#8 I guess some things don't change much, tw. Remember Twain and The Innocents Abroad??
"I rode to the front and struck up an acquaintance with King Solomon-in-all-his-glory, and got him to show me his lingering eternity of a gun. It had a rusty dint lock; it was ringed and barred and plated with silver from end to end, but it was as desperately out of the perpendicular as are the billiard cues of '49 that one finds yet in service in the ancient mining camps of California. The muzzle was eaten by the rust of centuries into a ragged filigree-work, like the end of a burntout stove-pipe. I shut one eye and peered within--it was flaked with iron rust like an old steamboat boiler. I borrowed the ponderous pistols and snapped them. They were rusty inside, too-had not been loaded for a generation. I went back, full of encouragement, and reported to the guide, and asked him to discharge this dismantled fortress. It came out, then. This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik of Tiberias. He was a source of Government revenue. He was to the Empire of Tiberias what the customs are to America. The Sheik imposed guards upon travelers and charged them for it. It is a lucrative source of emolument, and sometimes brings into the national treasury as much as thirty-five or forty dollars a year." |
JENIN: Dozens of Palestinian gunmen, in another challenge to President Mahmoud Abbas, blocked traffic in the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday to demand money for families of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel. The protest by al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades followed incidents last month in which gunmen from the group, part of Abbas's Fatah faction, trashed restaurants in the West Bank city of Ramallah patronised by Palestinian leaders and shot at his compound. "We have decided to stay here, in Jenin's main square, with the sons of martyrs until the Palestinian Authority pays the stipends," said Zachariya Zubeidi, al-Aqsa's West Bank leader, referring to relatives of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.