Unfortunately, there is nothing new to report about missing BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza nearly seven days ago.

He was mentioned pointedly by Saeb Erekat, former spokesman for Yasser Arafat and now a Fatah moderate and spokesman for the equally moderate Mahmoud Abbas, who went out of his way to mention Johnston. (Of course Johnston has been a strong voice for the Palestinians as a reporter stationed in Gaza.) The New York Times story was about the formation of the unity government of Palestinians:

In their speeches to the Palestinian Legislative Counci … Mr. Abbas and Mr. Haniya stood by their party positions. Mr. Abbas appealed to Israelis and their government “to take the road of a just peace by resuming negotiations” with him in order to “give future generations a hope of peaceful coexistence and put an end to the suffering and the cycle of violence.” …

But Mr. Haniya said that resistance to Israeli occupation would continue, though he said his government would seek “to consolidate and broaden” to the West Bank an often-broken truce with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

The continuing tension and the unresolved conflicts between Fatah and Hamas were evident in what Erekat had to say:

Saeb Erekat, also an aide to Mr. Abbas and a negotiator, was critical of Mr. Haniya’s speech for being less a government program than a partisan address.

“This is a coalition, and I hoped Haniya’s speech would be more than a campaign speech,” he said. “I wanted to hear dates and timetables, to hear him say give me 100 days or even 1,000 days to end the chaos and lawlessness. I wanted to know where is Alan Johnston of the BBC.” Mr. Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza and was last heard from Monday.

Mr. Erekat said he wanted Mr. Haniya, “as prime minister of all Palestinians, to renounce violence and accept the two-state solution.” Mr. Haniya “came a long way by mentioning the 1967 borders, that’s fine, but I urge him to go the extra mile by explicitly accepting the international principles,” he said.

The Times also mentions in passing something that usually goes unmentioned in polite society:

Mr. Abbas also expressed hope that the international community would welcome the new government, which has a number of cosmopolitan figures with whom the West is accustomed to dealing,

“Cosmopolitan figures”? Is that the extent of their qualification?

So: nothing about Johnston. Also nothing about the shocking attack on the UNWRA chief in Gaza.

Is there a news blackout for terrible stories involving Palestinians that don’t involve Israelis doing those terrible things to Palestinians? A gal could wonder…

Sci fi author Neal Stephenson explains the mystery behind the poor critical reception for the movie 300: the critics don’t get today’s audience.

Though it opened on a relatively small number of screens, “300” made money far beyond the most optimistic projections of its producers, racking up the third-best opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie.

The critics, however, were mostly hostile, and frequently venomous. Many reviews made the same points:

• “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.

• “300” is campy — meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres — yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.

• All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)

But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

This movie—with no stars, no locations, and a massive dose of violence took in another $31 million at the box office this weekend, for a total of more than $125 million in 10 days.

I have a feeling that, soon enough, Hollywood will go to war. If the suits haven’t woken up to the fact of the actual war we’re involved in, they will have by now woken up to the … dough.

I think Neal Gabler declared the end of movie magic too soon (though I have a lot more to say about his piece. Another time.).

Nothing.

This is the only report that appeared overnight on Google News.

BBC man still missing
Business Portal 24 (press release), Germany - 6 hours ago
No details have yet emerged concerning the whereabouts of the BBC’s Gaza Correspondent Alan Johnston who went missing on March 12. …