by Rabbi Ken Spiro
In the final analysis, Jewish history makes no rational sense.
On January 16, 1996, then President of Israel, Ezer Weizmann, gave a speech to both Houses of Parliament of Germany. He gave this speech in Hebrew to the Germans, fifty years after the Holocaust, and in it he beautifully summed up what Jewish history is. He said:
"It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era when the Jews returned to re-establish their homeland ...
"I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there in previous generations, places and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew but not along the far flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time from generation to generation down the paths of memory ...
"I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah on Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David and was exiled with Zedekiah. And I did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. ...   more »

By Joel C. Rosenberg
 (Washington, D.C., March 25, 2008) -- Despite the fact that thousands of missiles are being fired at Israel from Gaza as a "thank you" present from Hamas after Israel withdrew its military forces in the summer of 2005, the Bush administration seems determined to push Israel to divide Jerusalem, give away the West Bank, and create a sovereign Palestinian state.
Consider these headlines:
* Cheney says a Palestinian state is 'long overdue' (Los Angeles Times)
* Cheney calls for painful concessions for Mideast peace (Reuters)
* Rice: Now Is Time for Palestinian State: Rice Says Time for 'A Palestinian State' Is Now, Describes Peace Efforts As a Top Priority (AP)
* Rice says Palestinian state within reach (CNN)
* Olmert hints Jerusalem division is inevitable (Reuters)
* Olmert drawing plans to split Jerusalem with the Palestinians (AP)
* Netanyahu: Olmert government taking measures to cede Jerusalem (Haaretz)
* Palestinian PM Wants U.S. to Pressure Israel (AP)
Vice President Cheney in Israel over the weekend insisted the U.S. wasn't trying to pressure Israel, but the evidence suggests the opposite. Just as the Clinton White House intensified efforts to pressure then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to cut a ...   more »

Israel's population is expected to grow from around 7 million today to between 9.6 and 10.6 million by 2030, according to estimates released by the Central Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday.
The exhibited projection, based on 2005 population statistics, was also derived from three possible options - high, middle and low - differentiated by various assessments of differing components of population growth.
According to the middle option, the average annual growth rate between 2006 and 2030 will be 1.4 percent. and the proportion of Jews is expected to rise by 1.2%.
Ninety-three percent of the projected growth is estimated to be derived from natural growth, while the remaining 7% is expected to be the result of immigration.
The number of Jews in 2030 is expected to stand at 7.2 million (72% of the population), up from 5.3 million at the end of 2005 (76%).
Correspondingly, the number of Arabs is expected to be 2.4 million by 2030 (24% of the population), up from 1.4 million in 2005 (20%).
Finally, the number of those who are neither Jews nor Arabs is expected to be 418,000 by 2030 (4.2% of the population), up from 300,000 in 2005 (4.3%) The number of residents ...   more »

By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent 
Police and sappers were once again dispatched to Ariel's IDF Street during the Purim holiday Friday morning. A few minutes earlier, a man had knocked on the door of the Leibovitz family home and left a cardboard box with the boy who answered the door. "It's mishloach manot, a Purim gift basket," explained the visitor before disappearing.
The boy and his older brother trembled with fear. Their parents, who were out of town, ordered the boys by phone to get away from the package and call the police. In another residential building, 50 meters away, a bomb planted in a Purim gift basket had exploded the day before.
"This is not hysteria; it is alertness," police told the two boys after they finally opened the box to reveal candy and other treats from the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement in honor of the holiday. 
This is only one example of the tension that has gripped city residents after the booby-trapped gift basket injured a boy on Thursday. Those who were most frightened were members of a tiny, almost secretive community that operates in that Ariel building, among other sites in Israel; the "Messianic Jews." The group had ...   more »

By News Agencies
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Former British prime minister Tony Blair on Tuesday warned stakeholders in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that they were facing "a race against time."
"It is possible to get this resolved, but we need to be aware that we are racing against time now," the envoy for the Quartet of Middle East peace negotiators - The United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia - told a European Parliament panel in Brussels.
Blair set a planned mid-May visit to Israel by U.S. President George W. Bush as the next pointer in the Middle East peace process timeline.
By then, he said, Israelis, Palestinians and the international community need to clearly show that "we are in a different and better position than the position we are in today.
"This is decision-making time as to whether people are serious about moving the process forward or not," he added.
He said peace was possible because both Israelis and Palestinians want to live side by side in peace. However, he added that while the each side wants a two-state solution, neither believes it is going to get it. "Israelis see Palestinians as unable to combat terrorism and ...   more »

But local analysts offer different picture of relationship
By Anthony Elghossain
BEIRUT: In a recently published report, entitled "Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan," the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a pro-Israeli think tank, seeks to link the growing strategic importance of Iran in the region with the concurrent rise in prominence of groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah.
The emergence of Iran as a regional political force has coincided with the rise in prominence of groups like Hizbullah and the Mehdi Army, leading some commentators to surmise that a "Shiite Crescent" stretching from Iran through the Levant and the Gulf may threaten the existing regional order.
The report argues, in part, that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization with operational capabilities across the Middle East and throughout the Lebanese diaspora elsewhere. Also central to the report's argument is that Hizbullah is a proxy, stating that the "Party of God" is a puppet of the regime in Tehran.
In support of these claims, the report describes several mechanisms through which Hizbullah has become dependent on Iran, breaking the claimed dependency into financial and military pheres.
Financially, the report claims, Hizbullah receives around $100 million annually from Iran, a number that ...   more »

By Zhao Yidi
March 25 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedge funds may report $460 billion in credit losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, or almost four times the amount already disclosed, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Profits will continue to wane, other analysts said.
``There is light at the end of the tunnel, but it is still rather dim,'' Goldman analysts including New York-based Andrew Tilton said in a note to investors today. They estimated that residential mortgage losses will account for half the total, and commercial mortgages as much as 20 percent.
Earnings and share prices at U.S. financial institutions tumbled in the past year as fallout from the mortgage crisis spread to other markets. Demand for mortgage-backed securities evaporated, leading to the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos., once that market's largest underwriter, and a Federal Reserve-led bailout by JPMorgan Chase & Co. earlier this month.
Goldman's own share-price estimate was cut 3.7 percent to $210 at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller. The research firm also reduced its profit estimates for the world's biggest securities firm for the rest of this year and all of 2009.
Merrill Lynch & Co. had its ...   more »

By PAUL KRUGMAN
If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.
But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?
Why does the financial system need salvation?
Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?
The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.
Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.
This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.
As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand what banks do.
Banks exist because they help reconcile the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers. Savers want freedom — access to their money on short notice. ...   more »

By Bruno Waterfield
Dutch council officials will permit gay sex in public areas but fine dog owners who let their pets off the leash in Amsterdam's Vondelpark.
The glasses that will find your missing keys
Woman stuck after two years on toilet
How about that: Weird and bizarre stories from around the world
Paul van Grieken, an Alderman in the Oud-Zuid district of the city, has startled many Amsterdammers, despite their famously liberal attitudes, with plans to allow public sex as part of this summer's new rules of conduct for the country's best-known park.
"Why should we try to impose something that is actually impossible to impose, which also causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually means much pleasure?", he said.
Amsterdam's beautiful Vondelpark in the centre of city draws hordes of summer visitors, families, skaters and joggers.
But the park's rose garden has become famous as a trysting spot for gay men looking for uncomplicated sexual encounters.
Mr van Grieken stresses that tolerance to "cruising" gays, aimed at protecting homosexuals from violence, will have "strict rules attached".
"Thus, condoms must always be cleared away, it must never take place in the neighbourhood of children's playgrounds ...   more »

Sharon Gaudin
 March 20, 2008 (Computerworld) An employee looking to steal confidential information from his employer sneaks into what should be a secure back room after hours. He pulls charts and files from a top-level financial meeting and slides them into his briefcase before heading back out.
What the insider doesn't know is that his shoes picked up hundreds of tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that had been scattered across the floor. As he passes by an RFID reader near the front door of his office building, security will be alerted that he had accessed a secure area. The evidence is all over the soles of his shoes.
Sound a little like a scene from a James Bond movie? It's not.
Nox Defense, an arm of SimplyRFID Inc., said it has created an invisible perimeter-defense system designed to track things and people in real time -- all without their knowledge. The system that is made up of several technological pieces -- RFID chips the size of grains of sand and an RFID and video camera surveillance system.
"The key to an effective surveillance system is intelligence in the equipment itself," said Carl Brown, president of Nox Defense. "It does ...   more »

USS Montpelier crossing the Suez Canal, Feb. 2003
An American nuclear submarine has crossed the Suez Canal to join the US fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf, Egyptian sources say.
Egyptian officials reported that the nuclear submarine crossed the canal along with a destroyer on Friday and Egyptian forces were put on high alert when the navy convoy was passing through the canal.
An American destroyer recently left the Persian Gulf, heading towards the Mediterranean Sea; earlier Thursday, a US Navy rescue ship crossed the canal to enter the Red Sea.
The deployment comes as recent reports allege that US Vice President Dick Cheney is seeking to rally the support of Middle Eastern states for launching an attack on Iran.
This is while US officials deny that Cheney's Mideast tour is linked to a possible military attack on Iran.
According to the latest reports, in recent months a major part of the US Navy has been deployed in and around the Persian Gulf.
The fleet is armed with nuclear weapons and cruise missiles and carries hundreds of aircraft and rapid reaction forces. 
Original Source   more »

Raising prices spur $500 million dearth at U.N. arm
By TRACY WILKINSON
Clashes have been breaking out among Egyptians waiting in long lines for subsidized bread, and President Hosni Mubarak has ordered the army to start baking more to contain a political crisis. At least seven people have died, according to police. Two were stabbed in fights between customers in line, and the rest died of exhaustion or other medical problems aggravated by waiting in the spring heat.
Government bakeries sell subsidized versions of the flat, round bread that is a staple of people's diets. Acute shortages of subsidized bread, which is sold at less than one U.S. cent a loaf, have caused hours-long lines and violence at some sites in poor neighborhoods in recent weeks.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ROME — With food and fuel prices soaring, the United Nations agency charged with feeding the world's hungry has launched what it calls an "extraordinary emergency appeal" to cover costs and avoid having to cut aid, a senior official said Monday.
The World Food Program called on donor nations for urgent help in closing a funding gap of more than $500 million by May 1. If money doesn't arrive by then, Executive ...   more »

Andrea Thompson
A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming's impact on Earth's southernmost continent.
Scientists are shocked by the rapid change of events.
Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (41 kilometers by 2.5 kilometers - about 10 times the area of Manhattan) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf.
Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) that it looked like the entire ice shelf - about 6,180 square miles (16,000 square kilometers - about the size of Northern Ireland)- was at risk of collapsing.
David Vaughan of the BAS had predicted in 1993 that the northern part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if warming on the Peninsula continued at the same rate.
"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," he said. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a ...   more »

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) today called on Sen. Barack Obama to remove Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak as his military advisor and national campaign co-chairman.
"By choosing to have a military advisor and national campaign co-chairman like General McPeak, serious questions and doubts are once again being raised about Senator Obama's positions and judgment on Middle East issues," said RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks.
In a 2003 interview with the Oregonian, Gen. McPeak resorted to old stereotypes and unfortunate language by blaming the lack of progress with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on the undue political influence of American Jewry. The problem, said McPeak is "New York City. Miami. We have a large vote -- vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it."
"Rather than putting the blame where it belongs -- on the Palestinian leadership and their continued reliance on terror, General McPeak finds it more convenient to blame American Jewry and their perceived influence," said Brooks. "This is the same dangerous and disturbing canard being promoted by the likes of Jimmy Carter and authors Mearsheimer and Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby."
In addition, Gen. McPeak has a long history of criticizing ...   more »