by Rabbi Shraga Simmons
God adds a special day at the end of Sukkot, a day of great intimacy with our Creator, as He asks His Jewish children to remain with him for extra personal time together.
Imagine you throw a huge party and invite everyone you know. But this is no "regular" party: It's one solid week of food, music and fun. Eventually things wind down and people begin to leave. As the host, you quietly go over to a few of your best friends and whisper: "Stick around after everyone else leaves -- that's when I'm breaking out the good stuff."
Each year God has a weeklong celebration called "Sukkot." In ancient times in Jerusalem, the service in the Holy Temple during the week of Sukkot featured a total of 70 bull offerings. This, the Talmud explains, corresponds to each of the 70 nations of the world. The Temple was not just for Jews. When King Solomon built the Temple, he specifically asked God to heed the prayer of non-Jews who comes to the Temple (1-Kings 8:41-43). And the prophet Isaiah refers to the Temple as a "House for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7).
The Temple was the universal ...   more »

Judy Gold's opens her one-woman show, "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother," by playing an actual message left on her home answering machine by her own mom  
Early in Judy Gold's one-woman show, "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother," she plays an actual message left on her home answering machine by her own mom.  
The context of the message is that Gold was at her agent's office on the phone with her mother when they got disconnected. Gold didn't  
call back right away and her mother couldn't find her. The message that follows includes her mother frantically wondering out loud "What happened? Where are you? I'm a wreck," before it ends with her signing off, to Gold's dismay, with the non-frantic phrase "So long."  
"She thinks Jeffrey Dahmer is chopping my body up into a million pieces and she says so long?" an exasperated Gold says.  
It's a funny moment, one made even more humorous by Gold's exasperation. And it sets the stage for the next 80 minutes or so of Gold's often hilarious, somewhat uneven exploration of "what makes a Jewish mother different from a non-Jewish mother" that's currently playing at St. Luke's Theatre. ...   more »

Israeli troops killed seven Palestinian gunmen in airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday and set up a makeshift detention center just outside the territory, part of a military offensive aimed a stopping rocket fire on Israel during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
On Saturday afternoon, aircraft fired three missiles at a car carrying two militants, killing at least one, Palestinian security officials said. The Israeli army said the strike targeted militants with ties to the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. A spokesperson said the men had launched rocket attacks at Israel.
Earlier Saturday, a missile strike killed six gunmen from the Islamic militant group Hamas, Palestinian security officials said. Fifteen people were wounded in those strikes east of Gaza City, including two who were in serious condition. A woman was also among those hurt. Witnesses said ambulances driving to the scene came under fire.
More than a dozen Israeli tanks also moved in the area, and security officials reported exchanges of fire between the Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen.
The Israeli military said the early morning clash began when millitants fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli bulldozer. Troops responded with fire from the air and the ...   more »

Iran’s supreme ruler Ali Khamenei delivers war sermon, symbolically totes Kalashnikov October 14, 2006, This shot, suppressed in Iran’s media coverage, shows Khamenei speaking at Tehran University on Oct. 13, the third Friday of Ramadan,. He is holding an automatic AK 47 rifle in his right hand in a pose reminiscent of Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein at their most belligerent. His sermon was tantamount to a declaration of war by Iran and its Middle East allies: Syria, Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas against the United States and Israel. The Kalashnikov accentuated his words.

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Lego's new Mindstorm robot might be simple to build and program, but new software will let advanced users really get under the hood and put the machine through its paces.
The $250 Mindstorms kit is about as sophisticated as toys get. It comes with an industrial-strength microprocessor, individually controlled servomotors, Bluetooth wireless, and sensors for light, ultrasound, sound, and touch. It can walk on two legs, dance on four, and strike your fingers with a scorpionlike tail if you get too close.
Yet Mindstorms was designed as a "Christmas morning experience," said John Field. "It's made so that a child 10 to 14 years old could build and program a robot inan afternoon."
The Lego Mindstorm Robot  
That means some tradeoffs, though Field, who heads the team that developed Mindstorm's software at National Instruments, never uses that word. Mindstorm's software is built around NI's LabView software, which is used to create measurement and control systems for laboratories, high-tech industrial equipment, and, of course, robots.
Although simplified, the Mindstorm version of LabView [sample] lets children (and adults) do some sophisticated programming without sweating the details, Field said. Users can drop and drag function blocks–turn on a motor, turn right at ...   more »

The late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- ambassador, senator, sage and seer -- said it when the Soviet empire vanished like a black cloud, and sunshine burst forth everywhere:
    History had returned to where it had been before being interrupted by a century-long world war in two gruesome acts and several nerve-wracking intermissions. Seemingly suddenly, the Iron Curtain was gone and the great division between slave and free states, each armed with nuclear weapons ready to be launched at a moment's notice, was over. The future beckoned, and it looked a lot like a golden past.
    We were back to when the 20th century was young. It sounded idyllic at the time; you could almost hear the Viennese waltzes and bask in an old world renewed. As if good Franz Joseph were still on the throne and the royal families of Europe, all interrelated, would never let anything really bad happen.
    Living under the nuclear threat, the world had found it easy to forget just how unstable those earlier times really were. Blinded by nostalgia, we did not fully realize that, when the old 19th-century swirl of competing nationalisms and radical ideologies returned, it would be even ...   more »

The governor of Syria's Central Bank said Tuesday that the bank had converted half of its foreign currency reserves from U.S. dollars to euros.
"Syria's (foreign currency) reserves were entirely in U.S. dollars last year. But half of the reserves has since been converted to euros," Governor Adeeb Mayalleh said.
He would not disclose the value of Syria's foreign currency reserves but said they were "balanced" and capable of paying for the country's foreign expenses.
In February, the Syrian government decided to switch its primary hard currency from U.S. dollars to euros in a bid to avoid future pressure from Washington in view of differences over Iraq and Lebanon.
Under a decree signed by Syria's prime minister, all government agencies and public-sector companies were told to use the euro to pay for foreign goods and services. The euro also was to be used to collect the government's money from exports.
U.S.-Syrian relations have been poor for years over such issues including Damascus' support for Palestinian militant groups and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Syria has rejected repeated U.S. demands to expel anti-Israeli radical Palestinian factions based in the Syrian capital.
In March, the U.S. Administration's banned American banks from dealing with the Commercial ...   more »

October 14, 2006
Airmen from the Virginia Beach-based Red Horse Squadron will head to the Middle East on Monday in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Virginia Air National Guard announced Friday.
This deployment marks the 203d Rapid Engineers Deployable, Heavy Operational Repair Squadron's second activation since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The 30 airmen heading overseas Monday have spent the past month at a combat training program in Wisconsin. And 100 more members of the unit will head to that training next week and later deploy to the Middle East.
While overseas, the airmen will join other National Guardsmen in helping to build and maintain Air Force sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Qatar.
Both groups are scheduled to return home in May.
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By Hilary White
PURCELLVILLE, VA, October 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –  International law and court decisions will have increasing influence on US Supreme Court and Constitutional analysis, warns an American lawyer Michael Farris, head of the Virginia-based Homeschool Legal Defense Association.
The US Supreme Court will increasingly use international, not domestic, law sources to “help interpret American law, including the US Constitution,” Farris writes.
He quotes the late Justice Rhenquist, considered a conservative, who said, “It is time that the United States courts begin looking to the decisions of other constitutional courts to aid in their own deliberative process.”
Given the direction towards the extreme left and the revival of anti-Christian statism that is the fashion in legal decisions and legislation in Europe, however, Farris says that those who hold to more traditional concepts of rights, particularly parental and family rights, may have reason to worry.
As an advocate for homeschoolers, Farris particularly points to the recent jailing of a homeschooling mother in Germany and the government’s attempt to force children into state schools against their parents’ wishes.
In September, the online news magazine, Brussels Journal, reported that Katherina Plett, a German Baptist in Paderborn, was arrested in her home and ...   more »

LONDON (AFP) - British Airways has suspended a Christian woman who wears a necklace with a crucifix to work, even though it allows Muslims and Sikhs to wear headscarves and turbans.
Nadia Eweida, 55, told the Daily Mail Saturday, that she decided to sue her employer for religious discrimination after having been suspended without pay for three weeks.
"I will not hide my belief in the Lord Jesus. British Airways permits Muslims to wear a headscarf, Sikhs to wear a turban and other faiths religious apparel," Eweida said. "Only Christians are forbidden to express their faith."
Eweida, a British Airways employee for seven years, works at the BA check-in counter at London's Heathrow Airport.
In a statement, British Airways said: "The case is ongoing, and is still under investigation, and as such it would be inappropriate to discuss it in detail. An appeal is due to be heard next week.
"British Airways does recognize that uniformed employees may wish to wear jewelry including religious symbols. Our uniform policy states that these items can be worn underneath the uniform," it said.
"There is no ban. The rule applies for all jewelry and religious symbols on chains and is not specific to ...   more »

GENEVA (Reuters) - An outbreak of plague has been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 42 deaths reported among 626 suspected cases over the past 10 weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
But the U.N. health agency said the number of suspected cases "may be an overestimation" as the fatality ratio was unusually low for pneumonic plague.
"Preliminary results from a rapid diagnosis test in the field found three samples positive, out of eight," the WHO said, confirming the presence of the disease. It said additional tests were under way.
Highly contagious pneumonic plague is the most deadly form of plague. It can be spread by humans and usually kills half of its victims.
A team from the WHO, Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and Congolese health authorities has been investigating the outbreak near Wamba in Oriental province in the northeast of the country.
Disease surveillance was being strengthened and tracing of contacts of people with the disease was under way, as well as measures to raise awareness among the population, it said in a statement.
Plague, which causes fever, aches, vomiting and nausea, as well as open sores in some forms, is endemic ...   more »