Israeli rabbi : Abbas, Palestinians should die

JERUSALEM — An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week.

"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon late Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's popular name.

"God should strike them and these Palestinians -- evil haters of Israel -- with a plague," the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments and said Israel wanted to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would ensure good neighborly relations.

"The comments do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's view or the position of the government of Israel," Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

The United States said Yosef's comments were "inflammatory" and an impediment to peace efforts.

"As we move forward to relaunch peace negotiations, it is important that actions by people on all sides help to advance our effort, not hinder it," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement.

President Barack Obama's administration is hosting Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Washington this week to try to restart direct Mideast peace negotiations after a nearly two-year hiatus.

The Iraqi-born cleric has made similar remarks before, most notably in 2001, during a Palestinian uprising, when he called for Arabs' annihilation and said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.

He later said he was referring only to "terrorists" who attacked Israelis. In the 1990s, Yosef broke with other Orthodox Jewish leaders by voicing support for territorial compromise with the Palestinians.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Yosef's latest comments were tantamount to calling for "genocide against Palestinians." The rabbi's remarks, he said, were "an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process."

Arriving at Netanyahu's office for a weekly cabinet meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai of Shas declined to comment when asked by reporters about Yosef's sermon.

Netanyahu and Abbas are due to resume direct peace talks in Washington Thursday, the first such negotiations in 20 months in a peace process that commits both sides to avoid incitement, which has included anti-Jewish sermons by Palestinian clerics.

China’s massive traffic jam could last for weeks

Bumper-to-bumper gridlock spans 60 miles with cars moving little more than a half-mile a day at one point



BEIJING (AP) — China has just been declared the world’s second biggest economy, and now it has a monster traffic jam to match.

Triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 10 days ago and was 100 kilometers (60 miles) long at one point. Reaching almost to the outskirts of Beijing, traffic still creeps along in fits and starts, and the crisis could last for another three weeks, authorities say.

It’s a metaphor for a nation that sometimes chokes on its own breakneck growth.

In the worst-hit stretches of the road in northern China, drivers pass the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors. Many of the trucks that carry fruit and vegetables are unrefrigerated, and the cargoes are assumed to be rotting.

On Sunday, the eighth day of the near-standstill, trucks moved just over a kilometer (less than a mile) on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of Beijing. China Central Television reported Tuesday that some vehicles had been stuck for five days.

No portable toilets were set up along the highway, leaving only two apparent options — hike to a service area or into the fields.

But there were no reports of violent road rage, and the main complaint heard from drivers was about villagers on bicycles making a killing selling boxed lunches, bottled water to drink and heated water for noodles.

A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.

The traffic jam built up on the Beijing-Tibet highway, on a section that links the capital to the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The main reason traffic has increased on this partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy that this month surpassed Japan’s in size and is now second only to America’s.

Although wages remain generally low, auto ownership and gridlock have grown so commonplace that Inner Mongolia authorities restrict cars’ movement to alternate days, based on odd or even numbers in their license plates.

The car invasion is widely felt; Guo Jifu, head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center, told a symposium Monday that vehicles on Beijing’s roads multiplied by 1,900 per day on average in the first half of this year, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported.

The immediate cause of the traffic jam that began Aug. 14 is construction on one of three southbound highways feeding into Beijing.

Authorities are trying to ease the snarl-up by letting more trucks into the capital, especially at night, said Zhang, the traffic director. They also asked trucking companies to suspend operations and advised drivers to take the few alternate routes available.

“Things are getting better and better,” he said, but he added that the construction would go on until Sept. 17.

Alan Pisarski, author of “Commuting in America,” said the worst traffic jams in U.S. history tend to be associated with natural disasters, such as people fleeing Hurricane Katrina or the collapse of the upper deck of a freeway in Oakland, Calif., in the 1989 earthquake.

“It took some people days to get home after that one,” Pisarski said.

Traffic arrangements built up over generations in the U.S. are lacking in much of China, said Bob Honea, director of the University of Kansas Transportation Research Institute, who has visited China.

“We’ll see this problem more and more often. It’s true of every developing country,” he said.

Honea said the U.S. has never experienced a traffic jam as big as the one now bedeviling northern China, but he noted that traffic in Los Angeles “is pretty bad. It’s not a highway, it’s a parking lot.”

...Read More

Venezuela, more deadly than Iraq

Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.

Venezuelans have absorbed such grim statistics for years. Those with means have hidden their homes behind walls and hired foreign security experts to advise them on how to avoid kidnappings and killings. And rich and poor alike have resigned themselves to living with a murder rate that the opposition says remains low on the list of the government’s priorities.

Then a front-page photograph in a leading independent newspaper — and the government’s reaction — shocked the nation, and rekindled public debate over violent crime.

The photo in the paper, El Nacional, is unquestionably gory. It shows a dozen homicide victims strewn about the city’s largest morgue, just a sample of an unusually anarchic two-day stretch in this already perilous place.

While many Venezuelans saw the picture as a sober reminder of their vulnerability and a chance to effect change, the government took a different stand.

A court ordered the paper to stop publishing images of violence, as if that would quiet growing questions about why the government — despite proclaiming a revolution that heralds socialist values — has been unable to close the dangerous gap between rich and poor and make the country’s streets safer.

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group’s numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be under-counting murders).




...Read More

Empire State Building Basement Infested

Is nowhere safe? Bedbugs have struck the Empire State Building, the New York Daily News reports. The pests were found in an employee changing room in the basement of the tower, building officials said, and the room as been treated and fully cleared. "There were guys there last night, spraying down the place," a source confirmed. The Empire State Building is only the latest and most iconic of several buildings to recently report an infestation—others include the Times Square AMC theater, the Time Warner Center, a Victoria’s Secret in Lenox Hill, and a Brooklyn district attorney’s office. New York is taking the bugs seriously, and last month announced a half-million-dollar program to combat the infestation.

Read it at New York Daily News

Israeli soldier posed with bound Arab

JERUSALEM – A former Israeli soldier posted photos on Facebook of herself in uniform smiling beside bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, drawing sharp criticism Monday from the Israeli military and Palestinian officials.

Israeli news websites and blogs showed two photographs of the woman. In one, she is sitting legs crossed beside a blindfolded Palestinian man who is slumped against a concrete barrier. His face is turned downwards, while she leans toward him with her face upturned. Another shows her smiling at the camera with three Palestinian men with bound hands and blindfolds behind her.

The incident was a reminder of the fraught relations between Israeli soldiers and the West Bank Palestinians under their control.

Israeli soldiers have run into trouble on the social media sites like Facebook and YouTube before. Most recently a group of combat soldiers were reprimanded for breaking into choreographed dance moves while on patrol in the West Bank town of Hebron. The dance featured prominently on YouTube.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib condemned the photos and said they pointed to a deeper malaise — how Israel's 43-year-old occupation of Palestinians has affected the Israelis who enforce it.

"This shows the mentality of the occupier," Khatib said, "to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. The occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting."

The Israeli military also criticized the young woman, who Israeli news media and bloggers identified from her Facebook page as Eden Aberjil of the southern Israeli port town of Ashdod. No official confirmed her identity.

"These are disgraceful photos," said Capt. Barak Raz, an Israeli military spokesman. "Aside from matters of information security, we are talking about a serious violation of our morals and our ethical code and should this soldier be serving in active duty today, I would imagine that no doubt she would be court-martialed immediately," he told Associated Press Television News.

It was not clear whether the army could punish the woman, because she has finished her compulsory military service.

The comments by the woman and her friend in an exchange below one photograph suggested how casually the picture was treated, including jokes and sexual innuendoes.

"You're the sexiest like that," her friend wrote.

"I wonder if he's got Facebook!" the woman in the photograph responded. "I have to tag him in the picture!"

Aberjil did not respond to reporters' questions Monday.

The photographs were a reminder of snapshots taken in 2003 by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that showed Iraqi detainees naked, humiliated and terrified. In that case, some soldiers went to prison after the photos came to light.

The photographs of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinians, by contrast, show no overt physical abuse or coercion of the prisoners, although they are ridiculed in the comments between the soldier and her friends.

Palestinians are routinely handcuffed and blindfolded when they are arrested to stop them from trying to fle

Pentagon: China's military power growing

WASHINGTON – China's drive to transform itself into a major military power is being pursued in a secretive manner that increases the potential for misunderstanding and military conflict with other nations, the Pentagon says in a new report.

The Defense Department's annual assessment, released Monday, says Beijing is upgrading its hefty arsenal of land-based missiles, modernizing its nuclear forces and expanding its fleet of attack submarines.

The effort comes as China has suspended military-to-military talks with the U.S., which could reassure the U.S. about the motives behind Beijing's military buildup.

U.S.-China relations have been particularly strained in recent months, as China rejected the results of an investigation blaming North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship. China's military buildup also is seen as a threat to the U.S. ability to defend Taiwan.

The congressionally mandated report doesn't contain any surprises. It's long been known that China — emerging as a world economic powerhouse — is pouring billions of dollars into offensive and defensive military capabilities to protect its regional interests.

But U.S. officials say the trend is disappointing because of the secrecy surrounding the moves, which make it difficult to gauge Beijing's intentions.

China has refused to meet with senior Pentagon officials this year, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was rebuffed from traveling to China during a visit to Asia in June.

"It's been ambiguous over the past several months," a senior defense official said of how the Pentagon regards its relationship with China. The official, not authorized to speak publicly, spoke on condition of anonymity.

The report states that "the limited transparency in China's military and security affairs enhances uncertainty and increases the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation."

China has been dismissive of U.S. accusations that the growth and modernization of its military poses a threat.

U.S. officials say China could do more to promote stability in its region and join Western nations in denouncing Iran and North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

"Beijing's answer has been sometimes yes and sometimes no," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this year.

Among the findings in the Pentagon report is that China has as many as 1,150 short-range ballistic missiles and is acquiring an unknown number of medium-range missiles.

China also is developing artillery systems with the ability to strike across the Taiwan Strait, the report states

Attacks against Mexicans inflame tensions in NYC

Republicans try to change Constitution

to disenfranchise many Mexicans born

in the USA

NEW YORK – When Rodolfo Olmedo was dragged down by a group of men shouting anti-Mexican epithets and bashed over the head with a wooden stick on the street outside his home, he instinctively covered his face to keep from getting disfigured. Blood filled his mouth.

"I wanted to scream, but I couldn't because of the beating they were giving me," said the 25-year-old baker. Nearly five months later, he is still taking pain medications for his head injuries.

Recorded by a store's surveillance camera, the assault was the first of 11 suspected anti-Hispanic bias attacks in a Staten Island neighborhood, re-igniting years-old tensions between blacks and Hispanics in New York City's most remote borough.

Residents of Port Richmond — where an influx of newcomers from Latin America over the past decade has transformed the community — alternately blame the attacks on the economy, unemployment and the debate over Arizona's immigration law.

And although most of the suspects were described as young black men and investigated for bias crimes, a grand jury has indicted only one of seven people arrested on a hate-crime charge.

But Isaias Lozano, a day laborer, said he knows why he was attacked and robbed in December by "morenos" — the Spanish word he uses to describe his black neighbors.

"They hate us because we're Mexicans," he said while sitting at El Centro del Inmigrante, a center for immigrant day workers. "They aren't robbing just anybody."

Across the United States, the immigration debate plays out in suspicion of outsiders and sometimes escalates into violence. Port Richmond, tucked in a corner of New York City that most visitors never see, is wrestling with the perennial question of how people from different backgrounds can live together and get along.

Some community leaders here blame the attacks on hoodlums preying on day laborers, who are perceived as easy targets because they often carry cash home from work. Others say the Arizona law is stirring up a climate of intolerance, even these thousands of miles away.

"It's a cascading effect," said the Rev. Terry Troia, a board member of El Centro del Inmigrante. "There are negative impulses being put out there both nationally and locally. People on the fringe catch a piece of that, and they are acting on it."

Some of Port Richmond's black residents assert that newcomers' presence touches a nerve. Mike Mason, 47, a teacher who works in New Jersey, said the arrival of Mexican immigrants had changed the texture of the community.

"America has got to do something as far as immigration goes," he said. "In the morning you can see the streets lined with undocumented workers ... That's always in the back of people's minds."

Staten Island is a relatively isolated, suburban-like borough of New York City. It is home to nearly 500,000 people, most of whom live in detached homes instead of apartments, need cars to get around and a ferry to get across New York Harbor to Manhattan.

Between 2000 and 2008, the number of Hispanics living on the island grew roughly 40 percent, according to Census bureau statistics analyzed by City University of New York's Latino Data Project, with much of that growth coming from the Mexican community.

Many of those began to coalesce around the Port Richmond neighborhood, which had long been predominantly black and low-income. The neighborhood's main commercial thoroughfare, once marked by empty storefronts, suddenly came alive with Mexican businesses selling pinatas, bars playing Spanish-language heavy metal, and grocers stocking chilies and tomatillos. The neighborhood developed a new nickname: "Little Mexico."

Mexicans soon began reporting that they were attacked by their black neighbors.

One organization documented 21 assaults against day laborers one summer in 2003. When a day laborer was viciously stabbed and killed two years later, neighbors quickly blamed the black community, until reputed Latin Kings gang members were charged with the man's death.

In recent months, police have deployed additional foot and mounted patrols, a command post and Mexican-born officers to distribute bilingual fliers with safety tips. The FBI joined in creating a task force to look into civil rights abuses in the neighborhood. Residents have aired grievances at numerous town hall meetings.

On a recent summer day, Nicomedes Rocha said she was afraid of being targeted by blacks while walking on the street.

"I have to watch on both sides," said the 33-year-old dishwasher at a local taqueria, who was on her way to work carrying a shoulder bag. "They think I carry money."

But some black residents said it was wrong to talk about bias as the main motive for the attacks.

David Johnson, an amateur boxer who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years, blamed the incidents on drug addicts looking to rob people for cash to feed their habits. "They would do that to anybody," he said. "To jump toward bias issues is out of whack."

Rodolfo Olmedo was beaten and robbed of his cell phone and wallet on April 5. Four suspects have been arrested and charged; police investigated it as a bias crime, but a grand jury indicted the suspects only on robbery and gang assault charges.

William Smith, a spokesman for the Staten Island district attorney's office, said the attack on Olmedo was retaliatory. The suspects, he said, believed Olmedo had been involved in an earlier altercation.

Olmedo, who was hospitalized for five days and was briefly in a coma, contends he was targeted because of his ethnicity, not because he had been involved in a related incident or because the suspects wanted to steal his belongings.

After all, Olmedo said, they didn't take an expensive watch that he was wearing.

"It was," he said in Spanish, "a hate crime."