THE ATTACKS CONTINUE: Israel Says It Does Not Intend To Occupy Gaza

AP: Sun Morning: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israeli warplanes pressing one of Israel’s deadliest assaults ever on Palestinian militants dropped bombs and missiles on a top security installation and dozens of other targets across Hamas-ruled Gaza on Sunday.

Infantry and armored units headed to the Gaza border for a possible ground invasion, as the Israeli Cabinet authorized a callup of thousands of reserve soldiers. Some 280 Palestinians died in the first 24 hours of the campaign against Gaza rocket squads — most of them Hamas police. (The casualties put the toll well over a thousand).

EYEWITNESS REPORT: Gaza City - This is an on the spot report by freelance journalist Ewa Jasiewicz.

RED CROSS OVERWHELMED:

Gaza: ICRC calls for restraint as hospitals overwhelmed by scale of emergencies

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is extremely concerned by the mounting number of casualties inside the Gaza Strip, following a series of air strikes by the Israel Defense Forces. The strikes have killed at least 275 people and left more than 950 wounded, according to Palestinian health officials. In Israel, civilians have come under attack from rockets launched from Gaza that have killed at least one Israeli and wounded several others.

“People in Gaza are very afraid to go into the streets, which are virtually empty. The hospitals are overwhelmed and unable to cope with the scale and type of injuries that keep coming in,” said Marianne Robyn Whittington, an ICRC health delegate in Gaza.

MONITOR MEDIA COVERAGE CAREFULLY

Israel to mount aggressive emergency international PR effort in wake of Gaza campaign By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday instructed the Foreign Ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel’s international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip. Livni instructed senior ministry officials to open an aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign, in order to gain greater international support for Israel Defense Forces operations in the Gaza Strip….Livni instructed ministry officials currently on vacation in Israel to return immediately to their posts abroad, and to immediately mount public relations campaigns in their station countries, focusing on local media and public officials.

In addition, Israeli officials stationed abroad have been put on high alert. Livni will hold a series of talks with foreign officials in the coming days, in which she will attempt to explain the rationale for the expanded IDF operations in the Gaza Strip. The Foreign Ministry is also looking to recruit speakers of foreign languages, in particular Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and German, in order to expand Israel’s public relations campaign with the representatives of foreign media outlets currently in Israel.

An international media broadcast outlet will be opened in Sderot on Sunday, and the Foreign Ministry will organize a series of tours of Sderot and the Gaza envelope communities for foreign media and diplomatic figures. Speaking in English at a press conference Saturday, Livni said Israel “expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and co existence to determine the agenda of this region.”

How effective will this effort be here? How fair and even handed will the coverage be?

You tell me.

Already the US lines up with Israel even as countries worldwide condemn attack and call for a cease fire. In its statement, The White House has blamed Hamas, supported Israel.

ON THE PLAN: Ha’aretz via Daily Beast - Israel’s Plan of Attack

What does the Israeli offensive look like behind-the-scenes? According to Haaretz, Israel began planning its operation in Gaza six months ago. The plan involved “Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public.” Defense Minister Ehud Barak approved the plan on November 19, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert approved it on December 18.

An example of Israel’s use of disinformation was its announcement during the week that it would deliberate its course of action today—one day after the strike was already ordered. “Hamas evacuated all its headquarter personnel after the cabinet meeting on Wednesday,” one defense official said, “but the organization sent its people back in when they heard that everything was put on hold until Sunday.” In other news, the Palestinian Authority said it is ready to take over Gaza, should the Israeli operation succeed in overthrowing Hamas.

Headlines in Ha’aretz, the Israeli Newspaper:

• UN Security Council calls for immediate halt to Gaza violence

• Syria Calls Off Indirect Talks;

• Iran Calls On All Muslims to Help Gaza;

• Protests Among Israeli Arabs;

• Journalists Demand Entry to Gaza
– Remember? Israel was not permitting journalists to enter. Could this be why? — DS.

• Tutu Calls Attacks a “Hallmarks of War Crimes;”

• Israeli PM Rejects Calls for Cease Fire, Calls Hamas Terror Group;

AND

Ha’aretz Columnist Bradley Burston Anticipates and Ridicules/Dismisses All Criticism:

“It is, abruptly and again, wartime. Across the globe, the selective pacifists of the left and the recliner Rambos of the right are spoiling for their next battle, the war in Gaza.

They will fight one another in letters to Congress, in cable news sound bites, in raucous talk-radio phone-ins, in the virtual mega-heroics of the online battlefield of the talkback.

They will fight one another in the United Nations as well, unashamedly one-sided in their concern for human life …

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

Gideon Levy, senior journalist — The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again:

“Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: “Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn’t be provoked into anger… Not that the bully’s not right - someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!”

Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation “Cast Lead” is only in its infancy.

Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, and international law…”

URI AVNERY AT AGE 85: Criticizes the Israeli Left

“It is enough to look at these coming elections: the three big parties talk almost the same language, and not one of them puts forward a plan for peace.

There are small parties which say good and honest things, but at this juncture we simply need more than that. What is lacking is a major political force that is ready to come to power in order to make peace.

It is quite clear that the results of this coming election will be bad - and the only question is whether they will be just bad, or very bad, or even worse.

Uri Avnery comments start at 5:35 below:

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, many pretexts. We criticize - and rightly so - many things, the media, the education system, all our successive governments, the President of the United States, all the world.

But I miss one criticism - the criticism of ourselves.

My father used to tell me: if the situation is bad, the first thing to do is to ask yourself if you are alright. So I am asking: Am I alright? Are we alright?

Yes, we have voiced the right ideas. Our ideas have won. But what have we done to realize these ideas in practice, on the political battlefield?

Politics is a matter of power. What have we done to create a progressive political force in Israel? How did it happen that the Left, the camp of peace and progress, has almost been eradicated from the political map? Why don’t we have political power, why don’t we have, for example, even one newspaper, radio or TV station? How did the Israeli Left lose, in the last generation, all its levers of power?

We in the peace camp include many wonderful men and women, who confront the army every week in the fight against the Wall, who monitor the checkpoints, who refuse to serve in the occupation army, who fight against the occupation in dozens of ways. Many of us, of all ages, take part in these actions.

But while we stand and protest, the settlers rush ahead. Another goat and another dunam (1000 square meters), another hill and another outpost. Sometimes I, too, have the feeling that the dogs bark and the caravan moves on - and I am not content with being the dog. We chase the mosquitoes, but the swamp that produces the mosquitoes gets bigger and bigger.

The swamp is political. Only a political force can drain it. In other words: only a force that can confront the ruling powers, influence the decisions of the government and the Knesset.

That is a historic failure, and we bear the responsibility for it.”

THE ATTACK ON GAZA

I usually don’t blog on Satudays but the Israeli military attack on Gaza jolted me out of my other work and some sleep. This is still a “breaking” story.

Christmas is supposed to be the season of peace but it symbolic value has been repeatedly devalued.

First, with Richard Nixon defiling the holy day by bombing Hanoi and since then, this time of the year seems to motivate war makers to showcase exercises of brutality. It is also interesting that the right wing loudmouths who rail about a “war on Christmas” have nothing to say about wars that erupt during the Christmas season.

The “season” still inspires papal oratory of the kind we heard the other day from Pope Benedict XVI in his traditional address in St Peter’s Square.

He, like many of his predecessors, lashed out at war, saying:

“May the divine light of Bethlehem radiate throughout the Holy Land, bringing forth rich fruit from the efforts of all those who shun the twisted logic of conflict and violence.”

It was part of his traditional papal Christmas Day message “Urbi et Orbi,” Latin for “to the city and to the world,” usually covering the globe’s hot spots.

PEACE OR PIECES IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

Like President Bush whose calls for stability in the markets is usually followed by plunges in the exchanges — the other day, just before the bombs fell, he was hinting at a peace in the Middle East breakthrough, engineered by Condi’s “diplomacy.

The Pope’s references to the Holy Land has been followed by outbreaks of hostilities and threats of new wars. While Pakistan rushes troops and planes to the Indian Border, Israel fortifies its border with Lebanon — a country still rebuilding from Tel Aviv’s season of peace cluster bomb assault — and then sent its jets to bomb Gaza with the death toll climbing above 220.

AL JAZEERA REPORTS — SAT NIGHT

“Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s political leader, has called for an uprising against Israel after an unprecedented attack on the Gaza Strip killed at least 220 Palestinians and wounded 700 more.

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on Saturday, destroying Hamas police stations and interior ministry buildings.

It was the deadliest day in Gaza for decades, with Israel continuing to attack sites into the night and threatening that the operation would widen if necessary.

Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, described the assault as a war on Hamas, the Palestinian faction which took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

Members of the Israeli cabinet say the attack is in response to an increase in the number of home-made rockets being fired into southern Israel since a ceasefire ended on December 19.”

Video footage shows the bodies of dead people including men, women and children on Gaza streets.

FIRST THE BOMBS, THEN THE PROPAGANDA WAR

Alongside the attack, the propagandists were right behind them spinning the war as a legitimate act of self defense. Within hours of the attacks, I received this email from theisraelproject.org probably along with every media outlet in the USA. There was no comparable email from “the other side.”

Israeli officials and experts available for comment.

As you know, Israel is taking defensive action to protect itself against almost daily rocket, missile and mortar attacks from Gaza. Iran-backed Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza have fired more than 3,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians in 2008 alone and have stepped up their attacks since the ceasefire ended Friday (Dec. 19).

Israeli officials and experts in Washington, New York and Israel are ready and available to give interviews about the situation; please see contact information below.

This information is provided as a courtesy by The Israel Project, an international nonprofit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace. It is not related to any government or government entity. For more info: TheIsraelProject.org.

THE BODY COUNT STILL UNKNOWN

BBC was reporting the carnage that the spinners were sanitizing with claims that only Hamas soldiers or security personnel were hurt while reporters on the scene documented civilian casualties.

The BBC Video Report

Israeli F-16 bombers have pounded targets across the Gaza Strip, killing more than 200 people, according to local medical workers. Click to view

REACTIONS

There have been calls for a ceasefire, and condemnations from throughout the Arab World, alas, to cynical Americans, “the usual places.”

Hamas Press Conference After Israeli Attacks On Gaza

Taher al-Noono, a Hamas spokesman, speaks to reporters in Gaza following Israeli attacks which killed more than 195 people and wounded more than 200 others.

Bush Winks at Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza; | Obama and Clinton Are Silent By Matthew Rothschild

President-elect Barack Obama and Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton were silent in the first hours after the attack.

Bush’s reaction, and the non-reaction by Obama and Clinton, underscores the point that Hanan Ashrawi made on Saturday.

“Israel has gotten used to not being held accountable and to being a country that is above the law,” said the Palestinian legislator and human rights activist. She called the bombings a “massacre.”

Her comments on the election of Obama and the Bush administration:

PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN (UK) PROTESTS

“The West, including the British government, has supported the last two years’ of blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza for the crime of exercising their democratic rights in a manner not to Israel’s liking.

They have stood by while the people have been reduced to beggars dependent upon food aid, aid which has been consistently denied to them by Israel’s siege, resulting in malnutrition, trauma and deaths from medical neglect. This siege has been accompanied by regular military attacks on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank as Israel is allowed to act with impunity. The passage of 100 trucks of aid yesterday, in the BBC’s words ‘to prevent Israel being accused of a causing humanitarian crisis’ is a cynical diversion which does not fool anyone despite the hopes of our cowardly leaders.”

WHAT’S BEHIND THIS?

What caused this? Ask the Israelis they will blame Hamas. Its all their fault, they say. Ask Palestinians, they blame Israel for its policies they argue that turned Gaza into a blockaded ghetto with no access to the outside world that was being systematically starved. (Just before the military attack, Israel allowed humanitarian caravans to enter.)

“Experts” disagree. Spiegel, the German newspaper wrote months ago

HAMAS SAID TO HAVE BELIEVED ESCALATION WILL LEAD TO PEACE

“The question is why Hamas chose to escalate the situation. The most likely theory is desperation — namely that they are trying to stave off a popular coup. The situation in the Gaza Strip has gotten decidedly worse in the last few weeks. … Combined with the ongoing blockade from Israel, that means less fuel, medicine and food can reach the Gaza Strip. The populace there is now grumbling and its anger at the Hamas government is growing steadily.”

At the same time, analysts quoted in the same article say’ Hamas actually is seeking a cease fire with Israel by escalating its attacks. Here’s their “logic”

“For weeks, there have been signals from Hamas that they are prepared to offer Israel a 10- or 15- year ‘hudna,’” says Mkhaimar Abu Sada, one of the most respected political analysts in Gaza.

A hudna would be an elegant solution for the Islamists: it is a ceasefire under religious law, in which neither of the opponents backs down, but rather in which two enemies, despite a continuing dispute, agree to a “cold” peace. A hudna would allow Hamas to preserve its principles and therefore not lose face. On paper, the armed struggle against Israel would remain its lifeblood, while in practice it could agree on open borders with its arch-enemy. In return, Hamas would stop the shelling of Israeli towns and villages.”

So far, this scenario seems to be going nowhere. Instead we are back to the cycle of self-defeating and endless violence, attacks and counterattacks, bloodshed and death. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s right, only who’s left.

PALESTINIANS DIVIDED

Palestinians themselves are divided argues Jonathan Schanzer counterterrorism analyst for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Treasury. His new book is Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle For Palestine.

“It becomes increasingly clear that the Palestinians actually lack a coherent vision for their future. The Hamas faction seeks an Islamist polity. The Fatah faction seeks a more secular one. Opposition to Israel is perhaps the only issue upon which they truly agree…

Over time, what began as a political rivalry gave way to sharp disagreements and acrimony over Fatah’s engagement in peace talks with Israel during the Oslo years. Upon the prompting of Israel and the United States, Fatah met Hamas suicide bombings against Israel with Fatah crackdowns. Quietly, a Palestinian civil war was brewing….”

DAILY STAR (BEIRUT) ALL SIDES LOSE

And what now? The most sensible analysis I found was in an editorial in Beirut’s Daily Star which places these events in the context of the run-up to the Israeli elections where the hawks need to show how tough they are:

“The Islamist movement has provided its enemy with a pretext to bring ruin on the very people whose rights a resistance group is supposed to defend. It is not just the rival Fatah faction that recognizes this: Even some long-time supporters of Hamas’ tougher line have now retreated to a more pragmatic middle ground from which the obvious conclusion is that flipping makeshift rockets at a regional superpower will never liberate occupied land, only expose the dispossessed to further hardship.

It is the Israelis, through, who seem poised to embark on a course of even greater folly. Fresh from having convinced Hamas not to renew a six-month cease-fire by maintaining a crescendo of violations and then punctuating it with a series of deadly attack this month and last, Israel’s government is issuing all sorts of ominous warnings about invading the already battered enclave and “toppling” the de facto Hamas administration there. In fact, virtually all sides in the ongoing campaign ahead of February’s general elections are engaged in a competition to see who can utter the most frightening threats about what they will do to Gaza if and when they get the chance.

The Israelis have been down this road before, and it has never worked. Sure, churning up Gaza and scattering Hamas’ forces would be easier than the failed attempt to accomplish something similar against Hizbullah here in Lebanon in 2006. It might even help some members of the Israeli military to regain a measure of the confidence lost in places like Aita al-Shaab and Maroun al-Ras. But once the Israelis have had their way with Gaza, what then? Will the citizens of Israel be any closer to being accepted by their neighbors? Will those Palestinians and other Arabs willing to negotiate a peace - not a surrender - have any more credibility with their respective publics?

The answer to both questions is a resounding “no” - and no one should understand this better than the Israelis themselves. They have had a habit of undermining whatever Palestinian “peace partners” they have ever had, fulfilling their own prophecies by crippling moderates and empowering hard-liners. An invasion of Gaza will be no different than the hundreds of other bloody assaults the Zionist state has launched against Arabs over the past six decades: Innocent people will die, revenge will be exacted against Israeli soldiers and civilians.”

Comments on the Gaza coverage: Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org

URGENT ALERT: TIME WARNER THREATENS LA PUBLIC ACCESS: Jayne Stahl reports:

In a previous post, I wrote about a plan by Time Warner Cable to shut fourteen public access stations, in Los Angeles, on Wednesday, 12/31.

Anyone who thinks that Public Access exists simply to provide a soap box, and that there are other, more effective ways for the community to participate, be advised that the uncontested, and unopposed closure of one means of access threatens all others down the line. What next, viewer-supported programming?

As the Caucus for Producers, Writers, and Directors, the only group that includes all four guilds (WGA, DGA, PGA, and SAG) writes, in a letter to California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, Jr., ” Since the wave of media consolidation that began after the deregulation of the media in the early 90’s we have been prime advocates for media issues that affect the creative community….Public Access has been an important step for many young filmmakers and independent producers and access studios have provided training for countless individuals now working in the entertainment industry. Public Access is also a vital community service that we need now more than ever.”

Importantly, the City of Los Angeles has done nothing to preclude Time Warner from eliminating the public access system in what is the hub of the media industry. Indeed, the only person empowered to prevent this closure is state Attorney General Edmund G. (Gerry) Brown. Los Angeles, as a municipality, is responsible for operating public access channels, and no cable company has the right to shut them down until, and unless, the City has the opportunity to replace the channels.

In the words of actor, and activist, Ed Asner: “The studios should not close until the public’s rights are secured and replacement of the lost facilities are in place.”

Stanley Sheinbaum, another longtime opponent of censorship, writes “Cable operators pay franchise fees from revenue generated by cable subscribers who will be harmed when public channels are taken away.”

The response from those who abhor monopolies, and the ability of media conglommerates to strongarm the community must be swift, and decisive. Whether you live in Santa Monica, New York City, Boston, or Des Moines, Iowa, should Time Warner prevail on December 31st, what happens in Los Angeles will affect you.

Those who are concerned about protecting the integrity of the First Amendment, independent programming, and preventing a media shark from swallowing all the little fish, must act quickly by contacting California Attorney General Brown at: agpressoffice@doj.ca.gov, and urging him to seek injunctive relief under the California Business and Professions Code 17200, Section 3, Unfair Business Practices.

Unless we act to stop it, Time Warner will pull the plug on fourteen public access studios, in California, on Wednesday. First public access channels, what next?

Saturday - December 27, 2008

THE THREE VOICES

I am off today, or planned to be off, and needed to be off, but also needed to remember and honor three forces of nature and conscience who left us this week.

On Christamas Day, I offered up a song by the Three Tenors. Today, we honor Three Voices.

BRITISH WRITER AND DRAMATIST HAROLD PINTER

A Nobel Prize winning dramatist, he was also uncompromising in his crictism of the War in Iraq, on the role played by his own country and ours.

He may be silent now but these words will live on:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” he said.

“You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

READ HIS BIO:

COMMENTS: True to form, The Washington Post, that once great newspaper that supported the war comments not on the comments above but on his literary contribution as if his insights on the US (and presumably them) were not central to his life. The comments are, however, accurate.

In Words and in Silence, a Writer of Rare Power By Peter Marks

“Let us pause. And in deference to a man who knew precisely how to wring meaning from silence, stop just a little longer.

Harold Pinter, prospector of 24-karat drama in the tension-racked spaces between words, died in London on Wednesday, at age 78. With his death, the pool of contemporary playwrights of international literary stature has been all but drained dry.

Although he expressed the views of a pacifist, Pinter wrote as if he held his finger on the pin of a grenade. In modernist classics such as “The Homecoming,” “Old Times” and “No Man’s Land,” he devised characters who spoke in elliptical asides and enigmatic bursts. Violence of some nature was never out of the realm of possibility, even in his quietest plays. For Pinter was a connoisseur of subtext, of letting a story unfold on a living room set while a more savage one simmered in the crawl spaces of the mind. His characters routinely rattle each other with what never gains utterance.

His stark black-comic sensibility and economical use of language owed much to Samuel Beckett, the father of existential 20th-century drama. It was a debt that Pinter, who got his start as an actor in postwar Britain, readily acknowledged. When the Nobel Academy gave him the prize for literature in 2005, the act affirmed his link to Beckett, who had won it 36 years earlier. That they are among the few English-speaking dramatists to have received the award speaks to the nonpareil influence they both wielded over the style and force of the modern theater.

Power and turf are always at issue in Pinter. You get to see in his plays how much the anatomy of our emotional entanglements is built on ever-shifting questions of who’s up and who’s down.

HIS WORDS AGAIN: The Nobel Speech: December 7, 2005

EARTHA KITT

The news: NEW YORK – A family friend says Eartha Kitt, a sultry singer, dancer and actress who rose from South Carolina cotton fields to become an international symbol of elegance and sensuality, has died. She was 81.

Andrew Freedman says Kitt died Thursday of colon cancer and was recently treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

Kitt, a self-proclaimed “sex kitten” famous for her catlike purr, was one of America’s most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and getting a third nomination. She also was nominated for two Tony Awards and a Grammy.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Eartha Kitt was among the artists who sang on the remake of, ‘ We Are Family,’ a song originated by Sister Sledge, in a call for tolerance and end to hate crimes.

Also, I spoke with her for my, ‘We Are Family,’ film that premiered at Sundance early in 2002.

See Eartha Kitt web site for more on her fabulous career.

ADRIAN MITCHELL

He was a major British poet whose work against the Vietnam war led to the play, ‘Tell Me Lies,’ directed in London by Peter Brook. I last saw him at a London tribute to his friend Alan Ginsberg after that poet died. Here he is reading the original Tell Me Lies poem.

Honor their memory. Familiarize yourself with their work.

For the news hungry among us, here’s the Day After Christmas report of DXM’s Greeze in Oregon.

And via Naked Capitalism, a BBC story with video of life and hope. Viva MOKO.

A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand. Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea. The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said.

But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island.

Mr. Smith said that just when his team was flagging, the dolphin showed up and made straight for them.

“I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,” Mr Smith told the BBC, “but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.”

He added: “The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.”

Mr. Smith said he felt fortunate to have witnessed the extraordinary event, and was delighted for the whales, as in the past he has had to put down animals which have become beached. He said that the whales have not been seen since, but that the dolphin had returned to its usual practice of playing with swimmers in the bay.

“I shouldn’t do this I know, we are meant to remain scientific,” Mr Smith said, “but I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards because she really did save the day.”

MUSIC VIDEO OF THE DAY - Lizz Wright - Reaching For the Moon by Irving Berlin

Email comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org