Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

United Nations Cites Risk of Social Unrest from High Food Prices
May 7th, 2012
Daily NewsBloomberg
Categories: Today's Headlines;Warning

Food prices may stabilize at high levels and keep government import bills near a record, increasing the risk of social unrest in the world's least developed countries, the United Nations said.

The UN Food & Agriculture Organization is asking international lenders to accelerate the release of funds to help poor countries cope with high food costs through subsidies and avert riots, Hiroyuki Konuma, assistant director general at the FAO, said in an interview.

Global food costs are about 40 percent above the average in the past 10 years, according to a UN gauge, which tracks 55 commodities. Drought in South America, the biggest soybean- growing region, has wilted harvests, helping the organization's measure of cooking-oil prices advance to the highest level in nine months in April, even as bigger supplies of corn, rice and wheat pushed cereal prices lower.

"This is the danger that we're looking at," Konuma said on May 3. When governments are unable to subsidize food and are forced to pass on higher costs, "then you see the youth riot and you have social unrest," he said.

Syria Moving Scuds to Israel, Turkey Borders – Report
May 7th, 2012
Daily NewsINN - Gil Ronen
Categories: Today's Headlines;Warning

Let the Headlines Speak
May 7th, 2012
Daily NewsFrom the Internet
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Biden on Gay Marriage: 'Absolutely Comfortable With Men Marrying Men, Women Marrying Women'
Joe Biden is not convinced the economic recovery has flatlined, doesn't think Mitt Romney has a jobs plan and is "absolutely comfortable" with gay marriage. During a wide-ranging interview with David Gregory on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday, Biden weighed in on a wide range of topics--the economy, foreign policy, gay marriage, blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangjang, Mitt Romney and Osama bin Laden--six months ahead of the general election.

Peru coast littered with dead birds, dolphins
The government of Peru has warned people away from beaches along the country's northern coast due to the hundreds of dead birds and dolphins that have washed up on shore. More than 1,000 dead birds, a majority of them pelicans, and hundreds of dead dolphins have washed up in recent weeks.

Space weather expert has ominous forecast
Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.

Mexico city distributes volcano masks
Mexico City's government has started distributing 483,000 masks to residents who might need protection from the ash being spewed by the Popocatepetl volcano.

Voter backlash revives Europe debt fears
Here we go again. Expected it may have been, but the splintering political situation in Europe has raised fresh concerns about the viability of the single currency and the continent's resolve to extract itself from the economic mire.

Euro falls to three and a half year low amid market jitters at French and Greek elections
The Paris stock exchange CAC 40 index dropped 1.52pc in early trading with investors nervous about the growing pressure for a eurozone economic policy switch from austerity to growth, reflected in the French and Greek election results and President Hollande’s priorities. The euro fell heavily across the board on Monday.

Netanyahu holding elections so he is free to deal with Iran in September-October
Netanyahu is set on Sunday to announce that he is dissolving parliament and calling elections for September 4 — a year ahead of schedule. In the weeks immediately after that vote, said well-connected commentator Amnon Abramovich on the top-rated Channel 2 news, Netanyahu will head a transition government at home and have no need to worry about voter sentiment, and he knows that President Barack Obama will be paralyzed by the US presidential campaign. Netanyahu has shocked the nation in the past few days by indicating that he will be calling elections a year ahead of their scheduled date in October 2013, leaving analysts baffled as to his reasoning.

DNA links prove Jews are a ‘race,' says genetics expert
In his new book, “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not just skin deep. Jews exhibit, he writes, a distinctive genetic signature. Considering that the Nazis tried to exterminate Jews based on their supposed racial distinctiveness, such a conclusion might be a cause for concern. But Ostrer sees it as central to Jewish identity.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood rise from the ashes
At a meeting of Syria's opposition, Muslim Brotherhood officials gather round Marxists colleagues, nudging them to produce policy statements for the Syrian National Council, the main political group challenging President Bashar al-Assad. With many living in the West, and some ditching their trademark beards, it is hard to differentiate Brotherhood from leftists. But there is little dispute about who calls the shots.

Radical left and neo-Nazis score well in Greek elections
Greek voters on Sunday (6 May) punished the two ruling parties responsible for the last EU bail-out and its austerity measures by giving the radical left the second highest number of votes and allowing a neo-Nazi party into the legislature for the first time.

Syria holds parliamentary vote as violence rages
Syrians voted in a parliamentary election on Monday touted by authorities as a milestone of political reform but dismissed by the opposition as a facade while people are killed every day in an anti-government uprising. Violence persisted across the country between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebels fighting to end four decades of dynastic rule by his family.

Knesset to Dissolve Itself Within 24 Hours
May 7th, 2012
Daily NewsArutz Sheva - Gil Ronen
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel

The Knesset will begin preparations Monday afternoon for passing a law for its own dissolution. The law is expected to pass by Monday night or Tuesday morning. After the final vote on the law, the Knesset will go into a three month pre-election recess.

The bill for dissolving the Knesset was presented by the government itself, in order to speed up the process and remove the need for a preliminary reading.

Coalition Chairman MK Ze'ev Elkin estimated in an interview for IDF Radio that the move could be completed by the evening.

Elkin said that attempts by members of the coalition or opposition to postpone the Knesset's dissolution in order to pass a new law governing enlistment to the IDF were no more than propaganda.

Elkin was asked about the Likud Conference Sunday, in which Binyamin Netanyahu experienced a failure in an attempt to get control of the conference. The coalition chairman said that Likud is a democratic party and that one needs to accept the system's shortcomings as well as its advantages.

Netanyahu had attempted to set up an open vote for the election of members to the Likud internal court, and for electing himself to preside over the Likud Conference. However, members of the conference demanded that the vote be held as a secret ballot, in order to avoid a situation in which Netanyahu's candidates automatically receive preference. The shouts of "Secret! Secret!" overpowered Netanyahu, and he eventually cancelled the plan for an open vote.

Change of French Presidents Weakens Western Front Against Nuclear Iran
May 7th, 2012
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Two stalwarts of the Western confrontation against a nuclear-armed Iran suffered election defeats this week: Nicolas Sarkozy was swept out of the Elysee by the Socialist leader Francois Hollande Sunday, May 6. Three days earlier, the two parties forming UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s government coalition were trounced in local elections across Britain. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who faces an election in four months, never imagined he would be left so quickly on shifting sands against the Iranian nuclear threat.
In Washington, Dennis Ross, Barack Obama’s former adviser on Iran and frequent visitor to Jerusalem with messages from the White House said Sunday, May 6, that oddly enough Israel had attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and destroyed Syria’s nuclear facility 2007 without talk. So why were Israelis talking so much now?

Ross answered his own question by suggesting that Israeli leaders aimed at giving the world a strong motive for raising the heat on Iran and tightening sanctions so as to stop Israel going to war; then, if sanctions and diplomacy failed, no one could complain if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear program.

Ross appears to have forgotten the rows between the US and Israel in 1981 over attacking the Iraqi reactor and how hard Ronald Reagan leaned on Menahem Begin to stop him going through with it.
But most of all, Ross was reflecting the Obama administration’s impatience with the Iran debate going back and forth between Jerusalem and Washington for two years and is determined to wash its hands of the problem for now and get on with winning the president a second term in November.
The outgoing French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke more forcefully and frankly than any other Western leader about the real danger of a nuclear-armed Iran and accepted that it would have to be tackled by military action. He was also stood out as one of the few French leaders of recent times prepared to fight for French and Western Middle East interests.
The role of French special forces, navy and air forces, alongside US and British forces, was pivotal in the campaign to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. In recent weeks, he placed French units on standby in case President Obama decided to intervene in Syria. In the event, the US president pulled back from an operation that was planned to have involved Saudi and GCC armies as well.
France’s successful military showing in the Libyan war brought no political or economic rewards. Indeed, Paris shelled out a million dollars it could ill afford to pay for it. Sarkozy’s opponent Francois Hollande did not make this an issue in his campaign, but it was certainly not lost on the French voter. The French Muslim voter no doubt settled scores with Sarkozy for his ban on the veil and pro-Israeli policies and may even have cost him the presidency, although this issue too did not come to the fore in electioneering.
David Cameron, who probably spent even more on the Libyan war than Sakrozy and could afford it even less, is paying a heavy political price for the unpopular austerity measures he is clamping down on the British people to haul the country out of a deepening recession.
Iran has therefore won a handy breather on several fronts: Barack Obama is carefully avoiding any war involvement in the course of his election campaign – he even asked world leaders to give him “space”; French President Hollande needs time to find his feet, attack the declining French economy and rescue the euro. He will have no time or attention to spare in the months to come for Iran’s nuclear threat or the Syrian bloodbath.
When ten days ago, Netanyahu sent his security adviser Yaacov Amidror on a round trip to European capitals to pitch Israel’s case against Iran, he never imagined how quickly the Iranian issue would recede into irrelevance as key Western government go swept up in more pressing business and upsets.
Netanyahu announced Sunday that he would call an early election in four months, a year before it is due.
Prime minister since 2009, he is assured by every opinion poll that he is miles ahead in popularity of any Israeli politician. He told a meeting of his party Sunday, May 6, that he didn't want "a year and a half of political instability accompanied by blackmail and populism".

Currently in his element, he may feel that it is up to him now to take the initiative for preempting a nuclear Iran. And the sooner the better.