March 27 Blogging

• Time meets some Gaza protest leaders who went underground in fear of Hamas. Think these Facebook savvy youth like Israel?

But if both factions accept the terms youth organizers have laid out, Abu Yazan says, “Fatah is going to lose a lot too. They’re going to have to stop negotiating with Israel. They’re going to have to stop security cooperation, which is killing our cause.”

• Hugo Chavez’s supportive shoutout to Bashar Assad:

Assad, who opponents have called a repressive autocrat, “is a humanist, doctor, educated in London, in no way an extremist; he is a man of great human sensitivity,” said Chavez. “We salute him from here.”

Humanist? Yeah, right.

If Chavez starts reading hand-me-down copies of Vogue, he’ll realize that Mme. Assad might save Syria from her husband (!)

• Journos in Tripoli fret that Gaddafi’s media minders are spiking their food with sedatives. The Sunday Times has a paywall; this snippet from Miles Amoore’s dispatch will have to suffice:

The other interesting thing happening in the hotel at the moment is that the journalists are waking up feeling very groggy and tired in the morning, even though they had their full eight hours of sleep. So a rumor started to spread among the journalists staying here that our food is being spiked with some form of sedative. The journalists have started to buy their food from outside and try to avoid eating the hotel food.

• Canadian students at Queens U. are petitioning to have their rector, Nick Day, removed. Day wrote an ugly letter denouncing Israel and now, 72 percent of the students want him removed from the post.

I share the National Post‘s feeling of encouragement, but this update in today’s university paper says Day not over — at least yet. Former Queens U. rector Grant Bishop best explains the seriousness of Day’s abuse of his position.