UNITED NATIONS — A double-digit surge in Beijing’s military spending has raised serious but discreet concerns in the international community concerning the rise in China’s military might. And while the 18 percent jump in the 2008 military budget to an officially understated $60 billion has largely been focused on force modernizations, there’s little doubt that the People’s Republic of China has become a looming threat to democratic Taiwan’s sovereignty and as well as that of other regional states.
An incisive and thoughtful study by Washington’s respected American Enterprise Institute conceded, “Current trends are unfavorable to Taiwan. And consequently they pose challenges to U.S. interests.” The Report Strengthening Freedom in Asia, stated, “China’s growing power has provided Beijing with the resources to alter the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait, upsetting the dynamic equilibrium that has prevented the outbreak of major cross-Strait conflict for more than fifty years.” Thus the report adds, “Taiwan remains a potential international flash point for a great power war
Fresh fighting in reported in Sudan's oil region   
Indeed the PRC’s modernized and growing missile, naval, and air force arsenal arrayed offshore against Taiwan, has already likely tipped the balance of power towards Beijing. And ...   more »

By Walden Siew
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Financial firms face a "new world order" after a weekend fire sale of Bear Stearns and the Federal Reserve's first emergency weekend meeting since 1979, research firm CreditSights said in a report on Monday.
More industry consolidation and acquisitions may follow after JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Sunday said it was buying Bear Stearns (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) for $236 million, or $2 a share, a deep discount from the $30 price on Friday and record share price of about $172 last year.
"Last evening the Bear Stearns situation reached a crescendo, as JPMorgan agreed to acquire the wounded broker for a token amount of $2 per share," CreditSights said. "The reality check is that there are many challenged major banks, brokers, thrifts, finance/mortgage companies, and only a handful of bona fide strong U.S. banks."
CreditSights said it lowered its broker, bank and finance company recommendations to "market weight" due to the credit crisis and stresses in the market.
In the event of future consolidation, potential acquirers identified by CreditSights include JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research), once it works ...   more »

Roughly 30,000 to be offered deals as part a strategy for fuel prices
ATLANTA - Delta Air Lines said Tuesday it will offer voluntary severance payouts to roughly 30,000 employees — more than half its work force — and cut domestic capacity by an extra 5 percent this year as part of an overhaul of its business plan to deal with soaring fuel prices.
Executives at Atlanta-based Delta said in a memo to employees that the airline’s goal is to cut 2,000 frontline, administrative and management jobs through the voluntary program, attrition and other initiatives.
A spokeswoman says that if more than that amount agree to take the voluntary severance, that will be allowed. The severance program primarily affects mainline Delta employees. It will not affect Delta pilots, who have a union contract with the company, and employees at Delta regional carrier Comair, which is based in Erlanger, Ky.
Delta had 55,044 total full-time employees as of the end of last year.
Oil prices recently cracked $111 a barrel, nearly twice what they were a year ago.
The memo from Chief Executive Richard Anderson and President Ed Bastian did not mention Delta’s talks with Northwest Airlines Corp. about a combination ...   more »

More than three in four Americans think the United States is in a recession according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Tuesday.
Not since September 1992, two months before President George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid, have so many Americans said the economy was in such bad shape, USA Today reported.
Seventy-six percent of to those polled said the economy is in recession, compared to 22 percent who said it is not, USA Today said.
Asked if the United States could slip into a depression lasting several years, 59 percent said it was likely and 79 percent said they were worried about it, the newspaper reported.
The poll was completed on Sunday, the same day the U.S. Federal Reserve offered to extend direct lending to security firms for the first since the Great Depression and backed the JP Morgan Chase buyoutof investment bank Bear Stearns.
The poll results reflect a slide in confidence that economists say could make the U.S. economy worse, the article said.
Brian Bethune of economic forecaster Global Insight said the pessimism "creates more problems."
"When people experience higher gasoline prices, higher heating costs, fewer employment opportunities, housing prices going down, the common sense conclusion ...   more »

by Rabbi Shraga Simmons
Are you a resident of a "walled city"? If so, you'll celebrate Purim on a different day than other Jews.
The Megillah (Esther 9:20-22) says that the Jews prevailed over their enemies on the 13th of Adar, and on the 14th they feasted to celebrate the victory. But in Shushan the capital, the battle lasted another day and the holiday was not celebrated until the 15th.
When the Sages instituted Purim, they took into account that Shushan was a walled city, and made the following stipulation: While most cities celebrate Purim on the 14th of Adar, cities which were walled at the time of Joshua (Yehoshua Bin Nun) should celebrate a special Purim -- called "Shushan Purim" -- on the 15th of Adar.
(The Sages originally considered making Shushan Purim conditional on whether a city was walled from the time of Achashverosh -- because the victory occurred at that time. However, as not to honor a Persian city more than the Land of Israel, which was in ruins at the time of the Purim miracle, the Sages made "Purim on the 15th" conditional on cities walled from the time of Joshua.)
The only city that was ...   more »

by Rabbi Shraga Simmons
Are you a resident of a "walled city"? If so, you'll celebrate Purim on a different day than other Jews.
The Megillah (Esther 9:20-22) says that the Jews prevailed over their enemies on the 13th of Adar, and on the 14th they feasted to celebrate the victory. But in Shushan the capital, the battle lasted another day and the holiday was not celebrated until the 15th.
When the Sages instituted Purim, they took into account that Shushan was a walled city, and made the following stipulation: While most cities celebrate Purim on the 14th of Adar, cities which were walled at the time of Joshua (Yehoshua Bin Nun) should celebrate a special Purim -- called "Shushan Purim" -- on the 15th of Adar.
(The Sages originally considered making Shushan Purim conditional on whether a city was walled from the time of Achashverosh -- because the victory occurred at that time. However, as not to honor a Persian city more than the Land of Israel, which was in ruins at the time of the Purim miracle, the Sages made "Purim on the 15th" conditional on cities walled from the time of Joshua.)
The only city that was ...   more »

Yaakov Katz ,
In the face of a possible escalation with Syria and Iran's efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon, parts of the country will shut down next month in what security officials say will be the largest emergency exercise in Israel's history.
The drill, which is being organized by the newly-established National Emergency Authority, will take place over five days starting on Sunday, April 6.
But first, on Tuesday, a first-of-its-kind hospital emergency exercise will take place to see how Ashkelon's Barzilai Medical Center would cope with a Grad missile hitting a five-story hospitalization building and an outpatient clinic's laboratory filled with toxic chemicals and a fire breaking out, requiring patients to be lowered from the roof. Around 100 firemen, 10 fire service vehicles and various other equipment, as well as doctors and nurses, will participate in the drill, to be held between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
Preparations for the April exercise are being overseen by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i.
On the first day of the drill, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will convene the cabinet in Jerusalem in response to an "enemy attack" and to decide on an Israeli response.
Based on a lesson learned in the ...   more »

Canada's political stance has become more pronounced in recent months, analysts say
JERUSALEM–A United Nations panel voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn Israel for a recent armed incursion in the Gaza Strip that claimed more than 120 lives, many of them civilian.
Thirty-three member countries of the 47-seat UN Human Rights Council endorsed the resolution, which accused Israel of war crimes in its ongoing battles against Palestinian militants in Gaza.
Those in favour of censuring the Jewish state included China, India and Russia. Thirteen countries abstained, among them seven European governments.
But one nation stood alone against the denunciation of Israel, and that country was not the United States – Israel's leading foreign supporter – or even Israel itself, for neither country has a seat on the human rights body.
Instead, the lone dissenter was Canada.
"We're very happy that we see things in a similar way," Carmela Shamir, deputy director of the North America division at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an interview last week.
"Canada has adopted several times in recent months very brave positions."
People are beginning to take notice.
"There is a widespread impression that Canada's position is more pro-Israel than it has been ...   more »

As I heard the screams set off by the color red alarm, which sounds just 15 seconds before the rockets slam into the city; as I saw the terror-stricken faces and the frantic dashing for shelter; as I watched scenes of shrapnel-peppered teenagers being loaded into ambulances in front of their weeping friends, their siblings and parents shaking in shock, small children screaming for their mommies; as I watched the awful fear that now besets and hovers over yet another Jewish community, as it has over untold numbers of Jewish communities in the past, it was as if I could hear the exultant cries of the Arabs in the Gaza Strip, who proclaimed as they watched the results of their handiwork on the same You Tube channel I was viewing:
You’re a Jew, so we will terrorize you.
You’re a Jew, so we will maim you.
You’re a Jew, so we will kill you.
We’ll fire our Kassams,
And we’ll shoot off our mortars.
And though the ‘Color Red’ may send you scurrying for your holes
We will get you. We WILL get you.
And when your body lies bleeding and dismembered in the streets of Sderot,
When your devastated ...   more »

Israel is to hold its largest-ever emergency exercise in April - shutting down parts of the country as it tests its responses to massive, possibly non-conventional, attacks from Syria and Iran.
This is according to the top story Monday in The Jerusalem Post, and comes the day after Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem was quoted as saying a war between Syria and Israel is certainly a possibility.
Starting April 6, and stretching over five days, the emergency drill will include a convening of the cabinet following "an enemy attack," the sounding of sirens country-wide, mass-evacuations from "hit" areas - simulating responses to chemical and nuclear strikes - and the inundating of hospitals with thousands of Israeli casualties.
A high-ranking defense official said the drill would be "the biggest exercise in Israel's history."
He took pains to stress, however, that Israel was not planning the event because of fears of an imminent war but rather to implement lessons learned from the Second Lebanon War.
Moallem, interviewed by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Anba, was asked if he believed that Israel was preparing for war against Lebanon or Syria
"Everything is possible", he answered, adding that "every rational person should prepare for every ...   more »

Organized crime executions reach 3,008 in last 15 months
WASHINGTON – A murderous slaughter of almost unimaginable proportions is taking place below America's southern border – and it goes almost unnoticed by U.S. government officials here.
On Friday, a seventh victim gunned down in a private law office in central Mexico died at a hospital as police investigate links between the firm and the country's organized crime syndicates whose revenues are made from selling drugs, smuggling people into the U.S. and arms trafficking.
Five men and a woman died Thursday in the attack in the city of Guadalajara, according to the Jalisco state attorney general's office. Three were lawyers and the others were employees, and some of the victims were found with their hands tied. Authorities had not made any arrests.
Several leading Mexican newspapers reported, citing anonymous state judicial sources, that one of the lawyers may have been defending Archivaldo Ivan Guzman, the son of alleged Sinaloa drug cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. The elder Guzman escaped from federal prison in 2001 in a laundry cart after bribing guards.
The son, also known as "El Chapito" or "Little Chapo" was sentenced in February to five years for money ...   more »

House Democrats recently adopted a budget with massive tax hikes, many of which are directed at those Americans who can least afford them.
By allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010, this budget will raise income taxes not only on those in the highest income brackets, but raises the lowest bracket from 10 percent to 15 percent as well. Estates would again be taxed at 55 percent. The child tax credit would drop from $1,000 to $500. Senior citizens relying on investment income would be hurt by increases in dividend and capital gains taxes. It's not just that the Democrats want to raises taxes on the rich; they want to raises taxes on everybody.
The problem is, policing the world is expensive, and if elected officials insist upon continuing to fund our current foreign policy, the money has to come from somewhere. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost us more than $1 trillion.
The Democrats' budget gives the president all the funding he needs for his foreign policy, so one wonders how serious they ever were about ending the war. While Democrats propose to tax and spend, many Republicans aim to borrow and spend, which ...   more »