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 »

Mohammed Assadi
A Palestinian boy looks from the window of his house in the southern Gaza strip October 30, 2007. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa  
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinians will not pursue peace talks with Israel without an agreed timeline for reaching a deal on statehood, chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qurie said on Tuesday.
"The Israeli prime minister had announced that he will not accept a timeline, and we say we won't accept negotiations without a timeline. We do not want to go to open negotiations," Qurie told reporters.
He made the comments ahead of a planned visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank at the weekend by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is preparing the ground for a U.S.-led Middle East conference in late November or early December.
Western and Israeli officials have described a two-track process coming out of the Annapolis, Maryland meeting: the start of formal talks over a Palestinian state and a push to implement the first phase of a long-stalled "road map" peace plan.
The officials said Washington was considering holding a large follow-up meeting in mid-2008, bringing the two tracks together in a way that the Palestinians hope will culminate ...   more »

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has demanded Israel open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the UN nuclear watchdog and dismantle its weapons programme.
The security situation in the Middle East continues to pose a major threat to international peace and stability due to Israel's insistence on keeping its nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, Ahmed Abdulla Ali Al Ketbi, member of the UAE delegation, has told a UN General Assembly panel, WAM news agency reported Tuesday.
Ketbi decried as double standard the exemption to Israel -- which has not signed the NPT -- from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and said this has led to a dangerous security imbalance in the region.'This (the exemption) has contributed in one way or another to the irresponsible development of Israel's nuclear weapons, and encouragement of some other states, in the context of their concept of security deterrence, to acquire dangerous nuclear weapons,' Ketbi said.
'In spite of the confidence-building measures taken by Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, particularly in the area of disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, the security situation in the Middle East continues to pose a major threat to international peace, security and stability,' ...   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 »