内容摘要：Staple items such as rice (80-90 percent), wheat (90 percent) and sugar (70 percent) are largely produced in the US, though some rice and speciality grains are imported.

Staple items such as rice (80-90 percent), wheat (90 percent) and sugar (70 percent) are largely produced in the US, though some rice and speciality grains are imported.

All you can do as a writer is to keep writing, regardless of the reaction – whether kind or unkind, thoughtful or thoughtless – or the consequences, intended or not.Still, one of the casualties of writing about Palestinians can be the loss of the reassuring constancy and tender pleasure of valued friendships.

I suppose I am not alone on this sad score.Students, teachers, academics, artists, and so many others have been exiled, charged, or even jailed for refusing to ignore or sanitise the horror we see day after dreadful day.In this context, my travails, while stinging and disconcerting, are modest in comparison. Departed friends, however dear, are, it seems, the price for candour that unsettles.

Those friendships, built over decades through sometimes happy, sometimes sad experiences and shared confidences, have evaporated in an instant.I understood that this rupture could happen. I did not fear it. I accepted it.

Yet, when it did happen, it pricked.

It was abrupt. Phone calls went to voice mail. Emails went unanswered. Inevitably, the absence and quiet grew until they became an unmistakable verdict.One of the two will succeed Andrzej Duda, the outgoing nationalist conservative president who was also backed by PiS and has been blamed for holding up justice reforms by using his veto against the government.

This is a hotly contested race. Trzaskowski and Nawrocki haveover the European Union, national security and social values. At the same time, both candidates take a similarly hardline approach to immigration, and have used anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, building on growing resentment among Poles who see themselves as competing for strained social services with 1.55 million Ukrainian migrants and war refugees.

While Trzaskowski has proposed that only working Ukrainians should have access to the country’s child benefit, Nawrocki has gone further, saying he would also be against Ukraine joining NATO or even the EU.‘Every vote is needed’