Jerusalem – Knesset members Uri Maklev and Moshe Gafni (both United Torah Judaism) were attacked Thursday in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim.

A Gafni aide said to Ynet that the attackers were members of the Sikarikim group, considered to be among the most extreme of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, know for its opposition to the State of Israel and its institutions. They were responsible for a similar incident about a month ago in which stones were thrown at Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai (Shas).

The incident took place near one of the synagogues in the area. According to eyewitness reports, the two MKs had stones thrown at them and Gafni even had a chair hurled at his back. They ran away from the scene to the house of Rabbi Salonim.

They had previously met with Rabbi Elyashiv, and at the time of the attack had been engaged in dialogue between the two rabbis about the Emmanuel affair and the continuation of the struggle. They had just completed the minhah prayer in a synagogue when they were attacked by a group that protested their cooperation with the “Zionist regime.”

“This is proof that these hooligans don’t just hurt the secular public but even the haredim themselves,” the aide said to Ynet. “Worse than that – they hurt representatives of the public who are delegates of the sages of Israel.”

News Source:  Ynet

Israel – Slonim Grand Rabbi Shmuel Berezovsky said that his followers would not compromise and would continue their struggle against the High Court, in regards to the ongoing school segregation saga in the Immanuel settlement.

“Even if they put us in front of a firing squad, we would not give up and would not compromise,” Berezovsky declared in a letter released to followers and journalists.

Berezovsky heads a midsized Hasidic sect, and in recent months has become a key figure, as Slonim are dominant in Immanuel, where Ashkenazi parents have refused to send their daughters to school with Sephardi students.

“If I thought the justices believe in what they wrote, that the school in Immanuel is based on racial discrimination, I probably would have acted differently,” Berezovsky wrote. “But since I have no shadow of a doubt that they know the truth, that their words are lies to the core, this is a struggle between faith and heresy, between sacred power and impure Satanic forces? A struggle that we’ve always known would break out at the end of days.”

At the end of his message, Berezovsky called on the public to “join us in this sublime struggle that generations have waited and looked forward to.”

News Source:  Haaretz

Manhattan, NY – Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly unveiled on Wednesday the NYPD’s latest high-tech weapon against terror.

Addressing a civic group, Kelly said the department has begun using analytic software to monitor the behavior of potential terrorists.

By training cameras on something as mundane as an article of clothing, police can lock in on a person and track their movements. The collection of images can reveal whether someone is casing a location for a possible attack.

“With that software, we can conduct detailed searches,” he said. “We can pull up any camera, scroll back in time for as long as the data is store, which in our case is generally 30 days, and do this from any terminal on the network.”

Police officials said many of the cameras are already being used in lower Manhattan. Specifics weren’t immediately available. Kelly demonstrated the new technology at a midtown breakfast hosted by the Association for a Better New York.

As part of its growing counterterrorism efforts, the NYPD is beefing up security downtown with a network of some 3,000 cameras feeding into a data coordination center.

A similar program of security cameras and license plate readers is also planned for midtown — from 30th St. to 60th St., spanning the East River to the Hudson River.

News Source:  NY Daily News

Washington – Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s remarks about senior officials exposed what has been an open secret in Washington and Kabul for months: The fissures that emerged during the Obama administration’s three-month review of war strategy last year remain, and many of the personalities involved have strained relations that have festered for months.

High-level disputes over major foreign policy decisions are nothing new in Washington. And put-downs of senior Obama administration officials made in jest by Gen. McChrystal and his aides in the Rolling Stone article may have, under normal circumstances, caused just a few ripples.

“This is the way people in Washington on virtually any level of power and responsibility talk, almost without exception,” said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But the comments’ impact has been magnified by a series of public setbacks for the war effort that has produced a widely held perception in Washington that the war isn’t going well: continuing violence in Marjah, site of a highly touted offensive earlier this year; the firing by Afghan President Hamid Karzai of two highly regarded Afghan security officials; and a delay in operations around Kandahar.

In addition, the comments reinforce concerns, held even by supporters of President Barack Obama’s war strategy, that by keeping his current team intact despite public disagreements and private backbiting, the president has complicated an already complex military campaign that is reliant on perception as much as reality.

“This hasn’t been a team of rivals,” said one senior Democratic foreign policy staffer on Capitol Hill sympathetic to the administration’s Afghan plan. “This has just been a bunch of people who don’t like each other.”

Defense and military officials said Tuesday that the differences within Mr. Obama’s war council are to be expected when the stakes are so high, and that they actually serve a public good by giving the president a range of strongly held views on how to conduct the war.

“It would be foolish for the American people to suppose—and foolish for them to want—for all their leaders to agree,” said a U.S. military official familiar with the internal rivalries. “That’s not healthy.”

But there is a growing view in some circles that the rivalries and sniping are beginning to affect the way Afghan strategy is proceeding. Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave voice to those concerns, saying that while differences over policy have been relatively narrow, the personal infighting is concerning.

“Personality conflicts can have a negative effect on implementation of a policy, and that is what you’ve got to worry about,” Mr. Levin said.

Some of the tensions that exist are between civilians and the military. A recent book by Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter, with which the White House cooperated, portrays Mr. Obama’s civilian aides as deeply suspicious of the military brass, accusing them of intentionally boxing the president in through a series of coordinated leaks to the media during last year’s policy review.

It is a feeling the military has been concerned about for months. “There was discomfort here about the sense we couldn’t be trusted with information,” another military official involved in Afghan policy said recently.

At the same time, however, U.S. officials involved in Afghan policy say the divisions and personality conflicts are more complex than a simple civilian-military divide. Gen. McChrystal’s team has allies among several top civilians, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In addition, some of the most intense rivalries are among civilians. According to current and former U.S. officials, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, has rankled his fellow civilians in the State Department as well as in the White House with his abrasive manner. Mr. Holbrooke has denied such strains.

Retired Gen. James Jones, the national security adviser, also caused heartburn among some in the White House when he publicly chastised Mr. Karzai during Mr. Obama’s recent trip to Kabul at a time the administration was seeking to put divisions between the two presidents behind them.

The differences have frequently been very public, and very real. Vice President Joe Biden, who was the most prominent advocate of a less troop-heavy counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan during last year’s policy review, has on several occasions appeared at odds with other members of the president’s foreign policy team.

In Mr. Alter’s book, Mr. Biden is quoted as saying “a whole lot” of U.S. troops will be withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011—a widely held belief among Afghan and Pakistani officials that other senior members of the administration, including Mr. Gates, have sought to refute. Mr. Gates has insisted that any withdrawals will be based on conditions on the ground.

In addition, Mr. Biden late last year said on MSNBC that the new war plan “is not a COIN strategy”—military parlance for counterinsurgency—at the same time others in the administration were planning for exactly that.

The rifts date back to the three-month review last year, in which differences between senior members of the administration were aired very publicly. Gen. McChrystal’s classified assessment of the war’s progress—in which he painted a dire picture and called for more resources and an intensified counterinsurgency strategy—was leaked, as were cables from Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, openly opposing Gen. McChrystal’s views.

The rift caused by those cables—which Gen. McChrystal lashed out at in his Rolling Stone interview—has yet to subside, with several U.S. officials saying the two men still don’t get along. “They hate each other’s guts,” said a U.S. military official who has worked with both men. “There’s very little respect.”

Pentagon officials have worried that the relationship has hindered operations in Afghanistan, pointing to the close working relationship Gen. David Petraeus and then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker had when the two men were the military and civilian leads in Baghdad.

But Mr. Cordesman said history shows the Petraeus-Crocker relationship to be the exception to the rule—the allied command during World War II was famously fractured, for instance—and cautioned that dismissing Gen. McChrystal for “blowing off steam,” without a clear replacement available, would be a mistake.

“When you operate under a high-pressure environment…that pressure plays out,” said Mr. Cordesman. “It doesn’t necessarily play out in a way you can’t work with other people. But it does play out in a way where there is a lot of tension.”

News Source:  Wall Street Journal

Windsor Locks, CT – Three hundred travelers started the summer with a travel nightmare they will not soon forget.

Hundreds of Newark-bound passengers sat for four hours on a tarmac in a stifling cabin after bad weather and union regulations grounded their flight from London in Connecticut. To make matters worse, passengers said,  the plane’s generators shut down for the second time, leaving them with no air conditioning and sweltering temperatures that reached 100 degrees.

Some people on the inauspicious Virgin Atlantic flight fainted from the heat, said Andrew Porwancher, of Princeton, N.J.. One passenger was taken to a hospital, but airline officials said there is no evidence to link this with the flight.

Even before the flight left Heathrow Airport, there were problems. The generators were not working, so neither was the air conditioning system, passengers said. The flight was supposed to leave at 5:33 p.m., London time. Two hours later, with the plane fixed, the flight took off for Newark.

But problems arose again because of storms in the New York area on Tuesday night. The airline needed to divert the plane. With no option to land at JFK, it landed at Connecticut’s Bradley Airport, the company said.

When the plane, carrying 300 passengers and 14 crew, landed on the tarmac, the generators broke for the second time, passengers said. With no fresh air coming in, temperatures reached a baking 100 degrees, they said.

For four hours, they sat on the plane, sweating, frustrated and tired. During the ordeal, pilots exceeded their maximum flight time and the plane had to stay grounded so after all that, the passengers still couldn’t reach their Newark destination.

Passengers were eventually brought into a terminal, where they waited at least two more hours for their luggage and instructions on how they would eventually get to Newark.

Virgin Atlantic officials said Bradley Airport is not equipped to deal with international arrivals, so Virgin Atlantic had to wait for U.S. Immigration and Customs to arrive to process the passengers.

The flight was scheduled to reach Newark at 9:10 p.m. on Tuesday. Nearly 12 hours later, at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, passengers finally began boarding buses en route to Newark Airport.

Peter Blok, of Philadelphia, called the trip “hell on wheels.”

The airline apologized for the frustration and inconvenience the delays caused for the passengers.

“The safety and welfare of our passengers and crew is of paramount importance,” Virgin Atlantic said in a written statement.

The delays frustrated not only the passengers desperately waiting to get off the Virgin Atlantic plane in Connecticut, but those waiting to get out of Newark on the airline as well.

Eva Shah may not even make her own wedding. Shah was supposed to fly Virgin Atlantic to Mumbai, but the Newark flight she  needed to take to connect in Heathrow to complete the trip to India has been delayed 23 hours, her future brother-in-law, Justin Holmes, told NBCNewYork.

Holmes said the airline will only offer Shah a refund and will not transfer her to a more expensive flight.

The airline couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on that matter.

News Source:  NBC NY

Israel – The National Religious and the haredi sectors are not celebrating the World Cup. Despite thousands of haredi and National Religious yeshiva students who will occupy themselves in the coming months with the results of World Cup matches, nothing has been written of the international soccer tournament in the haredi press.

Rabbi Moshe Grylak, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem-based haredi newspaper Mispacha, told Ynet that the World Cup will not be mentioned in his newspaper, except, perhaps, in opinion pieces criticizing the tournament and the waste of time they embody.

“We have no problem with sports for developing the body,” he explained. “But this isn’t a business issue and the drunkenness of the masses over ‘the guy who made a goal.’ I was in Brazil when Pele was big, and people committed suicide when they lost. The values that we strive for are ethics, spiritual living, and principled living, and this is against this is adverse to this in the fullest sense of the word. It is like any other addiction.”

Grylak also said that the tournament does not create happiness, but superficial glee: “Joy is something internal. In this case, this is glee that comes at someone else’s expense, and we are seeking joy for everyone. It’s better than opening fire, but the addiction bothers us, not to speak of the waste of time. The sports sections all delve into the surrounding gossip – who is going out with whom and where. It already has nothing to do with sports.”

Moti Lavi, the main newscaster for Kol Chai radio, told Ynet that the station does not address the World Cup.

“We do not deal at all with the topic o the World Cup, unless the Israel national team would play on Shabbat, then we would address the issue from this angle,” he said.

The final match will not be broadcast on the radio, and the results will not be reported to listeners during news segments. According to Lavi, “If there were a Jewish player in the final match who said ‘Shema Yisrael’ like Yehuda Saado did on the Kochav Nolad (Israel’s version of American Idol) final, we would mention it. The game in and of itself is of no interest to the haredi public. Therefore, we do not cover it.”

Listeners from the National Religious will be compelled to listen to other stations in order to obtain information on the World Cup matches. “The National Religious public knows ahead of time that it will not receive reports on the World Cup from us,” said Lavi.

According to Lavi, sports embody some positive and some negative elements. In an effort to understand what is not good about sports, Lavi said, “Ask the women in Israel and see what they tell you.”

The National Religious public is not entirely ignoring the World Cup, which even receives mention among the Torah sermons written up in various pamphlets distributed in synagogues on Shabbat. Advertisements for snacks mentioning the World Cup also appear in these pamphlets.

According to Ofer Maoz, the editor of Gilui Da’at, his newspaper has yet to decide whether to cover the World Cup. However, a tournament-related advertisement has been included.

“We put the ad on the last page. In general, we do address secular topics from a religious angle, and there is a chance that the World Cup will be mentioned in the pamphlet by a religious figure or in a religious context,” he said.

According to him, the religious public is interested in the World Cup, “and, therefore, we will try to address the subject in a manner appropriate to synagogue pamphlets.”

News Source:  Ynet

New York, NY – Faisal Shahzad called himself a Muslim soldier and threatened more attacks to come after the botched May 1 Times Square terror bomb attempt.

Shahzad did not appear the least bit remorseful when he pleaded guilty to 10 federal crimes in a packed federal courtroom.

The Pakistani-born U.S. citizen was cool and collected when he said he wanted “to plead guilty and a hundred times more” for the terror plot, and that if the U.S. did not get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, halt drone attacks and stop meddling in Muslim lands, “we will be attacking U.S.”

He apparently became radicalized over the issue of U.S. drone attacks directed against militant groups in the northern part of his home country Pakistan.

Shahzad entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Manhattan just days after a his federal grand jury indictment. Some of the charges carried mandatory life sentences.

It was a strange performance from a 30-year-old Shelton Connecticut man who had actually been cooperating with the government.

“Consistent with someone who craves attention and will get it by whatever means is handy at any particular time,” said Zachary Carter, former U.S. attorney.

According to the indictment, Shahzad received a total of $12,000 prior to the attack from the Pakistani Taliban through cash drop-offs in Massachusetts and Long Island.

Shahzad was accused in the indictment of receiving explosives training in Waziristan, Pakistan, during a five-week trip to that country. He returned to the United States in February.

The indictment said he received $5,000 in cash on Feb. 25 from a co-conspirator in Pakistan and $7,000 more on April 10, allegedly sent at the co-conspirator’s direction.

So far, 14 suspects have already been picked up in the United States and Pakistan on information provided by Shahzad the moment he was arrested. The naturalized citizen, who has a B.A. and an M.B.A. from the University of Bridgeport and had worked as a financial analyst for Elizabeth Arden, admitted to receiving some terror training in Pakistan.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Pakistani Taliban “facilitated Faisal Shahzad’s attempted attack on American soil.”

Experts familiar with terror cases said Shazad’s courtroom appearance should not have been considered that startling. “Shahzad had nothing to do and no place to go. The man was completely bagged and tagged,” said Ron Kuby, defense lawyer.

Shahzad made his plea and accompanying statement as U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum began asking him a lengthy series of questions to ensure he understood his rights before accepting his plea.

Cedarbaum asked Shahzad if he understood he might spend the rest of his life in prison. He said he did.

At one point, she asked him if he was sure he wanted to plead guilty.

Shahzad also said he is “part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people.”

He said he actually tried to set off three separate bombs in an SUV parked near a Broadway theater May 1 to injure and kill people, but that all three failed to ignite. The Bridgeport, Conn., resident was arrested two days later.

Shahzad was arrested trying to leave the country May 3, two days after a gasoline-and-propane bomb failed to ignite in an SUV parked near a Broadway theater.

Shahzad, born in Pakistan, moved to the United States when he was 18.

News Source: AP

Madrid – Francisco Franco, the former fascist dictator of Spain, gave the Nazis a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them, according to a document found recently in a Spanish archive and reported on Sunday by the Spanish daily El Pais.

The paper said that in 1941, Spain prepared a list of all 6,000 Jews in its territory and gave it to the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler. At the time, Spain and Germany were negotiating over Spain’s entry into the Axis alliance.

In the end, however, no alliance was signed, and Spain remained neutral throughout World War II.

After the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, the Spanish government tried to destroy all evidence of its cooperation with the Germans. But the document recently found in an archive in the city of Zaragoza, in northeastern Spain, sheds light on what Franco sought to hide.

The document is an official order, dated May 13, 1941, issued by Franco’s chief of security, Jose Maria Finat y Escriva de Romani, to all provincial governors. It instructs them to prepare a list of every Jew in their district, both local residents and foreigners, along with details about “their personal and political leanings, their means of supporting themselves, their commercial activity, the level of threat they constitute and their security classification.”

Read full story at Haaretz

Madrid – Francisco Franco, the former fascist dictator of Spain, gave the Nazis a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them, according to a document found recently in a Spanish archive and reported on Sunday by the Spanish daily El Pais.

The paper said that in 1941, Spain prepared a list of all 6,000 Jews in its territory and gave it to the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler. At the time, Spain and Germany were negotiating over Spain’s entry into the Axis alliance.

In the end, however, no alliance was signed, and Spain remained neutral throughout World War II.

After the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, the Spanish government tried to destroy all evidence of its cooperation with the Germans. But the document recently found in an archive in the city of Zaragoza, in northeastern Spain, sheds light on what Franco sought to hide.

The document is an official order, dated May 13, 1941, issued by Franco’s chief of security, Jose Maria Finat y Escriva de Romani, to all provincial governors. It instructs them to prepare a list of every Jew in their district, both local residents and foreigners, along with details about “their personal and political leanings, their means of supporting themselves, their commercial activity, the level of threat they constitute and their security classification.”

Read full story at Haaretz

Israel – Outcry over the identity of a mysterious prisoner being held for unspecified crimes in the maximum security Ayalon jail. Dubbed ”Mister X” by the Hebrew language news website Y-net, which first reported on the case last week, the man’s identity has even been kept from his prison guards.

A measure of the severity of the crimes for which the man in being held is the fact that he is in the cell that was built specifically for Yigal Amir, the assassin of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

His wing is cut off from the rest of the prison by double iron doors. Other prisoners can neither see nor hear him.

According to Y-net, only a select few in the government know who the man is and what charges he is being jailed for. Nobody talks to him, nobody sees him, nobody visits him, nobody knows he is in jail.

”He was placed in full and complete separation from the outside world,” said one Israel Prison Service official quoted by Y-net.

”There is confidentiality surrounding the detainee in wing 15 in every respect, including his identity and the crimes he committed.

”I doubt even the jailers in charge of him know who he is. It is scary that in 2010 a man is imprisoned in Israel without us even knowing who he is,” the prison source was quoted as saying.

”It is simply a person without a name and without an identity who was placed in complete and absolute isolation from the outside world. We don’t know if anybody even knows he is in jail.”

An Israeli Prisons Service spokesman declined to comment on the case, saying that for security, the agency did not provide information about any prisoner.

Several blog websites have suggested that this may indicate the man is being held on suspicion of espionage and that he may be a serving agent of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

The story was quickly removed from the Y-net website after publication, and it was speculated to have been subjected to a gag order imposed by one of Israel’s security services.

No mention of the case has been made by any other Israeli news service. But the case has since attracted the attention of the prominent Israeli human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights, which has written to the Attorney-General protesting against the strict secrecy surrounding the jailing.

In the letter, Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the association, said there was no information on whether this person had been charged, tried or convicted.

”It is insupportable that, in a democratic country, authorities can arrest people in complete secrecy and disappear them from public view without the public even knowing such an arrest took place,” Mr Yakir wrote.

Earlier this year a gag order was lifted on the case involving Israeli journalist Anat Kamm, who was placed under house arrest last year after she was suspected of leaking secret documents to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she obtained while serving in the Israel Defence Forces.

The gag order was lifted after details surrounding Kamm’s case were published outside Israel.

In 1983, Marcus Klingberg, a leading Israeli scientist, was jailed for 20 years for passing secrets about Israel’s biological warfare program to the Soviets. But it was only after he had been in jail for a decade that Israelis heard of his arrest and conviction.

News Source:  The Age

Berlin – The day the Mossad operation on German soil began was a clear, sunny Sunday in late March 2009. Alexander Verin, who holds an Israeli passport, had an appointment with an attorney in Cologne to discuss naturalization. Verin was accompanied by a man named Michael Bodenheimer, who claimed that he was an Israeli of German descent. Bodenheimer wanted to apply for a German passport, but Verin, who had made the appointment, was doing most of the talking.

The two men explained that Bodenheimer’s father Hans had emigrated to Israel to escape Nazi persecution. As proof, the Israelis showed the attorney what they claimed was the parents’ marriage certificate, as well as a passport. In such cases, which number around 3,000 a year, Article 116 of Germany’s constitution provides for a relatively straightforward naturalization procedure.

The two Israelis were staying in a Cologne hotel. Bodenheimer would later rent an apartment on a run-down street in Cologne’s Eigelstein neighborhood, in a nondescript, sand-colored apartment building with a pizza takeout restaurant on the ground floor, near the railroad station. It was the perfect, cheap apartment for someone who didn’t want to be noticed.

On June 16, 2009, the attorney submitted the naturalization application to a registry office in Cologne. A German passport was issued in the name of Michael Bodenheimer two days later. It looked like a routine procedure.

But it was everything but routine when the passport was used in January in connection with the murder of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Read the full story at Der Spiegel

News Source:  Der Spiegel