Major General Amos Yadlin says current quiet on other fronts should not mislead Israel, as country's enemies watch Gaza developments before taking next steps
Roni Sofer
The latest round of violence in Gaza was ignited by the assassination of five Hamas military experts  trained in Iran, Syria and Lebanon, IDF Intelligence Chief Major General Amos Yadlin told cabinet ministers Sunday. 
Yadlin noted that the massive Qassam fire leveled at Israel by Palestinian terror groups began when Israel "prevented a quality terror attack" by assassinating the military experts.
The intelligence chief also noted that Hamas is waging a broad-based strategic military campaign, and that Israel must consider all facets of this campaign in order to respond most effectively.
“With all the focus on the south of Israel right now, said Yadlin, we must not forget Iran, Hizbullah and Syria. The fact that they are quiet right now does not mean that they have bowed out of this battle. On the contrary, they are all looking to Gaza in order to see how this conflict will pan out, and this will greatly determine the steps they take next,” he warned.
Hamas is currently under political siege, explained Yadlin. “Very few countries are ...   more »

If you listen to Barack H. Obama, you might get the impression Arab-American families are getting knocks on door in the middle of the night after which they are spirited away to concentration camps never to be seen again.
As the head of an Arab-American family, this was news to me.
But that's what he told the people of Texas in a commercial message just before the primary vote.
"If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties," he said. "It is that fundamental belief, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, it is that fundamental belief that makes this country work."
Granted he said "if." But that is an awfully big "if." I don't think there will be much emphasis on the word "if" when that message is played on Al-Jazeera and around the Muslim world where it is assumed America routinely rounds up innocent Arab-Americans without trial, without attorneys, without reason.
Does Barack H. Obama believe Arab-American families are being rounded up? Does he believe any have been rounded up? Does he believe it will happen?
Does his contempt for American institutions know no depths?...   more »

19-year-old locked up, subjected to 9-hour ordeal 
French Anti-Semitic Gang Lock Up, Torture Jewish Teen
(IsraelNN.com) The French Jewish community and local government officials are outraged after it was disclosed that anti-Semitic thugs locked up, brutally attacked and tormented a Jewish youth in the same Paris suburb where Ilan Hamili was tortured to death two years ago. The gang members are aged 17-25 and have been charged with locking up a 19-year-old boy, beating and sexually tormenting him.
The gang had falsely accused the youth of stealing from them and lured him into an apartment of one of the attackers. They scrawled "dirty Jew" on the face of the victim, who was subjected to a nine and a half hour ordeal. 
The attack occurred in the Paris suburb of Bagneux, whose municipal officials said, "We are shocked and outraged. We condemn such acts in the strongest term. Our city has values of tolerance, respect of differences, fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia," according to the European Jewish Press.
Original Source   more »

When a study shows that a popular anti-depressant doesn't work, those results are routinely suppressed, claims an article in a respected medical journal. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, all of the positive studies are published, but those that show negative or questionable results are often not published at all.
The article posed the question whether doctors and patients could make informed decisions about the use of anti-depressants such as Effoxor, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Remeron and Prozac.
The report examined 74 studies of anti-depressants and found that 38 studies showed positive results and 36 showed negative or questionable results. That means that nearly half of the studies showed unfavorable results. In many cases, patients taking a placebo experienced the same benefits. In some studies, the placebo actually worked better!
Since many of the studies were funded by drug companies producing the anti-depressants, very few of those unfavorable results ever saw the light of day. According to the article, only 14 unfavorable studies were ever published and, in 11 of them, the results were mischaracterized. So, only three studies were published showing unfavorable results. What doctors and patients saw were 38 studies showing favorable results from anti-depressants and only ...   more »

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, as Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall, a lady asked him, "Well, doctor, what have we got?" Franklin pointedly responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, defined a "republic" to be "a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices ... for a limited period, or during good behavior." In other words, in our constitutional republic, the people possess the power to govern themselves by laws they enact through elected representatives.
Today, the most serious threat to our nation's sovereignty and the republican form of government we cherish is the United Nations and other international organizations that work through ill-advised treaties and irresponsible bureaucrats to usurp the power of the American people to govern themselves. Unfortunately, more than a few politicians in our country are willing to cede power to foreign control.
One of those powers is the right to control the oceans and seas. The president's proposed budget for 2009 includes a request for nearly $5 million to support the International Seabed Authority, an international ...   more »

finds Michelle Obama
America 'guided by fear,' getting worse
all the time,' she says in campaign speech
Michelle Obama
WASHINGTON – Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, who raised controversy by saying she was proud of her country for the first time in her adult life, has had some even harsher things to say about America on the campaign trail.
In a New Yorker profile, she is quoted in a stump speech made throughout South Carolina as characterizing America as "just downright mean."
She said the country is divided, life is not good, the people are "guided by fear" and cynicism.
"We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day," she told churchgoers in that primary state. "Folks are just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime."
She went on to complain that college is too expensive, schools are not doing the job, health care is out of reach and pensions are disappearing.
"Let me tell you, don't get sick in America!" she exclaimed.
Michelle Obama set off a national firestorm with comments she made recently at a Milwaukee rally: "What we have learned over the past year is that hope is making a ...   more »

Teaching communism 
Family advocate: 'Just when we thought
indoctrination couldn't get any worse'
CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN'
Next on school agenda:
Teaching communism
Family advocate: 'Just when we thought
indoctrination couldn't get any worse'
By Bob Unruh
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who led his nation through decades of communism
A new plan by a California lawmaker would allow schools to be used to promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, and let teachers in public district classrooms "inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism," according to a traditional values advocacy organization.
"Just when we thought the indoctrination in California's public schools couldn't get any worse, state lawmakers introduce bills that will further brainwash innocent children," said a statement from Capitol Resource Institute, a traditional values and family advocacy organization based in California.
"We're in California. Of course it has a chance of succeeding," CRI spokeswoman Karen England told WND. "These people get bolder and bolder every year."
Her organization, along with several others, already has been battling over lawmakers' orders, already placed in law, that public schools in the state teach nothing but positive messages about homosexuality, transsexuality, bisexuality and other alternative lifestyles.
Those plans are being challenged ...   more »

by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) March 4, 2008
China said Tuesday its defence spending would jump 17.6 percent this year but insisted the rise was moderate, amid a flare-up in tensions with the United States over Beijing's growing military muscle.
Military spending in 2008 will reach 417.8 billion yuan (57.2 billion dollars at the end-2007 exchange rate), a spokesman for China's parliament told reporters ahead of the legislature's annual session beginning Wednesday.
As Jiang Enzhu announced the figures, he also renewed a warning to rival Taiwan that its plans for a March 22 referendum on United Nations membership was putting an already uneasy peace between the two sides at risk.
Nevertheless, Jiang said the budget rise, following a similar jump in 2007, was not excessive, with the spending coming off a low base and helping to boost soldiers' incomes as well as beef up the military's high-tech capabilities.
"In recent years the Chinese government has moderately increased its spending on national defence on the basis of sustained, steady and fast economic growth and rapid build-up of government revenues," Jiang said.
Jiang said China's military spending was just 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product last year, compared with 4.6 percent ...   more »

By Bob Brewin
The Defense Department said Monday that cyberattacks in 2007 against computer networks operated by governments and commercial institutions around the world "appear" to have originated within China -- marking the first time the Pentagon has so visibly pinned the blame against China for cyberattacks.
Defense made its cyber warfare charge against China in its annual report to Congress on China's military power.
"In the past year," the report concluded, "numerous computer networks around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, were subject to intrusions that appear to have originated within the [People's Republic of China]. These intrusions require many of the skills and capabilities that would also be required for computer network attack. Although it is unclear if these intrusions were conducted by, or with the endorsement of, the [People's Liberation Army] or other elements of the PRC government, developing capabilities for cyber warfare is consistent with authoritative PLA writings on this subject."
The report said that in 2007, networks operated by Defense, other federal agencies, defense-related think tanks and contractors experienced "multiple computer network intrusions, many of which appeared to have originated in the PRC."
The report also highlighted public statements by top intelligence ...   more »

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.   
The Federal Reserve building in Washington
Evans-Pritchard: Defending scaremongers
'Ninja' loans explode on sub-prime frontline
The latest news and views on the credit crisis
Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.
The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.
It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.
The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20pc rates in February after the near closure of the $330bn (£166m) "term-auction" market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3pc, but that was aeons ago in financial time.
"I never thought I would see anything like this in my life," said James Steele, an HSBC economist in New York.
No sane mortal ...   more »

State guidelines lay framework for deliberately letting some people die.
By Dorsey Griffith
Older, sicker patients could be allowed to die in order to save the lives of patients more likely to survive a massive disaster, bioterror attack or influenza pandemic in California.
It's not how nurses and doctors are accustomed to doing things, nor how Californians expect to be treated. But it is part of a sweeping statewide plan being praised for its breadth, even as it rankles providers who will have to carry it out.
The new "surge capacity guidelines" released by the state Department of Public Health, depict a post-disaster health care environment that looks and feels nothing like the system most Californians depend on.
It provides for scenarios in which patients could be herded into school gymnasiums for life-saving care or animal doctors could stitch up the human wounded and set their broken bones.
The 1,900-page document lays the practical – and ethical – groundwork for local and county health departments, hospitals, emergency responders and any able-bodied health care worker likely to be called upon in a catastrophe.
Striking in its specificity and its frank focus on the need to suspend or flex established laws and ...   more »

By Diana West  
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Transfixed by the two-candidate "horse race," maybe we didn't focus precisely on what happened in the homestretch of the last Democratic debate when Barack Obama tried to pick and nuance his way through a straight-ahead question from MSNBC's Tim Russert.
Q: Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?
The question arose because the longtime racist and anti-Semitic leader of the racist and anti-Semitic Nation of Islam had delivered a two-hour speech devoted mainly to praising Obama's candidacy.
Here is Obama's answer: "You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan's anti-Semitic comments. I think they are unacceptable and reprehensible. I did not solicit this support. He expressed pride in an African-American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can't censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we're not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally, with Minister Farrakhan."
"Minister" Farrakhan? The honorific seems unduly deferential applied to a demagogue who, just to recall a few pearls of his noxiousness, has labeled Judaism a "gutter religion," said "the white man" is "the anti-Christ," and suggested the post-Katrina failure of the New Orleans levees ...   more »