by Rabbi Leiby Burnham
How to maximize mileage for the most important journey you',ll ever take.
Consumption was cool. Bigger was better. More was marvelous.
Those were the roaring nineties. The internet boom was upon us, and new words entered our lexicon: IPO, cell phone, AOL, grunge, NASDAC, Starbucks, and most of all SUV. We were richer, we were bigger, we were stronger, and we were riding high above all the little guys. When our four ton behemoths were getting about the same MPG as a semi-trailer, we didn't even notice. After all, we were sitting on piles of tech stocks that were hotter than an afternoon jog in the Sahara.
Then came the new millenium and we learned a whole new jargon: outsourcing, foreclosure, Enron, layoffs, inflation, recession, and most of all, "pain at the pump" and the $4 gallon. People began cutting back on driving, GM shut four SUV plants in April, laying off 10,000 workers in the process. Selling an SUV today is like selling laptops to the Amish.
Today consumption is contemptous. Smaller is superior. Mini is magnificent.
Now hybrids, super-compacts, and SMART cars are all the rage. But what about the millions of us who ...   more »

Police failure to kill terrorists has nothing to do with Jewish morals
Effie Eitam
For 30 years, I served in the IDF on the frontlines of the war to defend the State of Israel and its citizens. During those years, I educated generations of soldiers that the most moral demand made of a fighter is to defeat his enemies. Any type of weapon, assault drills, and hand grenades were meant to kill the enemy. This is the objective and most moral result of an army’s existence.
We never thought that the need to kill the enemy tainted us or constituted some kind of problem with regards to the code of the purity of arms. This is how we educate our soldiers, and this is how the Israel Police should educate its police officers – they must hurt the enemy and risk their lives in order to protect the lives of citizens. To my regret, the police fail time and again when it comes to implementing this simple equation: Terrorists who fire or go on a rampage should be killed, even if it means the police must risk their lives to do so.
Of course, we do not wish to harm ...   more »

The French oil and gas giant Total said that it will not invest in an Iranian gas field, describing the situation there as too politically risky, the company's CEO told the Financial Times.
The company was considering investing in a liquefied natural gas project in Iran and was the last major Western oil company mulling such an investment there.
Total will be the third European company to opt out of the scheme after Royal Dutch Shell and Spain's Repsol decided not to invest in the project, but those two companies said they may join later stages of the field's development.
The decision means Iran is unlikely to be able to raise its gas exports until late next decade.
"Today we would be taking too much political risk to invest in Iran because people will say, 'Total will do anything for money,'" the firm's CEO, Cristophe de Margerie, said.
Analysts said the decision would deal a blow to Iran's energy industry.
Iran is under heavy international pressure to abandon its controversial nuclear program, for fear it is covertly manufacturing a nuclear bomb. The country has come under several sets of international economic sanctions.
Total's announcement comes as tension is on the ...   more »

 DUBAI, July 7 (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy said on Monday it was carrying out an exercise in the Gulf, days after vowing that Iran will not be allowed to block the waterway which carries crude from the world's largest oil-exporting region.
"The aim of Exercise Stake Net is to practise the tactics and procedures of protecting maritime infrastructure such as gas and oil installations," Commodore Peter Hudson said in a U.S. Fifth Fleet statement.
The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said in remarks published late last month that Tehran would impose controls on shipping in the Gulf and the strategic Strait of Hormuz if it was attacked.
Speculation about a possible attack on Iran because of its nuclear programme has risen since a report last month said Israel had practised such a strike.
Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, said last week the United States would not allow Iran to block the Gulf.
Fear of an escalation in the standoff between the West and Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, has helped propel oil prices over $140 a barrel.
Two U.S. vessels were taking part in the exercise alongside a British warship and ...   more »

By Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post
The District is rolling out an ambitious identification program this summer in what it calls a first-of-its-kind effort by a major U.S. city to unify services on one ID card.
With the One Card, library accounts, public school attendance, recreation-center use and other services will be tracked on a single piece of plastic.
Metro riders can have a SmarTrip chip implanted in the card.
"The eventual goal is that you'd need only one card across the entire District government," said Vivek Kundra, the city's chief technology officer.
Over the next three months, public libraries will begin issuing the One Card. In the fall, public school students and D.C. government employees will receive the cards as IDs. By 2010, the Department of Parks and Recreation, which has begun issuing the cards, will require the ID for using park facilities, Kundra said. Other services, including DC Healthcare Alliance, plan to use the card.
The card will be mandatory for D.C. students and government workers, but other residents can choose not to apply for the card.
More than 11,000 young workers in the summer jobs program have the ID cards, as do more than 8,000 patrons of the ...   more »

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for United States military bases across the world to be "eradicated" and said there must be "fundamental change" in the next US government.
"The greatest threat in the Middle East and to countries in the world is US intervention," he told a press conference after a summit of the "D8" group of developing nations.
"The military bases in the whole world should be eradicated and removed," he said.
"To build confidence in the region is to have fundamental change in the next US government," the Iranian leader added.
Ahmadinejad, who is embroiled in a wrangle over Iran's nuclear enrichment programme, called on the major powers to "withdraw from animosity and hostile actions against us".
"Justice, peace and friendship is also in their benefit," he said.
"To rebuild confidence, the US must withdraw its forces from Iraq and allow the fate of the people of Iraq and regional countries to be written by the hands of their own people," he said.
Original Source   more »

By Mark Thompson
The missile-bound game of nuclear tic-tac-toe continued across the Middle East and Europe Wednesday as Russia made a provocative response to an expansion of the U.S. missile shield in Europe, and Iran followed with a provocation of its own. After the U.S. and Czech Republic signed an agreement calling for the basing of a U.S. radar south of Prague, Moscow responded with a threat of unspecified "military" action if the system is ever deployed. Then, less than 24 hours later, apparently responding to increasing chatter from the U.S. and Israel about attacking Tehran's nuclear production sites, Iran test-fired a barrage of missiles at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, a vital waterway through which about 40% of the world's oil — much of it bound for the U.S. and the West — passes.
Iran's nine-missile test shows "our resolve and might against enemies who in recent weeks have threatened Iran with harsh language," Gen. Hossein Salami of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said in a broadcast over Iranian state television. Iran has threatened to halt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. or Israel attacks its nuclear-development sites. The test firings reportedly included ...   more »

By Bob Unruh
Dozens of nations dominated by Islam are pressing the United Nations to adopt an anti-"defamation" plan that would make Christians criminals under international law, according to a United States organization that has launched a campaign to defend freedom of religion worldwide.
"Around the world, Christians are being increasingly targeted, and even persecuted, for their religious beliefs. Now, one of the largest organizations in the United Nations is pushing to make a bad situation even worse by promoting anti-Christian bigotry," the American Center for Law & Justice said yesterday in announcing its petition drive.
The discrimination is "wrapped in the guise of a U.N. resolution called 'Combating Defamation of Religions,'" the announcement said. "We must put an immediate end to this most recent, dangerous attack on faith that attempts to criminalize Christianity."
The "anti-defamation" plan has been submitted to the U.N. repeatedly since about 1999, starting out as a plan to ban "defamation" of Islam and later changed to refer to "religions, officials said. It is being pushed by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference nations, which has adopted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, "which states that all rights are subject to sharia law, ...   more »

Talk of missiles and the Messiah are making big news in Israel, Iran, and the U.S. in recent days. It's a curious combination, to be sure. But numerous high-profile stories and television programs on both topics are stirring interest and controversy among millions in three countries that could not be more different. The Messiah stories are particularly interesting to me. Iran, as I mentioned the other day, is running a new documentary TV series on Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology (End Times theology), consistent with President Ahmadinejad's on-going call for the Muslim world to prepare for the "imminent" arrival of the Islamic Messiah, known as the Mahdi. The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a "Christian" invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a ...   more »