McDonald’s refuses to open branch in the West Bank

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:30:00 +0000

JERUSALEM — Israel's settlers are threatening to boycott McDonald's in Israel, after the popular burger chain refused to open a branch at a mall in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

"McDonald's decision not to be a part of the Ariel mall is a miserable decision discriminating against the city's residents," Ariel Mayor Eliyahu Shaviro said.

Former interior minister Eli Yishai said on his Facebook page that he would eat the first burger grilled by McDonald's local competitor Burger Ranch, and that is rumored to take the American chain's spot in Ariel.

Out of the ash, Sylvia Plath’s legend rises anew

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0000

The gossipiest, most divisive and arguably most compelling literary legend of them all — “the plot of the suicidal poetess and her abandonment by the man with the witty mouth,” to quote Janet Malcolm — is turning 50. It was on February 11, 1963, that 30-year-old Sylvia Plath, having first sealed up her young children’s bedroom with tape and towels, went into the kitchen of her London flat and gassed herself. Thus began the American poet’s deification as a feminist martyr and an ongoing conflict of Biblical fervor. On one side stand those who place culpability for Plath’s suicide squarely on the head of her husband, the late English poet Ted Hughes. The other side, equally intransigent, blames her innately tortured psyche, which had led to at least one prior suicide attempt.

Hughes’ murderous crime, to those who view it as such, is clear-cut: Six years after the couple’s epochal first encounter at a Cambridge University party in 1956 — he’d kissed her “bang smash” on the mouth, she’d bitten his cheek and drawn blood — Plath’s “big, dark, hunky boy,” the demigod of her teenage fantasies, destroyed their marriage by taking up with another woman, the austerely beautiful Assia Wevill. The case against Hughes was strengthened when, after another six years had passed, Wevill killed herself and their 4-year-old daughter, bizarrely by the same method of gas and, apparently, at least partly driven by his philandering.

Salon.com > ariel

McDonald’s refuses to open branch in the West Bank

Out of the ash, Sylvia Plath’s legend rises anew