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See Also: Al-Quds Times
By Jim Teeple, Voice of America
Jerusalem/Ramallah
28 November 2007
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There has been a mixed reaction in Israel and the Palestinian territories to the Annapolis Mideast peace conference. VOA’s Jim Teeple spoke with Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and with Israelis in Jerusalem about how they view Tuesday’s conference.
Street musicians serenade the strollers on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. The pedestrian promenade is where Israelis come to stroll, shop and relax. Some, like Tamar Zeldon, said they are thinking about the Annapolis peace conference, where Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to resume peace negotiations aimed at the creation of a Palestinian state.
“I always hope something will change, because we really need change. Yes, I think if they take it seriously it will make a real difference,” he said.
While some Israelis like Tamar Zeldon are optimistic, others like Jerusalem lawyer Daniel Mauden are less so. Mauden says he hopes for the best, but says he is not confident that leaders on either side can do the job.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Judaism, Middle East, News Articles, Opinion, Recent Posts on November 29, 2007 - י"ט כסלו תשס"ח at 9:50 am
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By Ted Belman, Israpundit, November 27, 2007
See Also: Al-Quds Times
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Monday categorically rejected assertions by American Jewish leaders that Jerusalem is not an Israeli issue but “a Jewish one.”
Speaking at a news briefing Monday, Olmert said that the Jerusalem issue had “been determined long ago” and that “the government of Israel has a sovereign right to negotiate anything on behalf of Israel.”
He said that at this stage, the matter was a theoretical rather than practical one, as the subject of Jerusalem was not yet on the negotiating table.
Don’t you believe it.
I attended a lecture tonight by Jacques Gauthier, a Canadian Lawyer who just received his PhD after twenty years of research on the legal status of Jerusalem and the writing of a dissertation of some 1300 pages with 3000 footnotes. He is not a Jew and had to present his thesis to a panel of two of the leading international lawyers and one world famous Jewish historian. The reason for so many footnotes was to enable himself to defend his thesis from intense attack by one of the lawyers who happened to be a Jewish anti-Zionist and who had represented the PA on numerous occasions.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on November 28, 2007 - י"ח כסלו תשס"ח at 9:10 am
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Council on Foreign Relations, November 27, 2007
Author: Michael Moran
The time may or may not be right, and progress may or may not ensue. But on Monday, for the first time in sixteen years, representatives of the Arab world, Israel, and a host of other interested parties convened under U.S. auspices to talk about peace. President Bush, meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ahead of the November 26 opening dinner, pronounced himself optimistic about the talks, and repeated the sentiment in later talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush offered a hopeful toast opening the ceremonial dinner Monday evening, saying “we share a common goal: two democratic states—Israel and Palestine—living side by side in peace and security.” News reports indicated that Israeli and Palestinian followed the dinner by working through the night in an attempt to narrow differences (AFP) and craft a joint peace statement ahead of negotiations.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East, News Articles, Opinion, Recent Posts on November 27, 2007 - י"ז כסלו תשס"ח at 9:48 am
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by Wael Mahdi, Arabian Business, 22 November 2007
The Saudi Minister of Labour said that Egyptians, Bangladeshis, and Indians were the dominant nationalities for the workers visas issued in Ramadan. 22% of the visas issued were for Egyptians, followed by Bangladeshis with 19% and Indians with 15%.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Labour has said that it has issued 878,737 working visas in the first nine months of 2007 showing a 57% increase from a year earlier, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Wednesday.
The ministry, which uses the Islamic calendar, said that number of visas issued in the month of Ramadan (which started on Sept.12) for this year was 90,619 visas, signaling a 104% increase over the same month a year earlier.
The ministry said that 50% of the working visas issued in Ramadan were for engineering professions. Services professions came next with 25% present and all other professions shared the remaining 25%.
The figures reflect the high demand for engineers and technical professionals by Saudi companies which are executing multi billion infrastructure projects. The number of visas issued for civil engineers went up 28% compared to a year earlier, according to the labor ministry.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Business and Commerce, Middle East Report, Recent Posts on November 23, 2007 - י"ג כסלו תשס"ח at 7:11 am
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by James Phillips, Heritage Foundation, November 21, 2007
Washington should not rush these negotiations, as it is more important to get them right than to get them done quickly. As long as Hamas is free to continue its terror campaign, it is virtually impossible for Israel to reach a final status agreement with the Palestinian Authority.
The long-delayed Annapolis conference, proposed by the Bush Administration to revive the dormant Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations, is slated to be convened on November 27. But the countries that will attend; the issues that will be addressed; and what, if anything, can be achieved at the conference all remain obscured by a thick diplomatic fog. The conference was originally conceived as an international forum to reach agreement on a “political horizon” for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Lately, however, it has been downgraded to a ceremonial diplomatic kickoff for final status negotiations due to the failure of Israeli and Palestinian diplomats to negotiate a common vision of the horizon. The continuing threat posed by Hamas, backed by Iran and Syria, also makes a sustainable peace agreement unattainable for the foreseeable future. Approaching the final year of its tenure, the Bush Administration must bear this in mind as it presses for realistic step-by-step negotiations to mitigate, rather than overly ambitious efforts to quickly resolve, the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East, Opinion, Recent Posts on November 22, 2007 - י"ב כסלו תשס"ח at 9:36 am
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The U.S. can’t prevent the Palestinians and their Arab backers from making poor choices.
BY JEFF ROBBINS, Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2007
In March 1999, a Democratic president of the United States was leading a military intervention in Kosovo. It was aimed at stopping the mass murder of a Muslim minority by Slobodan Milosevic, a bona fide war criminal. Our European allies ardently desired the U.S. to shoulder the burden of this effort–but wished to publicly distance themselves from it, in order to avoid the potential political fallout in their own countries that ineluctably follows an association with the U.S.
The European leaders were not simply imagining political risk where none existed: Tens of thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of European capitals in the spring of 1999, denouncing the U.S. for using military force to stop Milosevic from killing and persecuting Muslim Kosovars. At the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where I was a U.S. delegate at the time, a middle-aged Greek woman accosted me angrily at a reception and smugly attributed U.S. efforts to stop Milosevic to an American desperation to “protect American markets.” I responded that I had not known that American exports to Kosovo were of a magnitude so critical to the American economy as to galvanize the U.S. military industrial complex into launching a major bombing campaign there.
It is increasingly de rigueur around the world and, for that matter, in certain segments of the Democratic Party, to place responsibility for all international crises on the U.S. government. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has attained the level of high fashion to ascribe the persistent absence of peace to a lack of adequate U.S. “engagement” in resolving it.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Opinion on November 21, 2007 - י"א כסלו תשס"ח at 8:40 am
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Ed O’Loughlin , The Age, November 17, 2007
A relative oasis of stability for much of its short history, Jordan has accommodated several waves of refugees from its more troubled neighbours. But its tolerance is now being tested by a massive influx of Iraqis who have fled across the border since 2003.
Most people in Jordan are descended from refugees or wanderers.
At least 40% of the kingdom’s 6 million people — some say a lot more — are Palestinians who fled the “West Bank” of the Jordan river during wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967.
Most of the rest, the “East Bankers”, are descended from the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Syrian and Arabian deserts, with a sprinkling of Chechens, Circassians and Armenians displaced in the days of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire.
Even the ruling family comes from somewhere else. Members of the same ancient clan as the Prophet Mohammed, in 1925 the Hashemi were driven from their Mecca heartland by the rival house of Saud. Today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Saudi Arabia are the only two countries on earth named after their rulers.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East Report, News Articles on November 19, 2007 - ט' כסלו תשס"ח at 6:40 am
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Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service, November 18, 2007
It wasn’t a normal day for Raymond Rappaport, a veteran primary care doctor from Redwood City.
In the space of a few hours, he correctly diagnosed a postal worker suffering from anthrax poisoning and joined a team of emergency doctors to save the life of a young man with a gunshot wound to the chest. Then he entered a trauma room, covered from head to toe in a gas mask, biochemical suit and rubber gloves brandishing injectors filled with antidotes that counter nerve gas poisoning. He later worked on an unconscious patient who apparently had a seizure from a chemical attack.
Rappaport is one of 30 American doctors who recently participated in a grueling five-day course in emergency medicine hosted by Israeli civilian hospitals and military medics. On this day, the group visited the Israel Center for Medical Simulation, a state-of-the-art training center for emergency medicine at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv.
After each exercise, which was carried out using real equipment on electronic mannequins that breathed and spoke to them, the U.S. doctors watched a video playback and received feedback from Israel’s top medical trainers.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Health Sciences, Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts, Science and Technology on November 18, 2007 - ח' כסלו תשס"ח at 7:58 am
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By Ray Hanania, American Muslim, November 15, 2007
Too many apologists for the Hamas terrorist organization have tried to assert that the Islamicist organization is a product of Democracy that is seeking to democratically represent the Palestinian people and salvage them from years of Israeli oppression. They argue that because the group won one election, it therefore is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. But the truth is Hamas is not a Democracy at all, but a religious dictatorship. It used the last elections to destroy secular Palestinian society and replace it with a fundamentalist bastardization of Islam.
Since its existence, Hamas has only known violence. And while it claims to champion the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, it’s vision of a “Hamas Palestine” is a religiously oppressive dictatorship where Mullahs and religious fanatics bestow favors on their disciples while denying equal rights to secular Muslims, and to non-Muslims especially Christians and Jews. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on November 17, 2007 - ז' כסלו תשס"ח at 11:34 pm
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By Robert F. Service, ScienceNOW Daily News
16 November 2007
If the hoped-for hydrogen economy is ever to become a reality, researchers must devise efficient ways to produce and store the gas. That will require a series of breakthroughs that have been slow in coming. But researchers in the United States have hit upon a material for storing hydrogen that could be far better than the competition–just the sort of break hydrogen researchers are looking for.
Hydrogen has long been seen as a potentially green alternative to gasoline, which is produced from fossil fuels and gives off the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when burned. When piped through a fuel cell, hydrogen molecules (H2) combine with oxygen, producing only electricity and water. At room temperature, however, hydrogen is a gas, which makes it difficult to store enough of it on board a car to drive long distances. The gas can be compressed in high-pressure tanks or cooled to a liquid at ultracold temperatures. But both of those strategies require large amounts of energy themselves.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Air & Water, Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Recent Posts on November 17, 2007 - ז' כסלו תשס"ח at 10:34 am
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