TEL AVIV — Israel believes its newly-orbited Ofeq-7 satellite can track people and weapons in any targeted country, including Iran.
Israeli officials said Ofeq-7 contained a reconnaissance platform that could spot bottles on the floor. They said the camera payload could identify and send high-resolution images of items as small as 40 centimeters.
Ofeq-7 was launched into low-earth orbit on Monday, Middle East Newsline reported. The satellite, built by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries for the Defense Ministry, was said to contain enhancements to improve imagery.
"We have a new camera that is as good as anything available, and that includes the United States," an official said.
In a statement, IAI said Ofeq-7 weighed 300 kilograms and measured 2.3x1.2 meters. The width of the satellite, with a shelf life of four years, was expanded to 3.6 meters with a solar array.
Officials said Ofeq-7 was launched by IAI's Shavit three-stage solid-fuel satellite launch vehicle to an elliptical orbit that ranged from 300 to 600 kilometers in altitude.
"Following separation from the launcher, the satellite performed a series of autonomous activities, including deployment of the solar panels," IAI said. "The satellite and its subsystems' performance including the imaging capabilities will be ...   more »

 Hamas fighters besieged two Fatah security headquarters with guns and rocket launchers on Tuesday as deadly clashes threatened to topple the government and drive Gaza closer to civil war.
Gunmen from the radical Islamist movement attacked two seats of the Fatah loyalist national security -- the main Palestinian security force -- in Gaza City and Jabaliya, sparking heavy clashes with those holed up inside.
Security officials and witnesses said Hamas gunmen quickly abandoned the fight at the Gaza City base when defenders repelled their attempts to storm it, but that fighting was continuing at the larger base in Jabaliya.
Hamas's Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades unilaterally declared "the northern Gaza Strip a closed military zone" under its control and called on members of the mainstream Fatah loyalist security forces to stay at home. Dozens of security officers loyal to Fatah laid siege to the headquarters of Hamas's Al-Aqsa television before withdrawing after Hamas fighters turned up and ripped gunfire through three of their vehicles, witnesses said.
Earlier mortar shells slammed into prime minister Ismail Haniya's home and the seafront compound of president Mahmud Abbas in the latest bout of fighting that killed two people on Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 18 ...   more »

JERUSALEM - Elder statesman Shimon Peres has been elected        Israel's next president, winning the support of 86 of parliament's 120 members in a second and final round of balloting, Channel TV reported Wednesday.  
Peres, of the ruling Kadima Party, all but clinched the race after his two rivals withdrew after the first round of voting earlier in the day.
Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has held all of Israel's top civilian posts, later advanced to a yes-or-no vote in parliament.
The ordinarily quiet contest has been closely watched because of Peres' campaign to cap his six-decade political career with a term in the president's mansion, and rape allegations against the sitting president, Moshe Katsav.
Peres, of the ruling Kadima Party, received an unexpectedly high 58 votes in parliament's secret balloting in round one. Reuven Rivlin, a lawmaker and former parliament speaker from the hawkish Likud, took 37, and legislator Colette Avital of the Labor Party, 21.
Shortly after the votes were tallied, Avital announced she would not advance to a second round, and Labor said it would throw its support to Peres, who spent most of his political career in that party.
Shortly afterward, a weeping Rivlin ...   more »

Tourists puzzled by the jumble of buildings in classical and modern Rome can now find their bearings by visiting a virtual model of the imperial capital in what is being billed as the world's biggest computer simulation of an ancient city.
Rome Reborn was unveiled on Monday in a first release showing the city at its peak in 320 AD, under the Emperor Constantine when it had grown to a million inhabitants.
Brainchild of the University of Virginia's Bernard Frischer, Rome Reborn (www.romereborn.virginia.edu) will eventually show its evolution from Bronze Age hut settlements to the Sack of Rome in the 5th century AD and the devastating Gothic Wars.
Reproduced for tourists on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre to be opened near the Colosseum, Frischer says his model "will prepare them for their visit to the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine, so that they can understand the ruins a lot better".
"We can take people under the Colosseum and show them how the elevators worked to bring the animals up from underground chambers for the animal hunts they held," he said, referring to the great Roman amphitheatre inaugurated by Titus in ...   more »

VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog believes Iran could be running 8,000 centrifuges enriching uranium by year end, raising a significant risk it could make atomic bombs, diplomats say, although not everyone agrees.
Despite Iran's strides in shifting from a small nuclear fuel research programme towards an industry in the past few months, it remains unclear whether Tehran could spin so many centrifuges in unison indefinitely, the key to yielding bomb-grade uranium.
Western powers suspect Iran, with the world's second largest oil and gas reserves, is secretly aiming to refine uranium to the high threshold needed for nuclear weapons rather than the low level needed for electricity, as it says.
Iran has surprised monitors familiar with its breakdown-prone research phase, with only a few centrifuges running at once, by launching around 2,000 since February, the majority of them enriching uranium in linked networks.
Tehran is on pace to having 3,000 on line in July, diplomats briefed on International Atomic Energy Agency inspections said -- enough to yield enriched material for one bomb within a year.
Further, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei has told U.S. and EU leaders trying to foil Iran's atomic ambitions with sanctions that their policy has been ...   more »

A new plan being discussed among officials from the United States, Mexico and Canada essentially would erase national borders in North America for air carriers, perhaps giving Aeromexico a pass to run a Los Angeles-Toronto route or Air Canada to compete on the New York-Paris connection, according to WND columnist Jerome Corsi.
He reported on a meeting held in Tucson, Ariz., involving U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and her Mexican and Canadian counterparts.
She's already under fire, as WND has reported, for continuing work on a program that could start as early as July 15 to give Mexican truckers a virtual free pass to travel on United States roads.
The meeting in Tucson, called the North American Transportation Trilateral, made it clear U.S. air transportation facilities also are being reviewed in light of proposed traffic from foreign carriers that also are based in North America, Corsi's report noted.
Peters met with Mexico's Secretary of Commerce and Transportation Luis Téllez and Canada's Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communications Lawrence Cannon to define under the Security and Prosperity Partnership a North American transportation system that will meet the continental needs of "free trade" agreements including NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, ...   more »

There is a curious void in the modern American left. That void is the empty spot where God should be. The American left -- and the Democratic Party, as its political representative -- has worked tirelessly over the course of decades to cast God from the public square, all the time disclaiming their mission by invoking "tolerance" for all beliefs.
But now the cat is out of the bag. In the aftermath of John Kerry's electoral defeat in 2004, Democrats explained that they wished to re-enter the arena of moral values. During the two Democratic presidential debates, God was mentioned just once, by scurrilous panderer John Edwards; ethics was mentioned once, by Barack Obama, who was disclaiming his association with a lobbyist; morality was mentioned only in the context of America's international "immorality"; values were invoked only by Joe Biden (ironically enough, in touting Roe v. Wade ). When Democrats talk about moral values, they mean the Planned Parenthood brochure.
Where's God in the liberal moral equation? Nowhere to be found -- and with good reason. The American left now stands for the wholesale displacement of traditional religious morality and the utter rejection of the Divine. "We believe with certainty ...   more »

It wasn't until right after the little girl had received her third and final pertussis shot that all hell broke loose. One of five children in a Christian homeschooling family I know well, the child suffered an extreme and life-altering reaction to the common childhood vaccine. Today, perhaps 15 years later, her family's life largely revolves around taking care of the now-teenage girl, confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, her life decimated by a "required" vaccine shot.
Indeed, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, was set up years ago to pay for the care of just such vaccine-injured Americans. If you or your child suffers from anaphylactic shock or brachial neuritis as a result of getting any tetanus-toxoid-containing vaccine, you're eligible. Develop encephalopathy – literally, disease of the brain – from pertussis antigen-containing vaccines, or from measles, mumps and rubella virus-containing vaccines, and you qualify. What about chronic arthritis from rubella virus-containing vaccines, or a vaccine-strain measles viral infection from a measles virus-containing vaccine?
What about contracting paralytic polio or vaccine-strain polio viral infection from a polio live virus-containing vaccine, or intussusception (prolapsed intestine) from vaccines containing live, oral, ...   more »