Russia's recent moves, such as its joint military exercises with China, are a signal that Moscow is seeking to reclaim its status on the world stage. Its growing ties with Syria and Iran should be of concern to Israeli policymakers
Are we on the verge of a renewal of the Cold War?  
On the one hand, Russia, under Vladimir Putin's leadership and after years of international weakness, is trying to establish itself on the world stage through a demonstration of its military strength. On the other hand, today's Russia is not the Communist Soviet Union, which had a revolutionary ideology it looked to spread around the world.  
Just like the United States and its backyard – Latin America – Russia, with its assertive policy, is looking to make abundantly clear that the areas on its border are within its sphere of influence. This explains Russia's sensitivity to events in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine.  
It is obvious that Russia wants to send a clear a message: that Russia cannot be ignored. One of the major mistakes of western, and in particular American, foreign policy following the break up of the Soviet Union and Russia's weakness in ...   more »

By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
Dr. Joel Mergui, the president of the umbrella organization of the Jewish community in Paris, said in an interview with Haaretz on Monday that he fears that a mass migration to Israel among French Jews could severely deplete the Paris community.
The fears Mergui expressed in his interview with Haaretz are held by quite a number of community leaders in the Jewish world, though few are willing to express them publicly.
"Out of 600,000 Jews living in France, only a third is in contact with the community, and educate their children in Jewish schools. A third is in the process of becoming assimilated, and another third is in the middle, on the fence - and we need to pull them in. All of the education of the Jewish community for years was based on ties and identification with Israel. My worry is that we succeeded too well, we worked so hard with the third of the community whose strong ties with Israel may possibly empty out the Paris community. This is not a fear of anti-Zionism," Mergui said.
Mergui has a few surprising figures, even for those who are used to seeing Israel's beaches filled ...   more »

Last year, among the nation's 10 largest cities, Philadelphia had the highest murder rate with 406 victims. This year could easily top last year's with 240 murders so far.
Other cities such as Baltimore, Detroit and Washington, D.C., with large black populations, experience the nation's highest rates of murder and violent crime. This high murder rate is, and has been, predominantly a black problem.
According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation's homicides and were 46 percent of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer.
Blacks are not only the major victims of homicide; blacks suffer high rates of all categories of serious violent crime, and another black is most often the perpetrator.
Liberals and their political allies say the problem is the easy accessibility of guns and greater gun control is the solution. That has to be nonsense. Guns do not commit crimes; people do.  
Up through 1979, the FBI reported homicide arrests sorted by racial breakdowns that included Japanese. Between 1976 and 1978, 21 of 48,695 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter ...   more »

Guided bomb developed by specialists within Islamic Republic’s Defense Ministry and is now operational, IRNA news agency reports, adding it could be dropped from F-4 and F-5 jets
Reuters
Iran has developed a 2,000-pound (900 kg) “smart bomb”, official media quoted a Defense Ministry statement as saying on Wednesday, in the latest announcement from Tehran about progress regarding military hardware.
Revolutionary Guards   
Guards chief: Iran missiles can hit warships in Gulf / Reuters  
Commander of Revolutionary Guards says his ground forces have missiles that could penetrate armor plating fitted to Israel's Merkava tanks, US Abrams tanks     
The guided bomb, named Qased (Messenger), was developed by specialists within the ministry and is now operational, IRNA news agency said, adding it could be dropped from F-4 and F-5 jets.  
Iran still uses planes, such as the F-5, supplied by the United States to the government of the former shah of Iran, who was a close US ally. Mohammad Reza Shah was ousted in the 1979 Islamic revolution, after which Washington cut ties with Tehran.  
The two countries are embroiled in a deepening standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, which the West suspects is aimed at making atom bombs, ...   more »

By Rod Dreher    
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Everybody with male children this summer seems to be reading the wonderful retro guidebook The Dangerous Book for Boys. I was startled, and pleased, to find — amid the knot-tying, semaphore-reading, poker playing and all things the Dennis the Menace set needs to know — a page dedicated to, of all things, the Ten Commandments.
The Decalogue, dangerous? The commandments certainly are regarded as hazardous by the Irritable-American community, which successfully petitions the courts to banish them from public life. At least these stalwart secularists give the Decalogue its due; most of us admire the Ten Commandments just enough to avoid taking them seriously. If we grasped how radical they truly are, we'd find them an offensive stumbling block to us middle-class moderns, who live in a rebellious age characterized by sociologist Daniel Bell as "the rejection of a revealed order, or natural order, and the substitution of the ego, the self, as the lodestar of consciousness."
We have lost the fear of the Lord — and the absence of 'holy fear' makes us terrors unto ourselves and one another. Why? Because we know what humans who recognize no authority but themselves are capable ...   more »

Newspaper substitutes name of deity in airport bomber's motive
New York Times Building in New York City
The New York Times has equated the word "Allah" with "God" in a story it published today concerning the motive of an Islamic terrorist in the United Kingdom.
The Times made reference to a story originally published Monday in the Guardian newspaper, which stated: "Airport bomber's email to relative said he wanted to die for Allah."
The case involves Kafeel Ahmed, who crashed a Jeep Cherokee into the main terminal at Glasgow's international airport in June.  
But in the New York Times' version of the story, the word "Allah" appears nowhere, instead being changed to "God."
The precise wording from the Times article read:
The person close to the investigation said that Kafeel Ahmed had sent an e-mail message to his brother two hours before crashing the Jeep, but that it was not opened until 90 minutes after the attack. On Monday, The Guardian newspaper reported that Kafeel Ahmed had sent a text message to "a relative" with "a link to an e-mail and a password to access it," saying he was acting according to God's will 
Original Source
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By Richard Holt
RAF fighter jets were sent to intercept a Russian bomber which was heading towards British air space over the North Atlantic, it emerged this evening.   
Eurofighter intercepts the bomber 
Two Typhoons were sent from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to meet the Bear-H aircraft after the early warning radar system detected it heading towards UK territory, according to the Ministry of Defence.
It is the first time the Typhoon Eurofighters have been scrambled since they took on operational duties on June 29.
No more details have been released about the incident, which took place last week, but it is bound to heighten tensions after a number of assertive acts by Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Russia has resumed long-range patrols by its bomber planes for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
Relations with both Europe and the United States have been deteriorating as Russia, buoyed by booming energy prices, has shaken off the post-Soviet malaise of the 1990s.
Western criticism has mounted as Mr Putin curtailed freedoms in Russia and imposed economic punishments on ex-Soviet neighbours who had pursued a pro-Western course.
In June The Kremlin was angered by US ...   more »