train

As the majestic silver bullet (that would be the GNER cattle truck) flashed past Peterborough the other day at a stunning 23mph, I noticed a sign. It bore a picture of happy, handsome young achievers of both sexes co-existing happily in a non-discriminatory environment - not sure any of them were black, but that can sometimes spoil the happy co-existence of your non-discriminatory environments, so I see their point. The message was: 'Think outside the box? - They didn't even know there was a box!' No of course not - they live in bloody Peterborough; if they saw a box their heads would probably explode with the excitement of it all. Oddly, the next sign didn't read 'Imagination overload? Come to Peterborough, we're used to that sort of thing!'.