Rabbi Asher Brander
A bright light of confusion surrounds the day we call Lag B'omer. Ask one Jew what it is and he might even give you two opinions. According to Pri Megadim (1), something is special about the day, but we are not sure exactly what it is. If he's not sure, them I'm not either. Two basic schools of thought (there are more) posit something along these lines of
a. The students of Rabbi Akiva stopped dying on this day
b. Something relating to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai
       i. He died on this day
       ii. He revealed the secrets of Kabbalah on this day
Each approach has its problems – thoroughly explicated by the poskim. Consider: If Rabbi Akiva's students stopped dying on this day because there was no one left, it does not seem like much of a reason to celebrate. If they died throughout the omer period, but there was a special hiatus on Lag B'omer, then it merely begs the question, why this day - which brings us to our second reason. A celebration of anyone's yahrtzeit (anniversary of the person's death), particularly that of a tzaddik like Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (2), ...   more »

By Eli Ashkenazi 
"A rare find" and "a sensational discovery" are just some of phrases used by those people who have seen or heard about the discovery of a large stalagmite cave in the western Galilee some 10 days ago. Human skulls and animal bones were found at the site. According to experts, "These are rare and fascinating finds." The cave opening was uncovered by chance by a tractor driver.
The first to enter the cave were volunteers from the western Galilee rescue unit. Israel Antiquities Authority cave researchers and archaeologists were also summoned to the site. According to the testimony of those who entered, "It is a huge stalagmite cave that contains important archaeological finds." The cave is about 85 meters long, 40 meters wide and some 30 meters high. "We have not discovered another cave of such size in Israel," said Yinon Shivtiel, a cave 
researcher who lectures at the Safed Academic College.
The archaeological finds discovered in the cave have been dated to the early Stone Age, but so far no precise tests have been carried out. It is unclear how the human skull and the animal bones got into the cave. According to one expert, "These ...   more »

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Particularly since the late, lifelong Muslim Brother, Yasser Arafat, shifted anti-Israel jihad into fifth gear in September 2000, several Middle East and Islamic scholars have repeatedly asserted that 20th and 21st century Islamic anti-Semitism sprang solely from Nazi and European Christian influence.
Even now, Islamophiles like Bernard Lewis preach (as it were) that virulent Jew-hatred is not inherent to Islam – but rather, anti-Semitism migrated to the Middle East with European colonialism. The Quran uses "hard words ... about the Jews," even Lewis admits. Yet under Islamic rule, he claims they were "only rarely subject to persecution" and "their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst. ..."
Dr. Andrew G. Bostom's extensive, scientific and largely unprecedented new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History," definitively disproves such claims. (Full disclosure: I copy-edited several of these first-time English translations, and proofread many chapters.)
Publication of this landmark book informs self-respecting scholars, they can no longer shamelessly blame Christianity as the sole source of anti-Semitism – or more importantly, that Islam does not and never had its own innate brand of loathing for the Jewish people.
Islam detests non-Muslims ...   more »

TOVAH LAZAROFF and REBECCA ANNA STOIL
A multi-party bill designed to make it harder for the government to cede the Golan Heights to Syria received an initial promise of 61 signatures Monday even before it was filed by MK Eliyahu Gabbi (NU-NRP).
Sixty of those parliamentarians, including coalition minister and Shas party leader Eli Yishai, have already signed a petition in support of the bill on Monday. The 61st MK has promised to sign it Tuesday morning, at which point Gabbi intends to submit it to the Knesset.
While 61 signatures are required to pass the bill, Gabbi did not need that many names to file the legislation.
But he gathered them nonetheless as a show of strength both in support of the legislation and against any governmental steps to return the Golan to Syria.
The proposed law would require a two-thirds parliamentary majority - 80 MKs - in order to approve any concessions on the Golan Heights. At present, the Golan could be given away with only a majority of votes.
Among those who have signed the anti-Golan withdrawal bill are Labor MK Yoram Marciano, Kadima MKs Ronit Tirosh, David Tal, Marina Solodkin, Tzahi Hanegbi, Otniel Schneller and Ze'ev ...   more »

A UN agency said that Israel has denied 94 percent of Palestinian requests for building permits in West Bank areas under its full control.
Tuesday's report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also said that more than 3,000 Israeli demolition orders are pending against Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank.
The report says 10 small communities are at risk of being almost entirely displaced by demolitions.
The report deals with the 62 percent of the West Bank where Israel retains administrative control. OCHA says that from 2000 to 2007, Israel denied 94 percent of requests for building permits in this area.
Israeli officials had no immediate comment.
Original Source
   more »

A top Russian general says Moscow will take adequate measures to counter U.S. missile defense plans.
Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Buzhinsky told a Tuesday briefing that Russia was thinking about "asymmetrical" steps if the United States deploys missile defense elements in Europe. He did not give specifics.
At the same time, Buzhinsky said that the military doesn't plan to beef up the Soviet-era missile defense system that protects Moscow.
Russia has rejected the U.S. assurances that the plans were designed to counter a missile threat from Iran. It says the U.S. missile defense facilities will undermine its security.
Original Source   more »

European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory's head said Tuesday.
If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle."
The "Higgs," named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. ther work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain dark matter and dark energy -- strange phenomena that, stunned astrophysicists discovered a few years ago, account for 96 percent of the universe.
The LHC device "will be in working order by the end of June," CERN director general Robert Aymar told journalists.
A gamble costing six billion Swiss francs (almost six billion dollars, 3.9 billion euros) that has harnessed the labours of more than 2,000 physicists from nearly three dozen countries, the LHC is the biggest, most powerful high-energy particle accelerator ever built.
Beams of hydrogen protons will whizz around at near-light speed in opposite directions until, bent by ...   more »

By Alice Park
Life, if you're a bacterium or virus, boils down to this: finding a pristine human home to provide for your every need, from food and nutrients to shelter against biological storms. As a microbial drifter, you can literally travel the world, hopping from host to host when the opportunity presents itself or when conditions at your temporary residence start heading south. There's no worry about taking along life's necessities either—viruses in particular are adept at traveling light; incapable of reproducing on their own, they think nothing of co-opting the reproductive machinery of their cellular sponsors to help them spawn generation after generation of freeloading progeny.
But ever since Edward Jenner, a country doctor in England, inoculated his son and a handful of other children against smallpox in 1796 by exposing them to cowpox pus, things have been tougher on humans' most unwelcome intruders. In the past century, vaccines against diphtheria, polio, pertussis, measles, mumps and rubella, not to mention the more recent additions of hepatitis B and chicken pox, have wired humans with powerful immune sentries to ward off uninvited invasions. And thanks to state laws requiring vaccinations for youngsters enrolling in kindergarten, the U.S. currently enjoys ...   more »

The House and Senate have approved a bill that would bar state driver's license authorities from implementing the federal Real ID regulations.
Governor Pawlenty vetoed an earlier attempt to require that conditions be met before the state could change licenses to meet federal rules. But both chambers passed the bill by veto-proof margins: 50-16 in the Senate and 103-30 in the House.
The Real ID mandate would require every citizen to carry a U.S. government-approved card to board a plane or enter a federal facility.
Critics say it will be costly to implement and that too much of people's personal information will be added to a national database. Supporters argue that a more secure identification card will help in homeland security and immigration control efforts.
Original Source   more »

By Allan Hall
A former SS doctor accused of sending 900 sick children to their deaths under the Nazi euthanasia programme has been awarded a German medical association's highest honour.
The decision comes as Jewish organisations continue to press Germany to put 92-year-old Hans-Joachim Sewering on trial for mass murder.
He was given the Guenther-Budelmann medal by the German Federation of Internal Medicine for "unequalled services in the cause of freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical profession and to the nation's health system".
Sewering was a doctor at a tuberculosis clinic near Munich before World War II.
He allegedly signed orders sending 900 German Catholic children from the clinic to a "healing centre".
In fact, it was a killing centre carrying out a secret Nazi policy of murdering the handicapped who were declared "useless eaters" by the Nazis before the war.
Many of the Nazi participants in the programme went on to become death camp commandants and high-ranking officials of the Holocaust.
Four nuns who broke their vow of silence on the recommendation of the Archbishop of Munich in 1993 claim to have witnessed Sewering ordering the transfer of the children and signing documents to that ...   more »