PTT is back ... up and running and renewed

[mary <humdrum2 at libero.it>]

Some of you had noticed that Palestine Think Tank was strange-looking 
or --- gone --- for a good part of the day. As a matter of fact, it 
was affected by a worm.

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/

Haitham was aware of it and handled the upgrade of the system, and 
he'd been doing the maintenance work all day long to bring the site 
back to its users. Looks like things are ok now and currently the 
site should be up and running perfectly. One of the unfortunate 
aspects, however, is that comments from September are lost (hundreds 
of them).. forever. We do thank everyone who had commented, and the 
ongoing conversations were really good, but this is a small loss 
compared to risking the entire site. Other little things are not 
"exactly" as they were, but soon things will be like clockwork!

As is said, the Chinese ideogram for Chaos is the same one for 
Opportunity, and with the bit of limited chaos that took place, we've 
taken the opportunity to make a few changes. We have added two of our 
most featured and popular writers, who happen to be outstanding 
journalists, to our Editorial Board. All of you know Iqbal Tamimi and 
Kawther Salam, and we are certain that the power of their voices and 
their human sensitivity and knowledge will make PTT even more 
appealing and useful. A few of our guest writers have been invited as 
regular contributors, so our readers will be enjoying more often the 
brilliant commentary of Jeff Blankfort, Sameh Brill and Saja, who 
specialises in getting to the bottom of the Arab American media and 
politics, often with a humourous bent.

We have a new homepage feature, soon to be launched, "Children's 
Corner". This space is rather innovative for a site such as ours, 
since it seeks to highlight the thoughts, artwork, videos, photos, 
letters, essays and more by and for the Children of Palestine. We 
think this will be an important feature of our site and we are 
anxious to make it grow, seeking contributions from our readers as 
well, especially those in education and those who work with children, 
as we do for always seeking contributions to the site.

Hope that these changes will make PTT into an even stronger site in every way!