Israel, Gaza, and war crimes: an update

The Ehud Olmert article I referred to a couple of days ago has now been translated into English and can be found in full (here) in The Guardian.

Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025)

Sebastião Salgado, one of the great documentary photographers, died on Friday. I have been fascinated by his work since I saw the film The Salt of the Earth, a documentary about Salgado directed by his son Juliano and Wim Wenders. His dramatic, contrasty black-and-white images are a large part of what has inspired me to shift towards black-and-white photography.

But, given my concern for the environment, it is not surprising that I think his environmentalism was as important as his photography. With his wife Leila, he set up the Instituto Terra in 1998 with the purpose of restoring part of the Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Since then, it has restored 2,000 hectares of land and produced nearly 7 million seedlings. It has also become a major centre for environmental education.

Israel, Gaza, and war crimes

I have just come across this quote:

.…What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with reckless abandon. Yes, we are committing war crimes.

This did not come from the pen of an anti-Zionist or a pro-Palestinian. It is an extract from an article written by former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and published in the Hebrew edition of Ha’aretz on 22 May.

A Kindle question

 

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I find myself wondering how Amazon works out what items to recommend to me on Kindle. Specifically, I have questions about their recommendations allegedly based on my recent purchases. A couple of examples from today’s recommendations:

• A chess book. I have never bought a chess book (or anything chess related) from Amazon. The odd thing is that a couple of weeks ago, I did an Internet search for reviews of chess apps. As a result of that research, I decided to install Lichess on my tablet.
• A book on ChatGPT and another on AI more generally. Again, I have not bought anything AI related from Amazon. However, some of the blogs I subscribe to do discuss AI from time to time, e.g. its dangers; the immorality of training AI on copyright material; the academic use of AI (specifically, Claude) as a research assistant.

Coincidence? Or does Amazon install tracking cookies to pick up leads for potential sales?

Thought and action

In a recent Expressive Photography newsletter, Alister Benn makes the following comment:

If you don’t think about something at all, it has no value to you.
If all you do is think about something and then do nothing about it, you are of no value to it.

Alister was talking about photography, but I feel this has much wider application. For example, you cannot honestly say you value the natural world if you never give it a second thought. Conversely, if all you do is talk about caring for nature while continuing to live a typical modern Western lifestyle, you are certainly of no value to it.