A souvenir shop-owner displays a recently-made metal plaque for sale to tourists reading 'Obama, New Tutankhamun of the World', in Cairo's main tourist market ahead of President Barack Obama's planned June 4 speech in Cairo. Hieroglyphics at base of plaque were claimed by the vendor to spell the name 'Obama'. (AP photo/Ben Curtis)

Is Barack Obama the new King Tut?

At least one shop owner in Cairo's main tourist market says yes.

Cairo is preparing for Obama's arrival this Thursday when the US president will deliver his highly anticipated speech at Cairo University to the Arab and Muslim world.

What should Obama say?

Everyone has advice:

Some say: Get tough on Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is touting Top Ten Tips for Obama, including: "Propaganda speeches, which stall all progress, are the surest way to leading the region into a political abyss."

Egyptian proponents of democratic reforms, like former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, say Obama should challenge Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak head-on about democracy and human rights.

And one Web site offers this Top Ten for Cairo residents who will by trying to get around town on Thursday when Obama is in town. 

10 pieces of advice on the day of Obama's speech:

1. If you are a Cairo university student, be happy because it will be a day off.

2. If you are one of the students known to make trouble and active politically or religiously inside the university, be aware that state security will "host" you until the end of Obama's visit "from a trusted source."

3. If you work near the university, it's best to leave home after dawn prayer in order to reach work on time.

4. Carry your identity papers.

5. Go underground (metro) if you are headed near the university.

6. If Obama takes the metro then your chances of arriving in Giza are very slim, almost impossible, so take precautions and try to cancel you work appointments in Giza or Dokki. Those who live in these areas can take ferries and boats.

7. Don't wear black, because it can be construed as a sign of objection which may be the fastest way to detention, the only place you can reach fast during the visit.

8. If you wanna follow Obama's speech, don't think of going to Cairo University, be peaceful and don't put yourself in danger, watch it on TV.

9. Pregnant women due on June 4th who live in Dokki or near Cairo University should think 1,000 times before deciding to go to Galaa hospital otherwise they risk giving birth in a traffic light.

10. Those who like to go fishing on the Kasr el Nil and University bridges should refrain from doing that if they don't wanna be "fished" by security personnel.

What does paradise smell like? To some, it smells like rotting bodies.

"The war is over, and finally the Samouni family can retrieve and bury twenty-nine relatives from the wreckage of their home. I am in the Zeitoun neighborhood on a sunny day, heading toward what’s left of their house.

A horse cart rolls by; a man is driving and two women walk behind—an old one who shows her face and a young one who is wearing the niqab.

All you can see is her eyes.

'What’s in there?' I ask.

'We are pulling out the bodies,' the man replies. 'I just pulled out my grandmother.'

The body is wrapped in a blanket. The old woman opens the blanket. The smell is strong; I am about to vomit. The young woman screams: 'How dare you be disgusted! This is the smell of paradise. It’s too sweet.' And then: 'Don’t talk to her. She is not Muslim.'"

That story is one told by New York Times correspondent Taghreed El-Khodary in "The Smell of Paradise,"
a first-person account in the Columbia Journalism Review of covering Israel's winter military offensive in Gaza.

Israel barred all international reporters from freely entering Gaza during the war. That meant that reporters based in Gaza, like Taghreed, were among the few to be there to witness the conflict.

Taghreed writes of the chaos and anguish, the Hamas intimidation and the everyday defiance.

Taghreed's story is part of a special CJR section on reporting on the Gaza conflict.

Along with Taghreed's piece, there is a long article by Israeli journalist/blogger Lisa Goldman about covering the war from the Israeli side.

"Why were Israelis—both journalists and news consumers—so willing to accept the IDF’s version of events in Gaza" Goldman asks in "Covering Gaza from Israel." "Why did Israeli reporters, normally cynical and irreverent to a fault, fail to ask critical questions during the military operation?"

Goldman suggests that Israeli reporters felt that their patriotism had been challenged by critical coverage of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and that Gaza gave them a chance to prove Israelis wrong.

"There was just way too much access during the Lebanon war,” Israeli journalist Alon Ben-David told Goldman. “The army was too exposed, in real time. And I think we journalists also had a reaction to the over-exposure that we caused. I don’t think the army is obligated to allow reporters into a battlefield situation.”

Israel has barred its citizens from going to Gaza for years so they had no hopes of covering the war from the inside. (The IDF did take a few Israeli reporters on embeds...) And she found little concern among Israeli reporters about Israel's refusal to let international reporters in to cover Gaza.

Goldman offers this anecdote from Ethan Bronner of The New York Times:

"Ethan Bronner described a telling wartime conversation with an Israeli colleague and friend. 'He said he really didn’t care about the foreign press being prevented from entering Gaza,' recounted Bronner. 'So I said ‘but what if the army is doing bad stuff in Gaza?’' Raising his eyebrows to indicate astonishment, Bronner continued, 'And my colleague just answered, ‘I trust them.’ But why would he trust them? The whole nature of our business is not to trust anyone!”

A third piece, "A Matter of Trust," by J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward, looks at the vastly different coverage of Israel in the US and UK media.

Goldberg suggests that the US media can be more sympathetic than the UK to the Israeli perspective because there is a larger Jewish community in America than in England.

"American coverage of the Middle East was profoundly affected by its traumatic experience after the battle at Jenin in 2002," writes Goldberg. "During the eight-day Israeli incursion into a crowded refugee camp, Palestinian officials issued widely quoted reports of deaths numbering in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Israeli army said it was in the dozens. When the dust had settled, a United Nations investigation found that the army was right. That was the event that triggered the yearlong wave of media boycotts...

"The Jenin experience was evident in American coverage of the recent Gaza war from the outset," Goldberg writes. "When Israel barred reporters from entering Gaza, CNN’s cameras showed the fighting as tiny puffs of smoke, seen from a distant hilltop, while its reporters repeatedly noted that they couldn’t get inside to verify the facts. The BBC, by contrast, hired Palestinian camera crews and covered the devastation live. Only midway through the twenty-two day war, once the evidence of massive destruction was inescapable, did CNN start airing extensive footage from Palestinian crews. Whom you turn to first is a function of whom you trust more. And that depends on your point of view."

(AP photo/Bernat Armangue: An Israeli shell explodes in Gaza during the winter offensive)

It's graduation time on American college campuses. And that means a new batch of commencement speakers have fanned out across the nation to impart crucial advice.

There have been a good number of celebrated graduation speeches this year, including one by President Barack Obama at Arizona State University (where officials declined to give him an honorary degree because the first African-American president in U.S. history had not yet achieved enough in life...) and anothery by First Lady Michelle Obama, who spoke to graduates at an unlikely venue: The University of California, Merced campus.

At Reed College in Oregon, graduates heard from NPR's Eric Westervelt, a friend (in photo, below, at the Gaza-Egypt border in 2008 with our colleague, Ahmed Abu Hamda, after Hamas toppled the border walls) who just left his post as Jerusalem bureau chief for a new NPR posting in Berlin.

In his entertaining address to the Reed students, Eric imparted sage wisdom gained from years of covering war, tragedy and chaos around the globe.

You can listen to the 15-minute speech by clicking on this link:

Download ReedCommence09Westervelt

Like any good commencement speaker, Eric doled out his advice in easy-to-digest tidbits:

1. "Always have an exit strategy. This certainly applies to melees, riots, revolutions and general uncontrolled violent street chaos. I would advise you to maintain situational awareness at all times of an escape path. Think: If this little thing turns vicious and the high velocity tear gas rounds start flying, the bullets start flying, the truncheons are going everywhere, how will I get out of here? What wall will I hide behind? What little alleyway will I go to? How will I get out? Exit strategy. Of course, the need for an exit strategy also very much applies to bad jobs, bad relationships, bad loans and disastrous foreign policy wars of choice."

2. "Think very, very hard before you spend any significant amount of time in a conflict or combat zone.  War can be heady, powerful, intense and addictive. It can also prove to be a toxic, soul-sucking beast that can start to deform your spiritual and emotional world. A veteran photographer friend of mine who lives in the region full time observed: If you're not a little screwed up after years in the Middle East, you didn’t see enough. You didn't get close enough."

3. "Always take time to drink the tea." The real joy is likely to come from friends and family... Slow down and take stock of what you you see and hear.

Eric's final bit of advice revolves around a true story of dropping his cell phone down a toilet while on deadline during the recent Israeli military offensive in Gaza. To hear the wisdom gleaned from that absurd moment you will have to listen for yourselves...

Eric's advice reminded me of one of the more famous commencement speeches, "Wear sunscreen," by author Kurt Vonnegut.

Among the tips offered in the speech: Wear sunscreen. Floss. Sing. Do one thing every day that scares you.

As it turned out, the Vonnegut speech was an Internet hoax that spread far and fast. The hilarious words were actually penned by a Chicago Tribune columnist and later turned into a music video (below) by Baz Luhrmann...

Though he's appeared at Checkpoint Jerusalem before, here is a longer piece we've just done on Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, the pioneering Israeli DJ and creator of ThruYOU.

Once again, Gaza is going green.

Only, this time, it's not Hamas green.

Gaza is going eco-friendly.

With Israel maintaining its longstanding ban on allowing construction materials into the Hamas-controlled Mediterranean strip, everyone from the UN and Red Cross to the Hamas-led government and frustrated families are taking matters into their own hands.

Faced with an unending river of raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean and the Israeli cement restrictions, the Red Cross decided to scavenge the 25-foot-tall cement slabs from the Gaza-Egypt border fence that had been toppled by Hamas militants in January, 2008.

The Red Cross engineers worked with officials in Rafah to scavenge 2,800 of the concrete slabs to build two new football field-sized sewage treatment pools near the Gaza-Egypt border.

That has created a surreal scene as sewage flows into the new ponds whose borders are made of the concrete walls that once separated Egypt and Gaza.

"We are pioneers," said Marek Komarzynski, a Red Cross engineer who worked on the project.

When Hamas seized military control of Gaza two years ago, the new leaders trotted out a new slogan: Gaza: "Safe, clean and green."

Now, two years later, the new Hamas housing policy is pushing a new plan to train Palestinians to build mud-brick homes and buildings.

The head of the initiative is Hamas engineer and top government leader Ziad al Zaza who pulls out a blueprint and plans for a new Gaza City charity they are preparing to build using mud bricks.

"I hope to break the siege by building this model," says the Hamas leader.

Ziad al Zaza and Komarzynski aren't the only new Gaza eco-warriors.

The United Nations Development Program has sought advice from Rashid Abdel Hamid, a noted Palestinian architect who designed Gaza's first contemporary mud-brick buildings more than a decade ago. He is encouraging the UN to start its own training program to teach Palestinians to build buildings with clay.

(One of Gaza's two Abdel Hamid mud creations is the signature Al Deira Hotel, an elegant, 22-room, seaside hotel that's long been a favorite of visiting journalists and diplomats.)

And some Gaza residents are already taking matters into their own hands.

A growing number of Palestinians are building mud-brick homes.

One of them is a Rafah resident who gave his name only as Abu Rami.

Abu Rami and his sons bought a truckload of dirt that came from the excavated tunnels running under the Gaza-Egypt border, dumped it on their open land and began making mud bricks last week.

"We don't need cement," said Abu Rami.

Rafah's first modern day home eco-builder is Jihad Shaer, a 36-year-old father of five.

As Israeli air strikes hit the nearby smuggling tunnels last week, Shaer offered a tour of his small, two-room mud-brick home as two orange tabby kittens scampered about. The house has built-in platforms for the beds and built-in ledges for books and lanterns.

Shaer used old wooden crates for the windows and bought a bit of concrete from the smugglers to shore things up.

Sitting out front of his home, Shaer jokes about Gaza's plight with a joke about the composition of the word Palestine, which he says is a combination of the Arabic word for poverty (fala) and the Arabic word for mud (tiin).

"We've ended the poverty stage," says Shaer. "Now we've entered the stage of mud."

It was only a matter of time: Jesus has returned!

Or, at least, Cheesus of Nazareth has made a cameo appearance.

Texas residents Dan and Sarah Bell said that Cheesus appeared to them in a bag of Cheetos they bought at a gas station.

Dan and Sarah say they see a praying Jesus in the two-inch tall orange Cheeto.

Dan and Sarah tend to Cheesus by keeping him in a little container. They look after Cheesus and have big plans for the little Messiah: They want to sell him on E-Bay.

But if Cheesus doesn't bring a decent price, Dan says, he is simply going to eat the Messiah!

"How much do you think we should ask for it?" he told a local TV station. " It could be 25 cents, could be 25 dollars. If it's only 25 cents, we're just going to eat it."

Eat Cheesus?

Isn't that sacrilegious?

Now is the time for all good Christians to mobilize and save Cheesus!

Let not His Cheesiness become just another road trip snack!

(For non-believers out there, this is not the first time that God has manifested Himself as a Cheeto. You can see Cheesus here and in the 2008 video below...)

During Israel's military offensive last winter, reporters like me were stuck outside trying to get in.

Today I am stuck inside Gaza trying to get out.

Israel has closed the border again.

At first, the reasons weren't exactly clear.

This morning, the Israeli military killed two Palestinians approaching a section of the Gaza border.

The IDF said the two men were militants carrying weapons and that there was a short firefight before the Palestinians were killed.

Yesterday, before the attack, Israel unexpectedly stopped letting people in-and-out of Gaza at noon.

Today, in the wake of the border confrontation, the IDF said it was keeping the border closed until at least Sunday. 

Israel's Gaza borders have been comparatively quiet in the last few weeks, but not totally quiet.

Earlier this week, Palestinian militants fired a rocket at Sderot, marking the first time in two months that Gaza fighters targeted the southern Israeli town with one of the crude Qassams.

That prompted two days of Israeli air strikes, including Wednesday afternoon attacks we could hear while doing interviews near the Egyptian border as roaring Israeli planes were hitting smuggling tunnels.

Although today's attack hit a border area far from the Erez passenger crossing, Israel has kept the terminal closed all day.

Finding out why -- and trying to figure out who could get the border re-opened -- produced some runaround. The IDF said it was the Defense Ministry. The Defense Ministry said it was the IDF. Officials first said it was because of the morning attack. Then they said it was because of a "security assessment."

Though seemingly sympathetic, the Israeli military officials I spoke with were apparently not swayed by my appeals to get out so I could see Macy Gray tonight in Tel Aviv.

(The inability to see the show is particularly tragic since funky musicians like Macy Gray rarely come here to perform...)

My Gaza colleagues are also sympathetic, though it's hard for me to complain about being stuck for a few days to people who have been stuck here for years.

Late in the afternoon, the Defense Ministry called and said that, if I hurried to the border, they would open it up and let me (and anyone else who could get there in time) out.

A few minutes later, Palestinian militants attacked an Israeli border patrol, which didn't do much damage to the Israeli soldiers, but destroyed my last hopes of getting out of Gaza...

Well, now's a good time to adjust my outlook and think of this is an imposed summer weekend holiday on the Mediterranean coast, minus the booze, night clubs and bikini-filled beaches.

Lord knows plenty of people are paying lots of money along other parts of this coastline for a weekend on the warming Mediterranean...

The parking lot at Israel's Erez border crossing with Gaza is always a good barometer for how much interest there is in this isolated strip of land. Today it is mostly empty. There are a few aid workers going in, along with a trickle of journalists.

The Israel guard in the blast-resistant security booth asks me to lift my suitcase up on a ledge and open it up so he can look inside. I show him the baby seat I am bringing for my colleague who just had his first baby and the DVDs and the candy and the clothes and the books. One thing he's looking for is people bringing in large quantities of goods that Israel doesn't allow into Gaza. One time last year I was told by Israeli security at this booth that I could only bring in two cartons of cigarettes for my nicotine-addicted friends in Gaza.

This time the Israeli security let me through.

It's been four months since the end of Israel's military offensive in Gaza, and Hamas is still firmly in control.

Getting into Gaza now requires a Hamas security search at a rudimentary border checkpoint on the edge of the crossing.

Uniformed Gaza executive force members and police officers are searching bags for contraband.

They find it. In my bag. Stuffed up the pantlegs of my jeans.

Booze. Three bottles.

The border guards silently pull them out, one-by-one. Two bottles of Absolut Vodka and one bottle of arak.
He is doing this in front of a frustrated group of conservatively-dressed women from Gaza trying to get the OK from these border guards to head to the West Bank for a women's conference of some sort.

Somehow I feel it won't do much good to explain that these are gifts for friends in Gaza who don't mind the occasional drink, but can't openly buy a drop of good booze in this Hamas-led territory.

(The last open place selling booze in Gaza was firebombed on New Year's Eve a few years back...)

There are no set border rules in a place where you never know if there is actually going to be a border guard on the other side to greet you when you cross into Gaza, so it's sometimes hard to know for sure if you might have your bags checked on the Palestinian side.

Today, the answer is: Yes, you are going to have your bags checked.

My colleague told me as we were driving up to the checkpoint that Hamas is imposing a two bottle limit on ajnabis (foreigners) like me who are carrying forbidden booze into Gaza.

I must now choose: Which of my friends will lose out?

My colleague half-heartedly tries to talk the Hamas border guards into letting me bring all three, but they are adamant: Foreigners can bring in two bottles of booze. Period.

I decided to leave one bottle of vodka behind with Hamas.

Who knows what became of it. My colleague told me that they sometimes break the bottle in front of you. But this time, no.

Tonight I learned that the Hamas border guards nearly confiscated a six pack of ginger ale that they suspected was beer. The ginger ale coyotes had to open a can and let the border guard try it. Apparently, he went wild for the stuff.

I forgot to ask if the Hamas border guard asked the guy to bring him back some ginger ale the next time he came in...

For more than three years, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton has been leading US efforts to transform Palestinian security forces into a trusted, respected, dependable, professional force.

Doing so is considered one of the first and most important tasks in the Road Map for Middle East peace.

Israel isn't going to relinquish control of the West Bank until it has assurances that it can trust the PA security that is supposed to take over.

Dayton and the US security plan have received their share of criticism.

(In 2007, my colleague Warren Strobel and I wrote about the US foreign policy missteps that helped spark the Hamas takeover of Gaza.)

Dayton has kept a low profile while doing his work here.

But now he is speaking out to offer a rare public assessment of his work here.

In a recent speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dayton offers rare insight into the work he has been doing here for the last three years.

Dayton boasts of creating "new men" through the training program:

"Upon the return of these new men of Palestine," Dayton said, "they have shown motivation, discipline and professionalism, and they have made such a difference—and I am not making this up—that senior IDF commanders ask me frequently, 'How many more of these new Palestinians can you generate, and how quickly, because they are our way to leave the West Bank.'"

The most interesting moments of the talk come when Dayton discusses the reaction of the Israeli military to his work. Dayton says the IDF has gone from being skeptical and resistant to being supportive and encouraging.

Dayton highlights Hebron as a success story:

"Let me dwell on Hebron for a minute, because if any of you know about Hebron, this is a very difficult place, okay?" Dayton said "It's the largest city in the West Bank, it has a very large and aggressive settler population, and it is a very holy site for the Jewish people and for the Arab people.

"A year ago, the IDF rejected any suggestion that the Palestinian Authority should be allowed to reinforce its garrison in Hebron, which was a small force of only about four hundred police and gendarmes for this, the largest governorate in the West Bank. And we wanted to reinforce them with some of the graduates of the Jordan program. They said no.

"Yet the performance of these Jordan-trained graduates in Jenin, which was their first deployment, was so impressive that six months later, the IDF not only allowed the reinforcement in Hebron, but led it, facilitated it, and extended it. It's still going on. And the results of this reinforcement have been electric. There were villages in the Hebron governorate that had not seen a uniformed Palestinian policeman since 1967. Think about that. Not anymore."

The speech has plenty for policy wonks to munch on.

As Bibi prepares for his first meeting as PM with Obama on Monday, Time Magazine's Scott MacLeod recalls one of Bibi's more memorable meetings with then-President Clinton in 1996.

That meeting produced this memorable quote from Clinton:

"Who the f*** does he think he is? Who's the f***ing superpower here?"

Bibi is hoping for a better reception from Obama on Monday...