JPost.com Staff
"Syria will attend the Annapolis conference in order to examine the US's commitment to peace," according to Monday's editorial in Syria's official daily newspaper Teshreen.
According to the writer, the Syrians are pessimistic because of the Americans' past history.
"Syria agreed to attend the Annapolis conference but it is not naïve. [Syria] knows Israel does not want peace and is responsible for the seven-year hiatus in the peace process."
"Going to Annapolis, Syria takes into consideration that the Palestinian issue is the fundamental issue on the way to achieving peace, security, and stability in the region, and also that true peace requires the return of all occupied Arab territories, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian."
"Syria will be part of the consensus which aims to force Israel to follow International and Arab principles for peace, and to foil [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert's plan to force Arab countries to recognize Israel as a Jewish state," the article read.
"Syria and the entire Arab world knows that Olmert is trying to force the whole world to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and to obtain normalization without receiving anything in return. Will the Arab consensus be able to block Olmert's aspirations and ...   more »

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meeting Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Jerusalem earlier this year.
J'lem sources: PM to call for road map implementation in Annapolis   
By Aluf Benn, Barak Ravid and Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondents   
WASHINGTON - The implementation of the road map peace plan is imperative, and terminating terrorist activity in the Gaza Strip is an inseparable part of the plan's first stage. That, according to sources close to the prime minister, will be the theme of Ehud Olmert's address Tuesday at the Annapolis international peace summit.
Olmert, the sources told Haaretz, will also say that the time has come to move forward with peace talks and reach an agreement. According to Syrian Information Minister Muhsen Bilal's statement Sunday, the summit in Annapolis will see a Syrian delegation attending as well, headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad.
Olmert will call on the Arab nations to establish diplomatic relations with Israel as Jordan and Egypt have. He will also call on them to actively advance negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. 
Commenting on Syria's decision to send a delegation to the summit, sources close to the prime minister told ...   more »

Officials say State Department fears affecting negotiations leading to Annapolis
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – At the request of the Palestinians, the U.S. has been holding back from Israel reports critical of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' purported attempts to fight terrorism in the West Bank, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the reports.
The U.S. has been closely monitoring Abbas' implementation of commitments to fight armed groups in the West Bank ahead of this week's Annapolis summit. In line with understandings, State Department and U.S. security representatives were to share their observations with Israel while the U.S. also monitors Israeli commitments to dismantle anti-terror road blocks and to take initial steps toward bulldozing what are termed illegal outposts, or Jewish structures built in the West Bank without government permits.  
While the U.S. has been reporting to the Palestinians on Israel's actions on the ground ahead of Annapolis, according to informed diplomatic sources, it has withheld some State Department reports critical of Abbas' Fatah security forces purported fight against terror.
Fatah forces in recent weeks carried out what it called arrest operations against some gunmen in the West Bank, including members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of ...   more »

Jerusalem bureau chief analyzes upcoming U.S.-sponsored conference
Click below to hear WND's Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein offer his two cents on this week's U.S-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian conference at Annapolis.
Aaron Klein on WABC's John Batchelor Show 
Klein analyzed the upcoming international meeting last night on New York WABC Radio's new John Batchelor Show.
Klein has made himself available this week to news organizations seeking expert analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian summit.
Talker G. Gordon Liddy calls him "the most talented, well-connected reporter in the Middle East today."
Radio commentator Michael Reagan says Klein is the "Middle East insider you need to know. It takes the rest of the media weeks to catch up to Klein."  
In the Israeli media establishment, Klein is widely regarded as the most wired-in foreign reporter based in Jerusalem. He talks on a regular basis with all the newsmakers, from Israeli leaders through Palestinian officials through the region's terrorist chiefs.
Klein covers the Israeli-Palestinian arena extensively, with at least one exclusive article on the subject per day. He's broken scores of stories that made top headlines in the U.S. and Israel.
When Israeli leaders have stories to break they call Klein. Palestinian officials – including chief ...   more »

Ancient seal suggests Jezebel conducted business separate of her husband
By Heather Whipps
Jezebel, the queen whose name became synonymous with all things lewd and wicked, probably wielded a fair bit of power in ancient Israel, suggests a stone document seal newly traced to the Biblical "bad girl."
Originally discovered in Israel in 1964, the intricate seal was suspected all along to belong to Queen Jezebel, but confusion over the letters engraved on the stone left some uncertainty. Recently, closer scrutiny of the seal's engraving revealed markings characteristic of royal objects.
"The lion-sphinx with female head and female Isis-Hathor crown, which is unique, this clearly points to a queen," said Marjo Korpel, an Old Testament scholar at the University of Utrecht who conducted the research.
The seal confirms that Jezebel, who eventually met a gory demise, was a powerful figure in the ancient world who conducted business independent of her husband.
Complete results of the University of Utrecht study are published in a recent volume of the Journal for Semitics.
Royal symbols borrowed from Egypt
Jezebel, whose life in the 9th century B.C. is chronicled in the Bible, was married to King Ahab of Israel. As a Phoenician, the Queen ...   more »

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican plans to respond positively and very soon to an appeal by Muslim scholars for an unprecedented dialogue between Christianity and Islam, Roman Catholic cardinals and Islam experts say.
The Catholic Church, representing more than half the world's two billion Christians, has not yet officially answered the call made last month and hailed by most other Christian leaders.
 But cardinals in Rome and Vatican officials told Reuters many Catholic leaders wanted a serious dialogue with Muslim leaders to help overcome misunderstandings.
"The Vatican will respond positively, and quite soon," said Dakar Cardinal Theodore-Adrien Sarr, whose homeland Senegal is 95 percent Muslim. "We will not miss this opportunity."
"Watch out for this week," said a veteran cardinal, who asked not to be named. The prelates were in Rome for a ceremony to install 23 new members of the College of Cardinals.
Paris Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois said a serious and broad Christian-Muslim dialogue would help inter-faith relations in France, which has Europe's largest Muslim minority.
"This is a significant step," he said of the Muslim appeal. "I remember that only a few years ago, we regretted there weren't any Muslim leaders who could take a public stand, ...   more »

By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO, Nov. 22 — Many in Japan are starting to speak of “quitting America,” but they are not talking about a rise in anti-American political fervor. Rather, they mean a move away from American investments that is altering global capital flows and helping to weaken the dollar.
The move is seen in decisions of individual investors like Daijo Okudaira, a 66-year-old clerk at a Tokyo consulting company. Like many Japanese, Mr. Okudaira had long limited his overseas investments to the relative safety of securities from developed countries, particularly the United States.
Starting late last year, however, Mr. Okudaira made drastic changes to his portfolio, putting $50,000 into mutual funds focusing on stocks in China and other emerging economies. He said he had been drawn to these countries because they seemed to hold much brighter growth prospects than the United States.
“People say the engine of the global economy is shifting from the United States to emerging countries,” Mr. Okudaira said. “Emerging countries have growth and energy that America and Europe lack. They remind me of Japan 40 years ago.”
Japan’s legions of individual investors like Mr. Okudaira have emerged as a global financial force to be reckoned ...   more »

In a growing number of churches, salvation means saving the Earth.
A movement called Interfaith Power and Light offers ministers sermon tips on how to convert churchgoers into environmental activists. One program encourages people to switch to energy
efficient light bulbs on each night they light a holiday candle for Advent or Hanukkah.
Virginia's chapter has focused on developing a three-hour training program for congregations that asks members to calculate their carbon footprints and pledge a 10 percent reduction.
A movement called "Cool Congregations" is afoot in Tennessee, where members of different congregations meet to discuss the connection between faith and environment and then spread the green gospel to their houses of worship.
Original Source

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By Sara A. Carter - Fort Huachuca, the nation's largest intelligence-training center, changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists, with the aid of Mexican drug cartels, were planning an attack on the facility.
Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona Army base, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Times.
"A portion of the operatives were in the United States, with the remainder not yet in the United States," according to one of the documents, an FBI advisory that was distributed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, Customs and Border Protection and the Justice Department, among several other law enforcement agencies throughout the nation. "The Afghanis and Iraqis shaved their beards so as not to appear to be Middle Easterners."
According to the FBI advisory, each Middle Easterner paid Mexican drug lords $20,000 "or the equivalent in weapons" for the cartel's assistance in smuggling them and their weapons through tunnels along the border into the U.S. The weapons would be sent through tunnels that supposedly ended ...   more »

The government says it will rewrite rules for penalizing employers of illegal immigrants to try to satisfy a federal judge in San Francisco who put the crackdown on hold.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer stopped the Bush administration last month from going ahead with enforcement of regulations requiring employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers did not match records and the discrepancies could not be addressed in 90 days. In issuing the temporary injunction, the judge said the Social Security database contained errors that could have cost many legal workers their jobs, and the government did not properly study the effect of the rules on business.
Late Friday, Breyer agreed to a request from the administration to put the case on hold while it reworks the regulations — a process bound to put off enforcement until the spring. The judge stayed proceedings until March 24, when the government thought it could have new rules ready on how to enforce immigration laws in the workplace.
Business, labor and civil liberties groups had sued to stop the "no match" rules, arguing the plan would trap companies and workers in a costly bureaucratic nightmare.
In its motion, the administration acknowledged that ...   more »