Californians wondering if tomorrow's forecast will be sunny can now find out if there's also a chance of afternoon tremors.
Scientists launched a Web site Wednesday that calculates the probability of strong ground-shaking at specific locations over a 24-hour periodAfter a big earthquake hits an area, scientists know there will be aftershocks, but they can't pinpoint when or where. Now residents rattled by a quake can go online and check for the possibility of more jolting in their area.Details appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.The chances of the maps showing when and where a significant earthquake will strike, however, are slim most of the time, scientists say.

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U.S. administration official says Syria must make strategic decision and end disruptive efforts in Iraq, Israel
By Reuters 
Syria is a source of instability in the Middle East and it is time for them to make a strategic choice, a senior U.S administration official said Wednesday.   
"They are a major disruptive force, they are disruptive in Iraq, they are disruptive of the efforts between Palestinians and Israelis to come up with a Middle East peace," he told reporters on condition of anonymity.

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The Quartet met today in Moscow. The Quartet emphasizes that this is a hopeful and promising moment for both Palestinians and Israelis, and that they deserve the full support of the international community in helping them with the hard work and difficult decisions required in order to make positive use of this opportunity. The Quartet welcomed the commitments of the parties at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit of February 8 and urged them to renew their efforts to fulfill the commitments they agreed to at that time, in order to maintain momentum at this fragile moment of opportunity. The Quartet, underscoring the urgency of the matter, affirms its commitment to fully support the efforts of both parties to ensure successful Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank.

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(IsraelNN.com) United Nations Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Kieran Prendergast issued a statement calling upon the Palestinian Authority (PA) to fulfill its obligations to halt terror, warning there is a visible escalation in violence between Israel and the PA

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TOKYO (Reuters) -     North Korea said on Friday that its relations with Japan were inching toward a "dangerous phase of explosion" and reiterated that Tokyo imposing economic sanctions would be tantamount to a declaration of war.
Public anger in Japan over Pyongyang's abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s combined with concern over its nuclear arms programs have led to calls for sanctions against the reclusive communist state.

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By Aluf Benn and Nathan Guttman  
The U.S. first lady will arrive in Israel on Sunday morning, as part of a regional visit to promote democracy and the status of women.
Laura Bush's original itinerary included only Arab countries, according to senior political officials. However, sources in Jerusalem said President George Bush asked his wife to include Israel in the visit.

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But those of us who saw the problem as larger than Arafat — as resulting, rather, from the deep radicalization of the Palestinian body politic — expected little change. Indeed, I wrote at the time of Mahmoud Abbas' election to head the Palestinian Authority (PA) that, "he is potentially a far more formidable enemy to Israel" than was Arafat.

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An outgrowth of Managing Editor David Kupelian's widely read column of the same name, "WHY ARE CHRISTIANS LOSING AMERICA?" visits the key battlegrounds within Christianity that have made headlines over the past few years – from "mainline" Protestants' ordination of homosexual clergy and condemnations of Israel to the National Council of Churches' hardcore leftist activities to the Roman Catholic Church's devastating clergy sex scandals.

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LONDON (AFP) - A human embryo has been cloned for the first time in Britain, where such work is strictly regulated, scientists announced.
Scientists at Newcastle University, the first in Britain to obtain a licence to carry out therapeutic cloning for stem cell research, said they had successfully produced a blastocyst -- a tiny, early-stage embryo consisting of a hollow ball of cells -- cloned from a human cell using nuclear transfer.

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