McCain tells American Jews: Obama is dangerous to Israel
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&nid=16194
Republican presidential candidate John McCain reasserted a pro-Israel stance, flaunted his recent visit to Israel and said that the US would not accept a nuclear Iran under his leadership.
Stumping at a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Monday he attacked his opponent, democratic candidate Barack Obama, who is also expected to address the three-day convention along with Hillary Clinton, embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I am committed to making certain Israel maintains its qualitative military edge. Israel's enemies are too numerous, its margin of error too small and our shared interests and values too great for us to follow any other policy,” the Arizona senator said.
McCain criticized Obama’s soft stance on Iran, which he said is dangerous to Israel and the region. The former prisoner of war said that America must be tough on Iran.
“Armed as well with its ballistic missile arsenal, an Iranian nuclear bomb would pose an existential threat to the people of Israel.”
He also recalled his recent visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
“Today, when we join in saying 'never again', that is not a wish, a request or a plea to the enemies of Israel. It is a promise that the United States and Israel will honor against any enemy," he said.
Obama: The danger from Iran is real and my goal is to eliminate this threat
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5321
In his first foreign policy speech after clinching the Democratic nomination for president, Sen. Barack Obama vowed that as president he would deepen American defense cooperation with Israel. “Those who threaten Israel, threaten us. I will bring an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security and guarantee Israel’s military strength so that it can defend itself from any threat – from Gaza to Tehran. Obama said he would sign a memo of understanding promising Israel $30 bn over 10 years. He was addressing the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference, June 4.
Obama spelled out his position on talks with Iran. He said: “I will do everything in my power – everything, everything - to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Iran has grown stronger and increased its support for terror since this administration went to war in Iraq “and I refuse to support a policy that has made the US and Israel less secure.”
Proposing getting US troops out of Iraq “carefully”, Obama urged broaching Iran first with “aggressive principles and diplomacy. We have no time to waste. I would keep the military option on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel,” he stressed.” But, he said, diplomacy can be tough if backed by real leverage with no illusions. “We must give Iran a clear choice: Abandon nuclear weapons, support for terror and hatred for Israel or else we will ratchet up the pressure. Al Qods is rightly labeled a terrorist organization.
“If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed at home and abroad if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.
Some lay all the Middle East problems at the door of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians, he said. “It is not, never has been and never will be.”
He endorsed the Bush vision of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, saying there was no room at the negotiating table for [the Hamas] terrorists. While stressing that Israel’s identity must be preserved as “a Jewish state with secure, recongized and defensible borders and Jerusalem its undivided capital,” Obama also stated that the Palestinians need a state “that is contiguous.” He advised Israel to take steps consistent with its security to ease conditions on the West Bank and refrain from building new settlements.
Obama declared repeatedly that as president he would never compromise on his commitment to Israel’s security – “not while there are still voices that deny the Holocaust, not when there are terrorists who threaten Israel’s existence and there are rockets raining down from Gaza.”
Asserting that oil prices are a dangerous weapon and they were bankrolling the Iranian regime, he urged greater US-Israeli partnership to develop alternative sources of energy.
Summit Unlikely to Reach Biofuel Agreement
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/386500.aspx
CBNNews.com - ROME -- The U.S. Agriculture Secretary says he doubts the U.N. food summit will reach an agreement on the role of biofuels.
Ed Schafer told reporters Wednesday that the conference's final document would probably include some compromise language.
Participants at a U.N. summit on the world's food crisis have differed this week over how much the rush for environmentally friendly biofuels is contributing to rocketing food prices.
Fuels made from sugar cane, corn and other crops have been seen as a way to combat rising oil prices.
But environmentalists and some countries are becoming increasingly wary of biofuels, which they say could contribute heavily to the commodities price hike by diverting production from food crops to biofuel crops.
Gov't Releases Report on Modern Slavery
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/386627.aspx
CBNNews.com - The U.S. State Department released its annual report on what the government calls Modern Day Slavery.
This year 14 countries - including Myanmar , Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea - bottom out the list and face possible sanctions such as withholding non-humanitarian foreign aid.
The report looks at how governments fight human trafficking.
Today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged the significant progress that's been made, but pointed out there's still a lot of work to be done.
"We closely examined prosecution data and made a disturbing discovery. Although more countries are addressing human trafficking through prosecution and conviction the petty tyrants who exploit their laborers rarely receive serious punishment," Rice said.
The U.S. government estimates around 800,000 people are bought, sold, or transported for forced labor or sex each year, mostly female and minors.
'Expelled' Makers Win Legal Battle
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/386758.aspx
CBNNews.com - Makers of the movie "Expelled" survived a legal challenge Monday, confirming the documentary would not be kicked out of theaters.
Yoko Ono sued the filmmakers for using a 15 second excerpt of the famous Beatles' song "Imagine," written by her late husband John Lennon.
But U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein ruled that the song could be borrowed under the "fair use doctrine."
"That doctrine provides that the fair use of a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism and commentary is not an infringement of copyright," the judge wrote in his decision in Manhattan federal court.
Lawyers representing Premise Media Corp., Rampant Films and Rocky Mountain Pictures Inc. said they were pleased with the decision.
"There were important free-speech issues here - they were literally asking the judge to censor the film," lawyer Anthony Falzone said.
The "Expelled" documentary presents intelligent design or the theory that the universe is too complex to be explained by evolution alone.
It also highlights cases where scientists lost their jobs for challenging the theory of evolution.
Bird-Flu Exposure Detected in 15,000 Hens in Arkansas
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,362721,00.html
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Tyson Foods Inc. has begun killing and burying the carcasses of 15,000 hens in northwest Arkansas that tested positive for exposure to a strain of the avian flu that is not harmful to humans, state officials said Tuesday.
Jon Fitch, director of the state's Livestock and Poultry Commission, said routine blood tests conducted Friday found the possible exposure. Further tests done by the state and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found the birds did not have active infections, but rather were exposed to a subtype of the disease.
Fitch said the company immediately began disposing of the birds.
"There is absolutely no human health threat," Fitch said. "But we take this very seriously."
Fitch said state officials decided against announcing the infection to the general public because the birds tested positive for exposure to the H7N3 strain of the virus. The strain that ravaged Asian poultry stocks in late 2003 was H5N1 bird flu virus. That version of the virus has killed 240 people worldwide and scientists worry it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people.
Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for Springdale-based Tyson, said the hens showed no signs of sickness before their pre-slaughter blood tests. He said the exposed birds all came from a contractor.
"As a preventive measure, Tyson is also stepping up its surveillance of avian influenza in the area," Mickelson said in a statement. "The company plans to test all breeder farms that serve the local Tyson poultry complex, as well as any farms within a 10-mile radius of the affected farm."
Matt DeCample, a spokesman for Gov. Mike Beebe, said the governor was alerted about the tests Monday.
Stock in Tyson, the world's largest meat producer, fell by 8 percent in trading Tuesday, down $1.47 to $16.98 per share.
The Florida Healing Outpouring
http://www.gracethrufaith.com/selah/spiritual-life/the-florida-healing-outpouring
If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God. ( 1 Cor. 14:27-28)
Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said. And if a revelation comes to someone who is sitting down, the first speaker should stop. For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged. The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. (1 Cor. 14:29-33)
Therefore, my brothers, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way. (1 Cor. 14:39-40)
Every time something like this Florida Healing Outpouring comes along I am absolutely amazed at the naivety of believers. A simple reading of 1 Cor. 12 and 14 would show this disorganized, chaotic event to be the hoax it is. I believe that the people who attend think it's real, but their leaders should be sharply rebuked for their lack of discernment. It appears they've been blinded by their own desire for fame and fortune.
And now people are traveling from all over the country (some say the world) to capture the Holy Spirit and bring Him home with them. Since when do believers have to travel to some far away location to bring the Holy Spirit back to their church? If the Holy Spirit isn't already in their church, do they think making a trip to Florida will change things?
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)
We've had the Toronto and Brownsville blessings, the holy laughter and the barking and growling in the spirit. Each of these was heralded as the beginning of a great revival meant to take the world for Jesus, but a decade later the Church is smaller and weaker than ever.
Now we've got more intoxication in the spirit. It causes people to lose their inhibitions altogether. The behavior gets more demeaning with each new iteration of these so-called blessings, and the claims get more outrageous. We're told of angels walking among us, of visits to heaven where we learn that Paul doesn't occupy a mansion in the sky, but something more like a cabin on Walden Pond. We have angel feathers floating down and gold dust being sprinkled around. All these things seem to be especially designed to show us just how gullible we have become, and how ripe for deception.
For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (2 Tim 4:3)
But how did God instruct his people to act? Paul devoted 4 complete chapters to the subject of order and decorum in worship. (1 Cor. 11-14) This is consistent with Old Testament teachings that prohibited God's people from doing anything that demeaned their appearance or behavior. Their dress, their appearance, and their actions were all supposed to bring honor to God. Is God honored by people barking like dogs and acting like they're falling-down drunk?
Where is the Biblical precedent for this so-called spiritual out pouring? Wouldn't the Book that's supposed to be our guide for behavior mention this somewhere? Except to condemn it, the Bible is silent.
Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. (James 3:1)
I know God heals people because I've seen Him do it. I've prayed over people and the Lord has healed them and they've stayed healed. I myself have been healed from knee problems that made it impossible for me to walk up or down stairs or even get up after kneeling. While I've read that these things exist, I have yet to see any first person accounts of healing from Florida, or confirmation of such from an independent source. I hope and pray that folks are really being healed, because if they aren't untold numbers of seekers will be turned away from their search and God will have been mocked again by the very people who claim to be His own. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes if that's the case.
Unfortunately, the so-called Renewal and Revival Movement has not proven itself to be the most credible source in verifying the miraculous. If this outpouring is real, and people are being healed, they should invite church leaders from outside the movement to help them substantiate their claims. After all, Jesus sent the lepers He healed to the Temple for inspection by the priests. (Matt. 8:4) Should we expect any less today?
It's time for the church to get over our “zeal without knowledge” mentality and ask for some hard evidence. Asking for proof isn't demonstrating a lack of faith, it's holding people accountable for the claims they make in the Name of the Lord. It's not only logical that we should do this, it's also Biblical.
Colorado Governor Signs Anti-Discrimination Bill that will "forcibly normalize all varieties of sexual orientation"
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jun/08060204.html
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter signed a controversial new bill on Thursday that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and challenges the freedom of religious groups to oppose the homosexual lifestyle.
Despite a Focus on the Family media campaign urging veto of the bill, the governor signed Senate Bill 200 into law. The legislation forbids sexual orientation discrimination in "public accommodations," broadly defined to include any business, including home-based ones, that offer "goods and services" to the public.
Tom Minnery, senior vice president of government and public policy at Focus on the Family Action, warned in his Denver Post editorial last Saturday that SB 200 would "forcibly normalize all varieties of sexual orientation". Because "transsexual" is considered a sexual orientation, the bill would free men to enter women's restrooms and locker-rooms, noted Minnery.
"There are multiple problems with this legislation, but the problem of restrooms is the most breathtaking one. Until now, establishments open to the public have been allowed to restrict certain restrooms and locker rooms to one sex if it made sense to do so, as it almost always does."
"With SB 200, however, we no longer have two 'sexes'; we enter a brave new world with a myriad of 'sexual orientations' that must not be discriminated against, upon pain of the substantial civil and criminal penalties contained in the bill."
"Woe to the first women's fitness facility or mall owner who objects to a man dressed as a woman who wants to enter previously forbidden territory. And what an opportunity for sexual predators to use this law as 'cover' to enter intimate areas in search of a victim."
Democrat sponsor of the bill Senator Jennifer Veiga dismissed Focus on the Family's concern over bathroom and locker-room intrusions as "scare tactics."
Minnery also contended that the bill's application to small businesses threatens the religious freedom of operators of faith-based organizations.
"This is not a hypothetical threat. In Albuquerque, which has a similar law, a Christian husband and wife who own and operate their own photography studio were recently hauled before that state's human rights commission and fined more than $6,600 for politely refusing, on religious grounds, to photograph a lesbian 'commitment ceremony.'"
"We've seen similar charges brought by homosexuals against a video reproduction business in Virginia, a medical clinic in California, an adoption service in Arizona and a church in New Jersey," Minnery added.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) hailed the new Colorado bill as a civil rights victory.
"No one should be denied housing or access to public accommodations solely because of his or her sexual orientation," stated ADL Mountain States Regional Office Director Bruce DeBoskey.
Opponents of the bill have indicated that the legislation will do more than open public accommodations to practitioners of unorthodox sexual behavior.
"None of us wants to see people humiliated or embarrassed because of how they appear in public and no one should be turned away from hotels, restaurants and other truly 'public accommodations.' But this law intrudes on the freedoms of conscience of untold numbers of people of faith, and the consequences for Colorado will be severe," noted Minnery.
Human Life Amendment Signatures Certified - Historic Amendment Officially on November's Ballot
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion07259.shtml
DENVER, (christiansunite.com) -- For the first time in US history, the issue of personhood will be decided in the public forum by a constitutional amendment. Colorado for Equal Rights has been notified by the Colorado Secretary of State's Office that enough valid signatures were submitted to put the Every Human is a Person amendment on the November 2008 ballot. The Secretary of State's Office's random sampling indicated that there were 103,377 valid signatures, surpassing the 76,047 valid signatures that were required.
"The people of Colorado have spoken, the Secretary of State's Office has certified our signatures, and our equal rights amendment will be on November's ballot," stated Kristi Burton, initiative sponsor. "All humans should be protected by love and by law, and this amendment is a historic effort to ensure equal rights for every person."
Colorado for Equal Rights has demonstrated an unparalleled grassroots effort thus far, with likely more volunteer circulators than any other ballot initiative in the State's history. The grassroots initiative had over 1,300 volunteer petition circulators.
"We at Colorado for Equal Rights are incredibly thankful for our many volunteers who worked so hard for each signature we delivered to the Secretary of State's Office and the churches who stood behind us and supported us," Burton continued. "This victory is the voice of the people and all credit goes our Creator"
Colorado for Equal Rights is a statewide grassroots organization of concerned citizens who value human life. Colorado for Equal Rights is sponsoring the Human Life Amendment to the Colorado constitution, stating "(t)he term 'Person' or 'Persons' shall include any human from the time of fertilization."
Graduate Science Program Claims 'Viewpoint Discrimination' in Appeal of Texas Education Ruling
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion07257.shtml
DALLAS, (christiansunite.com) -- The California-based Institute for Creation Research Graduate School (ICRGS), established in 1981, has submitted its formal petition to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) calling for the education agency to reverse its decision to deny ICRGS' application for a Certificate of Authority to grant Master of Science degrees in the state of Texas.
The petition paves the way for ICRGS to sue the state agency and its officials in federal and/or state court.
The unconstitutional exercise of "viewpoint discrimination" is the focus of the ICRGS appeal and names Commissioner Raymund Paredes, Assistant Commissioner Joseph Stafford, Academic Excellence Committee chairperson Lyn Bracewell Phillips, and other THECB board members, who denied the application of ICRGS because its program is based on a creationist interpretation of scientific data rather than an evolutionary interpretation, which is prevalent in public education.
The ICRGS petition claims that the THECB failed to evaluate the ICRGS application without viewpoint discrimination. The formal petition sent to Austin includes 26 evidentiary appendices that buttress the academic freedom and other legal rights of ICRGS to offer its 27-year-old graduate program to Texas residents.
The petition was also delivered to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott due to the THECB's alleged violations of constitutional law standards.
Updates about the ICRGS case can be found at the organization's website at www.icr.org
Former National Operation Rescue Leaders Publicly Support Operation Rescue Director Troy Newman After Randall Terry Files Unbiblical Lawsuit
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion07258.shtml
MEDIA ADVISORY, (christiansunite.com) -- The men and women listed below were prominent national leaders of Operation Rescue during the period of Randall Terry's involvement in the organization.
They are stunned and angered by Mr. Terry's public attacks against the excellent work of Troy Newman and Operation Rescue in Wichita, Kansas, especially in the face of Mr. Terry abandoning Operation Rescue leadership over 15 years ago.
They felt Mr. Terry's vindictive and unchristian actions along with the harmful impact on the great work of Operation Rescue demanded this strong public response.
The former leaders have long disassociated from Randall Terry after his repeated refusal to submit to biblical restoration and oversight and Mr. Terry's continued negative lifestyle choices. These leaders can no longer work with Mr. Terry on any public projects.
Some of Mr. Terry's unbiblical lifestyle decisions include:
- Misstatements and deception to donors about his financial situation.
- Misuse and lack of accountability with respect to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the pro-life community.
- Improper and immoral relationships.
The Operation Rescue leaders are praying that Randall Terry repents and seeks God's help for spiritual restoration, healing of shattered and broken relationships and restitution of all ill-gained funds. They are also willing to sit down with Mr. Terry and other Christian leaders, in a biblical fashion, for prayer and to discuss their concerns.
Jeff White, former National Tactical Director with Operation Rescue, states, "It is with grief and brokenness that we send out this statement. For years, many have prayed and counseled with our brother Randall Terry as he continued in a sinful and manipulative lifestyle. Sadly, he has rejected all counsel and guidance from many Operation Rescue national leaders and chose a self-centered life narrative.
"Throughout this time, we have chosen to remain silent in hopes that somehow Randall would find his internal spiritual bearings and return back to a life of integrity and purpose. However, this is not the case.
"We now feel compelled to speak up because Randall's actions are hurting the work of Troy Newman and Operation Rescue in their efforts to see George Tiller end his barbaric abortion practices in Wichita, Kansas. Additionally, we can no longer remain silent while Mr. Terry continues to fleece unsuspecting pro-life people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for his personal and selfish gain."
Gov. Sebelius' 'Damage Control' Response Called 'Laughable' by OR
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion07256.shtml
WICHITA, Kansas, (christiansunite.com) -- Gov. Sebelius' office has released what Operation Rescue is calling a "laughable" response to photographs published by OR this morning, saying that the Tiller party depicted in a dozen photographs was a prize in a charity auction in which Sebelius had no control over who would attend.
"According to our source, who attended the event at Cedar Crest, the party was 'by special invitation only.' It was obvious to this person that Tiller was on a very friendly basis with Sebelius and took the time to personally introduce each member of his abortion clinic staff to the governor," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. "Our source was very specific that the event's purpose was to 'honor' Tiller and his staff. The pictures, especially the ones that include the political t-shirts produced by Tiller, back up our source's claims."
"It is laughable for Sebelius to now say she has no control over who she parties with. The Women's Political Caucus is a radical leftist feminist organization that is providing the smoke and mirrors to cover for the Tiller party," said Newman. "We don't buy it."
Receipts obtained by Operation Rescue from the Governor's office show that that taxpayers paid for the April 9, 2007, event.
This event an indication of a broader relationship that the Governor shares with the abortion industry.
Just over a month after the Tiller soiree, Gov. Sebelius celebrated her birthday on May 15, 2007, at a party thrown by Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid- Missouri while they were still under investigation by the Attorney General's office and the Johnson County District Attorney. The party featured Planned Parenthood CEP Peter Brownlie leading a conga line in celebration. Planned Parenthood was later cleared by Sebelius' hand-picked Attorney General Paul Morrison but charged by District Attorney Phill Kline with 107 criminal charges related to illegal abortions and manufacturing records.
About Operation Rescue Operation Rescue is one of the leading pro-life Christian activist organizations in the nation. Operation Rescue recently made headlines when it bought and closed an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas and has become the voice of the pro-life activist movement in America. Its activities are on the cutting edge of the abortion issue, taking direct action to restore legal personhood to the pre-born and stop abortion in obedience to biblical mandates.
Forecaster expects busy Atlantic hurricane season
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0335932420080603?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews
The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season will likely be a busy one with 15 tropical storms, of which eight will turn into hurricanes, the noted Colorado State University forecasting team said on Tuesday.
The prediction from the research team founded by hurricane forecasting pioneer William Gray was unchanged from the one CSU issued in April, which called for four of the eight hurricanes to become "major" storms, the most destructive type, with sustained winds of more than 110 miles per hour (177 kph).
The average hurricane season produces roughly 10 tropical storms and six hurricanes.
The CSU forecast said warm Atlantic sea temperatures, along with low pressure at the ocean's surface and low levels of vertical wind shear, would contribute to an above-average season.
Hurricanes draw energy from warm water, while vertical wind shear, a difference in wind speeds at different altitudes, can disrupt nascent storms.
"Conditions in the tropical Atlantic look quite favorable for an active hurricane season," lead forecaster Phil Klotzbach said in a statement.
The official six-month Atlantic hurricane season began on Sunday. The first cyclone of the year, Tropical Storm Arthur, formed a day earlier off the coast of Belize and moved quickly inland.
The storm lasted less than a day before weakening to a tropical depression, but it still forced Mexico to shut two of its three main crude oil ports because of rough seas.
Arthur drenched southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, threatening deadly flash floods and mudslides.
Klotzbach said forecasters were closely monitoring sea temperatures in the eastern Pacific for the development of El Nino, a warming of ocean water that can dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
"At this point, we do not believe that an El Nino will develop by late this summer," he said.
The CSU forecast called for a 69 percent chance that at least one major hurricane would hit the U.S. coast, well above the long-term average of 52 percent. It gave a 45 percent probability of a major hurricane on the East Coast and a 44 percent chance on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Energy, insurance and commodities markets have tracked Atlantic storms closely since the catastrophic years of 2004 and 2005.
Four powerful hurricanes hit Florida in 2004, collectively causing $45 billion in damage. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina became the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history when it ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf coast, causing $80 billion in damage and killing 1,500 people.
That year saw 28 tropical storms and hurricanes, the highest number since recordkeeping began in 1851.
Researchers say the Atlantic basin entered a period of heightened hurricane activity around 1995 that could last for 25 to 40 years. Some suggest human-induced global warming may be contributing to more and stronger hurricanes, while others say the increased numbers are due to natural cycles.
The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/world/europe/03russia.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.
He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.
Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)
“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.
Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers.
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.
“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
Is GPS Big Help Or Big Brother?
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/jun/01/me-is-gps-big-help-or-big-brother/?news-metro
These days, your boss can call you on your cell phone on your time off, maybe even over the weekend or while you're on vacation.
What about the idea of your boss being able to track where you are and where you've been?
The city of Tampa is doing just that. Inspectors in its building department now carry cell phones equipped with global positioning system technology so the city can keep tabs on inspectors. Supervisors hope the GPS gizmos will improve efficiency and crack down on slackers.
Employers increasingly are using GPS devices to keep track of workers on the road, especially as the technology gets cheaper and the price of gas rises.
But while backers say the trend leads to cost savings and improved customer service, it also has raised questions about privacy and Orwellian employer tactics.
One Tampa building inspector describes it as being followed by Big Brother.
"It's like, 'Hey, you know, we're watching you,'" said Benjamin Buckley, who has worked for the city for three years and is the union shop steward for the building inspection department.
The GPS technology was installed on about 40 inspectors' cell phones about two weeks ago. The service will cost about $20 to $30 per month for each phone, said John Barrios, manager of the city's construction services division.
Right Place, Right Time
City building inspectors are mostly road warriors who travel from appointment to appointment in city-issued vehicles. Although preventing taxpayer money from going to workers who goof off on the job would be a bonus, it's not the primary reason he wanted the devices installed, Barrios said.
Mostly, the department wants to know which inspectors are where so Barrios can send the right worker to the right place in a last-minute emergency, he said.
"I don't know what you can say to folks who are paranoid. My simple response is that if you're acting appropriately and professionally, it doesn't really matter who's watching," Barrios said. "You have nothing to be concerned about."
That may be so, but it still might have an effect on employees who follow the rules, too, says Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group.
"When employees feel like every move that they make is being tracked, it impacts upon them in ways that I think that are harmful to employee morale," Stephens said. "It's the same as if you felt like you were being constantly watched by a camera."
Other city departments might follow suit if the inspector program proves successful. Darrell Smith, the city's chief of staff, said one of the benefits would be the ability to immediately locate a city worker who gets in trouble out in the field.
Developed in the 1970s by the U.S. military, global positioning systems use satellite signals to transmit positions to a ground-based receiver. When the government opened the technology to civilians in the 1980s, it was still relatively unheard of and, for most people, unaffordable.
As technology expanded, the GPS market took off and trackers are becoming increasingly common, especially in cars, where people use GPS devices to get driving directions. Boaters and hikers also increasingly use the technology.
Cell phone-based GPS technology makes up about 10 percent of the consumer market, a figure that is growing, said Sal Dhanani, co-founder of TeleNav, a GPS company.
Caught On The Golf Course
For many companies that offer on-the-road customer service, the technology makes sense, Dhanani said. "It keeps people on track to make sure they're doing the jobs they're supposed to be doing," he said. "If you're supposed to be at a customer's house at 2 p.m., you're there at 2 p.m."
In Chicago last month, the superintendent of the city's sewer department was suspended from his job when his city-issued GPS device showed he was golfing when he was supposed to be working, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
In Indiana last year, six Fort Wayne-Allen county employees lost their jobs after an administrator placed GPS devices in department vehicles to catch health inspectors running personal errands on the job, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported.
The Tampa city employees union has so far fielded few complaints about the GPS tracking program but will be meeting with the city's human resources department this week to learn more about how the system will work, said Bernie Menendez, the union vice president.
Billboards That Look Back
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.
Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.
“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”
Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.
Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.
“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.
Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. The Philadelphia billboard was installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements. It installed the A&E billboard in association with Pearl Media, a Butler, N.J., company.
“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.
“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”
And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.
The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.
For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”
TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.
Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.
The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.
“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.
“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”
Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.
Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.
There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.
Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.
Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”
But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.
Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”
New science, drugs, may lengthen human life
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/health/stories/2008/06/03/anti_aging_drugs.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=9
Is 90 the new 50?
Not yet, aging researchers say, but medical breakthroughs to significantly extend life and ease the ailments of getting older are closer than many people think.
"The general public has no idea what's coming," said David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School professor who has made headlines with research into the health benefits of a substance found in red wine called resveratrol.
Speaking on a panel of aging experts, Sinclair had the boldest predictions. He said scientists can greatly increase longevity and improve health in lab animals like mice, and that drugs to benefit people are on the way.
"It's not an if, but a when," said Sinclair, who co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals to pursue such drugs. The company, which is testing medicine in people with Type 2 diabetes, was recently bought for $720 million by GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest drug maker.
Sinclair said treatments could be a few years or a decade away, but they're "really close. It's not something (from) science fiction and it's not something for the next generation."
The discussion of aging was a closing event of the first World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science for the public that brought together researchers ranging from biologists to quantum physicists. Participants included Nobel laureates, business leaders and philosophers.
At the longevity event, hundreds of people young and old packed a sold-out New York University hall, including actress Jane Fonda, who turned 70 in December.
Aging, particularly aging well and staying healthy, is increasingly a hot topic as the population grays, people live longer and tens of millions of baby-boomers enter or approach their 60s.
The experts here Sunday night said aging research, once a backwater of science, is experiencing an explosion of interest and optimism.
The session began not with talk but with song, as jazz legend Marilyn Maye strode the stage and belted out "Celebration" and "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News."
Maye said that most of her life she's been coy about revealing her age, but this year she admitted that she turned 80 in April.
Maye, who sat on the panel, said the biggest aging myth is that "cosmetic surgery makes you younger. I think attitude is the thing that keeps you young. And energy and activity and just keep moving."
Robert Butler, a pioneer of aging research who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for the book "Why Survive? Being Old in America," agreed that "people live longer and better by having a sense of purpose." He said that while medicine and biology are important for longevity, having friendships and close relationships also have a big impact.
Butler said a revolution in longevity has already arrived, noting that in the last century life spans increased 30 years, more than in the previous 5,000 years of human history.
Given the latest research, he said, more resources must be devoted to understanding the biology of aging, since "with one pill, we might be able to do a lot for many different conditions."
Some of that research comes from Richard Weindruch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and director of LifeGen Technologies who studies how extremely low-calorie diets affect aging.
Weindruch said his research, which began by showing how consuming little food could greatly increase the life spans of mice, moved on in 1989 to a long-term study on monkeys that can live up to 40 years.
"Just now we're starting to see statistically significant improvements in survival and resistance to disease and favorable effects on brain aging," he said. He said his team hopes to publish these results soon.
Sinclair said that based on Weindruch's work, he set out a decade ago to find the genes involved in caloric restriction and find a pill that can provide the benefits "without you feeling hungry all the time."
He described how his research found that mice given large doses of resveratrol "live longer, they're almost immune to the effects of obesity. They don't get diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's as frequently. We delay the diseases of aging."
Sinclair showed video of mice on resveratrol running on a treadmill far more vigorously than those who didn't get the substance. He called them "our Lance Armstrong mice."
A large dose meant the equivalent of a human drinking about 1,000 bottles of red wine daily, he said.
While the implications of the 2006 study for humans was uncertain, the news set off a surge in sales of dietary supplements containing resveratrol. Some scientists warned of its unproven effects and raised safety concerns.
Sinclair has said that he has taken resveratrol supplements, but at the longevity event he cautioned that right now there is no proven magic pill to extend life.
His suggestion? Exercise.
South America eyes common currency
http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/05/26/afx5047714.html
BRASILIA (Thomson Financial) - South America is thinking of creating a common currency and a central bank along the lines of those in the European Union's euro-zone, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Monday.
The idea is a logical next step following the signing last Friday of a teaty creating a Union of South American States that aims to promote joint regional customs and defense policies, Lula said during his weekly radio broadcast.
'Many things still haven't been realized. We are now going to create a Bank of South America. We are going to move forward so in the future we'll have a single central bank, a common currency,' he said.
But, he added: 'This is a process. It won't be something that happens quickly.'
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela all signed up to the UNASUR treaty creating the regional union during a ceremony in Brasilia last Friday.
The entity's goal is to bring together two trade blocs within South America, Mercosur and the Andean Community, and to integrate the region.
Brazil is also pushing for a regional defense council that could be used as a forum to settle inter-regional disputes as well as formulate joint policies.
Lula said the creation of UNASUR was 'the realization of a dream,' and evidence of remarkable economic and political progress South American nations have made in recent decades.
Brazil, Latin America's biggest economy, has taken the lead in the new entity.
But Colombia, the strongest U.S. ally in South America and a country often at odds with neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador, has decided not to join.
Lula stated that 'nobody can think of this as a crisis' in the nascent bloc, noting that several EU nations also opted out from aspects of European integration such as adopting the euro.
Return of the dead? Experts may clone dead people's tissue
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science/2008/06/01/experts_may_clone_dead_peoples_tissue/2519/
British government officials say they are considering legal action to allow scientists to use dead donors' tissue in stem cell cloning research.
Health ministers have requested that experts be permitted to use human tissue to clone embryonic stem cells regardless of whether they have the donor's specific permission, The Times of London reported Sunday.
It is reported tissue stored for as long as three decades could be used in the stem cell research if legal approval is given. Experts would be allowed to use tissue from donors who cannot be reached because they have died or otherwise can't be contacted, the Times said.
Officials said the amendment to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill has been tabled and is set to be discussed in coming days, the newspaper said.
More schools adopt cashless, biometric ID
http://www.clitheroeadvertiser.co.uk/valleynews/Biometric-ID-introduced-at-Bowland.4141414.jp
School dinners have been given a hi-tech overhaul at one Ribble Valley school.
A biometric cashless payment system and state-of-the-art kitchen equipment have been installed at Bowland High School in partnership with Lancashire County's Commercial Services Catering Division.
Bowland's dining area has also been redecorated and wired for sound – there are plans to install a video link.
Most pupils at Bowland buy a school meal and sales are among the highest in Lancashire from kitchens managed by LCCS.
The improved facilities support the school's healthy eating policy and meet new national school food standards, providing pupils with improved menus, more choice and fresh, local produce.
The new money-less payment system, already used in several Lancashire schools, uses biometric technology to create a digital signature from a partial fingerprint. The unique image which is created replaces cash at the point of sale.
The school explained the system is secure and meets the requirements of the Data Protection Act. It added the biometric registration is voluntary, but it had received a very enthusiastic response from catering staff, pupils and parents when it opened for business.
Headteacher Mr Stephen Cox said: "Although biometric identification has been used in schools for library use for a number of years, we are one of the first schools in Lancashire to embrace the technology for use in paying for school meals, while it is early days the pupils have embraced the technology and we are hoping it will enhance their lunchtime experience by speeding up service."
The 'future of money' goes mobile
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7427403.stm
Near Field Communications (NFC) offers shoppers the opportunity to wave a card or a phone near a sensor and beep, a coffee or train fare is paid for.
A lot of cash clings to this rocky tax-free outcrop, a fact that may have spurred trials of NFC which has been touted as the future of money.
It turns a phone into a digital purse that can read the chips and radio tags buried in smart posters from a distance of a few centimetres.
In one example application the data tells the phone to add a charge for a ticket to a football match.
The phone gets a message that unlocks the turnstile on the day of the match to let its owner onto the terraces.
"What we experience, especially in the soccer environment, is that security is an upcoming issue," says Herbert Pamminger of Skidata which is behind the football ticket trial.
It could also be equipped with biometrics to help kick hooliganism into touch.
"Organisers are watching out for people who are not allowed to enter the stadium," he says. "And this combination of biometrics is one approach."
Smart check-in
The ability NFC gives a phone to unlock a turnstile could also be used in other ways.
It could mean, for instance, that once a traveller has paid for a hotel room online the key to get in the room can be texted to them.
"In addition to the key itself the guest will also get a welcome receipt specifying the room he is staying at," says Gard Gabrielsen from electronic lock maker Vingcard Elsafe that has developed a hotel booking system using NFC.
"He will also typically get the GPS coordinates to the hotel he is staying at," he adds.
"But the key thing is that when the guest is then coming to the hotel he can totally bypass the reception desk and go straight to his room," he says.
"The telephone itself will open the door by just presenting the phone in front of the card reader."
Theft prevention
A team from the University of Applied of Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria is looking to use NFC to stop skis being stolen.
Skis are a pricey piece of equipment that are frequently stolen when holiday-makers prop them up outside a cafe.
But add a tag onto your boots and a reader onto your skis and you can make sure that your boots and your skis are united while on the piste.
If someone tries to slalom off with your gear then an alarm sounds.
Linked-in shopping
University of Rome has developed a virtual shopping basket for people to order household staples on their mobile. But more excitingly the same technology could also link to media and information too voluminous or specific, like individual product history, to put on a packet.
"You can put indirect information, which means you can write a URL, a link to some place on a network you can access," says Stefano Puglia, from the University of Rome.
"The idea is that by simply touching the object you can open up a connection to a site and have this information displayed on your phone," he says.
The applications will not see ubiquitous use until all phones come fitted with NFC readers. But handset makers are not going to put the technology in their phones until there are enough applications out there to make it worthwhile.
Those behind the technology are convinced NFC will enjoy the same success as Bluetooth and eventually it will be hard to find a phone without it.
Though it should be said that it has rivals such as the Nokia-developed Wibree and low power extensions to Bluetooth.
"All the major handset manufacturers are members of the NFC Forum, and they are all actively involved in working on the specifications, following the developments and are in most cases working on prototypes," said Paula Berger of the Near Field Communication Forum.
"We would expect them to be rolling out handsets some time in 2009, at the latest 2010, but probably 2009," she adds.
Church of England shelves debate on evangelising Muslims
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/church.of.england.shelves.debate.on.evangelising.muslims/19271.htm
A controversial debate by the Church of England’s General Synod over whether it should seek to convert Muslims has been postponed to 2009.
The motion, tabled by lay member Paul Eddy, received 124 signatures of support from Synod members, including the Bishop of Rochester, and was scheduled for a major debate and vote during the annual extended session of the Synod in York, from 4-8 July, just weeks ahead of the Lambeth Conference.
Mr Eddy’s motion called on the House of Bishops to “to confirm their understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in a multi-faith society, and to publish details of best practice in evangelising people of other faiths”.
A number of bishops and clergy have spoken out against the motion, including the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith, who was quoted by The Telegraph as saying: "Both the Bishop of Rochester's reported comments and the synod private members' motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations.
“Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are learning to respect one another's paths to God and to live in harmony. This demand for the evangelisation of people of other faiths contributes nothing to our communities."
Mr Eddy’s motion was dropped from the July Synod to make way for a backlog of legislative issues and another motion with a higher number of signatures on church buildings being used as tourist attractions. Mr Eddy’s motion has now been shelved for next February’s Synod at the earliest.
He said: “I’m not at all surprised that the motion didn’t get timetabled following the opposition I had from many bishops and the reaction to the media interviews.”
The former public relations consultant added that he had received wide support for the motion from the Anglo-Catholic as well as evangelical wings in Synod.
“People feel very aggrieved that, at this particular time in the Church’s history, Synod was not given an opportunity to be debate evangelism,” said Mr Eddy.
“At every session of Synod there are calls for more debates on vision, leadership and how we going to evangelise this nation and stem the decline in church attendance – rather than debate internal squabbles and politics. My motion gave Synod a unique opportunity to do that and others will draw their own conclusions.”
Mr Eddy believes that his motion was dropped from the York Synod because of concerns over the impact that a debate on the uniqueness of Christ might have on the Lambeth Conference, which would have fallen just under two weeks after his motion was debated.
“Now that Synod has electronic voting, it would have been very easy to show how many of our bishops believed in the uniqueness of Christ as the only means of salvation, something which would have shown the division on orthodox views in the House,” he said.
A Church of England spokesperson said, however: "It is not unusual for the General Synod to debate only one Private Member's Motion during its meetings, especially when there are a number of legislative issues to be debated, as there are at this Synod.
“Due to time constraints, the [Business] Committee has been able to schedule only one such motion for July, on the subject of church tourism, which heads the list in terms of the number of signatures from members.
“The motion on the uniqueness of Christ in multi-faith Britain is currently next on the list in terms of signature, and if it heads the list in February, will probably be debated then."
Mr Eddy is to be ordained in June 2009, making the February Synod in London his last opportunity to propose his motion in the Synod chamber.
“The timing of my ordination, and therefore resignation from Synod as a lay member, has not gone unnoticed by those wishing this debate to go away,” he said. “In York next month I shall seek to increase the number of supporting members to my motion so that the Business Committee will have a clear ‘first’ when [deciding] which PMM to table for the February sessions in Westminster, London.”
Mr Eddy said he had received assurances from other Synod members that a senior Synod member would table a similar motion in the event that his motion failed to be tabled in the February Synod.
“It will be debated one way or another,” he vowed.
Christians face 'hate crime' for preaching gospel in Muslim area
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=65922
Two American-born pastors handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham, England, were threatened with arrest and warned of being beaten for committing what an officer called a "hate crime."
Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, were handing out the leaflets and talking with local youths when they were approached and questioned by a police community support officer, or PCSO.
When the officer discovered the two Birmingham pastors were born in the U.S., he began a heated criticism of President Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cunningham explained that the gospel message was not linked to American foreign policy, but the officer reportedly became belligerent.
"He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message," Cunningham told the London Telegraph. "He said we were committing a hate crime by telling the youths to leave Islam and said that he was going to take us to the police station."
In England a PCSO is a full-time employee of the police charged with community peacekeeping, but the officers do not have the power of arrest without a constable. In this case, the pastors refused to accompany the PCSO into the presence of a constable or to divulge their home addresses as, they said, the officer grew "threatening and intimidating."
The ministers also claim the PCSO bullied them, saying, "You have been warned. If you come back here and get beaten up, well, you have been warned."
The local police station has since announced that the matter was fully investigated and that the PCSO would be given corrective training, but the incident fuels concerns that there are areas in Britain where the Christian message is increasingly unwelcome.
In April, Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester and the Church of England's only Pakistan-born bishop, wrote in the Telegraph that certain pockets of England were becoming "no-go" zones, places too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter.
Joseph Abraham, one of the threatened pastors agrees. He told the paper, "I couldn't believe this was happening in Britain. The bishop of Rochester was criticized by the Church of England recently when he said there were no-go areas in Britain, but he was right; there are certainly no-go areas for Christians who want to share the gospel."
U.N.: 50 percent more food needed by 2030
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24942035/
ROME - World food production must rise by 50 percent by 2030 to meet increasing demand, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told world leaders Tuesday at a summit grappling with hunger and civil unrest caused by food price hikes.
The secretary-general told the Rome gathering that nations must minimize export restrictions and import tariffs during the food price crisis and quickly resolve world trade talks.
"The world needs to produce more food," Ban said.
The Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is hosting the three-day summit to try to solve the short-term emergency of increased hunger caused by soaring prices and to help poor countries grow enough food to feed their own.
'Unacceptable'
In a message read to the delegates, Pope Benedict XVI said "hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable in a world which, in reality, has sufficient production levels, the resources, and the know-how to put an end to these tragedies and their consequences."
The Pope told the world leaders that millions of people at threat in countries with security concerns were looking to them for solutions.
Ban said a U.N. task force he set up to deal with the crisis is recommending the nations "improve vulnerable people's access to food and take immediate steps to increase food availability in their communities."
That means increasing food aid, supplying small farmers with seed and fertilizer in time for this year's planting seasons, and reducing trade restrictions to help the free flow of agricultural goods.
"Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing price controls," Ban said. "They only distort markets and force prices even higher."
Biofuels to blame?
The increasing diversion of food and animal feed to produce biofuel, and sharply higher fuel costs have also helped to shoot prices upward, experts say.
The United Nations is encouraging summit participants to start undoing a decades-long legacy of agricultural and trade policies that many blame for the failure of small farmers in poor countries to feed their own people.
Wealthy nations' subsidizing their own farmers makes it harder for small farmers in poor countries to compete in global markets, critics of such subsidies say. Jim Butler, the FAO's deputy director-general, said in an interview ahead of the gathering that a draft document that could be the basis for a final summit declaration doesn't promise to overhaul subsidy policy.
Congress last month passed a five-year farm bill heavy on subsidies, bucking White House objections that such aid in the middle of a global food crisis wasn't warranted.
The head of the summit's U.S. delegation, Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, insisted on Monday that biofuels will contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.
'Vulnerable' market
Figures by other international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, show that the increased demand for biofuels is contributing by 15-30 percent to food price increases, said Frederic Mousseau, a policy adviser at Oxfam, a British aid group.
"Food stocks are at their lowest in 25 years, so the market is very vulnerable to any policy changes" such as U.S. or European Union subsidizing biofuels or mandating greater use of this energy source, Mousseau said.
Brazil is another large exporter of biofuels, and President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva was expected to defend biofuels at the summit.
Several participants won't even be talking to each other at the summit.
Australia's foreign minister decried as "obscene" Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's participation in the summit. The longtime African leader has presided over the virtual transformation of his country from former breadbasket to agricultural basket case.
Zimbabweans increasingly are unable to afford food and other essentials with agriculture paralyzed by land reform and the world's highest rate of inflation.
The Dutch ministry for overseas development pledged to "ignore" Mugabe during the summit.
But on Tuesday, Mugabe defended his policy of seizing land from whites, saying he is undoing a legacy of Zimbabwe's former colonial masters.
EU sanctions against Mugabe because of Zimbabwe's poor human rights record forbid him from setting foot in the bloc's 27 nations, but those restrictions don't apply to U.N. forums.
Jewish leaders and some Italian politicians were among those denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attendance at the meeting. On Monday, Ahmadinejad repeated his call for the destruction of Israel, which is also participating in the summit.
Asked about the presence of the Zimbabwean and Iranian leaders, Schafer told reporters in Rome that the two were welcome to attend the summit, but that U.S. delegates would not be meeting with them.
Europe in the hands of the Irish - referendum could spell disaster for the EU
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/2055562/Irish-referendum-could-scupper-EU-treaty.html
In 1973, when Ireland joined what is now the European Union, it was the poorest country on the continent.
Today, thanks in no small part to £32 billion in EU grants, it is the second richest per capita (after Luxembourg).
So the result of a referendum on June 12 on whether to consolidate EU powers by ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon must surely be a foregone conclusion.
Despite every major political party backing the Yes campaign, support for a No vote is growing daily.
The most recent poll put the Yes voters at 41 per cent and the No voters at 33 per cent.
That sounds like a healthy lead until you discover the Yes campaign was polling well over 50 per cent on the eve of another Irish EU referendum – on the Nice Treaty in 2001 – before the electorate delivered a resounding No.
In Brussels, European parliamentarians are twitchy about the future of the EU's 495 million citizens resting in the hands of the one million Irish voters expected to turn out on polling day.
Having spent two years rebuilding the Treaty of Lisbon from the scrap parts of the defeated European Constitution, the Eurocrats can only watch as a learner driver takes the wheel of their juggernaut and drives it towards the edge of a cliff.
This scenario has arisen because, while all 26 of the other member states have decided to wave through the treaty via their parliaments (the UK included), Ireland alone has a legal obligation under its constitution to put the matter to a public vote.
Because the treaty must be passed unanimously by all 27 member states, an Irish No vote would kill it.
Earlier this week, the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, suggested a No vote would be catastrophic for the EU.
"We will all pay a price for it, Ireland included," he said, adding that there was "no plan B" if Ireland exercised its veto.
Mr Barroso and his cohorts argue that the treaty represents the next glorious stage in the EU's future, creating a new post of full-time European Council president, streamlining the European Commission and redistributing voting powers.
If you don't find these allegedly crucial changes inspiring, you're not alone.
And therein lies the fundamental problem for Ireland's Yes campaigners. Try as they might, they have been unable to come up with anything approaching a coherent, inspirational argument for a Yes.
Most tellingly of all, the new Irish premier, Brian Cowen, has admitted he hasn't read all of the 287-page treaty, and nor has Ireland's EU Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who said no sane person could read it from cover to cover.
Asked to sum up why the Irish should support Lisbon, Micheál Martin, director of the referendum campaign for one of the big three parties, Fianna Fáil, said: "First of all, the purpose of the treaty is to ensure that the EU is reformed so that it is more efficient and effective in meeting modern challenges…"
Cue widespread yawns from voters. And the leaders of the other main parties have been equally soporific, leaving an open goal for any No campaigner with the charisma and ability to play on popular fears.
Such a man is Declan Ganley, a multi-millionaire businessman who formed the campaign group Libertas to fight first the European Constitution and now the Lisbon Treaty.
Along with such powerful voices as the Irish Farmers Association and leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, he has given voters a dizzying array of reasons to vote No.
The farmers, who have received two thirds of Ireland's EU subsidies, argue that their handouts will be drastically cut, devastating rural areas.
Pro-life groups say Ireland will be forced to relax its abortion laws, pacifists say Ireland's cherished neutrality will be in danger because of provisions for a European army, and patriots say Ireland will be giving up the independence it fought so hard for less than 100 years ago.
On top of all that, there are fears that a centralised taxation system will mean the end of Ireland's favourable 12.5 per cent corporation tax (compared with the UK's 28 per cent), which has helped attract so many businesses.
John McGuirk, a leading member of Libertas, told me: "We will lose huge influence if Lisbon is ratified and we will get nothing in return.
"It will open the doors for Europe to interfere in our taxation system, and it will place huge restrictions on what rights we have to set our own laws."
While the treaty may yet get a Yes vote – the online bookmaker Paddy Power is offering odds of 1-4 for, 5-2 against – it all depends on whether the voters turn out on the day.
There is a real danger that apathy will prevent pro-Lisbon support being transformed into votes.
Éanna Nolan, a 38-year-old civil engineer, told me: "I am tending towards voting Yes, if only because the Yes campaign has the backing of all the major parties, whereas the No campaigners are people like Sinn Fein and [the singer] Dana."
Miriam Laird, a 28-year-old accountant, said: "I've always been pro-Europe, so I'm in favour of the treaty."
Yet both of these voters were not sure whether they would even bother to turn out on polling day.
In contrast, the No campaign supporters I spoke to were clear about their reasons for turning down the Lisbon Treaty – and about their intention to cast a vote on June 12.
Pádraig De Faoite, 22, a student teacher, said: "We're giving away our democracy and we have no idea what's going on in Brussels. On top of that, migrant workers will be able to come in from all over Europe and undercut Irish workers, so it will cost jobs."
Ide Nic Mhathuna, 24, an office administrator, cited the plight of Ireland's fishing industry, which has all but disappeared under the EU, as one of her reasons for voting No.
"A friend of mine who is a fisherman appeared in court this week for catching too many fish in the Irish Sea," she said.
"He's going to have a criminal record now, and it's crazy."
If Ireland rejects Lisbon on the basis of what might be termed parochial reasons – say, abortion or farming subsidies – and the vote is close, the country could be given opt-outs that would salvage the treaty.
But if it votes No by a substantial margin, and the reasons for doing so are varied, it will be impossible to resuscitate the fatally wounded treaty.
The EU will be faced with the prospect of starting all over again with a new document several years hence, or trying to bring in changes one by one.
Such an outcome would not, arguably, be a disaster (the EU has managed to keep functioning despite the 2005 Constitution being rejected) but it would leave European leaders with serious questions about the union's future.
The fact that France and Holland rejected the European Constitution in 2005 was a clear warning that support for the project among ordinary people may be waning.
This time, only Ireland has dared risk asking what people think. And if a country that has benefited so clearly from EU membership decides to distance itself from Brussels, it would be proof positive of just how far disillusionment with the EU has spread.
Tony Blair's Bid to be a Faith Leader
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/eboo_patel/2008/06/the_tony_blair_faith_foundatio.html
Tony Blair has the chance to do for the interfaith movement what Al Gore has done for environmentalism: create a tipping point effect on one of the most important issues of the 21st century.
Similar to the environmental movement, there are a number of excellent interfaith organizations bringing people from different faith communities together to build understanding and serve the common good. And just as the combination of environmental catastrophes and new science has focused public attention on climate change, so has the combination of high-profile religious violence and studies about the surprising persistence of faith inspired people to ask big questions about the impact of religion on the world.
The interfaith movement has lacked what the environmental movement got in 2000 – the presence of a serious global leader willing to engage a serious issue in a serious way: framing debate, galvanizing energy, generating resources, pointing to a major win and convincing the world that we can get there.
Until now.
In two eloquent and important speeches - the first was a month ago in London and the second just last week in New York - Tony Blair articulated why he is committing a good part of the rest of his life to being that figure.
The crux of Blair’s vision is contained in these few lines from his New York speech:
"Globalization is pushing people together. Interdependence is reality. Peaceful co-existence is essential. If faith becomes a countervailing force, pulling people apart, it becomes destructive and dangerous.
"If , by contrast, it becomes an instrument of peaceful co-existence, teaching people to live with difference, to treat diversity as a strength, to respect "the other", then Faith becomes an important part of making the 21st Century work. It enriches, it informs, it provides a common basis of values and belief for people to get along together."
When I met with Blair in Chicago a few months ago, I was struck by the depth of his commitment to the issue, the scope of his vision and the concrete plans for his institution, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
Blair will teach a course on Faith and Globalization at Yale University. There are plans for educational material on the intersection of religious devotion and religious diversity, meant for distribution everywhere from corporations to teenagers (through web-based technologies). The Interfaith Youth Core is partnering with the Blair Faith Foundation (and Malaria No More) to bring faith communities together to end malaria in the next 5 – 10 years.
It is an ambitious agenda, but Blair has never thought small.
I was a graduate student at Oxford from 1998 to 2001, the early years of Blair’s Prime Ministership. It was an exuberant time to be in Britain. The culture was moving from “Rule Britannia” to “Cool Britannia”. London was getting a makeover. A peace process was underway in Northern Ireland. Multiculturalism was becoming the new norm.
Blair had a vision and he made it happen.
Visions in the world of interfaith cooperation are not new. At the dawn of the 20th Century, the Chicago Protestant leader Charles Bonney ended the first Parliament of the World’s Religions with these words: “From now on, the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but on the giant ills that afflict humankind.”
There was nobody colossal enough to realize that dream in the last century.
We may have found the guy to make it happen in this one.
France readies for 'heaviest Presidency in EU history'
http://www.euractiv.com/en/opinion/france-readies-heaviest-presidency-eu-history/article-172884
On 1 July 2008, France takes over the EU's six-month rotating presidency from Slovenia with an exceptionally busy agenda.
According to a French diplomat in Brussels, "this presidency is the heaviest one of all the history of the European Union in terms of workload".
This, he explained, is because the EU is getting more cumbersome: there are more countries and commissioners than ever before and the Parliament has gained more powers. But it is also because additional factors have accumulated.
"For the first time, you have this coincidence of a heavier Union but there is also the end of the political mandate of the Commission and Parliament as well as the end of the ratification process of the Lisbon Treaty. You never had all these things together."
A series of sensitive dossiers have also piled up, all of which have to be closed by the end of the year. The energy and climate change package, tabled by the European Commission in January, is the first among them. The package includes a proposed revision of the EU's CO2 trading scheme and a new renewable energy directive, two dossiers which involve tough negotiations on how to share the burden of commitments between each EU member state.
"Energy and climate change is enough to feed a presidency," the diplomat pointed out. But he added that "there are circumstances which mean the agenda is heavier for political reasons because some things have been delayed." This includes for instance a debate on the future of the Common Agricultural Policy, which the French are keen to help shape under their Presidency.
Irish referendum on everyone's minds
The outcome of the Irish referendum on 12 June will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the Presidency's schedule.
Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, spoke about the issue at the European Policy Centre in Brussels on 26 May. "If the process continues without incident as it has so far today - and our sights are first turning to Ireland - we will have at heart to finish the preparatory work that started under the Slovenian presidency," he said.
But what will happen if the Irish reject the treaty? "There is no Plan B", Kouchner answered, echoing the European Commission's official line.
In practice, though, a solution will need to be found if the treaty is rejected and EU leaders will have plenty of time to discuss this during a summit on 19-20 June, just days before the start of the French Presidency.
Follow-up work would then have to be handled by France, potentially adding to an already busy agenda. "The responsibility of the entry into force of this new treaty is, we are conscious of it, essential," Kouchner said. "We will therefore attach all our energies to it."
Preparing for the EU diplomatic service
And provided all goes well and Ireland ratifies, there will still be a lot to do as the pressure then will fall on preparations for the Treaty's new provisions, which enter into force on 1 January 2009.
According to Kouchner, the French Presidency's work there will centre on designating the future permanent president of the Council and the new foreign policy chief, decisions which are all expected to be taken by EU heads of state at a summit in December.
Speculation is already rife about the names of the candidates, with names already being circulated. But Kouchner recently suggested that there could still be a few surprises and that more candidates could emerge.
Kouchner also said France will work to "lay the foundations for the new external action service as of the 1st of January 2009," indicating that the challenge will be to "find an efficient functioning between the Presidency of the European Council and the rotating Presidency, and, incidentally, to define the role of foreign affairs ministers in this new scheme".
Questions remain, however, as to how all the new roles will fall into place. According to the agreed schedule, the Treaty should be ratified by the end of 2008 and start applying as of 1 January 2009. This should also apply for the new permanent EU President and foreign policy chief.
But when EU leaders meet in December to pick their champion, the outcome of the European elections will still be unknown. And whichever party wins the poll in June will have the legitimacy to ask for the negotiations to be reopened, a situation which could place the new President in a difficult situation if he or she is not backed by the new majority.
Alain Lamassoure, a leading centre-right MEP who advises Sarkozy on European affairs, believes there could be two solutions to this problem. Writing on Blogactiv.euexternal , he says the first could be to delay the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty until June 2009, leaving the Czech Prime Minister to exert the Presidency according to the current rotating system.
Alternatively, he says EU leaders could choose to appoint an interim president as of 1 January 2009, and wait for the results of the parliamentary elections in June. "This second option is likely to be chosen for the High Representative: why not resort to it also for the President of the Council?," asks Lamassoure.
A more protective EU, focused on citizens
After the Treaty, Kouchner said making the EU care more about its citizensexternal will be a central concern, guiding France's initiatives in almost every area.
"Our second objective will be to respond to the demands of our peoples, who want a stronger Europe to answer globalisation," he told the EPC conference, saying that despite its positive achievements, Europe "does not convince anymore".
He said the French and citizens from other founding EU member states "often fear globalisation" because they see it as being "responsible for part of the unemployment and faults in our social protection system".
"Back at home, it is often the interrogations and anxieties which prevail," Kouchner said.
The issue has come up regularly in speeches by President Nicolas Sarkozy. On his election night, he portrayed the EU as "a Trojan horse of all the threats brought by a transforming world". More recently, he promised to "put politics back into Europe," criticising along the way Brussels Eurocrats who dictate "automatic rules that leave no room for political decision and accountability". The criticism was also directed at the European Central Bank, which Sarkozy has made a recurrent target.
"We must be able to talk about everything," Sarkozy said, "just like in any democracy: of our currency which is not a taboo subject, of trade policy, of industrial policy, of reciprocity in competition matters or the excesses of financial capitalism".
Concretely, Kouchner said, the French approach will seek to review the EU's search for more competitiveness (the Lisbon agenda) to "associate it with a renovated solidarity, through quality public services that contribute to growth, a renewed social agenda, and the fight against discrimination".
A social policy package, which the Commission originally planned to publish earlier this year, has been delayed to 2 July, just after the start of the French Presidency.
Four priorities
The four priorities of the Presidency are already widely known. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, French secretary of state for European affairs, further detailed them on 20 May at a hearing before the Conference of Committee Chairmen of the European Parliament. They are:
1. Finalising the energy-climate package;
2. Better controlling immigration flows by agreeing on a European Immigration and Asylum Pact;
3. European security and defence policy, and;
4. Reforming the Common Agricultural Policy.
Next steps:
* 1 July: Start of French Presidency.
* 13 July: Euro-Medierranean Summit (Paris).
* 15-16 Oct.: EU Summit (Brussels).
* 11-12 Dec.: EU Summit (Brussels).
* 31 Dec.: End of French Presidency.
EU foreign policy expected to enter 'new era'
http://euobserver.com/9/26264
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Parliament is seeking to bolster its role in the bloc's common foreign and security policy (CFSP), with senior MEPs saying it is time for Europe to become a "player and not just a payer" on the world stage.
Polish centre-right MEP and head of the foreign affairs committee, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, says that EU foreign is moving "from one era to another" with the new Lisbon Treaty, due to kick in next year.
The proposed new EU foreign minister and diplomatic service as well as the possibility for a group of member states to move ahead in defence cooperation mean foreign policy is "one of the most innovative parts of the treaty."
The fact that Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, will for the first time be present at the MEPs' annual debate on CFSP on Wednesday (4 June) is in itself a "turning point," said the Pole at a briefing on Tuesday.
Euro-deputies will today debate a report that sets out principles for the EU's foreign policy - such as respect for human rights - calls for certain issues to be prioritised and says that the CFSP budget from now until 2013 is "insufficient."
"Either we have to beef up foreign policy financially, or we have to rethink whether we really want to be a global player," said Mr Saryusz-Wolski, who next week will travel to Paris to discuss the issue with the incoming French EU presidency.
"We ask why is nothing ready, prepared for the events that will happen if the treaty [comes into force], and we haven't had an answer," he said.
"We are asking this question also: do you have any hidden reserves? What's your view? How to finance the new set up? No answer."
Democratic oversight
The report also calls for parliament to be given greater democratic oversight over the area, which to date has remained firmly the domain of member states.
It suggests that the foreign minister "regularly" appear before MEPs and that the parliament be "fully consulted" on who the foreign minister should be, as well as what the diplomatic service should look like.
Deputies are also urging the future EU foreign minister to inform the parliament before any "common actions" are taken.
"If we start sending soldiers into danger, it is up to the parliament to give its blessing," says Mr Saryusz-Wolski.
The report also takes a more long-term view of the future of common foreign and security policy, with the head of the foreign affairs committee urging the bloc to stop acting like a "fire brigade" rushing to put out emergencies here and there and to think more of the "long-term strategic interests of the Union…20–30 years ahead."
EU army
Mr Saryusz-Wolski, who believes the union will gradually develop its own army, says it is no longer enough that the bloc exercises its traditional role as a soft power.
"Too often we spend money without any conditions being attached. I am against Europe being a payer and not a player," he said.
But he admits there is a "fear" in the parliament that the foreign minister and the new permanent president of the European Council may add to the trill of voices of on the EU stage all claiming to speak for Europe and may not turn Europe into a player.
The potential for overlap between the two posts – starting in January - and for rivalry with the European Commission president is high.
Debates on the posts are expected to start in earnest in autumn and be wrapped up by December.
In time-honoured EU fashion, balancing who wins the posts will have to involve the consideration of a series of factors, including nationality, whether a candidate comes from an old or new member state or a small or big member state, and the person's political hue.
EU's Solana plays down hopes of Iran breakthrough
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3551988,00.html
EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana confirmed on Wednesday he would travel shortly to Iran to present a major powers' offer of incentives for it to suspend uranium enrichment, but played down prospects of a breakthrough.
"I don't expect miracles but I think it is important for us to keep extending a hand," said Solana, who has been charged to explore the scope for negotiations with Tehran.
Egypt tries to thwart Israel's plans in Europe
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/989457.html
Egypt has recently been attempting to thwart a proposed agreement to upgrade Israel's relationship with the European Union.
The proposed deal would significantly improve Israeli access to European markets, and could thus add billions of dollars to Israel's economy.
Israel first learned of the Egyptian efforts about two months ago, thanks to a tip received via diplomatic channels. The Foreign Ministry began investigating, and discovered that Cairo had instructed its ambassadors in Europe to wage a diplomatic campaign against the agreement.
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As part of this campaign, Egyptian ambassadors in London, Paris, Brussels, Spain, Rome and other European capitals have met with high-level Foreign Ministry officials in their respective countries to ask them to reconsider the agreement. The Egyptian argument is that in light of Israel's ongoing construction in West Bank settlements and its blockade of Gaza, the EU must not reward Jerusalem in any way.
After confirming this Egyptian effort, Israel decided to confront Cairo. Senior Foreign Ministry officials warned their Egyptian counterparts that Israel views this effort very gravely and wants it stopped. However, the Egyptians denied any wrongdoing.
Israel's assessment, a senior government official said, is that the Egyptian campaign constitutes retaliation for a United States Congress decision to freeze up to $200 million in American military aid to Egypt. Cairo blames Israel for this freeze, because Israel has frequently complained to Washington about Egypt's failure to combat arms smuggling into Gaza. One of the conditions Congress set for unfreezing the aid was an improvement in Egypt's performance in this sphere.
In addition, Israeli officials said, Cairo is upset because the EU has refused to grant Egypt a similarly favorable agreement.
So far, the officials said, Egypt's efforts have not succeeded, and there has been no change in the EU's stance on the agreement. Nevertheless, Israel is furious over what the officials termed Egypt's "double game": even as it claims to be trying to help Israel negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza, it is working against Israel on other fronts.
Israel expects the upgrade agreement with the EU to be signed by the end of the year. The deal governs cooperation in a wide range of fields, from trade to science to diplomacy, and defines Israel as a senior European partner - the highest level of association possible short of full EU membership.
Meanwhile, Israel also sent a formal protest to the Palestinian Authority yesterday over a letter sent by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to the OECD, in which he asked the organization to reconsider its invitation to Israel to join. Fayyad based this request on Israel's military operations in the territories, and construction in the settlements.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who met Monday with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, told Abbas that Israel deems the letter completely unacceptable.
Jerusalem's Temple Mount Continues To Be At Center Of Tensions
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=65919
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount belong to the Muslims and any Israeli action that "offends" the Mount will be answered by 1.5 billion Muslims, declared the chief of staff for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
"Jerusalem is Muslim. The blessed Al Aqsa mosque and Harem Al Sharif (Temple Mount) is 100 percent Muslim. The Israelis are playing with fire when they threaten Al Aqsa with digging that is taking place," said Abbas' chief of staff Rafiq Al Husseini.
The Temple Mount is Judaism's holiest site.
Husseini was referring to Israeli plans to construct a new bridge from the Western Wall area to the Temple Mount.
The old bridge was damaged two years ago. When Israeli workers tried to repair it, Palestinian leaders claimed the work was threatening the Al Aqsa Mosque, even though the mosque is located hundreds of feet away, the work did not tunnel under any Mount foundation or touch any structure connected to the mosque, and the repair work – which had been pre-approved by Jordan and the Mount's Muslim custodians – was conducted under the scrutiny of an accessible 24/7 webcam.
"Any hurting of Jerusalem will explode the whole negotiations between us and the Israelis ... we must work to strengthen Palestinian ties to Jerusalem," al-Husseini said.
Israel has been negotiating with Abbas in line with talks started at last November's U.S.-backed Annapolis Summit, which seeks to create a Palestinian state before the end of the year. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is widely expected to offer the Palestinians most of the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem. The Temple Mount is located in eastern Jerusalem.
Mainstream Palestinian leaders claim the Temple Mount is Muslim in spite of overwhelming archaeological evidence documenting the first and second Jewish temples.
In a WND exclusive interview last year, Taysir Tamimi, chief Palestinian Justice and one of the most influential Muslim leaders in Israel, argued the Jewish Temples never existed, the Western Wall really was a tying post for Muhammad's horse, the Al Aqsa Mosque was built by angels, and Abraham, Moses and Jesus were prophets for Islam.
Tamimi is considered the second most important Palestinian cleric after Muhammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
"Israel started since 1967 making archeological digs to show Jewish signs to prove the relationship between Judaism and the city and they found nothing. There is no Jewish connection to Israel before the Jews invaded in the 1880s," said Tamimi.
"About these so-called two Temples, they never existed, certainly not at the [Temple Mount]," Tamimi said during a sit-down interview in his eastern Jerusalem office.
The Palestinian cleric denied the validity of dozens of digs verified by experts worldwide revealing Jewish artifacts from the First and Second Temples throughout Jerusalem, including on the Temple Mount itself; excavations revealing Jewish homes and a synagogue in a site in Jerusalem called the City of David; or even the recent discovery of a Second Temple Jewish city in the vicinity of Jerusalem.
Tamimi said descriptions of the Jewish Temples in the Hebrew Tanach, in the Talmud and in Byzantine and Roman writings from the Temple periods were forged, and that the Torah was falsified to claim biblical patriarchs and matriarchs were Jewish when indeed they were prophets for Islam.
"All this is not real. We don't believe in all your versions. Your Torah was falsified. The text as given to the Muslim prophet Moses never mentions Jerusalem. Maybe Jerusalem was mentioned in the rest of the Torah, which was falsified by the Jews," said Tamimi.
He said Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus were "prophets for the Israelites sent by Allah as to usher in Islam."
Asked about the Western Wall, Tamimi said the structure was a tying post for Muhammad's horse and that it is part of the Al Aqsa Mosque, even though the Wall predates the mosque by over 1,000 years.
"The Western wall is the western wall of the Al Aqsa Mosque. It's where Prophet Muhammad tied his animal which took him from Mecca to Jerusalem to receive the revelations of Allah."
The Kotel, or Western Wall, is an outer retaining wall of the Temple Mount that survived the destruction of the Second Temple and still stands today in Jerusalem.
Tamimi went on to claim to WND the Al Aqsa Mosque , which has sprung multiple leaks and has had to be repainted several times, was built by angels.
"Al Aqsa was build by the angels forty years after the building of Al-Haram in Mecca. This we have no doubt is true," he said.
The First Temple was built by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C. It was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Second Temple was rebuilt in 515 B.C. after Jerusalem was freed from Babylonian captivity. That temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire in A.D. 70. Each temple stood for a period of about four centuries.
The Temple was the center of religious worship for ancient Israelites. It housed the Holy of Holies, which contained the Ark of the Covenant and was said to be the area upon which God's presence dwelt. All biblical holidays centered on worship at the Temple. The Temples served as the primary location for the offering of sacrifices and was the main gathering place for Israelites.
According to the Talmud, the world was created from the foundation stone of the Temple Mount. It's believed to be the biblical Mount Moriah, the location where Abraham fulfilled God's test to see if he would be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac.
The Temple Mount has remained a focal point for Jewish services for thousands of years. Prayers for a return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple have been uttered by Jews since the Second Temple was destroyed, according to Jewish tradition.
The Al Aqsa Mosque was constructed in about 709 to serve as a shrine near another shrine, the Dome of the Rock, which was built by an Islamic caliph. Al Aqsa was meant to mark what Muslims came to believe was the place at which Muhammad, the founder of Islam, ascended to heaven to receive revelations from Allah.
Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Quran. It is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible 656 times. Muslims worldwide pray with their backs away from the Temple Mount and toward Mecca.
Islamic tradition states Muhammad took a journey in a single night on a horse from "a sacred mosque" – believed to be in Mecca in southern Saudi Arabia – to "the farthest mosque" and from a rock there ascended to heaven. The farthest mosque became associated with Jerusalem about 120 years ago.
According to research by Israeli Author Shmuel Berkovits, Islam historically disregarded Jerusalem. Berkovits points out in his new book, "How dreadful is this place!" that Muhammad was said to loathe Jerusalem and what it stood for. He wrote Muhammad made a point of eliminating pagan sites of worship, and sanctifying only one place – the Kaaba in Mecca – to signify the unity of God.
As late as the 14th century, Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, whose writings influenced the Wahhabi movement in Arabia, ruled that sacred Islamic sites are to be found only in the Arabian Peninsula, and that "in Jerusalem, there is not a place one calls sacred, and the same holds true for the tombs of Hebron."
It wasn't until the late nineteenth century – incidentally when Jews started immigrating to Palestine – that some Muslim scholars began claiming Muhammad tied his horse to the Western Wall and associated Muhammad's purported night journey with the Temple Mount.
Turning Up the 'Heat' on Messianic Jews
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/385992.aspx
CBNNews.com - JERUSALEM, Israel - In the latest in a growing number of incidents against Israeli Messianic Jewish believers -- Jews who believe that Yeshua (Jesus, in Hebrew) is the Messiah -- a group of ultra-Orthodox youth set fire to New Testaments collected from the town's residents.
The Bible burning, which took place in Or Yehuda, a town of about 28,000 located between Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport, was first reported in the Israeli daily Maariv.
According to the article, Or Yehuda's Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon drove through the streets, asking residents over a loudspeaker to turn over New Testaments in their possession to yeshiva (religious seminary) students.
After collecting hundreds of Bibles the next day, the students threw them in a pile next to the neighborhood synagogue and set them on fire.
Though the newspaper caught the deputy mayor on film at the bonfire, he said he came to stop the students when he saw what they were doing.
"I asked that they prepare everything in a parking lot and I planned to come with a pick up and take the substances [New Testaments] in the pickup," he said. "When I got there, to my disappointment, a bunch of young guys spontaneously started a fire and burned some of the materials that were collected," he said.
Aharon said "missionaries" were to blame.
"The missionaries passed out a kit, which included the New Testament and two additional booklets in a new, well-to-do neighborhood in Or Yehuda," the deputy mayor said. "The whole essence of these pamphlets was incitement against the Jews," he said.
Jews Appalled at the Incident
Reaction to the Bible burning was swift.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman called it "a despicable act."
The Anti-Defamation League said burning anyone's Bible is "…a violation of basic Jewish principles and values."
The American Jewish Committee said "no provocation can justify such outrageous behavior."
Victor Kalisher, director of the Jerusalem Bible Society, which printed some of the New Testaments that were destroyed, called it "shocking."
"To see that such books are being burnt, it is shocking," Kalisher told CBN News. "As a Jew, as a son of a Holocaust survivor, when I see something like that, it only tells me that much dangerous things will probably follow," he said.
"The burning of Christian holy books in Or Yehuda is especially worrisome in light of the continued harassment of Messianic Jews in the country," stated an editorial in Haaretz, a prominent Israeli newspaper.
But attacks against Israeli Messianic Jews are on the increase.
A Near-Death Experience
On March 20, during the Purim holiday, Ami Ortiz, the youngest son of a Messianic pastor's family opened a booby-trapped holiday gift box delivered to their home, triggering a powerful bomb that nearly killed him and destroyed most of the contents of their apartment.
Though he's made miraculous strides in his recovery, this 15-year-old Israeli believer still faces a long stretch of surgeries and physical therapy.
Police suspect that anti-missionaries were behind the bombing. But after more than two months, no arrests have been made, and the family's attorney claims police are not pursuing the investigation.
The police sought a court order to prevent Israel's Channel 1 from broadcasting a story on the attack, which criticized their handling of the case, but the court denied the petition and the program aired last Friday evening.
"By God's grace, it was broadcast all over the country," David Ortiz, Ami's father told CBN News. "People were able to see it on the Internet. It was shown on satellite TV in the States and in other places, and Israelis were able to see for the first time what actually took place in my house," he said.
Other Incidents around the Country
There have been increasing numbers of incidents against Messianic believers, in places like the northern coastal city of Acco, Kiryat Gat, Jerusalem, and Beersheba.
The small Messianic fellowship in the southern desert city of Arad, less than 30 miles east of Beersheba, has experienced one of the most intense oppositions. Members of the Gur Hasidim, an ultra-Orthodox sect, frequently demonstrate in front of the homes of Jewish believers and at their fellowship when it meets on Shabbat (the Sabbath).
Yad L'Achim (hand to the brothers), an anti-missionary organization, works at galvanizing Israelis against the country's Messianic Jews.
"We're expressing protest against the fact that these people came here, people who came to this country in a problematic way, with social problems," said Yad L'Achim activist Alex Artovski.
"And they take people from the people of Israel and make them missionaries who belong to the cult Messianic Jews," he said.
But some Israelis find Yad L'Achim's demonstrations deeply disturbing.
"The Haredim are bothering them day and night and this bothers me very much because I am from a family of Holocaust survivors and my grandmother and grandfather in Poland were shouted at -- 'Jews get out,'" said Zohar Galant.
"Like this they are shouting at them now that they will get out. I, as a Jew, am embarrassed by these people who are engaging in these demonstrations and hurting innocent people," Galant said.
Jerusalem Bible Society Director Victor Kalisher has another concern -- that Israeli society will tolerate attacks against Messianic Jews.
"If the leaders of religious groups, people of leadership, people who should be a role models, are described as people who initiate and support burning of books with students dancing around it, the next day we can have people hurt, we can have windows broken, we can have a burnt shop. We cannot ignore it, we cannot think that well it's an isolated incident," he said. "It is not."
Qurei expresses doubts over peace
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1212041478483&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Reaching an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by the end of the year would require a "miracle," Ahmed Qurei, the head of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said Wednesday.
His remarks contradict statements made recently by Israeli government officials to the effect that "significant progress" has been achieved in the negotiations over the past few months.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Salaam Fayad, also voiced pessimism Wednesday regarding the prospects of achieving a deal with Israel before US President George W. Bush's left office.
Qurei told Fatah activists during a meeting in Ramallah that no "tangible" results had been achieved in the negotiations that followed November's peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland.
The gap between the Israelis and Palestinians remains very wide, he said, especially over the core issues of Jerusalem, refugees, the borders of a Palestinian state and the settlements in the West Bank.
"Although we have formed joint committees to discuss all these issues, we still haven't made any progress," Qurei said.
Referring to the ongoing dispute between Fatah and Hamas, Qurei called for resuming talks between the two movements. "The continued divisions don't serve the interests of anyone," he said. "Hamas must end its coup in the Gaza Strip and return to national dialogue."
Abbas, who chaired the weekly cabinet meeting in Ramallah, told the ministers that he opposed pursuing the negotiations while Israel continued to build new homes in the settlements and in east Jerusalem.
"If the Israelis want serious negotiations with sincere intentions, they must stop the settlement construction, release all Palestinian prisoners and remove the checkpoints and barriers," he said. "Unfortunately, the obstacles [to achieving an agreement] are increasing every day."
It was inconceivable, he said, that the Palestinians were negotiating over Jerusalem while the city was being "devoured" by Israel on a daily basis.
Abbas said the Palestinians welcomed news of the resumption of talks between Israel and Syria, adding that he did not believe this development would come at the expense of the Israeli-Palestinian track.
Speaking in Ramallah, Fayad said Israel's "policy of settlement and creating facts on the ground" would not bring peace and security. Israel's only option, he said, was to accept the two-state solution and end the occupation.
"The Palestinians' desire to achieve independence and freedom has not - and won't - be undermined," Fayad said.
Iran, Mideast peace top Bush-Olmert agenda
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080604/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_israel
WASHINGTON - A corruption scandal engulfing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was pushed into the background Wednesday as the beleaguered Israeli leader and staunch ally President Bush displayed chummy relations and declared resolve against Iran and for Mideast peace.
Bush warmly saluted Olmert as "my friend" twice in less than a minute of remarks before their Oval Office talks.
Olmert, clearly delighted to be again at the side of the U.S. president whose popularity in Israel far exceeds his own, gushed over Bush and grinned broadly at him throughout his brief statement. He effusively praised Bush's speech last month before the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, widely interpreted as favoring Israelis over Palestinians in their long-running dispute, as "the best expression of the United States commitment to the security and the well-being of the state of Israel." He even said he admired Bush's emotions.
Olmert's political future has been thrown into doubt because of testimony from New York businessman Morris Talansky, who says he gave Olmert envelopes stuffed with cash over a decade and a half, in part to fund a lavish lifestyle. Olmert's political allies are conspicuously refusing to come to his defense, and instead are jostling for his job.
Olmert's key coalition partner, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, now says he'll topple the government if Olmert doesn't step aside. And Olmert's rivals in his Kadima Party, including his popular deputy, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are gearing up for party primaries.
The developments are jeopardizing Bush's already ambitious timetable for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement by year's end.
But the situation was not mentioned as Bush and Olmert addressed reporters, and Olmert later told reporters that his problems hadn't come up in his talks with Bush. "The U.S. administration is familiar with the developments and follows them, but the meeting dealt with the matters on Israel's national agenda," he said.
Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, would not say whether it was a topic of discussion in private.
There are hints, though, that the Bush administration understands Olmert may well be on his way out. Hadley stressed, as have other administration officials recently, that the negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians are entered into by Olmert "on behalf of the government." The implication is that the process can proceed — even succeed — without Olmert in place.
Olmert said he thought it was still possible to make real progress before the deadline. "I hope that we will be able to make decisions during 2008," he told reporters, and noted that "not even half of the year has gone by."
This is a shift from Bush's initial reasoning for why an agreement could be reached this year — because Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are the right leaders at the right time to reach a historic but painful-to-all compromise.
"It involves participation by other ministers in this process — Foreign Minister Livni and Defense Minister Barak," Hadley said. "So, at this point, we follow the lead of the parties and the parties have indicated that they want to continue this process."
As they spoke, Abbas called for a new dialogue with Hamas, the militant group that has taken control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian government. Abbas said he will call for new legislative and presidential elections if the talks succeed.
The emphasis Bush chose, unprompted, for reporting on their talks was Iran, reflecting the importance of the topic to Israel.
Both countries are concerned about Tehran's nuclear intentions, but Israel believes that Iran has not suspended its uranium enrichment program despite U.S. intelligence report to the contrary. Olmert called Iran "the main threat to all of us" and later told reporters that it dominated the leaders' discussions.
In public, Bush sought to reassure Israelis worried about the U.S. commitment to keeping Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb and posing an even greater threat to Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Israel will one day be "wiped off the map."
"Iran is an existential threat to peace," Bush said. "It's very important for the world to take the Iranian threat quite seriously, which the United States does."
Hadley said that Bush plans to discuss with European leaders on a trip next week "how to step up our diplomatic efforts," including enacting stronger sanctions against Tehran. "We are taking action ourselves and urging other countries to increase pressure on Iran," he said.
In a post-meeting briefing for reporters, Olmert said Iran had been the dominant subject of his discussion with Bush, reflecting a "shared, deep understanding about the danger of the Iranian threat and the need to deal with it in a way that will bring the result we want."
"Every passing day we make another real step to deal with this problem in a more effective way," he said. "I don't think it would be helpful if I went into detail."
Israeli newspapers reported that Olmert hopes to acquire a sophisticated U.S. missile defense system, advanced radar and new warplanes. He would not say whether he brought up those requests with Bush.
Anti-Christian 'Cleansing' Campaign Picks Up Pace in Gaza
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126388
Attacks on Christian targets and those identified with Western culture have grown more frequent in Gaza in the past two years, and especially since the Hamas takeover in June 2007, experts say. The targets have included churches, Christian and United Nations schools, the American International School, libraries and Internet cafes.
The most recent incident occurred this past Saturday, May 31, when gunmen attacked the guards at the Al Manara school, stole a vehicle belonging to the Baptist Holy Book Society which operates the school and threatened the society's director. The Hamas leadership is not acting to stop the attacks and no one has been brought to justice.
Global jihad involvement
An Israeli intelligence report determined that there has been an increase in the number of attacks on Christian figures and institutions, as well as those associated with Western values. The attacks are being perpetrated by elements identified with the global jihad and radical Islam. In the past two years, groups associated with Al-Qaeda took responsibility for attacks upon Christians and Christian institutions with the expressly-stated goal of driving Christians out of Gaza.
The Christian community in Gaza numbers around 3,000. According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), the attacks on Christians have included the following:
* May 18, 2008: a large bomb exploded at the entrance to a fast-food restaurant near Al-Quds Open University in the center of Gaza City. The restaurant was completely destroyed. According to the owner, it was the second time his establishment had been attacked.
* May 16, 2008: a bomb exploded in the Rahabat al-Wardia school run by nuns in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City. Hamas condemned the incident and a call was made to the police to bring the criminals to justice. The previous year, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, the school was subjected to thefts and an arson attack.
* April 3, 2008: a monument in the Gaza Strip's foreign nationals' cemetery was blown up. Hamas promised to investigate.
* February 15, 2008: Three gunmen from the “Army of Islam in the Land of Ribat,” a network headed by Mumtaz Dughmush, broke into the YMCA library in Gaza City and set off a bomb which caused extensive damage. Hamas police condemned the event, calling it “a criminal act” and promising to investigate. The Hamas security forces detained a number of Army of Islam operatives but released them shortly thereafter, following a threat to use force to free them. After the event, senior Hamas figures met with senior Christian figures to express solidarity.
* January 10, 2008: a group called "Army of the Believers -- the Al-Qaeda Organization in Palestine,” attacked the International School in Beit Lahiya twice, burning vehicles and stealing equipment. According to a statement issued two days later, the school was accused of spreading polytheism and hatred for Islam. The attacks were timed to coincide with U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to Israel.
* December 31, 2007: the “Friends of the Sunnah Bayt al-Maqdis” issued a manifesto on the Pal-Today Website, affiliated with Islamic Jihad, threatening to attack anyone who participated in New Year's Eve celebrations.
* October 6, 2007, elements linked to Hamas abducted Rami Khadr Ayad from his home and shot him to death; he was a Christian who worked for the Holy Bible Society. The Hamas administration condemned the murder and opened an investigation whose results are so far unknown.
* June 19, 2007: during the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip Hamas gunmen attacked and vandalized a monastery and church.
* April 21, 2007: elements linked to the global jihad attacked the American International School in Gaza City.
* April 15, 2007: a group calling itself “The Swords of Truth in the Land of Ribat” set off bombs in two Internet cafes and a store selling Christian books, causing damage.
Report: Palestinian Textbooks Portray Jews in Bad Light
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,363122,00.html
JERUSALEM — Authors of Palestinian school textbooks took small steps toward softening their portrayal of Israel under the rule of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — but progress was quickly reversed after the militant Islamic Hamas took over, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education and by the American Jewish Committee looked at 120 textbooks published from 2000 to 2006.
The report reflects charges by Israelis that Palestinian textbooks are not in keeping with a peace process that started in 1993. Palestinians counter that Jewish Israeli students are not taught about Palestinian suffering.
Arnon Groiss, author of the report, said most of the textbooks from grade one to 10, issued under the late Yasser Arafat's rule, don't acknowledge any historical Jewish presence in ancient Palestine.
But in 11th grade books issued under the moderate Abbas, there are two maps showing Israel within the "Green Line" — the cease-fire line before the 1967 war, when Israel captured east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The textbooks issued under Abbas' rule also include a discussion of Jewish history in the region, the report said.
However, in 2006, the militant Islamic Hamas won an election and issued a 12th grade textbook that dramatically reversed those steps, the report said.
Mixed with anti-Semitic sentiments in the textbooks are genuine Palestinian complaints against Israel, including settlement building in areas Palestinians want for their future state, and the Israeli separation barrier, which swallows swathes of West Bank land.
Jamal Zakkout, spokesman for Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, said Palestinian textbooks should emphasize connection to the land and "a call for tolerance."
However, Zakkout said the main cause of Palestinian ill will toward Israel is not textbooks, but Israel's many checkpoints in the West Bank, the separation barrier and military operations in Palestinian towns.
Hamas officials were not available for comment Tuesday.
Israel must quit all Syrian land for peace: Assad
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0328698120080603?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
Israel must be prepared to return all Syrian lands occupied in the 1967 Middle East war as part of any peace deal between the two sides, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in remarks published on Tuesday.
Briefing editors of United Arab Emirates newspapers during a visit to the Gulf Arab state, Assad also said U.S. sponsorship would be essential in the next stage of indirect talks launched last month under Turkish sponsorship.
"At this stage we are not talking (with Israel) about anything else. What is on the agenda is the return of all land," al-Khaleej newspaper quoted Assad as saying during a visit on Monday. "In direct negotiations we will tackle the details which include the files of water and relations and other matters.
"As for water there are international rules that govern these matters and are usually referred to, but if the question of water is intended for (Syria to) give up the (condition on) 1967 borders that stretch to Tiberias then there will never be a compromise on the 1967 borders."
Israel and Syria said last month they had launched indirect peace talks mediated by Turkish officials, the first negotiations between the two sides in eight years.
The last peace talks broke down in 2000 over control of the shore of the lake, from which Israel draws much of its water.
Syria says it had Israeli assurances through Turkey that the Jewish states would be willing to give back the Golan Heights in return for peace.
"The negotiations are in their primary stage. In later stages they would require international sponsorship especially from the United States, a superpower that has special ties with Israel," al-Bayan newspaper quoted Assad as saying.
Many analysts say U.S. hostility to Syria makes a peace deal with Israel unlikely before President George W. Bush leaves office in January.
The United States said it did not object to talks but repeated its criticism of Syria's "support for terrorism".
Israel annexed the Golan in 1981 in a move condemned internationally. As well as strategic high ground, the fertile Golan Heights ensure Israeli control of important water resources in the arid region, land for vineyards, orchards and cattle-grazing.
Some 18,000 Israelis have moved to the Golan Heights and about 20,000 Syrians Druze live there. Israel gave the Druze the option of citizenship after annexing the territory but many rejected it.
The Last Jews of Babylon - A Prophetic Cycle At It's End
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/31/africa/01babylon.php
"I have no future here to stay."
Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.
The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah's prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar's sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.
Just over half a century ago, Iraq's Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community's heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
Among those who remain is a former car salesman who describes himself as the "rabbi, slaughterer and one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Iraq."
Although many of his Muslim friends and immediate neighbors know he is Jewish ("I'm proud, I'm Jewish, not ashamed. I'm not hiding," he wrote at one point.), he was wary of being named because it could draw more dangerous attention to him or his friends. To protect him, he is referred to as Saleh's grandson, because his or his father's name would be too easily recognizable here. Interviews with him were conducted by correspondence over the course of several months.
He lamented that Jews in Baghdad had had no meeting place since the Meir Tweig synagogue, the last in the city, was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly.
"I do my prayer in my house because we closed the synagogue from the war until now. If we open it, it will be a target," he wrote, adding later: "I have no future here, I can't marry, there is no girl. I can't put my kova on my head out of the house. If I'm out of Iraq, I'll share with people in all our feasts and do my prayer in the synagogue and will be with my family."
Now in his early 40s, he exists as anonymously and discreetly as he can. He cannot reliably hide his religion: it is stamped on his official identity card, which he must present at any security checkpoint. So he stays mainly in his own neighborhood, protected by Muslim neighbors who have been family friends for decades.
He is a very cautious man. After contact with him was first established through an intermediary, and his identity was confirmed by his family abroad, he consented to speak directly for only a few moments over the telephone. Even that was just to propose a safer way to correspond, under a version of his name different from the one that other Iraqis know.
His fears are all too real in a city where bodies are still found dumped in the street almost daily, despite a fall in the overall death toll.
Christians, a far larger group, have fled Iraq by the thousands, and even Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who live among millions of their fellows, remain fearful of religious and sectarian fanatics.
Jews were once a wealthy and politically active part of the spectrum of Iraq. In a fading red volume of the Iraq Directory of 1936, the "Israelite community," then numbering about 120,000, is listed along with Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and Sabeans. Rescued from a Baghdad library, this book lists Hebrew among the six languages of Iraq and describes a country in which "the mosque stands beside the church and the synagogue."
However, the directory predates decades of trauma: the 1941 Farhud pogrom in which more than 130 Jews were killed during the Feast of Shavuot, World War II, the Holocaust, the anti-Zionism of Saddam Hussein and the post-2003 rise of Islamic militants.
Most traces of Jews are now gone beside the Prat and the Hidekel rivers, the Hebrew names for the Euphrates and Tigris. Baghdad's Jewish quarter, in Taht al-Takia, is no more. And about 80 miles south of Baghdad lies the Hebrew-inscribed tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, "son of Buzi." During a visit there on Saturday, dozens of Muslim pilgrims filed through the well-tended shrine, its interior blackened by centuries of lamp smoke, to honor Ezekiel as a respected prophet.
Among these fragments of their civilization live the moribund huddle of holdouts.
Saleh's grandson is now alone. His mother died two decades ago, his older brother left in 1991, and his father, now 87, was among the last handful of Jews taken from Iraq by the Jewish Agency after 2003, reducing the current community to single figures.
Most of his other relatives departed in 1951, among more than 100,000 Jews who fled Iraq between 1949 and 1952, in the years after the state of Israel was created. Their exodus was code named "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah," after the Jewish leaders who took their people back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon beginning in 597 BC
Some of the remaining handful of Iraqi Jews are middle class, including two doctors. Others, including Saleh's grandson, are poor and unemployed, dependent on handouts.
"We see each other if there is something necessary, like a death, or to discuss some important things, or if someone needs help," he wrote. "We take care about the people in the Jewish community only, not the half or part-Jewish. We don't know about them after they left us."
Some Jews say they are too old to leave. Some do not want to leave their friends behind.
The few remaining Jews ignore the entreaties of worried relatives and friends abroad and await an unlikely renaissance, demographic extinction or a more sudden end.
Concern for their safety rose two years ago when one of them, a middle-aged man, was kidnapped. They have no idea whether he was taken because he was Jewish, wealthy, or whether the abduction was random.
"We don't know anything about him, and don't know the reason," Saleh's grandson said.
His relatives voice frustration at his insistence on remaining in Iraq, saying he cannot be persuaded to relinquish the family home. He wants to sell it for $300,000 to help build a new life abroad but has had no takers.
"I talk with him all the time," said his older brother, who lives in Europe and requested anonymity to protect his brother. "I call him every two weeks, and always I give him advice to leave, because it is dangerous, and because he needs to build his life and to find a wife."
The family argues that if buyers were going to come forward they would have done so long ago. They say that in Iraq's current instability, an unscrupulous buyer could simply steal the money back, knowing that Saleh's grandson would have no recourse without a tribe to protect him.
"Now there is nobody buying because of the situation in Sadr City," his brother said. "I keep telling him, 'Money is nothing.' "
The Jewish Agency for Israel, an organization that arranges immigration to the Holy Land, has offered to relocate the entire group. "Should the remaining Jews in Baghdad request to immigrate to Israel, the Jewish Agency will immediately facilitate this request and also take care of their absorption needs in Israel," said Zeev Bielski, the agency's chairman.
However, Michael Jankelowitz, an agency spokesman, conceded: "They are not interested in leaving. Their philosophy is, 'We are old, no one is affecting our day-to-day life. If we have to leave, we know how to contact the Jewish Agency.' "
His son says he knows the risks. "I'd like to leave, but I have my house, I can't leave it," he wrote. "I have no future here to stay."
He insists that he has responsibilities to his fellow Iraqi Jews, no matter how few in number.
"If I'm faithful in GOD, I'm not afraid of anything,".
Ahmadinejad says Israel will soon disappear as he anticipates the Mahdi's return
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080602124328.f6eyi8y1&show_article=1
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted on Monday that Muslims would uproot "satanic powers" and repeated his controversial belief that Israel will soon disappear, the Mehr news agency reported.
"I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene," he said.
"Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started."
Since taking the presidency in August 2005, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly provoked international outrage by predicting Israel is doomed to disappear.
"I tell you that with the unity and awareness of all the Islamic countries all the satanic powers will soon be destroyed," he said to a group of foreign visitors ahead of the 19th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Ahmadinejad also again expressed his apocalyptic vision that tyranny in the world be abolished by the return to earth of the Mahdi, the 12th imam of Shiite Islam, alongside great religious figures including Jesus Christ.
"With the appearance of the promised saviour... and his companions such as Jesus Christ, tyranny will be soon be eradicated in the world."
Ahmadinejad has always been a devotee of the Mahdi, who Shiites believe disappeared more than a thousand years ago and who will return one day to usher in a new era of peace and harmony.
His emphasis on the Mahdi has been a cause of controversy inside Iran with critics saying he would be better solving bread-and-butter domestic problems rather than talking about Iran's divine responsibility.
Iran Achieves a Four-Front Missile Command, Breakthrough on Nuclear Missile Warheads
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1352
DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps have created a separate missile command, in which Syria’s missile force is to be integrated. The joint command was formalized in a new mutual defense treaty signed by the Syrian defense minister, Gen. Hassan Turkmani in Tehran last week.
Israeli military sources judge the operational merger of Iranian and Syrian missile corps to be a major strategic hazard to the Jewish state.
Western and Israeli military experts connect it with other indications that Iran’s program for developing missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads has gone into high gear and reached an advanced stage. They believe the Iranians have beaten most of the technical difficulties holding it up.
On May 26, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which often goes easy on Iran, released a harsh report confirming Iran’s progress in “missile warhead design.”
The new missile command was cautiously announced last week by the IRGC commander, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari. He said: “An independent command might be created in Sepah (IRGC) in order to fortify the structure and activities of the missile section.”
DEBKAfile’s Iranians sources explain Jafar’s cautious language on three grounds:
1. He was preparing Iran’s population and the Arab world for a pretty portentous development.
2. He was at pains not to put off figures in the West who argue strongly in favor of unconditional talks with Tehran over its nuclear misdeeds. He counted on those advocates shouting down the Western strategists who would appreciate the startling significance of the separate command.
3. Tehran also views Syria’s co-option and the new mutual defense treaty as a sort of guarantee that Assad’s “peace talks” with Israel will in no way detract from his military and other commitments to Iran.
DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources disclose that the details of the combined command were worked out ahead of the Syrian defense minister’s talks in Tehran: It was agreed that Syria’s missile units would come under the new independent Iranian missile section and their operations would be fully coordinated with Tehran. Iranian officers are to be attached to Syrian units and Syrian officers posted to the Iranian command.
In the interim, Hizballah’s rise to power in Beirut has brought Lebanon into the shared Syrian-Iranian orbit. This development has enabled Tehran to line up a row of missiles deployments of varying strengths from Iran, Syria and Lebanon and up to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip – a missile array never before seen in the Middle East and a strategic menace most of Israel’s security leaders rate unacceptable.
Military experts comment that Tehran’s centralized control of four hostile missile fronts will virtually neutralize the American and Israeli anti-missile defense systems in the region; the Arrow and the Patriot missile interceptors could handle incoming missiles from one or maybe two directions – but not four.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israel’s armed forces have been working overtime, against repeated holdups, to get the third Arrow battery installed. It is to be deployed in northern Israel as a shield against Syrian ballistic missiles and Iranian missiles stationed in Syria.
The formation of the joint Iranian-Syrian missile command has slowed the project down. It calls for modifications in the Arrow’s deployment to meet the fresh challenge and a time-consuming study by US and Israeli intelligence specialists of how the new command structure functions. Western military sources doubt the Arrow system will be up and running by this summer, a period considered critical by military observers.
They discount as over-optimistic recent claims by Israeli officials that the new Iron Dome will be ready for operational testing against short-range missiles in the next year or two.
In a related development, DEBKAfile’s Gulf sources report that next week, Iran’s supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Syrian president Bashar Assad launch a major campaign to further isolate American influence and bludgeon moderate Arab governments into alignment with their extreme anti-US, anti-Israel line.
Assad sets out Sunday, June 1, for the United Arab Emirates for talks with Sheikh KHalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan in Abu Dhabi. Tuesday, he spends two days in Kuwait. The visits were set up by the Qatar ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spent Friday, May 30, in Assad’s palace, gathering compliments for the Doha accord he mediated which solved Lebanon’s political crisis by installing a national unity government in Beirut dominated by Hizballah.
The Qatari ruler, Assad and Khamenei have joined forces to use the Lebanon accord as an object lesson to teach Arab governments that they do not need the United States or Saudi Arabia to help them manage their problems.
This message was relayed in Iran foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s arrogant statement in Stockholm Friday. He said: “The United States of America needs a serious review of its foreign policy towards the Middle East. These policies in… Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and generally speaking in the Middle East are mistaken policies.”
DEBKAfile’s political sources point out that these reverses are piling up against the United States and Israel at the worst time possible: both governments are hobbled - Washington in the dying days of the Bush administration, and Israel, by the grave corruption allegations against prime minister Ehud Olmert which have placed him and the other two senior policy-makers, the defense and foreign ministers, at loggerheads.
Limited US attack on Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases in sight
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=5313
Our Washington sources report that president George W. Bush is closer than ever before to ordering a limited missile-air bombardment of the IRGC-al Qods Brigade’s installations in Iran. It is planned to target training camps and the munitions factories pumping fighters, missiles and roadside bombs to the Iraqi insurgency, Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza.
Iran is geared up for counteraction.
US intelligence estimates that Tehran’s counteraction will likewise be on a limited scale and therefore any US-Iranian military encounter will not be allowed to explode into a major confrontation. Because this US assault is not planned to extend to Iran’s nuclear installations, Tehran is not expected to hit back at distant American targets in the Persian Gulf or at Israel.
DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report, however, that Iran’s military preparations for countering an American attack are far broader than envisaged in Washington. Tehran would view a US attack on the IRGC bases as a casus belli and might react in ways and on a scale unanticipated in Washington.
Two days ago, Iran’s defense minister Gen. Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar warned: “Iran’s Armed Forces are fully prepared to counter any military attack with any intensity and to make the enemy regret initiating any such incursions.”
According to DEBKAfile’s Iranian and military sources, the IRGC had by mid-May completed their preparations for a US missile, air or commando assault on their command centers and bases in reprisal for Iranian intervention in Iraq.
These preparations encompass al Qods’ arms, most of them undercover, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Sudan. At home, the Revolutionary Guards have evacuated their key bases together with manpower and equipment to regular army sites or temporary quarters in villages located in remote corners of eastern and northern Iran. Their main headquarters and central training center at the Imam Ali University in northern Tehran are deserted except for sentries on the gates.
Indoctrination seminaries and dormitories hosting fighting strength in the holy town of Qom are empty, as is the Manzariyah training center east of the capital.
Deserted too is the main training camp near Isfahan for insurgents and terrorists from Iraq, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. It is here that they take courses from friendly al Qods training staff on how to sabotage strategic targets such as routes, bridges and military installations, and the activation of the extra-powerful roadside bombs (EFPs) which have had such a deadly effect on American troops in Iraq.
Christians to mobilise in Indian capital for Dalit demands
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christians.to.mobilise.in.indian.capital.for.dalit.demands/19265.htm
Church leaders and Christians from Andhra Pradesh in India are to travel to New Delhi to demand equal rights for Christian dalits.
The church in India has fought a decades-long campaign for equality for dalit Christians. The term dalit Christian refers to those Christians who have converted to Christianity from Hinduism but who are still categorised under their Hindu dalit status. Upon conversion to Christianity, dalits lose any privileges they received as Hindus.
"We have come to a stage of now or never. Hence, the need of showing our strength," explained Father Anthoniraj Thumma, secretary of Andhra Pradesh Federation of Churches (APFC), an ecumenical forum.
Last week, the priest and 50 other Christian leaders gathered in Hyderabad to discuss the arrangements for the New Delhi protest. At least 10,000 people are expected to participate in the demonstrations.
The protest will be staged as the Indian Parliament convenes its monsoon session.
Father Thumma said his federation has sought a letter of recommendation from Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance, which rules the federal government.
APFC President Rev BP Sugandhar, moderator of the Church of South India, told the gathering they are fighting for "a just cause and not begging for any favour from the government".
Although in 2004 the federal government's National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities recommended that the Indian Government reserve five per cent of government jobs for Christian Dalits, the proposals have never been implemented.
APFC executive secretary B Danam said the national commission and Supreme Court support the Christians' demands.
"Decks are cleared for the government to introduce the Bill. Since the government is still dilly-dallying, there is need to put political pressure," he said.
Last week, the Tamil Nadu state government assured that Christians and Muslims would be benefit from a 3.5 per cent reservation in government services.
It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Vanish From TV
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/world/europe/03russia.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
On a talk show last fall, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail G. Delyagin had some tart words about Vladimir V. Putin. When the program was later televised, Mr. Delyagin was not.
Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)
Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.
The stop list is, as Mr. Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”
It is also a striking indication of how Mr. Putin has increasingly relied on the Kremlin-controlled TV networks to consolidate power, especially in recent elections.
Opponents who were on TV a year or two ago all but vanished during the campaigns, as Mr. Putin won a parliamentary landslide for his party and then installed his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, as his successor. Mr. Putin is now prime minister, but is still widely considered Russia’s leader.
Onetime Putin allies like Mikhail M. Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei N. Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry K. Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of liberal parties.
Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, has said that its leaders are kept off TV.
And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means TV set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.
When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.
Indeed, political humor in general has been exiled from TV. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor A. Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of Russian leaders, including Mr. Putin. It was canceled in Mr. Putin’s first term, and Mr. Shenderovich has been all but barred from TV.
Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy.
In interviews, journalists said that they did not believe the Kremlin kept an official master stop list, but that the networks kept their own, and that they all operated under an informal stop list — an understanding of the Kremlin’s likes and dislikes.
Vladimir V. Pozner, host of “Times,” a political talk show on the top national network, Channel One, said the pressure to conform to Kremlin dictates had intensified over the last year, and had not eased even after the campaign.
“The elections have led to almost a paranoia on the part of the Kremlin administration about who is on television,” said Mr. Pozner, who is president of the Russian Academy of Television.
In practice, Mr. Pozner said, he tells Channel One executives whom he wants to invite on the show, and they weed out anyone they think is persona non grata.
“They will say, ‘Well, you know we can’t do that, it’s not possible, please, don’t put us in this situation. You can’t invite so and so’ — whether it be Kasparov or Kasyanov or someone else,” Mr. Pozner said.
He added: “The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that we do not have freedom of the press when it comes to the television networks.”
Vladimir R. Solovyov, another political talk show host, said Mr. Pozner was complaining only because his ratings were down and he was looking for someone to blame if his program was canceled. Mr. Solovyov, a vocal supporter of Mr. Putin, said he had never been bullied by the Kremlin.
Yet last year, his show, “Throw Down the Gauntlet,” regularly featured members of opposition parties. This year, the only politicians to appear have been leaders of Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, and an allied party.
Asked why he had not invited opposition leaders lately, Mr. Solovyov said: “No one supports them. They have nothing to say.”
Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, a liberal and former member of Parliament who used to appear on the show, said Mr. Solovyov was covering up for the Kremlin.
“He lies, of course,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “My programs with him were among the highest rated programs of any in the history of his show.”
Mr. Ryzhkov said he was usually allowed to appear in lengthy segments on only one major channel: Russia Today, the English-language news station, which the Kremlin established to spread its viewpoint globally.
“I can go on Russia Today only because they want to make it seem that in Russia, there is freedom of the press,” he said.
After the Soviet Union’s fall, several national and regional networks arose that were owned by oligarchs. Though they operated with relatively few restrictions, their owners often used them to settle personal and business scores. One network, NTV, garnered attention for its investigative reporting and war dispatches from Chechnya.
Mr. Putin chafed at negative coverage of the government, and the Kremlin effectively took over the major national networks in his first term, including NTV. Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV’s owner, was briefly arrested and then fled the country after giving up the network. From that point on, executives and journalists at Russian networks clearly understood that they would be punished for resisting the Kremlin.
All the major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or its allies. And since the presidential election in March, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Medvedev has indicated any interest in loosening the reins.
“Our television is very often criticized,” Mr. Medvedev said in April. “They say it is boring, it is pro-government, it is too oriented towards the positions of state agencies, of those in power. You know, I can say that our television — in terms of quality, in terms of the technology used — is, I believe, one of the best in the world.”
Valery Y. Komissarov, a former host on a state channel who is now a governing party leader in Parliament, said television coverage was a convenient scapegoat for opposition politicians and antagonistic commentators.
“These are people who are not interesting for society, who are not interesting for journalists,” Mr. Komissarov said. “But they want publicity and perhaps they want to explain away their lack of creative and political success by the fact that they are persecuted, that they are included on the so-called stop list.”
While the Kremlin has focused on TV because it has by far the largest audience, many radio stations and newspapers also abide by the stop list, either ignoring or belittling the opposition.
There are exceptions: a few national and regional newspapers regularly publish critical news and commentary about Mr. Putin and comments from those on the stop list. In addition, the Internet is not censored, and contains plenty of criticism of the government.
A small national network, Ren TV, pushes the boundaries, as does a national radio station, the Echo of Moscow, which has become the voice of the opposition even though Gazprom, the government gas monopoly, owns a majority stake in it.
The Kremlin seems to tolerate criticism in such outlets because they have a limited reach compared with the major television networks. The nightly news on Channel One, for example, is far more popular than any of its counterparts in the United States. It regularly is one of top 10 most-watched programs in Russia.
Mr. Delyagin, the political analyst edited out of the talk show last fall, said he was surprised to have been invited in the first place. He said he last appeared on a major network several years ago, before he began attacking the Kremlin and supporting the opposition.
“I thought that maybe she forgot to look at the stop list,” he said, referring to the program’s host, Kira A. Proshutinskaya.
(Last week, after a Russian-language version of this article was posted on a blog run by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times, Mr. Delyagin was invited to appear on a show on NTV.)
Ms. Proshutinskaya’s program, “The People Want to Know,” had been censored before.
Mr. Ryzhkov, the liberal former member of Parliament, went on the show last year, but its network, TV Center, refused to broadcast it.
In an interview, Ms. Proshutinskaya conceded that Mr. Delyagin had been digitally erased from the program. She said she had been embarrassed by the incident, as well as the one with Mr. Ryzhkov, explaining that the network was responsible. The Kremlin had so intimidated the networks, she said, that self-censorship was rampant.
“I would be lying if I said that it is easy to work these days,” she said. “The leadership of the channels, because of their great fear of losing their jobs — they are very lucrative positions — they overdo everything.”
The management of her network would not comment. But the network’s news director, Mikhail A. Ponomaryov, said journalists and hosts of talk shows had no choice but to comply with the rules.
“It would be stupid to say that we can do whatever we want,” he said. “If the owner of the company thinks that we should not show a person, as much as I want to, I cannot do it.”
BRIC nations grab power
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080529/COLUMNS03/805290325/1026/news12
In the latter part of the 19th century, an obscure American admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, propounded what he called the "Heartland Theory." It presupposed that if a combination of Eurasian nations (China, India, Russia) merged into a single power block, they could control the rest of the world.
Although a naval strategist, Mahan realized that maritime powers such as dominant Great Britain and the evolving United States of America would only have a marginal impact on the world's future. He likened the sea lanes to arteries of commerce, indispensable to the maintenance of economic growth.
As today's global restructuring indicates, world power is increasingly reposing in the world's extractionist and conversion nations.
The United States is unquestionably the world's sole superpower, but the advantages that put America in that position when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 are slowly slipping away.
Although the U.S. commands the world's dominant gross domestic product of goods and services ($13.5 trillion), almost 70 percent of this grandiose number represents bloated consumption.
Still at the top of the heap technologically and militarily, the U.S. is slowly losing its edge technically as thousands of foreign engineering graduates are returning to China and India, where jobs are waiting for them.
Japan, which joined Germany as the miracle economy of the latter part of the 20th century, is now in a no-growth suspension. Like Japan, Germany is shifting its manufacturing base to low-cost goods providers while maintaining its worldwide distribution and brand-name preference.
Both countries have supplemented America's "insourcing," especially in the automotive arena, where they have moved closer to their market. The two major World War II losers also are hemorrhaging population, which makes their industrial repositioning especially adroit.
'Asian giants' on the rise
The BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are emerging as the new powers destined to inherit world economic leadership by the middle of the 21st century.
With China and India combined representing more than one-third of the world's population (2.4 billion) and undisputed leaders in converting raw materials into finished goods, these Asian giants are headed for even greater dynamics as the century wears on.
Although starved for raw materials, China and India are nailing down access to oil, natural gas, iron ore, copper, rare metals and food staples wherever available. They're looking 50 years into the future so as not to be caught short when their expansion reaches its target.
Russia, blessed with a surfeit of raw material, is on the verge of developing the most widespread middle class in its history, which has been replete with czars, commissars and incompetent bureaucrats preventing the world's largest land mass from developing its vast potential.
Although numbering around 170 million, Russia, like most of Europe and Japan, is suffering from a shrinking population.
Russia also is cursed with a practically nonexistent infrastructure, much of it caused by the destruction wrought by the German armies and subsequent scorched earth policies practiced by the retreating Russians.
But with the massive inflow of new investments, plus an unprecedented currency surplus generated by natural resource sales, this predicament likely will be overcome within the next decade.
Russia also is flexing its political muscles over Eastern and Central Europe, since those areas have become dependent on the Russian bear for much of their oil and practically all of their natural gas.
Brazil has much to offer
The newcomer to the world's emerging power bloc, Brazil, had laughingly been called the "land of tomorrow" for the past century. Under the leadership of former Marxist Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, this Latin American powerhouse, with a 180 million strong population, has reached the rare $1 trillion annual gross domestic product target.
Brazil covers two-thirds of South America's land mass and has nearly unlimited natural resources. On top of huge reserves of food staples, Brazil has made two recent offshore oil discoveries, estimated to aggregate more than 50 billion barrels of reserves.
Historically friendly to the U.S., Brazil's leadership has ranged from an extreme leftist, "Jango" Goulart in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to a traditionally corrupt military dictator, Getúlio Vargas, during and after World War II.
Brazil was the only Latin American country that joined America's World War II effort in its final stages, sending a division to fight alongside American troops in northern Italy. It was Vargas of whom President Roosevelt said, "He may be an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B."
Myanmar's Christians Tell Stories of Hope
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/383841.aspx
YANGON, Burma - In the midst of tragedy and what seems like countless deaths, there are many stories of survival and hope here in Myanmar.
Orphans here are cramped into a house church on their knees praying that God will provide them with the means to rebuld their house. They are thankful they escaped the bamboo shack just moments before it was blown to pieces by Cyclone Nargis.
Cin Khan Lun shares how the big church next to her house swayed back and forth in the wind when the cyclone struck at midnight. She believes God miraculously saved her and her family.
"I prayed to God to send His angels to protect us," she said. "He gave me the verse in Nahum 1:7. 'The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble for those who trust in Him.' I believe the angels stretched their big wings to keep the big church from falling in the direction of our house."
Pastor Steven Len Piang is deeply saddened by the death of one of his church workers and family who were serving in the Irrawaddy Delta area.
Zaw Moe Aung, 29, along with his wife and 10-year-old daughter were swept away into the sea at the height of the cyclone. But in the midst of this tragedy, Pastor Steven believes in God's divine purpose.
"Nargis is a Hindu term for snake. In the bible snake symbolizes Satan but Satan can't work without God's permission. I believe this is a wake up call to all Christians especially to the Karen tribe who is the biggest Christian tribe in Myanmar and the first recipients of the gospel," he said.
"Most of the people living in the Irrawaddy delta are Karen. Imagine 100,000 Karen die and their churches have spiritual revival. Because of their size it will be revival for the whole country," he said.
David Vunga, director of the Myanmar Center for Church Planting, says the desperate situation is not only stirring revival among Christian churches but also causing Buddhists to open their hearts to the gospel.
"We went to this village with 500 families all Buddhists," he began. "My dad had the privilege to preach about the living God and that He is sovereign. It was the first time that a Christian preach in their village. They begin to see a different light and they see that Christians are a loving people and care for their well-being."
With the Burmese government's recent decision to open its doors to foreign aid workers, Christians in Myanmar and worldwide believe the door is likely to be opened to them only a short while, not only to save lives, but souls as well.
More Christians Arrested; Imprisoned Pastors may Face Treason Charges in Eritrea
http://news.christiansunite.com/Religion_News/religion07260.shtml
(christiansunite.com) - Police raided a private home and jailed 25 Christians who had gathered in Adi Kuala on Eritrea's Independence Day on May 24 to pray for their nation, according to a May 27 report from Compass Direct. Twenty men and five women meeting in a Christian's home were taken into custody. All are members of the local Medhane-Alem group, a renewal movement within the Eritrean Orthodox Church. They are now being held in a police station in the town which is about 90 km southwest of the capital city of Asmara.
Two separate groups of Christian prisoners held in detention for the past three months have been reportedly released recently. Ten members of the Church of the Living God, a breakaway group from the Eritrean Orthodox Church, were set free after three months' detention in the Mendefera police station. Another 15 members of the Kale-Hiwot Church who had been held in the Keren police station were also released. All the discharged prisoners were forced to pay 80,000 nakfa ($5,330) per person as bail. When they were set free, authorities strictly warned them against involvement in any Christian activities in the future. Some were forced to surrender property deeds as bond, in order to secure the steep bail demands.
The Compass report also indicated that the Eritrean government plans to press formal charges of treason against several pastors jailed for the past four years. Relatives and church members of the long-jailed pastors are experiencing "great anxiety" over these unconfirmed reports. Official conviction for treason carries the death penalty in Eritrea. Three of the most prominent pastors -- Full Gospel Church leaders Haile Naizghi and Dr. Kiflu Gebremeskel, together with Tesfatsion Hagos of the Rema Evangelical Church -- have been imprisoned incommunicado for the past four years.
Pray for the release of those in prison for the sake of Christ. Ask God to sustain by His grace the pastors and their loved ones as they face continued suffering (1 Peter 5:12).
For more information on the persecution facing Eritrean Christians, go to www.persecution.net/country/eritrea.htm.
Algerian Christians given suspended jail terms
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/algerian.christians.given.suspended.jail.terms/19264.htm
Four Algerian Christians received suspended jail terms and fines on Tuesday for seeking to convert Muslims in the latest in a series of cases to have provoked accusations in the West of religious repression.
Christian groups overseas and Algerian secular liberals point to recent state-ordered closures of some churches and prosecutions for proselytism as evidence that the overwhelmingly Muslim country of 33 million is persecuting minority Christians.
The government denies harassing Christians, believed to number about 10,000. The state-appointed Higher Islamic Council, which regulates religious practice, says Protestant evangelicals are secretly trying to divide Algerians to colonise the country.
A court in the western town of Tiaret handed a six month suspended prison term to Rachid Seghir, a 36-year-old computer technician, and fined him 200,000 dinars for breaking a provision in a 2006 law that forbids non-Muslims from seeking to convert Muslims.
Jillali Saidi, Abdelhak Rabih and Chaabane Baikel received two months suspended prison sentences and were fined 100,000 dinars each. The four said they intended to appeal. Two other accused, Mohamed Khan and Abdelkader Hori, were acquitted.
Under a provision in the 2006 law that limits religious worship to specific buildings approved by the state, more than a dozen churches have been closed in the past six months. Several mosques have also been closed under the same provision.
Larbi Drissi, a lawyer representing the Ministry of Religious Affairs, said: "We are satisfied with the verdicts because at the end of the day what we want is that people, irrespective of their religion, practise religion under the framework of the law."
Defence lawyer Khelloudja Khalfoun said: "The verdict confirms an attitude of lack of respect for freedom of conscience. All the group should have been acquitted."
Speaking to journalists outside the court before the hearing, Seghir said: "We are Christians and we are not ashamed to say it."
Algeria is almost totally Muslim. Most of its Christian colonial settler population fled shortly after independence from France in 1962.
Secular liberals suspect that tightening curbs on Christian activity is a headline-grabbing tactic to pander to widespread Islamist sentiment ahead of presidential elections in 2009.
In a case that stirred further concern in the West, the prosecutor at the Tiaret court last month demanded a three-year jail term for an Algerian woman, Habib Kouider, on a charge of "practising a non-Muslim religion without authorisation".
Critics argue she was breaking no law simply by practising her religion and pointed out that the constitution guarantees individual religious freedom. Her cases continues.
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