President Bush Says Venezuela's Chavez Using Oil to Back Terrorists, Bash U.S.
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/Chavez_terrorists_Bush/2008/03/12/79865.html
US President George W. Bush on Wednesday accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of backing "terrorists" in neighboring Colombia and fueling an anti-American campaign with his country's oil wealth.
"As it tries to expand its influence in Latin America, the regime claims to promote social justice. In truth its agenda amounts to little more than empty promises and a thirst for power," Bush said in a speech.
"It has squandered its oil wealth in an effort to promote its hostile anti-American vision, it has left its own citizens to face food shortages while it threatens its neighbors," the US president charged.
Bush's sharp criticisms of Chavez came as the White House tried to portray stalled passage of a US-Colombia free trade agreement as critical to curbing the influence of Chavez throughout Latin America.
Bush sharply criticized Chavez's reaction to a March 1 Colombian raid on a rebel camp inside Ecuador that killed a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist rebel group.
"The president of Venezuela praised the terrorist leader as a good revolutionary and ordered his troops to the Colombian border," the US president said.
"This is the latest step in a disturbing pattern of provocative behavior by the regime in Caracas. He has also called for FARC terrorists to be recognized as a legitimate army, senior regime officials have met with FARC leaders in Venezuela," said Bush.
Chavez had deployed 10 army battalions to the Colombian border in the wake of the raid, which had prompted Quito and Caracas to suspend relations with Bogota.
The three countries resolved the dispute at a Latin American summit in Santo Domingo Friday, with Colombia promising never to repeat such raid again.
To general surprise, Chavez, who only days earlier had been stoking the fires, intervened during the summit to ease regional tensions and set himself up as the agent of peace.
Cuba's Road to Democracy?
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/337021.aspx
Raul Castro's rise to power, coming after five decades of Cuban rule by his older brother Fidel, has sparked calls for democratic change from observers in Cuba and in the United States.
For some, the political transition renews hopes for a freer and more civilized society in a communist nation that has been called the last holdout of communism in the western hemisphere.
For others, including many in the Cuban-American community, Raul offers little change from Fidel. He's seen as a Stalinist dictator, surrounding himself with communist cronies.
A Failed System or Failed Policy?
For decades, the Cuban people have lived in poverty on an island where the average worker's salary is estimated at $17 per month.
Shortages of food and medicine are commonplace. Residents are dependent on the government for food, jobs, homes, and salaries, and human rights.
The Bush Administration blames Cuban conditions on a failed communist system that brutally represses its people.
This month, President Bush met in the Oval Office with families of Cuban political prisoners. They are among 75 pro-democracy activists who in March 2003 were sentenced to 20 years in prison for participation in peaceful activities.
The White House says these activists, like other dissidents, were arrested for resisting the Castro regime in a crackdown known as "Black Spring." Fifty-five of the original 75 Cuban dissidents remain imprisoned.
Critics of current U.S. foreign policy call the nearly 50-year U.S. embargo against Cuba a policy failure. They're urging President Bush to scrap the isolationist embargo which failed to topple Castro's communist regime.
"The reason, ironically, they've been able to survive so long is that we've helped the state security services prevent the Cuban people from getting information, getting money, from talking as much as they should, and visiting as much as they should with people from the outside," said Vicki Huddleston with the Brookings Institution.
As a former State Department official, Huddleston headed the U.S. Interest Section in Havana during the Clinton and part of the Bush Administrations. She says 76-year-old Raul is under pressure from his people to make reforms and now is the time to re-establish diplomatic channels with his new government.
"Exchange ambassadors like a normal country," she said. "Begin to talk to the Cuban government about migration, the environment, important to the U.S. national security and that we were doing at the beginning of the Bush Administration."
Sending the Right Message
When asked at a recent press conference why he refuses to to talk with Raul Castro, President Bush said such an action would send the wrong signals.
"What's lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs? What's lost is it will send the wrong message. It will send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners," Bush said.
"It will give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity," he added. "Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, look at me, I'm now recognized by the President of the United States."
The President called aid it's a mistake to talk with Raul Castro until he shows concrete signs of democratic reforms.
"Now, somebody would say, well, I'm going to tell him to release the prisoners. Well, it's a theory that all you got to do is embrace and these tyrants act," Bush said. "That's not how they act. That's not what causes them to respond."
"And so I made a decision quite the opposite, and that is to keep saying to the Cuban people, we stand with you; we will not sit down with your leaders that imprison your people because of what they believe; we will keep an embargo on you; we do want you to have money from people here in the homeland, but we will stay insistent upon this policy until you begin to get free," he said.
Other experts agree that Castro must make the first move.
The U.S. embargo would ease only after genuine reforms are made, such as the release of hundreds of political prisoners, free speech, and fair elections, says Caleb McCarry, the President's senior official at the U.S. State Department overseeing Cuban democratic transition.
"Cubans would like to elect their own president directly, something that has not been allowed. They'd like to enjoy basic freedoms we enjoy in our country and enjoyed in other countries," McCarry said. "U.S. strategy is aimed at preventing American resources from strengthening a repressive regime, to ensure we are not supporting the continuation and consolidation of a dictatorship in Cuba, but rather to encourage process of real reform."
Making the First Move
Brookings Institute's Huddleston disagrees.
"The more you open up, the more you'll unbalance the regime," she said. She instead says the U.S, should first end the travel and communication embargo. Allowing Americans to visit Cuba would promote the exchange of information and speed the spread of democratic ideals.
"Anything that empowers the Cuban people. We're talking about building up democracy, so we want freedom of information, free flow of money, remittances to the Cuban people," Huddleston said.
But Jim Roberts with the Heritage Foundation said he believes allowing Americans to freely travel to Cuba would delay Democracy by enriching the communist leaders. Roberts served in Latin America as a State Department foreign officer for 25 years.
"Given the fact we have an embargo in place, We're not going to just give it away for nothing," he said.
"The regime earns all this money because it goes straight to them because they control everything, the totalitarian police state, command economy," Roberts said. "But if you give the regime a lifeline and lift the embargo, I think you're going to delay the changes that are really going to alleviate the suffering of the people."
Helping the Enemy?
Roberts said the U.S. would be propping up a regime that is a security threat and friendly with anti-American nations like Iran and Venezuela.
"The Cuban intelligence services is one of top six in the world," he said. "They gather intelligence against us and sell it to our enemies, and have been doing it for years. The Iranians buy it. The Chinese went down and revamped an old Soviet listening service in Cuba. They monitor our Internet and telephone traffic. People don't think about this. This is why we can't trust this regime."
But that is good reason to engage the Castro government now, before America becomes irrelevant, Huddleston says.
"Cuba has 4.6 billion barrels a day of proven, or supposed, oil reserves offshore," she said. "Now what happens in five years when that's exploited and the money comes into the top? That means the regime can become more powerful, security services can extend their control, the military can build up."
If there is to be any U.S. policy change toward post-Castro Cuba, it may be unlikely before the November elections. President Bush and the candidates vying for his office may not risk offending the Cuban American and their powerful political lobby.
Bush: I'll Hand White House Keys to McCain
http://www.newsmax.com/politics/Bush_McCain_White_House/2008/03/12/79973.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Wednesday that he intends to finish his presidency with his ''head held high'' and expects to hand the keys to the White House to John McCain, the GOP nominee-in-waiting.
''I'm optimistic about this year because I know John McCain. I've know him for many years. I've seen his character and leadership up close,'' Bush said at a fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee. ''I've campaigned with him and I've campaigned against him and I can tell you this: He's a tough competitor.''
Bush said McCain is running on a ''clear, consistent and conservative agenda'' _ a nudge to the GOP's conservative base, which has long viewed McCain skeptically for working with Democrats on issues it detests.
''He's ready to lead this country,'' Bush said. ''I'm proud to be his friend. I'm proud to be his supporter, and on Inauguration Day, I'll be proud to say to John McCain, 'Congratulations, Mr. President.'''
About 2,000 people, including members of the Republican House leadership and Republican conference, attended the dinner, which raised $8.6 million to help Republican House candidates win in the fall. A nod to the fact that Congress is controlled by Democrats, a patriotic backdrop in the ballroom of the Washington hotel read, ''Earning Back the Majority.''
Bush urged members of the National Republican Congressional Committee to redouble efforts to re-elect Republicans in November. All members of the House are up for re-election, as well as one-third of the Senate. Republicans in the Senate must defend nearly twice as many seats in next year's elections as Democrats. And the challenge is a steep climb for Republicans because a number of GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate are retiring.
The president said the biggest issue in the races would be taxation. He said Republicans in Congress need to battle efforts to let the tax cuts he orchestrated expire, a move he said would equate to a tax increase.
''Milk expires. Taxes increase,'' he said.
The president said he was excited by this year's election and predicted that McCain, as president, would be the keynote speaker at the dinner in 2009. Reflecting on his dwindling months in office, Bush said, ''I intend to finish with my head held high.''
After dinner, Bush stopped at the residence of the ambassador of Kuwait to attend a dinner recognizing the partnership between the Kuwait-America Foundation and Malaria No More, which is committed to the fight against the deadly disease.
The foundation, established in 1991 in Washington, is a charitable organization inspired by Kuwait's liberation by allied coalition forces in the Gulf War. The group focuses its resources on education, cultural exchange and programs for youth and disadvantaged persons.
McCain Begins Search for V.P., Mum on Romney
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/McCain_VP_search/2008/03/12/79948.html
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Wednesday he has begun the process of finding a vice presidential running mate and wants someone who shares his views and can take his place.
Speaking to reporters on his campaign plane, the expected Republican nominee said he had seen news reports that a defeated rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, had expressed interest in the job, but he offered no comment one way or the other on whether Romney would be a candidate.
"I got that impression watching the interview last night," McCain said of Romney's interest in the No. 2 slot on the Republican ticket in November's election.
Romney told Fox News Channel's "Hannity and Colmes" on Tuesday that "any Republican leader in this country would be honored to be asked to serve as the vice presidential nominee, myself included."
Romney endorsed McCain in February after the Arizona senator defeated him in an often caustic campaign battle. McCain will face either Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York or Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in November.
McCain said he was just beginning to put together a search team to vet potential candidates and seek background checks on them. He joked that he has had "at least 100 volunteers to lead" the search for a No. 2.
No decision was expected any time soon. Presidential nominees often wait until just before their party's nominating convention in late summer to announce their running mate.
McCain said he and advisers have begun discussing "what was the process that was used in other campaigns, what process should we go through."
He said his prime criteria is someone "who can take your place, shares your principles, your values and your vision and your priorities."
McCain talked about his vice presidential search as he came to New Hampshire to hold a town-hall meeting in Exeter and say thank you to the state that revived his candidacy.
McCain won New Hampshire in January and put him on track to seize control of the Republican race, months after he was given up for dead.
Is the Religious Right Dead?
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/338617.aspx
With the race for the White House in full swing, some are wondering if the religious right still wields any political power.
Tony Perkins president of the Family Research Council and several other Christian leaders say the voice of the values voter is not dead.
They also say evangelicals are not in the pocket of any one party rather Christians should rally around the bible as the final authority for shaping public policy.
"I've been reading these headlines that the religious right, their influence is waning," Perkins said. "I've heard that Evangelicals are cracking up, I've even heard the religious right is dead and I tell you what I feel amazingly well."
Bishop Harry Jackson, president of High Impact agreed saying "our movement is not dead, our movement is maturing."
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and Rev. Jim Wallis, president and executive director of Sojourners also attended the event and weighed in on the topics discussed.
The lively debate was co-moderated by CBN News Senior National Correspondent David Brody.
NRB: Religious Freedom Under Attack
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/336771.aspx
NASHVILLE, Tenn -- The National Religious Broadcasters Association is holding its annual convention this week in Nashville, Tennessee. NRB members are in an uproar over what they call an attack on religious freedom.
On the surface, it is a convention filled with new technologies and new ways to reach people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But underneath the bright lights and demos, a battle is brewing -- a battle between federal government and the Church.
"It's going to be a dangerous threat," radio talk show host Janet Parshall told CBN News. "Just before our convention started down here, Charles Grassley actually put out the word that he's going to use subpoena power. If that happens you're going to have a battle royale."
Parshall participated on a special panel at the NRB convention. Panelists addressed the investigation by Iowa Senator Charles Grassley into several large television ministries. The ministries include those associated with Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Bishop Eddie Long, Joyce Meyer, and Randy and Paula White.
"This is not a crusade against ministries," Grassley said. "It has nothing to do with doctrine. It has only to do with the enforcement of the law, and it's no different than the investigation I've been doing on non-profits for the last five years."
Grassley is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. He believes the government has a right to investigate these tax-exempt ministries to make sure they are using funds for charitable purposes and not lavish lifestyles.
Right now, Grassley's investigation focuses on six television ministries. But those associated with NRB say the implications of that investigation are far-reaching, affecting Christian broadcasters across the spectrum.
"It's going to create an insatiable appetite for investigation," Parshall said. "It's really the Church on trial. It would be a bad day for America and it would be a deadly precedent for ministries straight across the board."
Craig Parshall serves as the NRB senior vice president & general counsel. "We put together a letter, a very firmly worded letter telling Senator Grassley why we disagree, why the approach was wrong, and why we believed he should have used a scalpel in this very delicate constitutional area," he said. "Unfortunately he used an axe."
NRB members say wielding an axe amounts to violating the First Amendment rights of television ministries.
"I think the only thing they're going to respond to is public protest and just a voice of Christians being heard in opposition to this witch hunt that's going on," said Ben Bull, chief counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. "Because it is a witch hunt and they will not stop with these handful of ministries. This is only the beginning."
Still, the panel believes there's a lesson to be learned in the Senate probe -- make sure your ministry stays above reproach.
"We need to be very careful in our ministries never to give the government the lumber to build our own gallows," Janet Parshall told the audience.
Obama Pro-Murder-By-Abortion; Pro-Homosexual 'Rights;' OK With Terri Schiavo Murder; Is This Guy Wearing a What-Would-Satan-Do Bracelet
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06968.shtml
Recovering Republican John Lofton, Editor of TheAmericanView.com and co-host of "The American View" radio show with the Constitution Party's 2004 Presidential candidate Michael Anthony Peroutka, has issued the following statement:
"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" -- Isaiah 5:20:
"Sen. Barack Obama is OK with the evils of abortion, homosexuality, and the murder of Terri Schiavo and he calls himself a Christian?! And, adding blasphemous insult to injury, he has invoked, of all people, the Lord Jesus Christ and His Sermon On The Mount to justify sodomite/lesbian fornication (civil unions for homosexuals.) For shame!
"In his 'The Screwtape Letters' C.S. Lewis writes: 'The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth- shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.'
"Or a soft-spoken, smooth-shaven, well-manicured, huge-smiling Presidential candidate such as Barack Obama."
For more on this disgusting, nauseating topic please listen to the current "The American View" radio show 146 www.theamericanview.com/index.php? id=998.
On this same program, you will hear an interview with Pastor Leon Forte of the Grace Christian Church in Athens, Ohio. Pastor Forte was the person who, at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, asked Obama the questions about his faith, which elicited Obama's anti-Christian statements on homosexuality and abortion. Pastor Forte is not pleased with what Obama had to say.
Obama’s Spiritual Mentor May Put Church in Hot Water
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/03/12/obamas-controversial-pastor-puts-church-in-hot-water/
CHICAGO - Barack Obama’s controversial pastor and the church he’s served for 36 years may be in hot water over statements he has made from the pulpit in support of the Illinois senator’s run for the White House.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. preaches that he follows the righteous path, but when it comes to the federal tax law, his Trinity United Church of Christ may have crossed the line.
Although Wright delivered what was billed as his final sermon last month on his path to retirement, prior to his departure he delivered commentary from the pulpit now being scrutinized in which he praised Obama.
“There is a man here who can take this country in a new direction,” Wright said during his Jan. 13 sermon, according to recordings obtained by FOX News.
It was not the first time Wright appeared to endorse Obama, who was baptized at Trinity United, has been an active member of the church for two decades and receives spiritual mentorship from Wright.
The title of Obama’s second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was taken from a sermon by Wright.
During a Christmas sermon, Wright tried to compare Obama’s upbringing to Jesus at the hands of the Romans.
“Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people,” Wright said. “Hillary would never know that.
“Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person.”
In his Jan. 13 sermon, Wright said:
“Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.”
FOX News purchased the video recordings of Wright’s sermons from the church.
“It’s pretty clear an indirect endorsement of Barack Obama - that’s not something you’re supposed to do according to the tax code,” said Andrew Walsh, a professor at Trinity College who specializes in religion in politics.
The tax code bans churches from participating in or intervening in a political campaign. Violations can result in the loss of a church’s tax exempt status.
The Obama campaign issued a statement in response to FOX News’ inquiries about Wright’s sermons.
“Senator Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church,” said Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman.
“Senator Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Senator Obama deeply disagrees.”
Obama defended Wright’s longtime activism for blacks in America last week at a campaign event in Ohio.
“Jeremiah Wright … has said some things that are considered controversial because he’s considered that part of his social gospel,” Obama said.
The Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t comment on whether it is looking into potential tax violations at Trinity United. The church declined to make Wright available for an interview.
Congregant Dwight Hopkins, a professor of Theology at the University of Chicago, said there is no basis for the IRS to go after the church.
“From the church side they will say it’s theology,” said. “If it wasn’t a senator running for president and it wasn’t his church, then I think we could say all kinds of things.”
The IRS has written dozens of letters warning churches against political advocacy from the pulpit. Yet it has revoked a church’s tax-exempt status only twice in the last half-century.
Walsh said it’s not typical for the IRS to enforce the rules.
“There’s a tension here between the desires of the religious leaders to say important things in the public marketplace and the IRS rules, and so most of the time, the IRS does not enforce these rules,” Walsh said.
The public scrutiny of these sermons comes in the wake of last month’s revelation by the head of the United Church of Christ that the IRS is investigation a speech Obama gave at the denomination’s national conference last year in Connecticut.
In a certified letter, Marsha Ramirez, IRS director, EO Examinations, wrote:
“Our concerns are based on articles posted on several Web sites including the church’s which state the United States Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama addressed nearly 10,000 church members gathered at the United Church of Christ’s biennial General Synod at the Hartford Civic Center, on June 23, 2007. In addition, 40 Obama volunteers staffed campaign tables outside the center to promote his campaign.”
The church and the Obama campaign have denied that any inappropriate political advocacy occurred during this speech.
Wright’s sermons often address themes of white supremacy and black repression, and critics have called them racially divisive.
Some remarks attributed to Wright that have been posted on the Internet and cited in press accounts include:
“Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college.
“Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.
“We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers. … We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. … We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. … We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means.
“And … And … And! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this shit!”
Click here to hear an audio clip of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. WARNING: Contains offensive language.
Once Wright’s remarks were widely publicized last year, Obama backed out of his plans for his pastor to speak at his Feb. 10 presidential announcement.
Obama met Wright after college while working with local churches in Chicago to tackle problems of drug abuse and unemployment in inner-city neighborhoods. Wright preached an Afrocentric theology that interpreted the Bible through shared suffering of African Americans.
For Obama, this experience was a spiritual turning point. He has written that he had been exposed to various faiths during his life but never formally adopted one until after meeting Wright.
“Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” he wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.”
“Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story.”
Weather Channel Founder: Sue Al Gore for Fraud
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337710,00.html
The founder of the Weather Channel wants to sue Al Gore for fraud, hoping a legal debate will settle the global warming debate once and for all.
John Coleman, who founded the cable network in 1982, suggests suing for fraud proponents of global warming, including Al Gore, and companies that sell carbon credits.
"Is he committing financial fraud? That is the question," Coleman said.
"Since we can't get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue," Coleman said. "I'm confident that the advocates of 'no significant effect from carbon dioxide' would win the case."
Coleman says his side of the global warming debate is being buried in mainstream media circles.
"As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there's been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that's been erased," he said.
"I think if we continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at last begin to realize that they've been scammed on this global warming thing."
Coleman spoke to FOXNews.com after his appearance last week at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, where he called global warming a scam and lambasted the cable network he helped create.
"You want to tune to the Weather Channel and have them tell you how to live your life?" Coleman said. "Come on."
He laments the network's decision to focus on traffic and lifestyle reports over the weather.
"It's very clear that they don't realize that weather is the most significant impact in every human being's daily life, and good, solid, up-to-the-minute weather information and meaningful forecasts presented in such a way that people find them understandable and enjoyable can have a significant impact," he said.
"The more you cloud that up with other baloney, the weaker the product," he said.
Coleman has long been a skeptic of global warming, and carbon dioxide is the linchpin to his argument. "Does carbon dioxide cause a warming of the atmosphere? The proponents of global warming pin their whole piece on that," he said.
The compound carbon dioxide makes up only 38 out of every 100,000 particles in the atmosphere, he said.
"That's about twice as what there were in the atmosphere in the time we started burning fossil fuels, so it's gone up but it's still a tiny compound," Coleman said. "So how can that tiny trace compound have such a significant effect on temperature?
"My position is it can't," he continued. "It doesn't, and the whole case for global warming is based on a fallacy."
Preparing to Rebuild The Temple - Temple Institute prepares linen garments for descendents of Aaron
http://www.templeinstitute.org/garment_manufacture.htm
"For Aaron's sons, make tunics and sashes. Also make them hats that are both dignified and beautiful. Place these [vestments] on Aaron and his sons. Then anoint them, and install them, sanctifying them to be priests to Me. Also make linen pants to cover their nakedness, reaching from their waists to their thighs. [All these vestments] must be worn by Aaron and his sons whenever they enter the Communion Tent or offer sacrifice on the altar, performing the divine service in the sanctuary; otherwise they will have committed a sin and they will die. This shall be a law for [Aaron] and his descendants after him for all time." (Exodus 28:40-43)
"They made the tunics for Aaron and his sons by weaving them out of fine linen. [They made] the linen turban, the fine linen hats, and the line pants, [all out of] twined linen. [They made] the belt, embroidered out of twined linen, and sky-blue, dark red and crimson wool." (Exodus 39:28-29)
For the first time in 1,938 years the linen garments of the lay priests are being produced in preparation for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple and the renewal of the Divine service.
The last priestly garments to have been worn were those worn by the priests who were martyred by the Roman legions who brutally invaded and destroyed the Holy Temple on the ninth day of the month of Av, in the year 70 AD.
The Temple Institute has spared no effort in procuring the necessary materials for the performing of this Torah commandment, and once again has enlisted 21st century technology in order to do so in a manner befitting the Torah injunction that these priestly garments be "both dignified and beautiful". (Exodus 28:40)
Specially prepared flaxen thread , wound into six-ply strands, according to the Torah prescribed requirement, ("twined linen - shesh mushzar"), has been imported from India. These individual spools of thread are presently being spun into larger 1.7 meter long spindles in order to accommodate the next step: the weaving of bolts of fabric 1.7 meters wide.
Before commencing this process, (known in Hebrew as hashtayah), of creating the 1.7 meter spindles, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, founder of the Temple Institute made the traditional shechechiyanu blessing expressing gratitude to God " ...for keeping us alive and preserving us and permitting us to behold this day."
In addition, before every step of the manufacturing process, a special statement of intent must be uttered in Hebrew: "L'shem mitzvat assei assiyat bigdei hakehuna: for the sake of the positive commandment to make the priestly garments."
The prepared spindles are then being transported from the textile factory in the town of Gedera to a second factory in the city of Tel Aviv. There they will be woven into kilometer (3,280 foot) long bolts.
The weaving process, (known in Hebrew as arigah), creates the checkerboard pattern described in Torah, (ibid 28:39).
The final states of the manufacture of the garments involves the cutting, sewing and embroidering of the woven fabric, creating the tunic (ketonet), pants (michnasayim), turban (mitznefet) and belt (avnet).
The turban (mitznefet) is eight meters (26 feet) in length, and is wrapped around the priest's head. Each belt (avnet) requires a sixteen meter (52 feet) length of linen, which is wrapped around the priest's waist. (During the time of the Second Temple, when preparing to serve in the Holy Temple, the priests dressed in the chamber known as the chamber of Pinchas the Wardrober, and each priest was assisted by a fellow priest with the turban and belt.)
As always, in recreating temple-ready vessels and garments, the Temple Institute research department initiates the process with intensive research, assuring in this case that the priestly garments will be created in strict accordance to the halachic requirements as described in Torah and in the unbroken oral tradition received at Sinai and preserved by Jewish sages throughout the generations.
Each set of priestly garments will be tailored to fit its individual purchaser. The garments being created are not museum pieces or collector's items. Their cost is 2,500 shekel, (approximately $695).
They will be sold only to true descendants of the High Priest Aharon, who aspire to be fully prepared for the day when they can once again perform the Divine service in the Holy Temple, may we merit to rebuild it soon!
Incredibly, this is our first public announcement of the production of the priestly garments and we have already registered our first orders. A second production run is already being planned to accommodate the anticipated demand.
In these very difficult and trying times we witness the enemies of the God of Israel arrayed to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west of the land of Israel, shamelessly boasting of their wicked intentions, and even Israel's friends are calling upon her to relinquish control over the Temple Mount, the one place chosen on earth by God for His presence to dwell, and for all mankind to be seen in His service.
The demand by the descendents of Aharon for the garments that they will wear while tending to their daily responsibilities in the Holy Temple can only be understood as an expression of unshakable faith in the unfolding trajectory of Jewish history and in God's promise for all mankind: "And My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations." (Isaiah 56:7)
Scholars continue to debate location of Ark of Covenant
http://www.twincities.com/ci_8432309?nclick_check=1
Like another famous swashbuckling treasure hunter, he has a fear of snakes. And he's not averse to associating with mystics, charlatans and crooks in his quest for prized artifacts.
But unlike his fictional alter-ego, the "British Indiana Jones" claims he's discovered the genuine Ark of the Covenant — or at least a direct descendant of the vessel constructed to hold the original tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.
In a newly released book, University of London professor Tudor Parfitt claims to have located the treasured artifact on a dusty shelf of an out-of-the-way museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.
"It was just by chance that I finally managed to track it down to a storeroom in Harare, was able to analyze it and discover that, quite apart from anything else, it's quite probably the oldest wooden object in sub-Sahara Africa," said Parfitt, an expert in Oriental and African studies. "It's massively important in terms of history, even apart from its status as the last surviving link to the original Ark of Moses."
In his book, "The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark," Parfitt describes traipsing around the globe, decoding ancient texts and deciphering numerous clues to locate the enigmatic object.
Along the way, the man dubbed the "British Indiana Jones" by friends, colleagues and the Wall Street Journal uncovered genetic evidence confirming claims by the Lemba tribe that its members are descendants of ancient Israelite priests, the lost Ark's caretakers.
Among a host of similarities with the Israelites, the Lemba priests have been the guardians of the ngoma lungundu, a sacred but unassuming wooden drum they say came from the great temple in Jerusalem.
Based on radiocarbon testing dating it to A.D. 1350, Parfitt believes a replacement was constructed from a piece of the original ngoma, which legend says destroyed itself or was destroyed in a pyrotechnic explosion.
But some Bible scholars, archaeologists and Ark experts are skeptical of Parfitt's claims and even of the Ark's existence. Others say the ngoma could be one of multiple replicas constructed in ancient times.
Still others say the description of the drum is a far cry from the gold-covered Ark of the Covenant described in Exodus, complete with its golden cherubim.
J. Edward Wright, a professor of Hebrew Bible and early Judaism at the University of Arizona, conceded it's possible the Babylonians stripped the gold from the Ark after invading Jerusalem in 586 B.C. The Ark is believed to have disappeared from the temple in Jerusalem around that time.
In the ensuing 2,500 years, many treasure seekers have risked their lives and fortunes trying to locate it. And many claims have been made about the location of arguably the most important religious artifact in history.
"The most dominant theory has to do with the St. Mary of Zion Church in Aksum, Ethiopia," said Beatrice Lawrence, an instructor at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. "The theories abound, but there is no evidence to support any theory over the other."
Grant R. Jeffrey, author of "The New Temple and the Second Coming" and 24 other books, said Jewish writings and the Ethiopian Royal Chronicles indicate a replica of the Ark was made before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem.
The original, they say, was hidden in Ethiopia until 1991, when it was transported to Israel.
The Temple Institute, a group of orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem dedicated to rebuilding the temple, claim the Ark is safely stored in a hidden chamber under the Temple Mount complex, according to the institute's Web site.
Meanwhile, the Sanhedrin Court, the only religious body authorized to determine the temple's correct location, reconvened in 2005.
And renowned biblical archaeologist Vendyl Jones, who claims to be the inspiration for the fictional Indiana Jones, is trying to raise $88,000 to return to Qumran to remove 40 stones blocking entrance to an inner cave where he believes the Ark and other temple treasures are located.
If the Ark is found and authenticated, biblical scholars say, it would be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history.
"I suppose if they found it, it would be on par with something like the discovery of the treasures of King Tut," said William M. Schniedewind, a professor of biblical studies and northwest Semitic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Parfitt, whose work tracking down the lost tribes of Israel has been featured on "60 Minutes" and the BBC, began to suspect the Lemba tribe possessed the Ark after attending a tribal ceremony in 1987.
At the time, tribal leaders told him about the ngoma, which they said was guarded by the white lions of God and a two-headed snake inside a nearby mountain cave.
Over the next two decades, Parfitt traveled from Israel to Egypt, Ethiopia and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in search of the ngoma and its secrets. He encountered a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea, was ambushed and shot at in Africa and narrowly escaped being kidnapped by Islamic outlaws in Yemen.
He experienced a major breakthrough in 1999 when he took DNA samples from 136 male members of the Lemba tribe. In a finding that drew worldwide publicity, a genetic analysis confirmed they were descendents of Aaron, the brother of Moses.
In 2001, Parfitt returned to the Dumghe Mountain cave, but he didn't find the ngoma. He was later told the ngoma had been moved, and he kept searching.
Finally, based on a tip about the transport of artifacts in war-ravaged areas and using a photo of the ngoma taken in the 1940s by a missionary scholar, Parfitt located the sacred object in a storeroom in the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe.
The wooden drum had a blackened hole in the bottom and the shattered remnants of wooden rings on each corner. Parfitt also noticed a carved, interlaced pattern described in the biblical Book of Exodus.
While the ngoma still is stored at the museum in Harare, Parfitt is concerned the highly valuable artifact once again may disappear in a nation plagued by violence and corruption.
Parfitt, who was inspired to search for the Ark by a friend, hopes the discovery will bring peace.
"My friend Reuven is a very peaceful man and something of a mystic and visionary," Parfitt said. "His whole excitement about the Ark was based on the idea that the Quran talks about it as being in some way a symbol of legitimacy for Israel. He was always convinced before his death if it was ever found that somehow the Ark might pave the way for peace in the Middle East."
'Lost Tribe of Israel' couples marry in Jerusalem
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58667
Eighteen couples from a group of hundreds who recently moved here from India believing they are one of the "lost tribes" of Israel have been married in a massive, emotional ceremony, fulfilling for many a lifelong dream of starting a life in what they consider their homeland.
"For the first time, 18 B'nei Menashe couples – equal to chai ['life' in Hebrew numerical equivalent] – married in a joint ceremony under the wedding canopy in Jerusalem. This symbolizes their successful absorption into Jewish and Israeli society, and we wish the couples a lot of joy and success," said Michael Freund, chairman of Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based immigrant organization working with the "lost" Jews.
Shavei hopes to bring to the Jewish state the remaining 7,000 Indian citizens who believe they are the Bnei Menashe, the descendants of Manasseh, one of biblical patriarch Joseph's two sons and a grandson of Jacob, the man whose name was changed to Israel.
The tribe lives in the two Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, to which they claim to have been exiled from Israel more than 2,700 years ago by the Assyrian empire.
This past August, WND reported Freund's group brought 230 Bnei Menashe to Israel; the new arrivals made their way to a Shavei Israel absorption center in northern Israel where they studied Hebrew and Torah. The batch of arrivals followed about 1,200 other Bnei Menashe brought here the past 10 years, largely with the help of Shavei Israel.
Freund, who previously served as deputy communications director under former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stressed the Bnei Menashe have been keeping Jewish customs for at least the past four decades and were well-off in India but came due to Zionist ideology.
According to Bnei Menashe oral tradition, the tribe was exiled from Israel and pushed to the east, eventually settling in the border regions of China and India, where most remain today. Most kept customs similar to Jewish tradition, including observing Shabbat, keeping the laws of Kosher, practicing circumcision on the eighth day of a baby boy's life and observing laws of family purity.
In the 1950s, several thousand Bnei Menashe say they set out on foot to Israel but were quickly halted by Indian authorities. Undeterred, many began practicing Orthodox Judaism and pledged to make it to Israel. They now attend community centers established by Shavei Israel to teach the Bnei Menashe Jewish tradition and modern Hebrew.
Israel moves to restrict "lost Jews" immigration
Freund recently brought batches of the tribe to Israel after members of Israel's chief rabbinate flew to India to meet with and convert members of the Bnei Menashe. Once legally Jewish, the tribe was able to apply for Israeli citizenship under the country's "Law of Return," which guarantees sanctuary to Jews from around the world.
But the Israeli government, which heavily restricts conversions, put a halt on the plan in October when Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit pushed through a bill heavily restricting approval of new immigrants who want to convert to Judaism and move to the Jewish state.
The bill, largely viewed as specifically targeting the Bnei Menashe, took away the interior minister's power to approve the immigration of groups who claim Jewish descent, instead requiring a vote by the entire Israeli cabinet each time any group of more than ten "lost Jews" wants approval to immigrate.
Freund accused Sheetrit of attempting to "prevent groups with historical ties to the Jewish people from returning to Judaism and moving to Israel."
"Requiring full cabinet approval every time a group of 100 or 200 people wish to move here and undergo conversion is a recipe for bureaucratic inertia, as there is little chance of getting such an item onto the busy agenda of the entire government," said Freund.
This bill wasn't the first time the Israeli government has blocked the arrival of the Bnei Menashe.
Over the last decade, Freund's Shavei Israel, at times working with other organizations, brought about 1,200 Bnei Menashe members to the Jewish state.
The original batches of Bnei Menashe to arrive here came as tourists in an agreement with Israel's Interior Ministry. Once here, the Bnei Menashe converted officially to Judaism and became citizens.
But diplomatic wrangling halted the immigration process in 2003, with officials from some Israeli ministries refusing to grant the rest of the group still in India permission to travel here.
To smooth the process, Freund enlisted the help of Israel's chief rabbinate, who flew to India in 2005 to convert members of the Bnei Menashe, a process stopped last year by India.
Freund then coordinated with the Israeli government the arrival of batches of a few hundred Bnei Menashe as tourists who would later convert, but that process was canceled after Sheetrit took office.
The activist said he was hopeful a way would be found to fly over the remaining Bnei Menashe:
"The divine process of Israel's return to Zion is far greater than any single person or even government, and no human power can stand in its way," he said.
Intelligence report predicts grave dangers to Israeli security in the coming year
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5098
The annual intelligence report submitted to the Israeli government Sunday, March 9, predicted grave dangers to Israeli security in the coming year. However, even in the short term, DEBKAfile’s military and Middle East sources report the Israeli army, police and security forces are on guard for stormy events in the second half of March.
1. To bring reluctant Arab rulers to the Damascus Arab League summit on the 29th, Syria has quietly slipped the word that the contentious Lebanese issue will be left off the agenda. Deliberations would be confined to the Gaza crisis. The Saudis were therefore persuaded to accept the Syrian invitation on March 9 after several refusals.
Israeli intelligence has warned that in the interim Hamas and Jihad Islami would make every effort to ignite the Gaza front in order to unite the Arab rulers behind a dramatic Arab resolution in support of the Palestinian Islamists. This tactic would transfer the Gaza issue’s center of gravity from Cairo, which is brokering a Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal, to radical Damascus.
Egged on by Syria and Iran, Hamas keeps on stalling this track and raising its demands. Amos Gilead, security adviser in Israel’s defense ministry, who traveled to Cairo Sunday to try and break the deadlock, came back empty-handed. He said the coming summit was the key to progress and warned that the current slowdown in Palestinian rocket and missile attacks from Gaza in the last two days was extremely fragile. Hamas was poised to generate a flare-up at any time that it suited the book of Syria and Iran. Nevertheless, Israel has scaled down its anti-rocket operations in the Gaza Strip.
2. Most of all, the coming Arab League summit will for the first time host an Iranian head of state. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be seated beside Syrian president Bashar Assad as guest of honor to parade the Tehran-Damascus axis’ pre-eminent role in Arab Middle East affairs, with Iran setting the pace.
This prospect has raised the military barometer across the region and injected a radical note in “moderate” Arab utterances.
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak suddenly declared Monday, March 10, that Israel continues to be responsible for the Gaza Strip after its pull-out and its status in both Gaza and the West Bank is that of an occupation force. In an interview, he endorsed the Hamas line which called on Israel to halt military operations not only in Gaza but also on the West Bank.
The Lebanese impasse may have been left off the formal agenda, but it looms large over the Arab world as the key divisive element. Over the weekend, the US navy built up its deployment opposite the Lebanese coast with the USS Ross guided missile destroyer and the USS Philippine Sea cruiser.
Syria responded by placing its air and naval bases, where too Russian warships are docked, on a state of preparedness.
Israel’s new national intelligence report affirms that the United States’ declining role in the region has left a vacuum for radical elements to fill. Its authors, the chiefs of military intelligence, the Mossad, Shin Bet and the foreign ministry’s intelligence unit, warned of the heightened threat from missiles in the arsenals of a future nuclear-armed Iran (within two years) and Syrian. A Hizballah attack and a stronger Hamas were also in prospect.
In the coming two weeks, Syria, Iran, Hizballah and Hamas will be further tightening the military and terrorist loop around Israel – to the north, the south, and among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, at the expense of Israel’s deterrent strength.
According to our military sources, Hizballah is completing its preparations for revenge on Israel, whom it accuses of killing its military commander Imad Mughniyeh last month. The latest estimate is that the Shiite terrorists will strike on the border and/or inside Israel, rather than hit overseas targets.
Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert steadily refuses to look these facts in the face and insists that Israel’s security situation has never been better.
Both he and foreign minister Tzipi Livni are still carefully treading the line drawn by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, whose main preoccupation these days is to keep foreign crises at bay for the rest of the Bush presidency.
In Jerusalem last week, Rice confided that to achieve a lull in the cross-border violence in Gaza, even concessions to Hamas were acceptable. This stance, which Israel accepted, substantially enhanced the Islamists’ bargaining position.
Syria 'intensely' arming itself to place all of Israel within firing range
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58472
Syria is in the midst of "intensely" arming itself, placing into position rockets and missiles capable of striking the entire Jewish state, according to an assessment presented to the Knesset today by multiple Israeli security agencies.
The announcement follows a WND exclusive report last month quoting security officials stating Syria, aided by Russia and Iran, has been furiously acquiring rockets and missiles, including projectiles capable of hitting any point in Israel. The officials listed anti-tank, anti-aircraft and ballistic missiles as some of the arms procured by Syria.
Yesterday, Israel's Mossad and Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence chiefs presented an annual security report to the Knesset warning of Syria's armament program.
The chiefs also warned of a possible flare-up at Israel's northern border with the Hezbollah terror group and said in their assessment Iran could cross the technological threshold enabling it to assemble a nuclear bomb by the end of next year.
The assessment came after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced last week negotiations between the Jewish state and Syria should be seriously considered it if would bring an end to Syrian-sponsored terrorism and Damascus' "involvement in the axis of evil."
The negotiations would aim for some sort of Israeli evacuation from the Golan Heights strategic, mountainous territory looking down on Israeli and Syrian population centers twice used by Damascus to launch ground invasions into the Jewish state.
Syria openly provides refuge to Palestinian terror leaders, including the chiefs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and has been accused of shipping weapons to Hezbollah. Damascus is also accused of supporting the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq.
'Furious frenzy' to get Russian missiles
Olmert's announcement of Israel's willingness to negotiate followed a WND report in which Israeli and Jordanian security officials outlined Syria's recent armament.
A Jordanian security official said one of the main reasons Damascus did not retaliate after Israel carried out its Sept. 6 air strike inside Syria – which allegedly targeted a nascent nuclear facility – was because Syria's rocket infrastructure was not yet complete.
The official said that after the Israeli air strike, Syria picked up the pace of acquiring rockets and missiles, largely from Russia with Iranian backing, with the goal of completing its missile and rocket arsenal by the end of the year. The Jordanian official said Syria is aiming to possess the capacity to fire more than 100 rockets into Israel per hour for a sustained period of time.
"The Syrians have three main goals: to maximize their anti-tank, anti-aircraft and ballistic missile and rocket capabilities," explained the Jordanian official.
According to Israeli and Jordanian officials, Syria recently quietly struck a deal with Russia that allows Moscow to station submarines and war boats off Syrian ports. In exchange, Russia is supplying Syria with weaponry at lower costs, with some of the missiles and rockets being financed by Iran.
"The Iranians opened an extended credit line with Russia for Syria with the purpose of arming Syria," said one Jordanian security official.
"Russia's involvement and strategic positioning is almost like a return to its Cold War stance," the official said.
Both the Israeli and Jordanian officials told WND large quantities of Syrian rockets and missiles are being stockpiled at the major Syrian ports of Latakia and Tartus.
Syria's new acquisitions include Russia's S-300 surface-to-air missile defense shield, which is similar to the U.S.-funded, Israeli-engineered Arrow anti-missile system currently deployed in Israel. The S-300 system is being run not by Syria but by Russian naval technicians who work from Syria's ports, security officials said.
New ballistic missiles and rockets include Alexander rockets and a massive quantity of various Scud surface-to-surface missiles, including Scud B and Scud D missiles.
Israeli security officials noted Syria recently test-fired two Scud D surface-to-surface missiles, which have a range of about 250 miles, covering most Israeli territory. The officials said the Syrian missile test was coordinated with Iran and is believed to have been successful. It is not known what type of warhead the missiles had.
In addition to longer-range Scuds, Syria is in possession of shorter-range missiles such as 220 millimeter and 305 millimeter rockets, some of which have been passed on to the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah.
Israel has information Syria recently acquired and deployed Chinese-made C-802 missiles, which were successfully used against the Israeli navy during Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006. The missiles were passed to Syria by Iran, Israeli security officials told WND.
Russia recently sold to Syria advanced anti-tank missiles similar to the projectiles that devastated Israeli tanks during the last Lebanon war, causing the highest number of Israeli troop casualties during the 34 days of military confrontations. Syria and Russia are negotiating the sale of advanced anti-aircraft missiles.
Defense official: Hizbullah ready to fight Israel
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3517550,00.html
The Hizbullah organization has completed its military and logistic preparations for a confrontation with Israel, a senior defense official told Ynet on Monday evening, based on recent intelligence assessments.
Hizbullah's preparations reinforce the intelligence estimate that a conflict in northern Israel is closer than a wide-scale conflict in the Gaza Strip. This may be one of the reasons why the IDF is not rushing into a comprehensive operation in Gaza.
Senior defense establishment officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, admitted several months ago that in terms of Hizbullah's missile arsenal, the group has closed the gaps created after the Second Lebanon War.
The annual intelligence review, presented to cabinet ministers Sunday by officials from the Shin Bet internal security service, Miltary Intelligence and the Mossad, said that the likelihood for a wide-scale Hamas attack in 2008 was slim.
However, the likelihood that Hizbullah will resume its violent acts against Israel is higher than the likelihood for an escalation on other fronts. An escalation on one front may lead to a similar situation on additional fronts.
Hizbullah fighters are closely monitoring the IDF's movements on the northern border, and have even come up with dozens of scenarios for the moment Israel acts against the organization.
According to the defense establishment, Hizbullah's plans focus both on the activity in southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley.
Another estimate is that Hizbullah has decided to carry out a terror attack in response to the assassination of the group's senior official Imad Mugniyah in Damascus. Although there is no evidence that Israel was involved in the killing, the organization will seek to respond at the first opportunity it gets.
These estimates illustrate the risk in an escalation on the northern front this year, as expressed in the intelligence briefing presented to the cabinet ministers on Sunday. The IDF is preparing for such a possibility, holding a large number of exercises both among soldiers in compulsory service and among reserve forces.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday that "the intelligence assessment presidents a wide picture of threats on Israel's security, from Jerusalem to Iran. We must look at reality as it is, without any illusions, and prepare for the real threats we are facing."
Barak spoke during a visit to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, where eight students were shot to death by an Israeli Arab terrorist Thursday.
Barak said earlier Monday that the operational activity in Gaza would continue. According to Barak, "Whoever thinks that this is the end of the story and that there's already a truce is wrong… We haven't finished anything and the important trials are still ahead."
The minister noted that the defense establishment's goal was to stop the rocket fire at Israel and the terror emanating from Gaza, while dramatically reducing weapon smuggling into the Strip.
A ceasefire can only be considered once these things materialize, he said.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni also addressed the issue Monday, saying that "We don't believe in (arriving to) a situation whereby Hamas can choose when it attacks and when it doesn't in order to strengthen itself."
According to Livni, "in the Middle East, every hesitation is taken as weakness. The states in the region are testing the leadership in the international community.
She added that the problem of weapons smuggling from Egypt into the Gaza Strip cannot be neglected.
Despite the Israeli denials, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confirmed the existence of a truce between Israel and Hamas. "There is an agreement in principle," he told reporters following a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah in Amman.
Israel in favor of Sarkozy’s plan for launch of Mediterranean Union July 13
http://www.ejpress.org/article/25201
Israeli President Shimon Peres on Wednesday expressed his support for French President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans for the creation of a Mediterranean Union to promote trade and cooperation.
"I support 100 percent the plan," Peres, who is on a five-day state visit to France, said in an interview with French radio Europe 1.
"The entire Israeli government is in favour of Sarkozy’s initiative of course," he added.
"North Europe countries, the Maghreb countries in the south and the Arab countries in the middle, why not cooperate on what is possiblre?," he asked, recalling that Europe started with a union on coal and steel.
A summit meeting between the EU countries and Mediterranean countries, including Israel, is scheduled to take place on 13 July in Paris when France takes over the six-month EU presidency.
Ahead of a EU summit meeting at the end of this week, France and Germany settled their differences over President Sarkozy's plan to create the EU-Mediterranean new forum.
Merkel would also travel to Paris for the ceremony launching the Mediterranean Union on July 13, the spokesman added.
Sarkozy is expected to outline the compromise at the meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels on Thursday.
The French president originally envisaged setting up an organisation exclusively for states bordering the Mediterranean but Germany balked at the idea fearing it would freeze out northern EU countries from a vital geo-political region.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel forced Sarkozy last week to open up the club to all 27 EU states.
The new union is intended to replace the so-called Barcelona Process which was launched in 1995 with much fanfare but which has made little headway in building cross-border business.
Gun rights to be argued in Supreme Court
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=69427
A prominent black conservative leader says individual liberty and one of the most fundamental constitutional rights is at risk in a case before the nation's highest court next week.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments March 18 in a case challenging the District of Columbia's 30-year-old ban on handguns. Attorneys for the District plan to argue that the Constitution protects only the gun rights of militias and that the Second Amendment does not prevent states from enacting firearms regulations.
Former Cincinnati Mayor Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, says the case is to gun rights what Roe vs.. Wade was to the protection of innocent life. He says it all boils down to whether or not big government can take away one of American's "most fundamental individual rights."
"...This is going to come down to probably one vote – [the] vote of Justice Kennedy – he is the swing vote on this," notes Blackwell. "And I think it is very important that those of us who hold [gun rights] as a fundamental human right speak up, speak loudly and sort of flood the public square with our opinion."
Blackwell has co-written a column with former National Rifle Association president Sandy Froman for TownHall.com titled Judging Gun Rights: Are They Inalienable.
Carlson Named One of the 'Most Influential Christian Leaders of 2007'
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06966.shtml
The Christian Telegraph, a Russian-language news agency, has named World Congress of Families International Secretary Allan C. Carlson one of the "Most Influential Christian Leaders of 2007."
Carlson shares this honor with U.S. Evangelist Joyce Meyer, Latvian Mega-Church Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Moscow Patriarch Alexy II, CBN President Pat Robertson and Dr. Franklin Graham.
In naming him "Researcher of the Year," The Christian Telegraph called Carlson a "distinguished analyst and researcher of the history of the family and its influence on the moral foundations of society."
The Christian Telegraph News Agency is part of IN VICTORY, the largest Christian portal serving Russian- speakers worldwide. IN VICTORY has up to 4 million page-views a month and is read by Russian-speaking Christians in over 60 countries.
Christian Telegraph News Agency provides news and features to IN VICTORY. The News Agency recently established a site where part of its news is translated into English, to give English-speakers insights into developments in Russia, www.christiantelegraph.com.
Dr. Carlson is a prominent historian of the family and the author of many books, including "The Natural Family: A Manifesto," which he co-authored with Paul T. Mero.
Carlson is the founder of World Congress of Families, as well as serving as International Secretary. He is also president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. Carlson has an upcoming interview in The Christian Telegraph.
For more information on World Congress of Families, including Dr. Carlson's complete bio, visit www.worldcongress.org. To schedule an interview with Allan Carlson, contact Larry Jacobs at 800-461- 3113.
The World Congress of Families (WCF) is an international network of pro-family organizations, scholars, leaders and people of goodwill from more than 60 countries that seeks to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the 'seedbed' of civil society. The WCF was founded in 1997 by Allan Carlson and is a project of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (www.profam.org). To date, there have been four World Congresses of Families - Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004) and Warsaw, Poland (2007).
Further Investigation Demanded as Ohio Drops Bid to Close Illegal Abortion Clinic
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06967.shtml
DAYTON, Ohio -- Ohio has dropped its efforts to close a suburban Dayton abortion clinic that was operating without an agreement with a local hospital for emergency care in violation of the law.
Health Director Dr. Alvin Jackson stated Tuesday that he is satisfied that late-term abortionist Martin Haskell has sufficiently provided the names of Miami Valley Hospital and three physicians who have agreed to treat Haskell's botched abortion patients. Pro-life groups are expressing disappointment and outrage that efforts to close the clinic have been discontinued.
Haskell, who heavily promoted the partial-birth abortion procedure recently banned in the Untied States, operated his abortion mill for five years in violation of the law until the Health Department finally revoked his clinic license three weeks ago. Even then, Haskell continued to keep his mill open despite the dangers to women who had no emergency plan in the event of complications.
"It is little wonder why abortionists continue to believe they are above the law when non-enforcement of existing laws sends them that message loud and clear," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.
"If Haskell would so brazenly thumb his nose at the law over safety issues, we have to wonder if he isn't breaking the law in other areas," said Newman. "Has Haskell discontinued the now illegal partial-birth abortion method of killing late-term, viable babies? How do we know if he has or hasn't? We call on the State of Ohio to launch a detailed investigation into Haskell's mill to determine if he is in violation of any other state and local laws."
Second Pathology Report Points to Manslaughter at Hialeah Abortion Mill
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06963.shtml
HIALEAH, FL -- Results of a forensic pathologist's review of documents and slides related to the autopsy of a baby born alive during an abortion at a Hialeah clinic in 2006, reveal that non-medical workers may have committed manslaughter when they shoved the struggling baby girl into a biohazard bag and tossed her on the roof of the clinic to die.
The Thomas Moore Society, who is representing the mother of the baby, named Shanice Denise, hired forensic pathologist Abdullah Fatteh to inspect the available evidence, including the county autopsy report, microscopic slides prepared by the medical examiner, and other records.
Fatteh concluded that unlicensed worker Belkis Gonzalez performed the abortion, wherein the baby was born alive. He concluded that they cut the cord and improperly disposed of the baby's body. Abortionist Pierre Renelique was absent during the incident.
Fatteh stated, "The actions of unlicensed clinic staff probably accelerated and/or contributed to the death of the newborn ... It is most likely that neglectful actions around the time of birth of newborn and prematurity were the significant factors that resulted in this newborn's death."
"These conclusions imply that Gonzalez could be held accountable for manslaughter in the premature death of baby Shanice," said Operation Rescue spokesperson Cheryl Sullenger.
Gonzalez, who owned a group of abortion mills, including the Hialeah clinic, pled guilty to practicing medicine without a license at another abortion mill in Miramar, Florida, on December 20, 2007, and was given five years probation. Her associate, Senesis was also charged in the Miramar incident, and her case is still pending.
Gonzalez' lawyer, Robelto Osborne, a former abortionist who had his license revoked, was previously convicted of practicing medicine without a license, as was her receptionist, Joselin Colado, and her cleaning lady, Adrianne Rojas.
The criminal investigation against Gonzalez in the death of Baby Shanice is open and progressing.
"The only way to protect the public from these predatory illegal abortionists is to put them in jail," said Sullenger. "We pray that charges will be filed soon and that justice will be done for Baby Shanice."
Tainted Grand Jury Disbands Without Indicting Planned Parenthood
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06961.shtml
OLATHE, Kansas -- A citizen-called grand jury that was empanelled to investigate a Planned Parenthood in Overland Park, Kansas, on seven allegations of criminal misconduct disbanded late Monday without issuing an indictment after unanimously withdrawing the only subpoena they issued in the so-called investigation.
The proceedings were tainted by misconduct on the parts of the Judge Kevin Moriarty and special prosecutors, that included improper backroom deals cut with Planned Parenthood attorneys that denied critical evidence to the grand jury as a whole. The secrecy of the grand jury was compromised at every turn.
"The people of Johnson County should be offended that the grand jury made such a mockery of this investigation," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. "There is no way that they could have possibly investigated all seven allegations that the voters empanelled them to investigate without inspecting any documents from Planned Parenthood."
"It's shocking that Planned Parenthood was allowed to direct their own investigation and dictate to the grand jury what evidence would be provided, and even how they would be allowed to view the evidence," said Newman. "The entire process was corrupted, and Judge Moriarty is responsible for that corruption. We are considering the possibility of filing ethics charges against him."
Moriarty refused to allow members of the grand jury to inspect 16 subpoenaed abortion records that had already had all patient-identifying information redacted, citing bogus privacy concerns. Instead, he personally took custody of the records and prepared a "spreadsheet" summary of information in the records. The grand jury was not allowed to view the evidence in context.
The L.I.F.E. Coalition, consisting of Operation Rescue, Concerned Women for America, and Women Influencing the Nation, led the petition process that convened the grand jury. The petition requested an investigation of Planned Parenthood for performing illegal late term abortions, failure to report child sex abuse, failure to provide legally mandated standard of care, filing false information with the state, illegal trafficking of fetal tissue, failure to comply with parental consent requirements, and the failure to enforce the required 24-hour waiting period.
"There's no way the public can take the conclusion of this grand jury seriously. We are considering our legal options to insure that true justice is done," said Newman.
Planned Parenthood still faces 107 criminal charges filed by the District Attorney's office in October of last year.
Iraq: Body of Kidnapped Catholic Archbishop Found
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337427,00.html
BAGHDAD — The body of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found in a shallow grave in northern Iraq on Thursday, two weeks after he was kidnapped by gunmen in one of the most dramatic attacks against the country's small Christian community.
The sad discovery of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho's body came on a day that saw more violence elsewhere in Iraq. A parked car bomb exploded in a commercial district of central Baghdad, killing 18 people and wounding dozens more, police said. Gunmen also killed five members of an anti-al-Qaida group near Tikrit, and a correspondent for a newspaper in Baghdad.
Pope Benedict XVI deplored Rahho's death, calling it an "inhuman act of violence that offends the dignity of the human being and harms the peaceful coexistence of the dear Iraqi people."
Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Iraqi Christians have been targeted by Islamic extremists who label them "crusaders" loyal to U.S. troops. Militants have attacked churches, priests and businesses owned by Christians. Many Christians have fled the country, a trend mirrored in many dwindling pockets of Christianity across the Islamic world.
Rahho, 65, was seized on Feb. 29, just minutes after he delivered a mass in Mosul, a city considered by the U.S. military the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq. Three of Rahho's companions were killed.
After two weeks of searching and praying, officials at the archbishop's church received a phone call Wednesday from the captors. The caller told the officials that Rahho had died and where to find his body, Monsignor Shlemon Warduni, the auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, told The Associated Press.
It was not immediately clear if Rahho was killed or if he died of an illness. Shortly after his abduction, church officials had said they were especially worried because the archbishop had health problems, which they did not identify.
A Mosul morgue official, speaking on condition of anonymity for security concerns, said Rahho's body had no bullet holes. The official said police found the body in an early stage of decomposition under a thin layer of dirt just north of the city, suggesting that Rahho had been dead for a few days.
There have been no claims of responsibility for the archbishop's kidnapping or his death.
The Chaldean church is an Eastern-rite denomination that recognizes the authority of the pope and is aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. Chaldean Catholics make up a tiny minority of the current Iraqi population but are the largest group among the less than 1 million Christians in Iraq, according to last year's International Religious Freedom Report from the U.S. State Department.
In a telegram of condolence sent to the head of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq, Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, Pope Benedict said he hoped that the "tragic event" would at least help build a peaceful future for the country.
Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who pledged last fall to protect and support the Christian minority, said in a statement Thursday that "we condemn and denounce this ugly crime and consider it as an aggression that aims to ignite strife among ... the Iraqi people."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the U.S. was saddened by the news.
"This is a terrible and tragic act of terrorism, in particular for the Chaldean community. And our thoughts and prayers go out to the archbishop's family, as well as to the entire Chaldean community," he told reporters.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been trying to root out extremists from Mosul, a violent city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
In an interview in November with AsiaNews, Rahho said the situation in Mosul was not improving and "religious persecution is more noticeable than elsewhere because the city is split along religious lines."
Thursday's bombing in Baghdad, meanwhile, killed 18 people near a bridge in Tahrir Square, a district of clothing shops just outside the heavily fortified Green Zone, a police official said.
In other violence, five members of an Awakening Council were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked two separate checkpoints near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. Nine others were wounded in the attacks.
Unknown gunmen also killed a correspondent for a Baghdad newspaper.
Qassim Abdul-Hussein al-Iqabi, 36, was shot while walking in Baghdad's largely Shiite Karradah neighborhood, according to a police official. Both police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information.
Excluding the latest death, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded at least 127 journalists and 50 media support workers killed since the U.S.-led war began in March 2003.
Church Leaders and Christian Youths Detained in China
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06965.shtml
At approximately 12:00 a.m. on February 18, Chinese police disrupted a gathering of 250 Christians in the home of a believer in Shangqiu City, Henan province. Eighty of the believers present were detained.
According to a March 3 report from China Aid Association (CAA), ten of these Christians have since been released. The 70 who remain detained are being held on charges of "making use of a cult to violate law enforcement." Police also confiscated blankets, goods, air conditioners and furniture from the believer's home.
On February 28, 11 youths and two adults were detained by Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (PSB) officials while attending a house church Bible study in Huocheng County, Qingshuihe township. The believers were held at the Qingshuihe township PSB office and released at approximately 10:00 p.m. on February 29. CAA has reported that three of the youths have recently been re-arrested and sentenced to 15 days detention.
Pray for the release of these Christians. Pray that they will faithfully share God's grace with those around them while detained and continue to give themselves fully to the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:50-58).
For more information on the persecution of Christians in China, go to www.persecution.net/country/china.htm.
70 House Church Leaders Detained in Shangqiu City, Henan Province; 3 Minors Detained in Xinyuan County, Xinjiang Province
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06957.shtml
China Aid Association (CAA) has learned that at 12am in the morning of February 18, 2008, a Bible training held in the house of brother Xue Weimin was attacked by more than 20 policemen. 250 believers were present in the training.
80 believers were taken by more than 10 police vehicles and detained. 10 were released later. The other 70 are still detained under the charges of "making use of a cult to violate law enforcement." 20 of them are detained in a detention center, while 50 are detained in prison (39 sisters and 11 brothers).
All blankets, foods, air conditioners and furniture were confiscated by the police without necessary documentation.
CAA has also learned that 3 minors whom were released on 29th from Huocheng County, Xinjiang Province were detained again by PSB of another county - Xinyuan County, Xinjiang Province. They will serve 15 days of detention in Xinyuan house of detention.
China's oil reserve build-up adds to global demand
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/chinas-oil-reserve-build-up-adds/story.aspx?guid=%7BBA07A1FB-2A01-484B-852C-948CD491D7F7%7D
SAN FRANCISCO -- China's plans to build its strategic petroleum reserves to at least 100 million barrels by 2010 could add more pressure to crude prices which have already been at record highs.
The world's second-largest oil consumer already has built two underground storage reserves in east China and will put into use two more storage bases soon, a senior Chinese official said over the weekend, according to China's official Xinhua news agency.
"Although China is not the only source of rising oil prices, it has consumed the largest share of the global increase in oil demand in the last seven years," said Donald Straszheim, chairman of Straszheim Global Advisors and an expert on Asian economies. "Building reserves will of course add more pressure on global oil prices."
China's goal is to build strategic oil reserves equivalent to 30 days of imported oil by 2010, says China's top economic planning administration. That's about 100 million barrels based on China's current import level and about 120 million in 2010 based on estimated growth rates.
China's move followed similar steps in the United States, the world's top oil consumer. By 2010, China's reserve amount will still be only about one seventh of the U.S. level, but China is likely to increase its reserves at a faster pace, thus adds more impact on world's oil demand, analysts said.
Oil reserves are often built in a period of tens of years with a slow pace to avoid rattling the oil market. The United States, which has the world's biggest reserve, started its crude storage in 1975.
China's reserve-building could add one more pressure to oil prices, which have moved sharply higher on global supply concerns, the weak dollar and increased investment flows. On Tuesday, the benchmark oil futures contract surged to a new high of $109.72 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It has rallied more than $20 in one month.
Increasing reserves
China is nearing completion of the two new strategic oil reserve bases, said Zhao Guobao, vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planning body.
The bases are located in northeast China's Liaoning province and east China's Shandong province, Zhang said on Saturday, according to Xinhua. The oil-reserve bases located in east China's Zhejiang province are in operation, he added.
By the year 2010, China will have strategic oil reserves equivalent to 30 days of imported oil, Xinhua reported, quoting NDRC. China currently imports about 3.5 million barrels a day of oil, or about half of its total consumption, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration.
How much China's move will push up oil prices depends on the pace it accumulates reserves, said James Williams, an economist at WTRG Economics, an energy research firm.
Assuming China's imports will increase by 5% a year, a percentage that is in line with current estimates, imports will nearly reach 4 million barrels a day by 2010, Williams said. A reserve level of 30 days of imports would total 120 million barrels.
It's unclear how much oil China has stocked in its existing bases. But since the country is just in the first steps of building reserves, China will likely need to buy 100 million barrels in two years to reach the 120 million barrels level in 2010, Williams said. That's about 140,000 barrels a day, or 2% of China's current consumption. The percentage isn't small compared to some estimates that put China's growth in total oil demand at around 6%.
"I don't view it as anything earthshaking, but it does have an impact on the market," said Williams.
Zhang's statements were seen as unusual. China seldom reveals details about its oil reserves, which it started building in 2004. Oil demand from China, whose economy grew more than 11% in 2007, has increasingly raised international concerns.
But over the long run, it's good for the rest of world that China has reserves, analysts said. Without such stockpiles, China is more likely to bid up oil prices if there is a global supply disruption.
Rising demand
While the U.S. economy is lingering on the brink of a recession, China' gross domestic product is estimated to maintain its rapid 10% pace in 2008. Its oil demand is offsetting weaker increases in developed countries.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency Tuesday cut its global oil-product demand forecast, citing reduced demand in the U.S. and Europe. But the agency said demand from China will remain strong.
Weaker growth among Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries "stands against still-robust projections for GDP growth in China and the Middle East, the key oil demand growth centers," IEA said in a recent report.
IEA estimated China will increase this year's oil consumption by nearly 6%, while OECD countries' demand will only gain a tiny 0.6%.
Recent snowstorms that devastated half of China's 32 provinces and brought widespread power shortages could also "herald a surge in oil demand for power generation," although "this is likely to be temporary," IEA said in the report.
Coal remains the dominant fuel in China's power generation, but since coal's transportation and production were disrupted during the snowstorms, the country has increasingly resorted to petroleum products to generate electricity.
U.S. takes similar steps
China's move to increase its crude reserves came amid increasing talks in the United States that the Bush administration's strategy to add more oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is pushing oil prices higher.
Crude oil in the reserve rose to 698.7 million barrels in the week ending Feb. 29, or equivalent to more than two months' imports. February's level is about 10 million barrels higher than one year ago and 100 million barrels higher than five years ago.
The U.S. accounts for about a quarter of the world's oil consumption, which stands at around 86 million barrels a day.
Guy Caruso, a senior U.S. energy official, said in Senate testimony last week that the buildup of the strategic reserve is adding four to five cents a gallon to gasoline prices.
But Caruso, an administrator at the Department of Energy's U.S. Energy Information Administration, declined to say whether he thought the current increases in the SPR were a good idea. "I'd have to defer that to my bosses," Caruso said.
U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said last week the Bush administration will continue to expand the reserve to its capacity of 727 million barrels.
The pace of U.S. reserve accumulation is much slower than China's. The U.S. increased the SPR in the last week of February by about 20,000 barrels a day, EIA data show.
The increase wouldn't have a "consequential" impact on the price of oil, Bodman said, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
US dependece on space could become Achilles' heel
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/09/america/space.php
It does not take much imagination to realize how badly war in space could unfold. An enemy - say, China in a confrontation over Taiwan, or Iran staring down America over the Iranian nuclear program - could knock out the U.S. satellite system in a barrage of antisatellite weapons, instantly paralyzing American troops, planes and ships around the world.
Space itself could be polluted for decades to come, rendered unusable.
The global economic system would probably collapse, along with air travel and communications. Cellphones would not work. Nor would ATMs and dashboard navigational gizmos. And preventing an accidental nuclear exchange could become much more difficult.
"The fallout, if you will, could be tremendous," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.
The consequences of war in space are in fact so cataclysmic that arms control advocates like Kimball would like simply to prohibit the use of weapons beyond the earth's atmosphere.
But it may already be too late for that. In the weeks since a U.S. rocket slammed into an out-of-control satellite over the Pacific Ocean, officials and experts have made it clear that the United States, for better or worse, is committed to having the capacity to wage war in space. And that, it seems likely, will prompt others to keep pace.
What makes people want to ban war in space is exactly what keeps the Pentagon's war planners busy preparing for it: The United States has become so dependent on space that it has become the country's Achilles' heel.
"Our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities," General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, wrote in congressional testimony on Feb. 27, "and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure."
Whatever Pentagon assurances there have been to the contrary, the destruction of a satellite more than 130 miles, or 200 kilometers, above the Pacific Ocean a week earlier, on Feb. 20, was an extraordinary display of what Chilton had in mind - a capacity that the Pentagon under President George W. Bush has tenaciously sought to protect and enlarge.
Is war in space inevitable? The idea of such a war has been around since Sputnik, but for most of the Cold War it remained safely within the realm of science fiction and the carefully proscribed U.S.-Soviet arms race. But a dozen countries now can reach space with satellites - and, therefore, with weapons. China strutted its stuff in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own weather satellites 530 miles above the planet.
"The first era of the space age was one of experimentation and discovery," a congressional commission reported just before Bush took office in 2001. "We are now on the threshold of a new era of the space age, devoted to mastering operations in space." One of the authors of that report was Bush's first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the policy it recommended became a tenet of U.S. policy: The United States should develop "new military capabilities for operation to, from, in and through space."
Technology, too, has become an enemy of peace in space. Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was considered so fantastical by its critics that it was known as "Star Wars." But the programs Reagan began were the ancestors of the weaponry that brought down the American satellite.
The Chinese strike, and now the Pentagon's, have given ammunition to both sides of the debate over war in orbit.
Arms control advocates say the bull's-eyes underscore the need to expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the United States and 90 other countries have ratified. It bans the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on the Moon.
Space, in this view, should remain a place for exploration and research, not humanity's destructive side. The grim potential of the latter was hinted at by the vast field of debris that China's test left, posing a threat to any passing satellite or space ship. The Pentagon said its own shot, at a lower altitude, would not have the same effect - the debris would fall to earth and burn up.
The risk posed by space junk was the main reason the United States and Soviet Union abandoned antisatellite tests in the 1980s. Michael Krepon, who has written on the militarization of space, said the Chinese test broke an unofficial moratorium that had lasted since then. And he expressed disappointment that the Pentagon's strike had damaged support for a ban, which the Chinese say they want in spite of their 2007 test.
"The truth of the matter is it doesn't take too many satellite hits to create a big mess in low earth orbit," he said.
The White House, on the other hand, opposes a treaty proscribing space weaponry; Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, says it would be unenforceable, noting that even a benign object put in orbit could become a weapon if it rammed another satellite.
A new American president could reverse that attitude, but he or she would have to go up against the generals and admirals, contractors, lawmakers and others who strongly support the goal of keeping U.S. superiority in space.
And so, research continues on how to protect U.S. satellites and deny the wartime use of satellites to potential enemies - including work on lasers and whiz-bang stuff like cylinders of hardened material that could be hurled from space to targets on the ground. "Rods from God," those are called.
For now, such weapons remain untested and, by all accounts, impractical because the cost of putting a weapon in orbit is huge. "It is much easier to hold a target at risk from the land or sea than from space," said Elliot Pulham, who heads the Space Foundation, a nonprofit group in Colorado Springs.
Romanovs bless Medvedev after Russian vote win
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080313/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_russia_medvedev_romanov;_ylt=AkY_BgCDPFcYo8IOF2m.6gftiBIF
The self-declared heir to Russia's imperial throne on Thursday congratulated Dmitry Medvedev on his election win and urged the future Kremlin leader to fulfil Russia's destiny as a great world power.
Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, the leading claimant to the Russian imperial throne, sent a congratulatory telegram to Medvedev, Alexander Zakatov, head of the chancellery of Russia's self-styled Imperial House, told Reuters.
Medvedev, a 42-year-old former lawyer, is set to become the youngest Russian leader since the last Tsar, Nicholas II, who he says he admires. He will be officially sworn in May, though he has already moved to the Kremlin.
"You take up the rule of the Russian state at an historical stage when it has overcome atheism and inhuman totalitarianism, then withstood the inevitable shocks after the collapse of the old system and way of living," the Grand Duchess wrote.
Russia, she said, had renewed confidence in its destiny as a truly great world power based on traditional values, public welfare, the protection of rights and freedoms, the defence of national interests and an active role in international affairs.
The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for 300 years before Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, setting Russia on course for the Bolshevik Revolution, civil war and 70 years of Communist rule.
The Bolsheviks killed Nicholas, his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael, and most of their close family in 1918, though some Romanovs escaped to Europe, where they kept up opposition to Soviet rule.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, scores of tiny monarchist groups emerged but none have garnered widespread support.
Kremlin opponents such as Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov say Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have themselves ruled like tsars, with enormous powers and few limits to their authority.
Putin says his greatest achievement has been to bring stability after the chaos of the 1990s. Medvedev has said he will appoint Putin, a former KGB spy, as his prime minister.
"May God shed on you the wisdom, strength and will to preserve, consolidate and multiply all the good that was achieved with the great nationwide effort over the past years," Maria Vladimirovna, who lives in Spain, told Medvedev.
She called on Medvedev to "overcome the hardships and woes that have not yet been eradicated".
Putin was sent similar congratulations when he won election as Russian president, Zakatov said.
Sri Lanka's Christians experience 'dramatic' rise in violence - CSW
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/sri.lankas.christians.experience.dramatic.rise.in.violence.csw/17262.htm
Christians in Sri Lanka have seen a “dramatic” increase in violence within the last month, according to reports from the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka (NCEASL).
On 3 March the Zion Mount Prayer House in Mulaitivu District was set on fire. The pastor, his wife, child and two other people were inside at the time, although it is believed they were able to escape, reports Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).
The previous day ten Bible School students in Lunuwila, Putlam District, were attacked by ten masked men on motorbikes. The attack occurred as the students of the Believers Church Bible College were walking from the railway station at 7pm. They were beaten, kicked and attacked with rods. More attackers arrived in a van and dragged one student into the vehicle, where he was beaten and kicked. Nine students were treated in hospital for injuries.
On the same day, a mob of 200 people surrounded a local pastor’s home in Udugama, Galle District, and told him to leave the village or face death. The crowd also referred to the ethnicity of his wife, who is a Tamil, and warned that his Church, Opma Bible Ministry, could be accused of complicity with terrorism. In early February three men armed with clubs came to the Sunday school and threatened the church.
These attacks are the latest in a series of incidents since the beginning of February. On 17 February, Pastor Neil Edirisinghe was shot dead. His wife was also shot and wounded, and she remains in a critical condition. On the same day, a mob of 50 people armed with rods attacked King’s Revival Church in Mathugama, Kaluthara District, and assaulted a 10-year-old child, one man and two women.
On 14 February a Christian home in Weeraketiya, Hambanthota District, was stoned while the local pastor, his wife and two children were inside visiting a sick parishioner.
In addition to violence, Christians are facing other forms of harassment. On 3 March, the ‘Pradeshiya Sabhawa’ (Provincial Council) in Kelaniya, Gampaha District revoked approval for the construction of a new church building. The Foursquare Gospel Church had received approval for the new building, but was then ordered to stop construction immediately. No reason was given.
Alexa Papadouris, Advocacy Director at Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) said: “The recent severe escalation in violence is deeply troubling. Although there have been similar periods of hostility towards Christians in Sri Lanka in the past, acts of violence had significantly decreased in the last two years.
"We urge the Sri Lankan authorities to take immediate action to quell this new upsurge of attacks, bring the perpetrators of violence to justice, and to ensure that a climate of impunity does not develop.”
6 Signs the U.S. May Be Headed for War in Iran
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/news-desk/2008/03/11/6-signs-the-us-may-be-headed-for-war-in-iran.html
Is the United States moving toward military action with Iran?
The resignation of the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East is setting off alarms that the Bush administration is intent on using military force to stop Iran's moves toward gaining nuclear weapons.
In announcing his sudden resignation today following a report on his views in Esquire, Adm. William Fallon didn't directly deny that he differs with President Bush over at least some aspects of the president's policy on Iran. For his part, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it is "ridiculous" to think that the departure of Fallon -- whose Central Command has been working on contingency plans for strikes on Iran as well as overseeing Iraq -- signals that the United States is planning to go to war with Iran.
Fallon's resignation, ending a 41-year Navy career, has reignited the buzz of speculation over what the Bush administration intends to do given that its troubled, sluggish diplomatic effort has failed to slow Iran's nuclear advances. Those activities include the advancing process of uranium enrichment, a key step to producing the material necessary to fuel a bomb, though the Iranians assert the work is to produce nuclear fuel for civilian power reactors, not weapons.
Here are six developments that may have Iran as a common thread. And, if it comes to war, they may be seen as clues as to what was planned. None of them is conclusive, and each has a credible non-Iran related explanation:
1. Fallon's resignation: With the Army fully engaged in Iraq, much of the contingency planning for possible military action has fallen to the Navy, which has looked at the use of carrier-based warplanes and sea-launched missiles as the weapons to destroy Iran's air defenses and nuclear infrastructure. Centcom commands the U.S. naval forces in and near the Persian Gulf.
In the aftermath of the problems with the Iraq war, there has been much discussion within the military that senior military officers should have resigned at the time when they disagreed with the White House.
2. Vice President Cheney's peace trip: Cheney, who is seen as a leading hawk on Iran, is going on what is described as a Mideast trip to try to give a boost to stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But he has also scheduled two other stops: One, Oman, is a key military ally and logistics hub for military operations in the Persian Gulf.
It also faces Iran across the narrow, vital Strait of Hormuz, the vulnerable oil transit chokepoint into and out of the Persian Gulf that Iran has threatened to blockade in the event of war. Cheney is also going to Saudi Arabia, whose support would be sought before any military action given its ability to increase oil supplies if Iran's oil is cut off.
Back in March 2002, Cheney made a high-profile Mideast trip to Saudi Arabia and other nations that officials said at the time was about diplomacy toward Iraq and not war, which began a year later.
3. Israeli airstrike on Syria: Israel's airstrike deep in Syria last October was reported to have targeted a nuclear-related facility, but details have remained sketchy and some experts have been skeptical that Syria had a covert nuclear program. An alternative scenario floating in Israel and Lebanon is that the real purpose of the strike was to force Syria to switch on the targeting electronics for newly received Russian anti-aircraft defenses.
The location of the strike is seen as on a likely flight path to Iran (also crossing the friendly Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq), and knowing the electronic signatures of the defensive systems is necessary to reduce the risks for warplanes heading to targets in Iran.
4. Warships off Lebanon: Two U.S. warships took up positions off Lebanon earlier this month, replacing the USS Cole. The deployment was said to signal U.S. concern over the political stalemate in Lebanon and the influence of Syria in that country.
But the United States also would want its warships in the eastern Mediterranean in the event of military action against Iran to keep Iranian ally Syria in check and to help provide air cover to Israel against Iranian missile reprisals. One of the newly deployed ships, the USS Ross, is an Aegis guided missile destroyer, a top system for defense against air attacks.
5. Israeli comments: Israeli President Shimon Peres said earlier this month that Israel will not consider unilateral action to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
In the past, though, Israeli officials have quite consistently said they were prepared to act alone -- if that becomes necessary -- to ensure that Iran does not cross a nuclear weapons threshold. Was Peres speaking for himself, or has President Bush given the Israelis an assurance that they won't have to act alone?
6.Israel's war with Hezbollah: While this seems a bit old, Israel's July 2006 war in Lebanon against Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces was seen at the time as a step that Israel would want to take if it anticipated a clash with Iran.
The radical Shiite group is seen not only as a threat on it own but also as a possible Iranian surrogate force in the event of war with Iran.
So it was important for Israel to push Hezbollah forces back from their positions on Lebanon's border with Israel and to do enough damage to Hezbollah's Iranian-supplied arsenals to reduce its capabilities.
Since then, Hezbollah has been able to rearm, though a United Nations force polices a border area buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
Iran Schoolbooks Teach Jihad, Martyrdom, Study Shows
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200803/CUL20080312a.html
When third grade school children in Iran turn to page 113 of their textbook "Let's Read," they find a passage that says, "At that time, the Israeli officer pounded (three-year-old) Muhammad's head with the rifle's stock and his warm blood sprinkled upon his (six-year-old brother) Khaled's hands."
The Iranian textbook was published in 2004, before the controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran in 2005. In another third-grade text, "Gifts of Heavan," an illustration of a monster wearing the Star of David is seen going through a tidy Muslim town leaving garbage everywhere.
While those examples could seem shocking to some, it gets worse, said Arnon Groiss, director of research at the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, who recently completed a study of 115 Iranian school textbooks. (Most of the books reviewed in the study had been published in 2004.)
"Indoctrination is less felt in the lower grades and increases in the higher grades," Groiss said, speaking at a forum Monday on the topic at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
The books are part of an overall indoctrination effort aimed at school children. This effort includes rewritten Iranian history and the inclusion of Jihadist political views in science and geography texts, he said.
The seventh grade text "Islamic Culture and Religious Instruction," which refers to the West and Israel as the "Arrogant Ones," tells students that war is unavoidable and victory is guaranteed "in order to continue with all our power our revolution against the Arrogant Ones and the oppressors."
An eighth grade text says the "army of Islam would make the Arrogant Ones fall in holy Jihad and heavy attack."
"This is a form of child abuse rejected by all civilized countries," said Groiss, who for 30 years was an Arab-language journalist and is currently deputy director at Israel Broadcasting Authorities Arabic Radio. "This pictures a regime bent on global war to the point of self-destruction."
On page 20 of the high school textbook "Humanities," the United States is described as an "imperialist country" that "does not refrain from massacring people, from burying alive soldiers of the opposite side and from using mass-destruction weapons. It makes use of atomic bombs. ... It creates the greatest dictatorships and the violent and torturous security-oriented regimes, and defends them."
The good news could be that most Iranian families dismiss the teachings in the books, telling their children to simply memorize the material for the test, but nothing else, said the Iranian-born Shayan Arya at the forum.
"To the Iranian youth, America is the most popular country," said Arya, a member of the Constitutionalist Party of Iran - an international group of one-time Iranian citizens pushing for the establishment of a liberal democracy in that country. However, even a small number influenced by the books could be damaging, he said.
"The Islamist regime does not need to be 100 percent successful, only a small portion," Arya said. "If 10 percent are exposed, that's 5 million. If 1 percent is exposed, that's 500,000. If it's a half of a percent, that's 250,000. That's more troops than we have in Iraq."
'Electoral Engineering' in Iran
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,336851,00.html
Although Westerners are inclined to think the outcome of an election is something you find out after the vote, that is not the case in Iran under the mullahs. There, elections are staged, but sometimes the plot has a twist. The real story of the parliamentary elections in Iran this Friday will not be the wholesale defeat of the so-called “reformists”; it will be the boycott of the electoral sham by the majority of Iranians, particularly the youth.
This year's election, while in many ways similar to every other election held under the rule of the ayatollahs since 1979, has a particular significance. The regime finds itself in a conundrum: it is in dire need of a show of popular legitimacy — something it obviously lacks — but it must also preserve the most radical, belligerent faction at the helm of power.
The Friday election also coincides with anti-regime protests and rallies throughout the country, particularly in the universities of major cities. This upsurge in dissent has only increased in spite of a state crackdown unprecedented in recent years. The Washington Times reported from Tehran on March 7 that more than 3,000 students held anti-government protests at major universities in Shiraz for the ninth consecutive day, chanting, “We are men and women of fighting, dare to fight and we will fight back,” and “This is the final warning. The student movement is ready for the uprising.”
According to the Times, the network of the People's Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK), which “also has been involved in a nationwide campaign urging Iranians to boycott the upcoming Majlis (parliamentary) elections scheduled to take place next Friday,” had a very active role in the student rallies.
There are a few fundamental facts one must consider before delving into deciphering the election news from Iran. First, there is the regime's obsession with inflated voter turnout numbers. This does not come from its commitment to democratic practices and respect for the popular will, but to its need to create an aura of legitimacy. The more isolated and illegitimate the Tehran regime becomes, the more it presses for stupefyingly high turnouts.
Secondly, in true democracies, free elections are a manifestation of popular sovereignty. In Iran under the mullahs, however, free elections are intrinsically and irreconcilably in contradiction with the despotic theocracy, in which a cleric, the Supreme Leader, has ultimate, unquestioned power and talk of popular sovereignty is considered apostasy.
Thirdly, the Friday election, like others before it, is in many ways simply a barometer to measure the political balance among the rival factions within the theocratic regime. In the months preceding the March 14 election, Iran's political landscape has been the scene of ferocious factional infighting, known among Iranians as the “fight among the wolf pack.”
The fact is that despite the crushing weight of domestic and foreign isolation, the ayatollahs' regime has neither the political nor ideological capacity to change the course of its rogue behavior at home or abroad. Incapable of satisfying these pre-requisites to emergence from isolation, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei views the appalling suppression at home coupled with escalation of terrorism in Iraq and beyond, as well as the acceleration of the nuclear weapons program as his only options.
Backed by his allies in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and President Ahmadinejad's cabinet, Khamenei has set about purging all political rivals from the ruling body at the expense of evermore contraction of the entire system. After the election, power will be concentrated in the hands of the most extreme factions of the theocracy, embodied by the IRGC and Ahmadinejad.
This faction is comprised of Supreme Leader Khamenei, the IRGC's top brass and the various groups of the political block known as the “Principlists,” which includes Ahmadinejad and his cabinet as well as other radicals like former top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, and former IRGC top commander Mohsen Rezaei.
The faction inappropriately labeled as “reformist” has been dealt a heavy blow by the faction of Ahmadinejad, et al. Of course, as this drama plays out, the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The “reformists” are in fact a who's who of political figures who, throughout the 1980s and the 16 years of rule by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, had a major role in the atrocities, terrorism and nuclear weapons program of the ayatollahs' regime.
Prior to the upcoming election, many of the “reformist” candidates were disqualified by the Guardian Council, the vetting body of the clerical regime. But the radicals wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to keep key “reformist” figures out of the parliament, but not to the extent that Rafsanjani, Khatami or other heavyweights would call for an election boycott.
In a political machination known as “electoral engineering” in the regime's inner circle, the dominant faction put in place an elaborate scheme to exact maximum benefit from the elections. According to this scenario, they will de-claw the “reformist” list of candidates and at the same time keep enough of them on the ballot to claim the election was inclusive. The end result is that come Friday, about 60 candidates of the “reformist” faction, albeit insignificant ones, will probably make it to the 290-seat Parliament (Majlis). Almost all of the key leaders have been purged, and in the actual competitions for about 200 Majlis seats, no “reformist” candidate is on the list.
On Friday, the Iran policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic should be listening not to the mullahs' election reports, but to the voice of millions of Iranians, as echoed by the students in recent anti-regime rallies. The people of Iran want real democratic change, and that means regime change. The international community should coordinate political and diplomatic efforts abroad in support of the movement for democracy in Iran.
Pakistan Army Says Cross-Border Fire From U.S.-Led Coalition in Afghanistan Kills 4
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337657,00.html
TANGRAI, Pakistan — U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan fired across the border into Pakistan in a strike against Taliban militants, but the Pakistani army said Thursday that two women and two children were killed.
Anger at civilian deaths and concern that they fuel extremism could persuade the incoming Pakistani government to ease off a U.S.-backed policy of using military force to root out militants.
But the attack also illustrates Washington's concern at how the Taliban and Al Qaeda continue to use Pakistan's lawless border area as a base for attacks in Afghanistan.
[A Defense official confirmed to FOX News Thursday that at around 11 p.m. local time yesterday U.S. forces in the southeastern region of Afghanistan launched an attack on a Taliban leader believed to be just miles away from the border in Pakistan.]
[This official said the U.S. military has not yet been able to determine the success of the strike. The strike came in the form of artillery rounds and was based on information coming from U.S. intelligence sources. Strikes of this nature are "normally done in cooperation with the Pakistanis."]
A homicide bomber rammed a convoy of U.S. troops in the Afghan capital on Thursday, killing six civilians, while the American-led coalition said it killed a dozen militants in the southern province of Helmand.
In Tangrai, a Pakistani village of about 40 houses surrounded by fields and mountains, villagers led an Associated Press reporter to the rubble of the house hit in the cross-border attack Wednesday morning. Only one of its four walls was still standing among a tangle of mud bricks, bedding and cooking pots.
"We are innocent, we have nothing to do with such things," said Noor Khan, a black-bearded greengrocer who said the house was his family home. He said a total of six civilians died — four women and two boys — all of them his relatives. "We are poor people just trying to earn a living."
In Afghanistan, a spokesman for the American-led coalition said troops using "precision-guided munitions" hit a compound about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) inside Pakistan.
Maj. Chris Belcher said the troops were responding to an "imminent threat" and that the coalition informed Pakistani authorities after the strike.
"We received reliable intelligence indicating senior Haqqani Network members were in the compound at the time of the strike," Belcher said Thursday in Kabul.
Siraj Haqqani is a prominent Afghan militant. On Wednesday, a coalition statement accused Haqqani of organizing a homicide attack that killed two NATO soldiers at an Afghan government office on March 3. It said Haqqani "has become the most dangerous Taliban leader in Afghanistan."
It was not immediately clear whether the coalition forces fired from the ground or the air or what weapons were used. Belcher said he could not comment on what the threat was and had no information on casualties.
Pakistan's army, which has received billions of dollars from Washington to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on its side of the border, initially said the incident was an accident.
Spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said five artillery shells fired by coalition forces strayed into Pakistan's North Waziristan region. One shell hit a home in the village, killing two women and two children, he said.
Asked later about the coalition saying it had hit the compound deliberately, Abbas said the government had summoned a coalition representative to appear on Friday.
"We have called for an explanation of whatever statement they have given," Abbas said. Firing across the border "is a violation and second, civilians were killed," he said.
Asked whether militants were also present, Abbas said only that: "We have asked them to explain how the civilian casualties occurred."
Pakistan has deployed some 90,000 troops to hunt down militants in its border regions. President Pervez Musharraf has sought to convince Pakistanis that they are fighting to protect their own country, not just for America's sake.
But with violence escalating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, many here hope the anti-Musharraf parties that triumphed in parliamentary elections last month will scale back military activities and seek dialogue with militant groups, whose influence has been growing.
Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said the new parliament would review its counterterrorism strategy.
"Pakistan's integrity and territorial sovereignty should be respected," Iqbal told AP. "Killing of innocent people is highly deplorable and there should not be any repeat."
There have been several incidents in the past of coalition fire from Afghanistan landing in Pakistani territory.
Some incidents may be due to the poor demarcation of the long, rugged border. In June last year, a rocket fired during a battle between U.S.-led NATO forces and insurgents in Afghanistan struck a home in North Waziristan, killing 10 civilians.
But there have also been several cases in which unmanned U.S. drones have fired missiles at suspected militant hide-outs in Pakistan's border regions, including a strike in January that killed a senior Al Qaeda commander.
A remark last year by Barack Obama, one of the two Democrats hoping to become the next U.S. president, that he might authorize U.S. troops to strike unilaterally in Pakistan if they located Osama bin Laden triggered a storm of indignation in Pakistan.
But U.S. military officials and soldiers have said on several occasions that they already have authority to pursue or fire on militants a short distance inside Pakistan.
Pakistani officials usually deny such incidents or voice complaints that have no visible consequences, leading many to believe that cross-border strikes are carried out with Islamabad's tacit blessing.
Lutheran Group: Marriage is One Man, One Woman
http://www.newsmax.com/us/Lutherans_marriage/2008/03/13/80159.html
NEW YORK -- A task force drafting a statement on sexuality for the nation's largest Lutheran group said Thursday that the church should continue defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
However, the panel did not condemn same-gender relationships. The committee expressed regret that historic Lutheran teachings have been used to hurt gays and lesbians, and acknowledged that some congregations already accept same-sex couples.
The report released by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is part of the denomination's yearslong effort to bridge internal differences over the Bible and homosexuality.
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a separate, smaller group, is theologically conservative, and teaches that same-gender relationships violate Scripture.
Called a ''Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality,'' the report is a wide-ranging study of Christian views on sexual morality, premarital sex, domestic abuse and families.
But the most anticipated part of the document was whether the task force would recommend equal standing for gay and heterosexual couples in the 4.8 million-member church.
Next year, the panel will decide whether to suggest changes in current clergy standards that bar gays and lesbians from being ordained if they are sexually active. After revisions, both proposals will be presented for a vote to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis.
The document released Thursday repeatedly states that sexual intimacy should be reserved for married couples, and condemns sex for personal gratification alone.
''The church recognizes the historic origin of the term 'marriage' as a lifelong and committed relationship between a woman and a man, and does not wish to alter this understanding,'' the report says.
The task force goes on to describe different responses to gays and lesbians in congregations, noting that some churches require celibacy for them, while others urge gay couples to ''establish relationships that are chaste, mutual, monogamous and lifelong.''
''These relationships are to be held to the same rigorous standards and sexual ethics as all others,'' the document says. ''This suggests that dissolution of a committed same-gender relationship be treated with the same gravity as the dissolution of a marriage.''
The document expressed regret that Lutheran teachings have been used ''to tear apart families with gay or lesbian members,'' and asks all Lutherans to welcome gays, and advocate for legal protection for them.
The task force also addressed the different views of Scripture that have led to the conflict over homosexuality. The document said that the Bible ''can be abused and misunderstood through selective use as a moral guide,'' noting that biblical verses were once used to justify slavery.
They said Scripture should be interpreted in light of scientific knowledge and human experience. ''Human knowledge about sexuality, such as that found in medicine and the social and physical sciences, can teach us about healthy practice and provide new insights,'' they said.
The 15-member task force, comprised of Lutheran clergy, lay people and academics, expressed hope that the members of the denomination can continue studying the issue together.
The ELCA is one of several Protestant groups divided over gay relationships.
The Episcopal Church caused an uproar in 2003 when it consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
About three dozen of the nearly 11,000 congregations in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have voted to leave the national church since its 2006 national meeting. At that assembly, Presbyterians debated providing some leeway in ordaining gays, and allowing alternative phrasings in liturgy for the divine Trinity _ ''Father, Son and Holy Spirit.''
'Stand with Children' Comments on the Oral Arguments - California Supreme Court Marriage Case
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06959.shtml
SAN FRANCISCO -- "As I listened to the arguments in the California Supreme Court today, there was no mention of the rights and interests of children in the marriage of their parents," said Bill May, spokesperson for Stand with Children. "That is unfortunate, because the court's decision will be between the narrow private interests of a small group of adults and the common interest of every child in having a married mother and father." Stand with Children is an educational project that focuses on the stake children have in the marriage of their parents.
"The interest of children is best served by laws encouraging and supporting marriage for their mothers and fathers rather than by supporting those who would intentionally deprive them of a mother or a father," May emphasized. "Redefining marriage will disconnect it from the most basic public interest, - encouraging people who engage in reproductive acts to enter marriage commitments which provide their children with a mother and father."
"Children can't articulate their best interest; they depend on adults to do it for them. For thousands of years marriage has been focused on procreating and raising children. Marriage has never been focused on the status of adults or severed from the reality that sexual relations between a man and a woman have the potential to generate new life."
"We know from our own experience it is natural to desire a married mother and father. Intentionally depriving a child of a mother or a father is wrong. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 69% of respondents agreed, "a child needs a mother and a father to grow up happily." (Pew Research Center, July 1, 2007)
"Marriage between a man and a woman is in fact a public interest and not a lifestyle choice equivalent to cohabitation, single parenthood, or same-sex relationships. Marriage must be promoted, not watered down. Currently 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock and 34 percent are deprived of their biological fathers."
Parents urged to boycott homosexual indoctrination at schools
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=58177
What if homosexual rights advocates staged a huge promotional event and no one came to see it? That's exactly what a coalition of organizations is proposing for April 25, this year's "Day of Silence," which is sponsored in public schools across the nation.
"It's outrageous that our neighborhood schools would allow homosexual activism to intrude into the classroom," said Buddy Smith of the American Family Association, one of a long list of organizations asking parents to keep their students home from school on that day.
"'Day of Silence' is about coercing students to repudiate traditional morality. It's time for Christian parents to draw the line – if your children will be exposed to this DOS propaganda in their school, then keep them home for the day," he said.
The "Day of Silence" promotion is intended, ostensibly, to make students "aware" of the "discrimination" suffered by homosexuals in society, by having students remain silent for the day. Such events typically are organized by a school's "Gay-Straight Alliance" group, but the event has been promoted for its previous 11 years by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an organization with the agenda of establishing homosexual advocacy organizations such as GSAs in all schools in the nation.
The pro-family coalition said the event "is designed to pressure students to regard homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior as normal and worthy." It said the teaching environment is disrupted by the event because some students "and even some teachers" remain silent through the school day.
"Protesters wear T-shirts and hand out 'speaking cards' protesting alleged injustice, harassment, prejudice, and discrimination toward 'LGBT' people and their 'allies,'" the coalition said.
Linda Harvey, a spokeswoman for Mission America, told WND, "It's incredibly important that parents be very aware because things are quickly getting to a bizarre level."
A parent in Massachusetts was jailed when he objected to his kindergarten son being presented with a public school district book advocating homosexuality, and in California, lawmakers have written a law requiring teachers to present only positive representations of such alternative lifestyle choices.
Such events only "honor" such alternative lifestyles, she said.
"When a parent finds out about this kind of event, they need to take immediate action, join with other parents. They need to go to the school board. They need to be persistent. They will get a cold shoulder from those who say, 'We've never heard this concern before.' Those are standard responses. They need to be persistent, and very, very discerning about what's really going on and who's advocating this," she warned.
The harm being done is enormous, she noted.
Besides being morally objectionable, such lifestyles present enormously higher risks for children for HIV and other related health damage.
"Parents need to decide this is real, this is extremely damaging. And it's only going to get worse. In the early 1990s there were a handful of homosexual clubs at schools. Now there are about 3,500-4,000 in high schools and they are increasing. The big trend now is in middle schools. GLSEN has made it a goal to have homosexual clubs in every school K-12. They're going to make it if we don't stand up and be counted," she said.
Matt Barber, a spokesman for Concerned Women for America, said the day "amounts to educational malpractice."
"“Our schools are supposed to be places of learning, not places of political indoctrination. It is the height of impropriety and cynicism for 'gay' activists and school officials to use children as pawns in their attempt to further a highly controversial and polarizing political agenda," he said.
"Social activism does not belong in the classroom," added Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth.
The coalition is suggesting parents ask their school districts about "Day of Silence" plans, especially the date because some school districts vary. Then, the group said, parents should "inform the school of our intention to keep your children home on that date and explain why."
Then parents should talk with their children about the issue and explain homosexual behavior is not an "'innate identity,' it is sinful and unnatural," the coalition suggested. And church and religious leaders should be encouraged to organize opposition to public school promotion of homosexuality.
"The director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force broke homosexual activists' code of silence on the threat homosexual behavior poses to young people's health when he admitted this month that HIV 'is a gay disease,'" said Gary Glenn of AFA Michigan. "GLSEN should cancel its celebration of that code of silence about the severe public health hazards of homosexual behavior, and any school administrator who continues to stand silent while enabling the promotion of such harmful behavior should be sued for criminal negligence."
Exodus Mandate works full time on its campaign to encourage and help Christian families to leave Pharoah's school system, and spokesman Chaplain E. Ray Moore warned Christian parents of the costs of letting their children remain in a system that advocates homosexuality.
"Based on statistics, there is a 70-to-80 percent chance that a Christian child will abandon the church and their faith in a public school career," Moore has told WND. The bottom line, then, is Christian parents need to lobby their pastors, pastors need to lobby their denominations and their denominations need to start programs creating and operating private schools, he said.
There's also a new organization in California, called California Exodus and operating with the slogan Rescue Your Child, seeking to remove 600,000 children from California's public schools because of that state's mandatory promotion of homosexuality.
High School Officials Assign Racist 'Gay' Porn
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion06964.shtml
WASHINGTON -- Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, had assigned the pornographic book "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" to students as required reading. When a group of outraged parents found out, they filed a formal complaint. Now the book has been changed to an "optional title," meaning kids may still select the book for peer study under the direction of a teacher.
The book is replete with profanity, overt racism through multiple uses of the N-word, an explicit description of a sex act involving Mother Theresa and some of the most graphic, vile and vivid depictions of homosexual anal sodomy every put in print.
"After almost 15 years of school advocacy and reviewing many objectionable books and curricula, I have never seen anything this vulgar and harmful to students," Lora Sue Hauser, Executive Director of North Shore Student Advocacy (NSSA), told Concerned Women for America (CWA).
NSSA complained to the State Attorney's office of Lake County, Illinois, and they agreed that the book violated Illinois' obscenity statute prohibiting adults from "distributing harmful materials to minors." But, amazingly, Hauser was told by the State's Attorney's office that state and federal obscenity laws exempt school officials from prosecution.
"It takes a lot to shock me," said Matt Barber, CWA's Policy Director for Cultural Issues. "My jaw hit the ground when I read what's in this book. This isn't a First Amendment issue; this is about school officials betraying the community trust. Heads need to roll here. Assigning this racist, pornographic smut to high school kids is nothing short of child abuse. Don't forget, this was required reading until parents complained.
"If Deerfield High School Principal Sue Hebson, Superintendent George Fornero or any of the teachers responsible for this outrage had any sense of responsibility, they would now resign on their own rather than making parents and taxpayers force them from their positions. Shame on them, and shame on Illinois School District 113.
"It's disgraceful for these people, who have been entrusted to help mold the minds of Deerfield's impressionable youth, to have abused those youth by ostensibly violating the very laws intended to protect them. To hide behind some inexplicable exemption is just plain cowardly. Deerfield parents should seriously consider every possible legal option to ensure that these people are held accountable," concluded Barber.
Concerned Women for America is the nation's largest public policy women's organization.
Farmers struggle to keep up with world food demand
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/09/business/crop.php
Whatever Dennis Miller decides to plant this year on his farm, the world needs. Wheat prices have doubled in the past six months. Corn is on a tear. Barley, sunflower seeds, canola and soybeans are all up sharply.
"For once, there's great reason to be optimistic," Miller said.
But the prices that have renewed Miller's faith in farming are causing pain far and wide. A tailor in Lagos named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread that he and his family love.
"If you wanted to buy three loaves, now you buy one," Ojuku said.
Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics.
Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world's developing economies have been growing at about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards.
The high growth rate means hundreds of millions of people are, for the first time, getting access to the basics of life, including better diets. That jump in demand is helping to drive the prices of agricultural commodities up.
Farmers the world over are producing flat-out. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world's grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.
"Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe," said Daniel Basse of AgResource, a consultancy in Chicago. "But if they do, we're going to need another two or three globes to grow it all."
A similar patter prevailed for a time in the 1990s, but this time investors are betting, as they buy and sell contracts for future delivery of food commodities, that scarcity and high prices will last for years.
If that happens, it is likely to present big problems for managing the American economy.
Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel inflation reminiscent of the 1970s.
And the increases could become an even bigger problem elsewhere. The increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries.
In the long run, the food supply could grow. More land may be pulled into production, and dated farming methods in some countries may be improved. Moreover, rising prices could force more people to cut back. The big question is whether such changes will be enough to bring supply and demand into better balance.
"People are trying to figure out - is this a new era?" said Joseph Glauber, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Are prices going to be high forever?"
At a moment when much of the United States is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing. The U.S. Agriculture Department forecasts that farm income this year will be 50 percent greater than the average for the past 10 years. The flood of money into American agriculture is leading to rising land values and a renewed sense of optimism in rural America.
"All of a sudden farmers are more in control, which is a weird position for them," said Brian Sorenson of the Northern Crops Institute in Fargo, North Dakota. "Everyone's knocking at their door, saying, 'Grow this, grow that.' "
Miller's family has worked the Great Plains for more than a century. One afternoon early last month, he turned on the computer in his combination office and laundry room to see what commodity prices were up to.
"Oh, my goodness, look at that," Miller said. Barley was $6.40 a bushel, approaching a price that would tempt him to plant more.
Soybeans were $12.79 a bushel, up from $8.50 in August.
The frozen earth of his 2,760 acres, or 1,115 hectares, was only a few weeks from coming to life, but Miller was happily uncertain about what to plant. Last year, the decision was easy for Miller and everyone else: prices of corn were high because of new government mandates for production of ethanol, a motor fuel. This year, so many crops look like good bets, and there is so little land on which to plant them.
"I'm debating between spring wheat, durum wheat, canola, malting barley, confection sunflowers, oil sunflowers, soybeans, flax and corn," Miller said.
The biggest blemish on this winter of joy for farmers is that their own costs are rising rapidly. The costs of the diesel fuel used to run tractors and combines and of the fertilizer essential to modern agriculture have soared. Miller does not just want high prices; he needs them to pay his bills.
Until recently, he could expect about $3 a bushel for his wheat - far less than what his parents and grandparents received, when inflation is taken into account. Consumption in the United States was dropping as Americans shunned carbohydrates. The export market, while healthy, faced competition.
Now prices have more than tripled, partly because of a drought in Australia and bad harvests elsewhere and also because of unslaked global demand for crackers, bread and noodles. In seven of the past eight years, world wheat consumption has outpaced production.
Stockpiles are at their lowest point in decades.
Around the world, wheat is becoming a precious commodity. In Pakistan, thousands of paramilitary troops have been deployed since January to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Malaysia, trying to keep its commodities at home, has made it a crime to export flour and other products without a license. Consumer groups in Italy staged a widely publicized (if also widely disregarded) one-day pasta strike last autumn to protest rising prices.
In the United States, the price of dry pasta has risen 20 percent since October, according to government data. Flour is up 19 percent since last summer.
Food and beverage prices are rising 4 percent a year, the fastest pace in nearly two decades.
The American Bakers Association took the radical step last month of suggesting that American exports be curtailed to keep wheat at home, though the group later relented.
If all this suggests a golden age for American growers, it could well be brief, said Bruce Babcock, an economist at Iowa State University. He predicted that farmers would do their best to increase production, possibly to the point of pulling land out of conservation programs so they could plant more. "Give farmers a price incentive, and they'll produce," he said.
The Agriculture Department forecasts that world wheat production will increase 8 percent this year. In the United States, plantings of spring and durum wheat are expected to rise by two million acres, helping to drive prices down to $7 a bushel, the government said. Yet the competition among crops for acreage has become so intense that some farmers think the government and analysts like Babcock are being overly optimistic.
Read Smith, a farmer in St. John, Washington, thinks a new era is at hand for all sorts of crops. "Price spikes have usually been short-lived," he said. "I think this one is different."
His example is plain old mustard. Two years ago, Smith would have been paid less than 15 cents a pound, or 33 cents a kilogram, for mustard seeds. As more lucrative crops began supplanting mustard, dealers raised their offering price to 20 cents, then 30 cents, then 48 cents early this year. Smith gave in, agreeing to convert as much as 100 acres of wheat fields to mustard.
Smith said it was inevitable that supermarket mustard, just like flour, bread and pasta, would become more expensive. "We've lulled the public with cheap food," he said. "It's not going to be a steal anymore."
As the newly urbanized and newly affluent seek more protein and more calories, a phenomenon called "diet globalization" is playing out around the world. Demand is growing for pork in Russia, beef in Indonesia and dairy products in Mexico. Rice is giving way to noodles, home-cooked food to fast food.
Though racked with upheaval for years and with many millions still rooted in poverty, Nigeria has a growing middle class. Median income per person doubled in the first half of this decade, to $560 in 2005. Much of this increase is being spent on food.
Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 45 pounds, a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root.
Nigeria's wheat imports in 2007 were forecast to rise 10 percent more. But demand was also rising in many other places, from Venezuela to India. At the same time, drought and competition from other crops limited supply.
So wheat prices soared, and over the past year, bread prices in Nigeria have jumped about 50 percent. Amid a public outcry, bakers started making smaller loaves, hoping customers who could not afford to pay more would pay about the same to eat less. Sales have dropped for street hawkers selling loaves. With imports shrinking, mills are running at half capacity.
At Honeywell Flour Mills, one of the largest in Nigeria, executives were glued one recent day to commodity screens. The price of wheat ticked ever upward. "Even when you see a little downturn, you wait for some few hours or a day, and before you know it, it's gone way up again," said the production director, Nino Albert Ozara.
Despite the crisis, there is little sense of a permanent retreat from wheat in Nigeria. The mills are increasing their capacity, hoping for a day when supply is sufficient to stabilize prices.
"The moment you develop a taste, you are hooked," said a confident Muyiwa Talabi, director of an American wheat-marketing office in Lagos.
Ojuku, the man who buys fewer loaves, and one of his fellow tailors in Lagos, Mukala Sule, 39, are trying to adjust to the new era. "I must eat bread and tea in the morning," Sule said as he sat on a bench at a roadside cafe a few weeks ago. "Otherwise, I can't be happy."
For a breakfast that includes a small loaf, he pays about $1 a day, twice what the traditional eba would have cost him. To save a few pennies, he decided to skip butter. The bread was the important thing.
"Even if the price goes up," Sule said, "if I have the money, I'll still buy it."
Gold Hits $1000, Dollar Tanks, Oil Soars
http://www.newsmax.com/money/gold_1000_dollars/2008/03/13/80078.html
Gold futures hit $1,000 an ounce for the first time Thursday, pushed past the benchmark by the sinking dollar and record crude oil prices.
The dollar fell below 100 yen during Asian trading Thursday, its weakest level against the Japanese currency in 12 years. The dollar also dropped to all-time lows against the euro.
After reaching $1,001 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, gold for April delivery dropped slightly to $999.70 by midmorning Thursday.
The price still doesn't match the all-time high of $850 in 1980, if that price is adjusted for inflation. An $850 ounce of gold then would be worth $2,177 in today's dollars.
The $1,000 an ounce price, though, is still a milestone and a telling sign that investors are continuing to abandon the dollar.
Gold has been pushing up against the $1,000 an ounce mark for weeks, mainly because of the weaker dollar. Interest rate cuts - and the prospect of more on the way - have weakened the currency so much that foreign investors can buy dollar-based commodities like gold and oil more cheaply.
Crude oil futures hit a record high above $110 a barrel Thursday, after first crossing that level Wednesday, also due to investors abandoning the weak dollar.
Investors have been expecting gold futures to rise to $1,000 as they watched the dollar spiral lower, said Scott Meyers, senior trading analyst with Pioneer Futures, a division of MF Global. Gold has been steadily creeping closer to the record after rising nearly 32 percent in 2007.
The dollar's decline and the boost in the price of oil price merely added the extra push.
''We're getting a scenario where commodities are the place to be today,'' Meyers said. ''With the weak dollar, it's hard to be against them.''
Meyers declined to speculate on how high gold could go, saying, ''to pick a top is a foolish game to play at this juncture.''
The Federal Reserve's meeting next week could provide more encouragement for gold prices since the Fed is widely believed to be considering cutting interest rates again. Another rate cut could reduce the dollar's value further, making gold an even better investment.
Church to offer 25-cent gas discount
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080313/ap_on_fe_st/odd_church_gas_discount;_ylt=Aso5toKEYZjUnHJd4xPkIuntiBIF
With Easter approaching, a church in western Ohio plans to help people fill up and also hopes to help fill their spiritual needs.
This Saturday, Pastor Wesley Miller and his Xenia Christian Center will pay 25 cents of the price of every gallon of gas purchased at a local United Dairy Farmers convenience store.
Miller says by offering the deal, his church can promote its Easter services planned for the following weekend while helping those squeezed by the high cost of gasoline.
AAA's statewide average for a gallon of regular is now $3.37, just 3 cents below last year's record high.
The pastor says the church doesn't mind if people show up purely out of greed, because his congregation would like to reach them, too.
Dollar Losing Worldwide Clout
http://www.newsmax.com/money/dollar_losing_clout/2008/03/13/80165.html
SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Antique store owners in lower Manhattan, ticket vendors at India's Taj Majal and Brazilian business executives heading to China all have one thing in common these days: They don't want U.S. dollars.
Hit by a free fall with no end in sight, the once mighty U.S. dollar is no longer just crashing on currency markets and making life more expensive for American tourists and business people abroad; its clout is evaporating worldwide as foreign businesses and individuals turn to other currencies.
Experts say the bleak U.S. economic forecast means it will take years for the greenback to recover its value and prestige.
Negative dollar sentiment is growing in nations where the dollar was historically accepted as equal or better than local currency _ and dollar aversion is even extending to some quarters in the United States.
At the Taj Mahal, dollars were always legal tender, alongside rupees, for entry into the palace. But because of the falling value of the dollar, the government implemented a rupees-only policy a month ago. Indian merchants catering to tourists have also turned bearish on the dollar.
''Gone are the days when we used to run after dollars, holding onto them for rainy days,'' said Vijay Narain, a tour operator in the city of Agra where the Taj Mahal is located. ''Now we prefer the euro. It gives us more riches.''
In Bolivia, billboards feature George Washington's image on a $1 bill alongside a bright pink 500 euro note, encouraging savers to turn to the euro to tuck away money earned abroad or sent home in remittances.
''If the dollar's going down ... save it in Euros!!!'' say the signs popping up around La Paz for Bolivia's Banco Bisa.
And in neighboring Brazil, the Confidence Cambio money-changing service was the first to start offering yuan so travelers to China no longer have to change the money into dollars first. The service is already a hit because Brazil does big business with China, and lots of Brazilians are heading to the Olympics this summer.
''Now we tell people not to take dollars when they go abroad, it's better to change it directly to the local currency,'' said Fabio Agostinho, one of the firm's managing partners. ''If people leave here with dollars and go abroad, they lose when they exchange them. It's the same thing whether they're heading to China, Europe or even Argentina.''
In Manhattan's Bowery district, Billy LeRoy, the owner of Billy's Antiques & Props, prefers payment in euros so he can stockpile the currency for his annual antique buying trip to Paris.
''Whip out dollars at the French flea market now, and they'll shoo you away,'' he said at his store near apartment buildings where Europeans are snapping up units because they've become dirt cheap. ''Before it was like the second coming of Christ, but now they don't want it or if they do take dollars, they're going to take their pound of flesh.''
The dollar has steadily eroded in value against the euro and other currencies since 2002 as U.S. budget and trade deficits ballooned, but fears of an American recession and credit crisis have sent the dollar to stunning lows amid predictions the slump will continue for a long time.
The euro traded for a record $1.5625 before declining to $1.5586 Thursday while the dollar dropped below 100 Japanese yen for the first time since November 1995. It traded as low as 99.75 yen before recovering some ground to 101.68 yen. The dollar also recently hit a 10-year low against the Chilean peso, and fell to its lowest level against Brazil's real since the nation floated its currency in 1999.
While low dollar cycles have come and gone for decades, experts caution that it's now much more difficult to predict when this one will end because the euro didn't exist as competition for the dollar before.
During previous U.S. economic downturns, big foreign funds typically snapped up U.S. treasuries, helping to shore up the dollar to a certain degree. But the euro and currencies from other nations are now seen as legitimate options, and interest rates are higher outside the United States _ meaning the funds can get better returns on investments elsewhere.
''You have the U.S. still holding this trade deficit, but now you have the possibility of a U.S. led recession, and you have a weakening currency. So it's a very dark outlook for the dollar,'' said Gareth Sylvester, senior currency strategist with the British firm HIFX Inc., which executed $40 billion in currency trades last year.
Nations that were once seen as incredibly risky for investments _ such as Brazil _ are now seen as good long-term bets. And countries such as China and Russia, with burgeoning coffers of money to invest abroad, are thought to be shifting some of their reserves or diversifying fresh income to destinations and currencies outside the United States.
It used to be important for most countries ''to accumulate dollars as a precautionary element against rainy days, but the accumulation of reserves has become so large in most emerging market countries that the balance is way beyond what's needed for precautionary reasons,'' said Eliot Kalter, a fellow at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a former International Monetary Fund official.
While most experts believe the dollar will eventually regain strength, no one is willing to predict when that will happen.
''I think the factors that are affecting the weakness of the dollar will be reversed, but no time soon,'' Kalter said.
The problem right now, is that ''people just don't want to be holding U.S dollars and U.S.-based equities,'' Sylvester added. ''If you are an investor with a million dollars to invest, you look for the highest yield _ you're looking at South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.''
And it's not only the big time investors that are looking for other options.
In Peru, where savings in U.S. dollars were long a popular hedge against inflation, many citizens are closing dollar accounts in favor of Peruvian soles.
At the same time, businesses like supermarkets, movie theaters and cable TV companies that used to accept dollars are now demanding soles.
Edwin Figueroa, a 29-year-old systems engineer, switched his checking account from dollars to soles seven months ago as the dollar's decline started worrying him. He doesn't think he'll be going back anytime soon.
The Peruvian sol ''is stable now,'' he said. ''And maybe in a year, the dollar will even go lower.''
Welcome to the new Babylon - Empires in the Desert
http://www.commodityonline.com/news/topstory/newsdetails.php?id=6275&cont=1
For 3,881 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest structure ever built. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World had a lot to live up to even then. The Great Pyramid and its cohorts remain something to see: a feat of strength and wealth shouting to the world, “Look at me!”
Well, there’s a new Pharaoh in town, and he’s building the world’s tallest buildings on the backs of foreign workers and foreign cash, just like old times. The Middle East once again holds the distinction of being home to the tallest structure on earth.
Dubai alone has more than 270 high-rises and is in the midst of constructing an additional 339. Furthermore, 330 high-rise construction projects have already been approved.
In fact, by 2015, Dubai will have more buildings of 100-plus floors than any other city in the world.
As mind-boggling as that sounds, Pharaoh’s only just begun…
The top 10 tallest buildings are a cumulative 4,918 feet. That’s not even counting Dubai’s newest skyscraper, Burj Dubai. That one, to be completed this year, is expected to be more than 2,000 feet.
The Burj Dubai alone will be more than the height of four Great Pyramids… more than all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stacked on top of each other.
Remember, too, that the Great Pyramid took 20 years to build. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus took six times that -- well over a century.
In contrast, the mighty Burj Dubai will be completed on December 30, 2008 -- less than four years from the time they broke ground.
Indeed, the Pharaohs live again.
What’s even more astounding than the heights of these new “Colossi” of Rhodes are the price tags. The top two towers in Dubai rang in at $650 million and $4.1 billion, or more than the entire GDPs of Belize and Barbados combined.
You haven’t seen anything, though, until you’ve looked at Dubai with a wide-angle lens.
Burj Dubai, the tower that will exceed 2,000 feet, is part of a larger development called “Downtown Burj Dubai.” It will be home to 30,000 citizens, with 19 residential towers and nine hotels.
And it will cost $20 billion to build.
If I stopped now, you’d probably be reasonably amazed at the amount of money these projects cost, at their sheer sizes and ambitions. But I have to tell you, Downtown Burj Dubai is small potatoes.
Another city, to be named Masdar City and constructed less than 100 miles from Dubai on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, will cost $22 billion and will be the first “green” city ever built.
But even these two massive projects combined don’t equal half the cost of Kuwait’s Silk City. This immense city will be home to 700,000 people and the 1,001-meter-tall Mubarak Tower -- the centerpiece of the Silk City skyline.
To channel Robin Leech for a moment, “The price tag for these champagne wishes and caviar dreams is an eye-watering $86 billion.”
I could spend an untold amount of time telling you all the amazing things this city will include, like a resort, a 200-hectare desert preserve, a new international airport, a new railway, and a bridge linking it to Kuwait City.
Instead, I’ll just send you to the official website, and move on to an even bigger project.
Yes, bigger…
Saudi Arabia is in the midst of constructing a city costing nearly more than these three huge projects (Downtown Burj Dubai, Masdar City and Silk City).
King Abdullah Economic City will cost more than $120 billion. That’s 16% more than Kuwait’s entire GDP.
It will be home to 2 million people in six distinct cities within 168 million square meters of prime coastal land.
A 14 million square-meter port on the Red Sea will make this mega-city a hub for trade with Europe, Africa and Asia. A central business district promises to be a new financial capital of the world. Sea resorts will offer some of the best tourist destinations in the Middle East.
The Industrial, Residential and Education zones are expected to be second to none.
I don’t mean to sound like a cheerleader. I just can’t help but stand in awe of these countries that are able to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into these massive “pleasure projects.”
For example, the United Arab Emirates is putting $60 billion into Dubailand, an entertainment district that will cover 3 billion square feet and include some of the largest, most expensive attractions ever built.
How big is a 3-billion-square-foot amusement park exactly? First, take every single Disney-owned theme park and resort in the world. Then imagine them all in one place. Then double that.
Middle Eastern countries are literally creating Empires in the Desert, building them on a scale never before seen or even imagined. Their only limits are the depths of their pockets. And right now, those pockets seem to have no bottom at all.
Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09stream.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
It has been more than two decades since Scotty tried to use a computer mouse as a microphone to control a Macintosh in “Star Trek IV.”
Since then, personal computer users have continued to live under the tyranny of the mice, windows, icons and pull-down menus originally invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and popularized by Apple and Microsoft in the next decade.
Last year, however, the arrival of the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone began to break down the logjam in technological innovation for the way humans interact with computers.
Both devices extend the idea of directly controlling objects on the screen and blending that ability with visually compelling physics software that brings computer screens to life in new, immersive ways. With a Wii, a wave of the hand can slam a tennis ball in cyberspace; with the iPhone, a flick of a finger can slide a photograph across the screen like paper on a table.
The idea of directly manipulating information on a computer screen is almost as old computer graphics terminals, going back at least to 1963, to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad drawing system he created at M.I.T. for his Ph.D. thesis. Since then, a thriving scientific and engineering discipline has sprung up around systems that bridge what was originally called the man-machine interface. There has been a broad exploration of pointing devices, alternatives to keyboards for entering information, voice-recognition technologies, and even sensors that capture and interact with human brain waves.
What is new is a convergence of more powerful and less expensive computer hardware and an inspired set of mostly younger software designers who came of age well past the advent of the original graphical user interface paradigm of the 1970s and ’80s.
This new generation is “mostly under 25,” said Joy Mountford, who until last month was vice president for design innovation at an advanced development group at Yahoo. “They come from a world of fluid media, and they multitask at an extraordinary level.”
One intriguing example of this new immersive approach to Web navigation is the PicLens software from Cooliris, a 10-person start-up based here.
This software plug-in for Web browsers tries to make it possible to navigate, find and share information by directly browsing the images, video and other digital media that are increasingly common on the Web.
PicLens currently offers a small icon cue inset in each Web photo that lets users know they are at a site like Facebook, Google or Flickr that can be browsed with the software. Clicking on the icon transports the user away from the conventional page-oriented Web into an immersive browsing environment.
The software does away with the browser frame and gives the user the effect of flying through a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images. In the future, the Cooliris designers plan to make it possible to browse text and video as well.
“I’ve wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn’t changed from 20 years ago,” said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. “People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.”
Some of these ideas can be traced back to the 1990s, to work done at the M.I.T. Media Lab. In 2002, a former student there, John Underkoffler, brought the idea of direct manipulation to life in “Minority Report,” the science-fiction movie. (In the movie, Tom Cruise interacts with a wall-size transparent computer display directly with his hands.) More recently, the idea of a multitouch display, where images could be moved or scaled by direct touch, was brought to life both by Jeff Han, a computer science researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and by W. Daniel Hillis and Bran Ferren, researchers at the consulting firm Applied Minds, who developed a “touch table” world map.
The transition to more immersive displays is happening in part because of more powerful computer hardware, but also because of an explosion of more powerful programming tools. These tools offer visual effects that were once within the grasp of only the most skillful programmers to a wide audience with only basic skills.
“The old paradigm is breaking down,” said Paul Mercer, senior director of software at Palm Inc. “It used to be that you needed to be a visionary and technologist like Michelangelo, but we’re turning that corner.”
Indeed, the more powerful graphics-oriented software has spilled over into the creation of palettes for a new generation of software-oriented artists. One new programming language, Processing, is an extension of Sun’s Java designed specifically for students, artists, designers, researchers and hobbyists who are interested in programming images, animations and interactions. It has been used extensively at “Design and the Elastic Mind,” a digital art exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Voice, too, is finally beginning to play a significant role as an interface tool in a new generation of consumer-oriented wireless handsets. Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.’s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens.
“We’re on the verge of creating something as compelling as touch, except with voice,” said Mike McCue, general manager of the Tellme subsidiary of Microsoft.
The common theme of all of the technologies will be a new kind of immersive experience.
“If you’re looking for what’s next after the Web browser, this is it,” said Bill Joy, a partner at the Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, the venture firm that is funding Cooliris.
Britain makes camera that "sees" under clothes
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080309/tc_nm/security_britain_technology_dc
A British company has developed a camera that can detect weapons, drugs or explosives hidden under people's clothes from up to 25 meters away in what could be a breakthrough for the security industry.
The T5000 camera, created by a company called ThruVision, uses what it calls "passive imaging technology" to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays -- known as Terahertz or T-rays -- that they emit.
The high-powered camera can detect hidden objects from up to 80 feet away and is effective even when people are moving. It does not reveal physical body details and the screening is harmless, the company says.
The technology, which has military and civilian applications and could be used in crowded airports, shopping malls or sporting events, will be unveiled at a scientific development exhibition sponsored by Britain's Home Office on March 12-13.
"Acts of terrorism have shaken the world in recent years and security precautions have been tightened globally," said Clive Beattie, the chief executive of ThruVision.
"The ability to see both metallic and non-metallic items on people out to 25 meters is certainly a key capability that will enhance any comprehensive security system."
While the technology may enhance detection, it may also increase concerns that Britain is becoming a surveillance society, with hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit television cameras already monitoring people countrywide every day.
ThruVision came up with the technology for the T5000 in collaboration with the European Space Agency and from studying research by astronomers into dying stars.
The technology works on the basis that all people and objects emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation. Terahertz rays lie somewhere between infrared and microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum and travel through clouds and walls.
Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.
From Second Life to the Star Trek holodeck — virtual reality is brining users closer to interacting with holograms
http://physorg.com/news124368610.html
Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.
A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others.
The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.
At a recent conference on artificial intelligence, the researchers unveiled the “embodiment” of their success to date: “Eddie,” a 4-year-old child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.
“Current avatars in massively multiplayer online worlds — such as Second Life — are directly tethered to a user’s keystrokes and only give the illusion of mentality,” said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. “Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.”
Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer, according to Bringsjord.
The principles and techniques that humans deploy in order to understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other humans is collectively referred to as a “theory of mind.”
Bringsjord’s research group is now starting to engineer part of that theory, which would allow artificial agents to understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other agents, in order to be genuine stand-ins for human beings or autonomous intellects in their own right.
The logico-mathematical theory will include rigorous, declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil, according to Bringsjord.
To test “Eddie’s” reasoning powers, the group created a demo in Second Life that subjected their theory to a false-belief test.
In a typical real-life version of this test, a child witnesses a series of events in which Person A places an object (such as a teddy bear) in a certain location (such as a cabinet). Person A then leaves the room, and during his absence Person B moves the object to a new location (such as the refrigerator). The child is then asked to predict where Person A will look for the object when he gets back.
The right answer, of course, is the cabinet, but children age 4 and under will generally say the refrigerator because they haven’t yet formed a theory of the mind of others.
The researchers recreated the same situation in Second Life, using an automated theorem prover coupled with procedures for converting conversational English in Second Life into formal logic, the native language of the prover.
When the code is executed, the software simulates keystrokes in Second Life. This enables control of “Eddie,” who demonstrates an incorrect prediction of where Person A will look for the teddy bear — a response consistent with that of a 4-year old child.
But, in an instant, Eddie’s mind can be improved, and if the test is run again, he makes the correct prediction.
“Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have — as avatars — states that are correlates to those experienced by humans,” Bringsjord said.
“Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense.”
This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and the team hopes to engineer a version of the Star Trek holodeck — a virtual reality system used onboard the starships that allowed users to interact with the projected holograms of other individuals.
Such a system could allow cognitively robust synthetic characters to interact directly with human beings, according to Bringsjord.
The proposed research would require the use of two of Rensselaer’s state-of-the-art research facilities — the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).
The most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world, the CCNI is made up of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters, providing more than 100 teraflops of computing power.
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