Yaakov Katz
With Iran racing toward nuclear power and IDF preparations for the possibility of a conflict with Syria and Hizbullah in high gear, the Home Front Command plans to launch a publicity campaign to prepare the public for war.
Within a few weeks it intends to inform the public about what people need to do in the event of attack.
The campaign was not connected to a specific event or threat but was meant to brace the public for war in general, senior IDF officers said.
"Our job is to prepare for an all-out war," Col. Hilik Sofer, head of the Home Front Command Population Division, told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday. "We prepare for a wide range of possibilities since it doesn't make a difference where the threat comes from."
Several weeks ago, the Home Front Command distributed pamphlets in Netivot and Ashkelon explaining how to behave during a Kassam attack. Both cities are within 15 kilometers of the Gaza Strip.
The IDF has deployed early warning systems outside Netivot and Ashkelon. They have not been activated, pending government approval.
Next week, Sofer will meet with heads of government offices and local councils to discuss ways to improve service ...   more »

Moscow is in negotiations to purchase a large section of downtown Jerusalem once controlled by the Russian government prior to Israel's rebirth in 1948.
The 17-acre Russian Compound is today home to a large police facility and detention center, numerous pubs and restaurants and a large Russian Orthodox church.
The Russian government built up the area in the 1860s to accommodate the large number of Russian pilgrims who were visiting Jerusalem every year, particularly around the time of Easter.
Negotiations over the land has been ongoing since the premiership of Ehud Barak some seven years ago. The Russians are reportedly prepared to pay $100 million for the prime real estate.
Speaking to Israel National News, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman stressed that Israel is not "selling" the land to Russia, but rather "returning" the area to its former owners - a very dangerous way of putting things considering the Arab claim to all of what is today the Jewish state.
Original Source
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Barry Rubin
In the Middle East, violence is not the result of poor communication but a tool for political gain. Nothing proves that point better than Syria's successful use of violence and terrorism to promote its interests. No amount of dialogue is going to change that reality.
Now Syria is using a Palestinian front group to start a war inside Lebanon, just as it employed another Lebanese client organization, Hezbollah, to battle Israel last year. The Syrian government's message is simple: Lebanon will know no peace until it again becomes our satellite.
In two years, 15 major terrorist attacks targeted Lebanon's independent-minded leaders. Most notorious was the assassination of popular former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, which also killed 21 bystanders.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sponsors terrorism and his wishes for Syria's role in the Middle East are fundamentally at odds with the West, Barry Rubin writes. Give him an inch in negotiations and he'll take a mile.
Vahid Salemi, The Associated Press
In response, the United Nations set up an international investigation whose interim reports pointed the finger at Syria and even, in unpublished drafts, at president Bashar al-Assad's closest relatives for the killing. Last week, the ...   more »

By Lee Silver
Newsweek International
June 4, 2007 issue - It last happened about 3.6 billion years ago. a tiny living cell emerged from the dust of the Earth. It replicated itself, and its progeny replicated themselves, and so on, with genetic twists and turns down through billions of generations. Today every living organism—every person, plant, animal and microbe—can trace its heritage back to that first cell. Earth's extended family is the only kind of life that we've observed, so far, in the universe.
This pantheon of living organisms is about to get some newcomers—and we're not talking about extraterrestrials. Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.
The people who are defying Nature's monopoly on creation are a loose collection of engineers, computer scientists, physicists and chemists who look at life quite differently than traditional biologists do. Harvard professor George Church wants "to do for biology what Intel does for electronics"—namely, making biological parts that can ...   more »

President Vladimir Putin issued an acerbic warning Thursday to the United States, saying the recent test of a new Russian missile was a direct response to US actions and condemning "imperialism" in world affairs.
"Our American partners have quit the ABM Treaty," Putin told reporters after meeting his Greek counterpart, referring to the landmark 1972 US-Soviet treaty limiting the missile defenses of the Cold War superpower foes.
"We warned them then that we would come out with a response to maintain the strategic balance in the world. Yesterday we conducted a test of a new strategic ballistic missile with multiple warheads, and of a new cruise missile, and will continue to improve our resources."
The United States informed Russia in 2001 that it was exercising its option to withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) pact. It has since stepped up controversial plans, fiercely opposed by Russia, to deploy a missile defence shield in eastern Europe.
Putin warned Wednesday that the US missile defense plan would turn Europe into a "powder keg" and he repeated on Thursday previous assertions that the planned deployments would ignite a new Cold War-style arms buildup.
"We are not the initiators of this new round ...   more »