Archaeologists discover a 3,000-year-old beekeeping industry in Israel
Items found: Honeycombs, beeswax and 30 hives dating to around 900 B.C.
The beehives are made of straw and unbaked clay
Beekeeping was widely practiced in the ancient world
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Archaeologists digging in northern Israel have discovered evidence of a 3,000-year-old beekeeping industry, including remnants of ancient honeycombs, beeswax and what they believe are the oldest intact beehives ever found.
The findings in the ruins of the city of Rehov this summer include 30 intact hives dating to around 900 B.C., archaeologist Amihai Mazar of Jerusalem's Hebrew University told The Associated Press. He said it offers unique evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in the Holy Land at the time of the Bible.
Beekeeping was widely practiced in the ancient world, where honey was used for medicinal and religious purposes as well as for food, and beeswax was used to make molds for metal and to create surfaces to write on. While bees and beekeeping are depicted in ancient artwork, nothing similar to the Rehov hives has been found before, Mazar said.
The beehives, made of straw and unbaked clay, have a hole at one end to allow the ...   more »

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Yemen have launched the vast Trans-Arabia Oil Pipeline project with encouragement from Washington, DEBKA-Net Weekly 313 revealed on Aug. 10, 2007. By crisscrossing Arabia overland, the net of oil pipelines will bypass the Straits of Hormuz at the throat of the Persian Gulf and so remove Gulf oil routes from the lurking threat of Iranian closure.
The 35,000-strong new Saudi security force, disclosed this week, will protect the new project, together with the oil installations of the world’s biggest oil exporter, from attack by such enemies as al Qaeda or Iran. The first 5,000 recruits are already in training, as plans advance to start laying the first section of the new pipeline system in November, 2007.
Because of the sensitivity of their mission, Saudi security experts assisted by American advisers are thoroughly screening each recruit about his family, tribal and past associations to weed out religious extremists. DEBKAfile adds that the new oil security force will be the third largest in Saudi Arabia, after the armed forces and the National Guard.
The first Trans-Arabia pipeline will carry 5 million barrels of oil a day, almost one third of the 17 million ...   more »

Unconfirmed details of Israel's alleged foray into Syrian airspace 10 days ago continued to circulate Sunday in foreign media with a latest report by The Sunday Times.
According to the report, at a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team waited to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching IAF planes. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.
According to Israeli sources, the Times continued, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented the PM with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.
Dagan feared such a device could later be mounted on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles, the report said.
"This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel," said an Israeli source to the Times. "We've known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can't live with a nuclear warhead."
According to an IAF source, the Israeli satellite Ofek 7, launched in June, was diverted from Iran to Syria. It sent out ...   more »

By Barak Ravid, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents, Haaretz Service and News Agencies   
Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton said Sunday that Israel's reported military operation inside Syria earlier this month should be regarded as a 'clear message to Iran' that its nuclear efforts will not be ignored by the international community.
"I think it would be unusual for Israel to conduct a military operation inside Syria other than for a very high value target, and certainly a Syrian effort in the nuclear weapons area would qualify," Bolton told Channel 10 in an interview broadcast Sunday.
"I think this is a clear message not only to Syria, I think it's a clear message to Iran as well, that its continued efforts to acquire nuclear weapons are not going to go unanswered," Bolton said    Bolton, who has long called for a hard line against the Syrian and Iranian regimes, did not indicate that he had first-hand information about the incident.
The U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times quoted an Israeli source on Sunday as saying that Syria had been planning a "devastating surprise" for Israel, in the wake of reports that the Israel Air Force carried out an air ...   more »

DAMASCUS, Syria: U.S. intimations of Syrian nuclear cooperation with North Korea might be a prelude to an attack on Syria, a state-run newspaper said Sunday.
The comment published in an editorial in one of the largest state-owned dailies, al-Thawra, came two days after a senior U.S. nuclear official said the North Koreans were in Syria and that Damascus may have had contacts with "secret suppliers" to obtain nuclear equipment.
Al-Thawra predicted Sunday there more accusations could well be on their way.
"The magnitude of these false accusations might be a prelude to a new aggression against Syria," al-Thawra daily said.
The newspaper called the suggestions of atomic cooperation "a flagrant lie" and said Syria has repeatedly asked the international community to disarm Israel of its nuclear weapons and called for a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction.
Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation policy, was responding Friday to questions about an Israeli airstrike in northern Syria earlier this month.
Neither side has explained what exactly happened, but a U.S. government official confirmed that Israeli warplanes were targeting weapons from Iran and destined for Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, while other unnamed officials quoted ...   more »

The nuclear Iranian crisis forces the world "to prepare for the worst" which "is war," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Sunday evening, while emphasizing that negotiations should still be the preferred course of action.
Kouchner, quoted by French daily Le Figaro, added that "Iran does whatever it pleases in Iraq ... one cannot find in the entire world a crisis greater than this one."
Kouchner's statements came just hours after US Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the Bush administration's commitment, at least for the time being, to using diplomatic and economic means to counter the potential nuclear threat from Iran.
Speculation has persisted about preparations for a military strike against Iran for its alleged support for terrorism and its nuclear program.
Gates, in a broadcast interview, said he would not discuss "hypotheticals" about what President George W. Bush "may or may not do."
"I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach. That's the one we are using," the Pentagon chief said.
"We always say all options are on the table, but clearly, the diplomatic ...   more »

WASHINGTON, September 13 (RIA Novosti) - The U.S. has a 14-ton super bomb more destructive than the vacuum bomb just tested by Russia, a U.S. general said Wednesday.
The statement was made by retired Lt. General McInerney, chairman of the Iran Policy Committee, and former Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
McInerney said the U.S. has "a new massive ordnance penetrator that's 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates ... Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can't penetrate."
He also said the new Russian bomb was not a "penetrator."
On Tuesday, the Fox News television channel said: "A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime.".
Commenting on the report, McInerney said: "Since Germany has backed out of helping economically, we do not have any other choice. ... They've forced us into the military option."
McInerney described some possible military campaign scenarios and said: "The one I favor the most, of course, is an air campaign," he continued.
He said that bombing would be launched by 65-70 stealth bombers and 400 ...   more »

On July 25, I asked in a column entitled, "Porn triggers acting out on victims? Really?" why the Federal Bureau of Prisons spiked its own sex-offender study at Butner prison in North Carolina.
The Butner study, as it turns out (newsflash!), found that criminal sex offenders tend to hide the extent of their crimes.
Moreover, although of 155 men arrested "just" for child pornography 40 (26 percent) admitted to being child molesters, it turns out that later, 132 men (85 percent) confessed to sexually abusing children – admitting to 1,777 young victims. Judge W. Earl Britt 
So, the Butner study finds the allegedly "benign" lust for child pornography correlates with a 85 percent probability of child sexual abuse. When Butner refused to release the study, lawyer Jan Larue noted, "Judith Simon Garrett, assistant general counsel at the BOP, is heavily involved in squelching the study." Garrett believes sex offenders deserve sexual media and wants to eliminate "restrictions on early release mechanisms."
Well, now, two months after the Butner report was leaked to the New York Times, FindLaw reports that U.S. District Court Judge W. Earl Britt has struck down a law aimed at holding sex offenders indefinitely in mental hospitals. ...   more »

I was quite properly rapped last week by a dozen or more readers for observing that the separation of church and state is "embedded" in the United States Constitution. I now discover it was "read into" the Constitution by the Supreme Court in 1947, creating the mythology that the Constitution's original framers put it there.
Well, they didn't, and I am therefore guilty as charged. But where, I wondered, did I get the idea to begin with? I'm ashamed to admit that I picked it up from the Canadian news media.
Why I should have so gullibly believed their version of the American political scene, when I so readily doubt their version of the Canadian one, I cannot explain or defend.
However, this does provide me with an excuse to write again on what Thomas Jefferson (not the Constitution) called "the wall of separation" between church and state.  
This concept sits well in the modern secularist mind, whether American or Canadian, because it enables the state to put controls on religion, and thereby evade one specific directive that is very much in the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise ...   more »

By ZACK QUAINTANCE/The Monitor
MISSION — When firefighters arrived, they found a man covered in bees. “They were on him head to toe,” said Elias Saldivar, the Alton fire chief. His firefighters pulled the man away, suffering stings on their faces as they fought off attacks. “The coat and pants only cover so much,” the chief said of his firefighters’ protective clothing. Rescuers separated 57-year-old Paul Lee Campton from the bees, but it was too late. Campton, a disabled man who uses a walker, died Thursday at Mission Regional Medical Center after being stung more than 1,000 times. The attack happened about 6 p.m. Wednesday at a house just outside Mission on the south side of 6 Mile Line, just east of Bryan Road. Authorities said Campton and his brother, Lester Campton, 41, opened the garage door and were swarmed by as many as 1,000 bees. Lester Campton escaped to a neighbor’s house and called for help. Alton firefighters arrived on the scene to find a thick, dark cloud of bees attacking the men. As paramedics took Paul Lee Campton to the hospital, the bees followed after them, stinging emergency workers, Chief Saldivar said. No rescuer sustained serious injuries. Paul ...   more »

By Bo Nielsen-Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar fell to an all-time low versus the euro as traders bet the Federal Reserve will cut borrowing costs at least a quarter-percentage point next week. The U.S. currency declined for a second week against the euro for the first time since July. A government report yesterday showed slowing retail sales growth, suggesting the housing slump is starting to affect the rest of the economy. The Fed will meet on Sept. 18. ``The U.S. economy is slowing, and the pace of consumer spending growth has slipped somewhat, and that's dollar negative,'' said Jay Bryson, global economist with Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, who previously analyzed currencies at the Fed. ``The Fed will cut rates by 25 basis points and make sure they can act again if necessary.'' The dollar weakened 0.8 percent to $1.3875 per euro from $1.3768 on Sept. 7. The U.S. currency fell to an all-time low of $1.3927 on Sept. 13. The dollar snapped a two-week losing streak and gained 1.8 percent versus the yen, to 115.36 from 113.38 a week ago. Interest-rate futures show traders bet there's a 58 percent chance of a half-percentage-point cut in the benchmark ...   more »

DALLAS, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- Texas doctors have identified nine cases of the skin disease leishmaniasis in patients who have not traveled to endemic areas.The infectious disease, sometimes called the Baghdad boil, is common in South America, Mexico and the Middle East, but the North Texas patients identified by doctors at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center had not traveled to any of those areas.The infection causes large sores that look like boils and usually last six to 12 months. The disease is caused by a single-celled parasite called Leishmania, and special cultures must be done to confirm the diagnosis of leishmaniasis, the hospital said Friday in a release.Dr. Kent Aftergut said all of the leishmaniasis cases in North Texas appear to be Leishmania mexicana, which is less dangerous than other forms of the parasite.Doctors suspect human infection begins when a sand fly bites a rodent called the burrowing wood rat, which carries the parasite. When the sand fly later bites a person, the sores may develop.

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