Linda Heard -
If the US and Russia continue a course of mutual belligerency — albeit gloved — the road to Armageddon will be short.
The West must understand that Russia newly flushed with energy wealth is no longer an underdog but a major world player. Russia, in its turn, must quit sending its bombers to tease Western countries. The US should come to terms with the fact it's no longer the only policeman on the block.
People are generally given to shrugging off mentions of a third world war. This is mainly because the next one could be mankind's last. Those who sprinkle their speeches or articles with dire warnings of a massive nuclear conflagration are often written off as scaremongers. Those who lived through the horrors of World War II and later witnessed the battered planet coming together to draft the Geneva Conventions and form the United Nations had hope that we had truly learned our lesson. Never again!
Surely it is inconceivable that world leaders would be prepared to put their nations on a suicidal collision course for any reason. Indeed, even during the most critical periods of the 45-year-long Cold War between the former Soviet Union ...   more »

yaakov katz,
A large-scale IDF operation against Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza was drawing near, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Tuesday.
"Every day that passes brings us closer to a broad operation in Gaza," Barak told Army Radio.
"We are not happy to do it, we're not rushing to do it, and we'll be happy if circumstances succeed in preventing it," he said. "But the time is approaching when we'll have to undertake a broad operation in Gaza."
Meanwhile, Hamas terror chief Muhammad Deif was quoted as saying that Hamas would soon strike "deep inside Israel."
Hamas official Sheikh Ahmad Hamdan of Khan Yunis said Tuesday that he recently met with Deif in the fugitive's hiding place. According to Hamdan, Deif, leader of Hamas's Izzadin a-Kassam armed wing, told him that in the next few weeks, his group would initiate an attack against the "Israeli occupation, and not remain on the defensive."
Deif, wanted by Israel for planning and executing numerous terror attacks, has eluded capture for years. In July 2006, he was wounded in an IAF strike on a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. Palestinian sources reported that nine members of the same family were ...   more »

2007 marks 40 years since the launch of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, one of the defining developments in the Jewish world in the second half of the 20th century. In its honor, the US Senate will vote this week on a resolution commemorating the movement's founding following the Six Day War.
"Forty years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, Americans from all walks of life came together to stand in solidarity with Soviet Jewry during its darkest hour," Sen. Joe Lieberman (Ind.-Connecticut), who co-authored the bill with Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said this week. "Organizations like the National Council of Soviet Jewry gave voice to the voiceless millions of people trapped behind the Iron Curtain."
The movement's success, the liberation of Soviet Jews from totalitarian communism, was the final stage of a dramatic reorientation of world Jewry. The exit of an estimated million and a half Jews, two-thirds to Israel and the rest mainly to North America, marks the most recent major exodus of Jews from Europe. In its wake, a Europe that began the 20th century as home to 85 percent-90% of the world's Jews finds itself at the start of this century ...   more »

WASHINGTON — The Democrat-controlled Congress is examining a request to develop a new bomb designed for a U.S. air strike on Iran.
The Bush administration wants $88 million for the production of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. The 30,000-pound conventional bomb, meant for deployment by the B-2 aircraft, would be the most powerful bunker-buster ever designed.
Analysts agree that MOP was designed to destroy Iranian and North Korean underground facilities, such as Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant, Middle East Newsline reported. The bomb was said to be able to penetrate more than 65 meters of earth.
"It'll go through it like a hot knife through butter," John Pike, a leading U.S. weapons analyst, told Congressional Quarterly.
Darfur force 'may be' operational by early 2008     
The administration did not explain the use of MOP. A White House statement cited "an urgent operational need from theater commanders" in its funding request to modify B-2s to carry MOP.
"We are not authorizing Bush to use a 30,000-pound bunker buster," Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington Democrat, said, according to the Congressional Quarterly report. "They've been banging the drums the same way as they did in 2002 with Iraq."
MOP has been ...   more »

By: Newsmax Staff 
An item buried in President Bush’s latest request for $190 billion in emergency war funding offers telling evidence that the U.S. could be preparing an attack on Iran.
The Defense Department has asked for $88 million to retrofit B-2 Stealth bombers so they can carry a 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator (MOP), which has the capacity to destroy deep underground targets.
The Administration says the request is in response to an “urgent operational need from theater commanders.”
Some observers might conclude that the Pentagon is seeking weaponry to strike Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in their caves in Afghanistan.
But as Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, points out in the New York Post, that would not require Stealth bombers.
“The Americans own the skies over Afghanistan and Iraq and could, if they wished, blanket the two countries with all manner of bombardment from a few thousand feet in broad daylight,” Baker notes.
Instead, the more likely targets are the subterranean nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran, according to Baker, who writes:
“The debate in Washington about what to do with the increasingly recalcitrant and self-confident Iranian regime has taken a ...   more »