The less we deserve good fortune, the more we hope for it.

— Molière

Here’s your live video from Gaza; may or may not work with your browser.

WMV Video

A classic mainstream media moment, brought to you by UPI: Boy’s death on video is a fake, blog says - UPI.com.

But IsraelINN.com said Charles Johnson’s U.S. blog Little Green Fields uncovered several alleged discrepancies...

Layers upon layers of fact-checking!

George W. says farewell in his last address to the nation as President, beginning at 8 pm Eastern time. Here’s a thread to discuss it...

LGF reader “Leonidas Hoplite” forwarded a picture taken this afternoon with a cell phone camera by a passenger on the NYC-NJ ferry:

Spider rolled in from
Hollister burn
With a one-eyed stolen mare
Donned himself with chicken fat
Sawin on a jaw bone violin there
Kathleen was sittin down
In Little Red’s recovery room
In her criminal underwear bra
I was naked to the waist
With my fierce black hound
And I’m cookin up a filipino box spring hog
Cookin up a filipino box spring hog
Cookin up a filipino box spring hog

— Tom Waits

The media are reporting that everyone made it out alive... the plane was only in the air for about three minutes...

An airstrike in Gaza has taken out the interior minister of Hamas, who oversaw the training of Hamas’ paramilitary terrorist gangs.

The Associated Press calls these gangs “security agents,” which I suppose they are, if you don’t consider the security of Israelis important.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Hamas officials are confirming that an Israeli airstrike killed the Hamas interior minister, who oversaw thousands of security agents in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army confirmed the airstrike.

Hamas television says Interior Minister Said Siam was killed in a strike that flattened a home in Gaza City. A top aide, Siam’s brother and his brother’s family were also killed. Siam is considered to be among Hamas’ top five leaders in Gaza.

What kind of person keeps his family around him, even when he knows he’s likely to be a high value target for the Israeli Air Force?

Gifts for geeks! A major update for the indispensable Javascript library jQuery has been released into the wild: jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation. They’re claiming some big speed improvements and other nice enhancements; full details are in the release notes. And they’ve also unveiled a great Ajax-based API browser, setting a new standard for API documentation. Kudos to the jQuery team for some excellent work.

We’ve installed the new version at LGF and had only one problem so far, which is a bit amazing considering that the LGF Blog Engine contains quite a lot of jQuery-based Javascript code and uses half a dozen plugins.

The problem occurred in both Internet Explorer and Firefox 3 (but strangely, not in Safari), and was tracked down to the following code, which refreshes any currently visible “spinoff links” after a successful login:

The first expression was causing script timeouts in IE and Firefox. The Firebug debugger revealed that jQuery was entering an infinite loop when trying to process the expression, even with no visible spinoff links.

After more experimentation, we concluded that jQuery 1.3 has some bugs lurking in the new implementation of the “:not” selector. In this case there's a simple fix that doesn't affect functionality: use the “:visible” selector instead.

But in other sections where we really needed the NOT functionality, we had to change the code to use jQuery's "not" method instead of the selector. For example, this:

...had to be changed to this:

After these changes, everything seems groovy in all the major browsers on both Mac and PC. But please let us know if you discover anything that isn’t working right.

Michael Yon (who may soon be filing a lawsuit against Michael Moore) forwarded this striking photograph from Afghanistan as an LGF exclusive:

I thought you might want to see our folks in action. This nighttime shot is from my days with a tiny unit of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. We were 2 days drive from nearest paved road, and very deep in Taliban country. In case of serious attack, the nearest backup was probably too far away to matter.

The International Committe of the Red Cross has issued a statement that Israel’s use of white phosphorus is not illegal. This, of course, has not stopped the international left from making accusations.

GENEVA – The international Red Cross said Tuesday that Israel has fired white phosphorus shells in its offensive in the Gaza Strip, but has no evidence to suggest it is being used improperly or illegally.

The comments came after a human rights organization accused the Jewish state of using the incendiary agent, which ignites when it strikes the skin and burns straight through or until it is cut off from oxygen. It can cause horrific injuries.

The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Israel to exercise “extreme caution” in using the incendiary agent, which is used to illuminate targets at night or create a smoke screen for day attacks, said Peter Herby, the head of the organization’s mines-arms unit.

“In some of the strikes in Gaza it’s pretty clear that phosphorus was used,” Herby told The Associated Press. “But it’s not very unusual to use phosphorus to create smoke or illuminate a target. We have no evidence to suggest it’s being used in any other way.”

The media and the United Nations are screaming again today about an IDF attack on a UN compound; Ehud Olmert apparently apologized to the UN immediately after the incident, but now the IDF says Hamas was using the compound as a firing station.

Gunshots and an anti-tank missile were fired at IDF troops near the UN compound that was attacked by the IDF on Thursday, senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post.

Accordng to the officials, the IDF responded by firing artillery shells at the location of the gunmen and that the shells caused damage to the UN installations. At least three people were wounded and the building was set on fire.

The IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration coordinated the arrival of five fire trucks to the compound to help put out the flames.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in Israel Thursday to promote a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, expressed “strong protest and outrage” at the reported shelling of the UN compound.

Ban also demanded an investigation into the shelling, and said Defense Minister Ehud Barak had told him it was a “grave mistake.”

Palestinians reported that an IDF tank shell also struck one of the wings of a Gaza hospital midday Thursday. Witnesses said part of the structure was on fire. The army said that the building was also being used by Hamas men who were firing on IDF troops.

UPDATE at 1/15/09 11:54:08 am:

MSNBC reports that the IDF came under fire with anti-tank weapons and machine guns from inside the UN compound.

Israel says it does not target U.N. buildings or personnel. But the Israeli officer said troops opened fire after militants inside the compound shot anti-tank weapons and machine guns. He said the troops used 155 mm artillery shells.