Israel's new electric car initiative was presented to a US congressional committee this week in hopes of garnering investment in a project that could ease financial troubles caused by rising oil prices.
Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who has teamed with Renaul/Nissan to introduce electric cars to Israel on a massive scale in the coming years, told the congressional Committee on Energy Independence that investing in the Israeli initiative will be good for America in several ways.
First, most of the infrastructure for the project, which will require battery swap stations being built throughout Israel, will be built in the United States, creating jobs for Americans.
More importantly, if the project proves successful in Israel, it will provide a model for more wide scale electric car use in the US.
Agassi noted that operating an electric car costs about six cents a mile, whereas a gasoline-powered car costs 16 cents a mile to operate.
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A senior Palestinian Authority official on Thursday said the regime of US-backed Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is pulling for Democratic candidate Barack Obama to win the upcoming US presidential election.
PA Planning Minister Samir Abdullah told reporters on a visit to Tokyo that the assumption in Ramallah is that Obama will win the election, and once inaugurated will immediately set in motion the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state on the biblical Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria.
"[Obama] promised that he will not wait until the end of his term to launch negotiations and he will make it happen from day one," said Abdullah, referring to current US President George W. Bush's unfulfilled promise to oversee the birth of "Palestine" during his time in office.
Israel's leadership has expressed a willingness to give the Palestinian Arabs a state, though they have never exercised sovereignty over any part of the Middle East, but are reluctant to do so until the Palestinian Authority proves itself capable of effectively ruling and preventing its citizens from attacking the Jewish state.
Palestinian leaders hope the next US president will pressure Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria even without those obligations being met.
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Yesterday morning, I listened to Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman describe the terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian construction worker suddenly turned the bulldozer he was driving into traffic, crushing everything (and everyone) in its path.
The attack took place on one of Jerusalem's busiest streets. Ambassador Gillerman noted sarcastically that the driver "courteously" stopped to let a car pull in front of him, which he then ran over and crushed, killing a woman and her baby. In another car, a woman threw her baby out the car window before the bulldozer crushed her to death. (The baby survived, the ambassador said, but was "gravely wounded.")
According to Gillerman, the construction worker was an Israeli-Arab who worked for an Israeli Arab. "He took the bulldozer, with which he fed his own wife and family, and used it to crush other families to death, simply for being Israeli Jews."
Gillerman described the attack as typical of the Palestinian contribution to the world. Of course, the ambassador was angry (who wouldn't be?). But he went on to argue his point, reminding the audience that it was the Palestinians who invented airline hijackings. The long lines at airports are another Palestinian contribution ...   more »

Herb Keinon
There is a real concern that the Jewish community in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), which today is estimated to number some 500,000, could disappear in a generation if steps are not taken to curb rampant assimilation there, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday.
Olmert's comments preceded a briefing on the state of the Jews in the FSU, and the 600,000 from there who left between 1989 and 2007, but did not immigrate to Israel. More than one million immigrants did come to Israel during the same period.
According to figures presented at the meeting by the Jewish Agency and the Absorption Ministry, there are between 900,000 to a million people in the FSU eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, of whom 470,000 are not Jewish according to Halacha. The Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent.
The ministers were presented with numbers showing that immigration from the FSU has fallen from 34,000 in 2001 to 6,700 in 2007, an 80 percent decrease. In addition, some 83,000 immigrants who arrived from 1989 to 2005 have left the country, and some 50,000 to 100,000 former ...   more »

 DeForest McDuff
This year's stock market decline has received a lot of media attention. But what most people don't realize is that the stock market has been silently losing value for almost a full decade.
Measured in dollars, the S&P 500 is down almost 15% since its 2000 highs. Adjusting for inflation or measuring with almost any other yardstick, the index is down substantially more.
This would be great if stocks were finally cheap again, but I don't see any evidence of that yet. When all is said and done, I expect the stock market to go quite a bit lower from its current level, not only in dollars but even more in terms of purchasing power.
The Silent Market Crash
Perhaps this title would have been more appropriate this time last year. But the decline measured in dollars greatly underestimates the true loss in purchasing power of stock market investors. Below is a chart of the S&P 500 priced in U.S. dollars:
The S&P 500 is down 15% from its peak in 2000. That's pretty lousy for an 8 year investment. I suppose if you had invested at the March 2003 lows (did anybody actually invest at this bottom?), ...   more »

The G-8 summit in Tokyo, which opens Monday, faces a number of alarming problems, and Germany's chancellor has sent a letter to other leaders of the world's industrialized nations arguing that the sudden rise in the price of food needs urgent attention.
 AFP
People in Nairobi, Kenya, wait for food aid -- like people in 30 of the world's poorest nations, according to a German government study.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has set a tone ahead of this week's G-8 summit in Japan by sending a starkly-worded warning to her colleagues about the consequences of rising food prices. The crisis, she wrote in a six-page letter to other G-8 leaders last Monday, might "endanger democracy, destabilize nations and lead to international security problems."
Merkel organized a working group last April to analyze the recent rise in world food prices and to recommend solutions. Her government experts have found that "speculative trading in futures markets … have a significant influence on the level and volatility of staple food prices." To answer the "dramatic nature" of the crisis, the commission recommends "heightened agricultural productivity" in developing nations, a "quick supply of seeds, fertilizer and farm equipment to selected regions" as well as ...   more »

By ERIC KLINENBERG
Mother Nature goes to extremes in the summer, spoiling the gift of good weather with hurricanes, heat waves, fires and floods. This year she started early. On May 2, Cyclone Nargis laid waste to large parts of Myanmar. According to the latest counts, the disaster left 2.4 million people destitute, more than 50,000 missing and at least 84,000 dead. On May 12, China’s Sichuan Province suffered an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. China’s state media reported that more than five million people lost their homes; an estimated 80,000 people, many of them children, were killed.
Wealthy nations are much better protected from the so-called natural hazards, but by no means have they been spared this year. Consider the U.S. in June: Iowa experienced a deluge of historic proportions, with large-scale crop destruction spiking the cost of food and raising fears of an inflationary spiral. California, where the driest two months of spring on record turned grass and brush into kindling, endured more than 1,000 wildfires and braced for more to come. On the East Coast, more than 30 people perished during the kind of heat wave that usually comes in July or August.
Is there ...   more »

Daniel Foggo
Hundreds of endangered monkeys are being taken from the African bush and sent to a “secretive” laboratory in Iran for scientific experiments.
An undercover inquiry by The Sunday Times has revealed that wild monkeys, which are banned from experiments in Britain, are being freely supplied in large numbers to laboratories in other parts of the world. All will undergo invasive and maybe painful experiments leading ultimately to their death.
One Tanzanian dealer, Nazir Manji, who runs African Primates, an animal-supplying company based in Dar es Salaam, said that in recent years he had been selling up to 4,000 vervet monkeys a year to laboratories, charging about £60 each.
Vervets are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). Despite this they are being routinely caught and sold to any buyer prepared to pay.
Another Tanzanian dealer, Filbert Rubibira, was asked last year to prepare an order of monkeys to send to the Chinese military for “scientific purposes”. The deal was cancelled at the last minute for reasons that were unclear.
Rubibira told an undercover reporter posing as a buyer that the Cites office in Tanzania would sign permits regardless of what fate awaited the monkeys. ...   more »

More cases of the most dangerous type of malaria than ever before are being brought back to the UK from trips abroad, official figures show.
A Health Protection Agency study identified 6,753 cases of falciparum malaria diagnosed in the country between 2002 and 2006
This is a 30% increase over 15 years, reports the British Medical Journal.
Experts said many of the cases arose from visits to west Africa made by people visiting relatives and friends.
 There is a prevailing myth that travellers who were born in a malaria-endemic country such as Africa have some 'natural' immunity to malaria and this is simply not the case
Professor Peter Chiodini
HPA 
Malaria is spread by mosquitoes carrying the plasmodium parasite, and can take weeks or months to emerge after the bite itself.
Travel to areas where malaria is endemic has increased sharply in the past two decades, from just under 600,000 visits in 1987, to 2.6 million in 2004.
The HPA study looked at the origins of 39,300 cases of malaria diagnosed in the UK between 1987 and 2006, 20,488 of which were in UK residents coming back from trips abroad, rather than travellers from other countries falling ill during a ...   more »

Massive economic growth is driving major seaport expansion in the Middle East worth in excess of $33bn to handle record volumes of containers and bulk cargoes, say leading maritime industry observers.
'The emergence of strong and diversified maritime companies and operators is making the Middle East, and the Arabian Gulf in particular, one of the most dynamic and vibrant international maritime centres in the world,' said Christopher Hayman, Managing Director of Seatrade, organisers of Seatrade Middle East Maritime 2008.
Seatrade Middle East Maritime - the region's premier maritime sector forum - runs from 14-16 December at Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre under the patronage of HH Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai.
According to the most up-to-date data on new seaport developments or expansions from research company Proleads, which monitors all major regional construction, there are currently around 50 such projects valued at more than $33bn across the Middle East with individual budgets ranging from $10m to $5.5bn.
The region is home to one of the world's largest container ports in Dubai's Jebel Ali, which currently handles around 11 million twenty-foot equivalent container units a ...   more »

A newspaper in the United Arab Emirates says the tiny Gulf state's government is lobbying neighboring countries to depeg their currencies from the US dollar to curb inflation.
The National, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi ruling family, reported Sunday that the UAE is calling on all six Gulf Cooperation Council member states to "rethink" their monetary policy amid soaring inflation in the oil-rich region.
It cited an internal report by Abu Dhabi's Department of Planning and Economy.
The GCC members are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. All of their currencies are pegged to the dollar except Kuwait, which depegged its currency, the dinar, from the dollar in May 2007 in favor of a basket of currencies.
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Jerusalem Post
Although Iran's leaders are relentlessly dismissing the notion that the West, including Israel, would dare attack its nuclear facilities and/or other targets, they are actually profoundly concerned by the prospect of a strike designed to achieve regime change.
To ensure their continued hold on power in the event of such an attack, therefore, they have been gradually introducing a comprehensive emergency plan, called "Passive Defense," according to a report issued Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
MEMRI said the "Passive Defense" plan has been drawn up on the orders of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and its provisions indicate "that the regime's main fear is of an attack on Iran's vital infrastructures which would ultimately lead to its downfall."
"Passive Defense" seems to constitute the kind of homeland security program that was notably lacking in Israel during the Second Lebanon War. It places prime responsibility for managing the home front in the event of a war on Iran's Basij militia - which comprises some 12.5 million volunteers, almost half of them women - operating via a "region-based apparatus" that has already been set up in coordination with the country's Interior Ministry.
Overseeing the plan is Gholam ...   more »

By Amir Oren,
Tehran will consider any military action against its nuclear facilities as the beginning of a war, Iran's official news agency IRNA reported Friday.
The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, was quoted as saying that any country that attacks Iran would regret doing so.
According to the report, Jafari has warned that such a step would be the beginning of war.  
However, the general was also quoted as saying that he considers it unlikely Iran's adversaries would attempt an attack.
In a newspaper interview last week, Jafari warned that if attacked, Iran would barrage Israel with missiles and choke off the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a narrow outlet for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf.
Israel carried out a large military exercise last month, seen throughout the media as a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.
U.S. admiral: Iran likely to attack Israel
Meanwhile, a U.S. admiral warned earlier this week that Iran is likely to launch ballistic missiles against Israel and the United States and the NATO alliance should prepare for it.
In recent years, the missile boats of the Sixth Fleet practiced intercepting Shahab-3 missiles from Iran aimed at Israel, along ...   more »

By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.
It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.
Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the ...   more »