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Stylistically, Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves is set in the same social milieu as Italian Neo-Realist films, the working class. But while its proletarian protagonists are similar in class to, say, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 drama Bicycle Thieves, Fallen Leaves is a romantic comedy. Blue collar boy meets girl on the wrong side of the tracks in Helsinki. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and the hard drinking Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are lonely thirty-somethings, searching for love and intimacy in this movie full of dry wit that’s likely to cause viewers to smile often, and perhaps laugh out loud a few times. 

Writer/director Michel Franco’s moving Memory is one of AFI FEST 2023’s most memorable movies. Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, who works at an adult daycare facility and is first glimpsed in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the recovering ex-drinker participates in a 12-step program in Brooklyn. At a subsequent high school reunion, Sylvia has a strange encounter with Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), who she goes on to (wrongly) accuse of having sexually abused her when they were students. As it turns out, Sylvia has a history of incestuous sexual molestation, which likely triggered her substance abuse. Saul, too, has his own afflictions.

My first open letter was addressed to the people of Gaza https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/10/letter-to-gaza.html . It had hundreds of responses mostly asking us not to give up and asking for list of actions to do (these are available at ongaza.org and http://qumsiyeh.org/whatyoucando/ )

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand has been negotiating directly with representatives of Hamas in Iran to release 23 Thai hostages from Gaza, the largest nationality among kidnapped foreigners.

Thailand also expressed "outrage" against Israel's U.N. ambassador for showing the General Assembly a "horrific" video of Hamas purportedly trying to decapitate a Thai laborer.

The 1,400 Israelis and foreigners killed by Hamas' Oct. 7 cross-border attack include at least 32 impoverished Thai agricultural workers slain near the Israel-Gaza frontier, officials said.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thaivisin talked by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the 23 Thai hostages and said on November 1:

"If there there is any progress, he'll phone me.  And if there are any demands involved he will also inform us," Mr. Srettha said, according to November 2's Bangkok Post.

In Iran's capital Tehran, meanwhile, representatives of Hamas held direct negotiations with Buddhist-majority Thailand's Muslim Sunni and Shia officials.

The subjugation and annihilation of innocent civilians, bombed into the dust of "collateral damage," does not support America, Israel or the West's claim for moral high ground and a path to peace.

On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombed a Palestinian refugee camp with 100,000 inhabitants, producing a hellscape of casualties, 50 dead, 150 injured, with buildings in collapse at the periphery of  massive bomb crater.   The stated public intention was to kill a single Hamas commander.

There are two million Palestinians warehoused in the sliver of land 26 miles long and between 2-7 miles wide, a containment camp holding indigenous peoples of the region hostage, known as the Gaza Strip. 

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which is estimated to have at least 40,000 members.  If the ration of 50 -1 holds up, that is 50 Palestinians will die for every Hamas member killed -- then every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed.  This is not without possibility, perhaps the colonizers’ plan.

Gaza has changed the political equation in Palestine. 

Moreover, the repercussions of this devastating war are likely to alter the political equation in the entire Middle East and to re-center Palestine as the world’s most urgent political crisis for years to come. 

 Since the establishment of Israel, facilitated by Britain and protected by the United States and other Western countries, the priorities have been entirely Israeli. 

     ‘Israeli security’, Israel’s ‘military edge’, ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’, and much more, have defined the West’s political discourse on the Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine. 

 This bizarre US-western understanding of the so-called conflict, that an oppressor has ‘rights’ over the oppressed, has enabled Israel to maintain a military occupation over Palestinian Territories that has lasted for over 56 years.