Olmert mulls halting ties with PA, giving ultimatum to Abbas Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is weighing an ultimatum to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: Either dismantle the terrorist organizations, or Israel will sever all ties. Olmert publicly hinted at this possibility on Tuesday saying that Israel will "review all contacts" with the Palestinians if Hamas heads a future government after its recent electoral victory.
The 9/11 Commission's 'Solution' Won't Fix the Real Intelligence Failures. Richard A. Posner does not simply point to feet of clay. He attacks them with hammer, tongs and clarity of insight when it comes to the dangers of the ragged overhaul of U.S. intelligence that Congress and the Bush administration now pursue.
President Émile Lahoud of Lebanon on Friday appointed a pro-Syrian businessman and member of Parliament as prime minister-designate, breaking weeks of deadlock over the formation of a Lebanese government and paving the way for parliamentary elections to be held on schedule in late May or June.The new prime minister, Najib Mikati, has strong ties to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but he still won broad support from Lebanon's opposition movement in consultations between the government and Parliament over the choice.
James Wolfensohn, the departing president of the World Bank, will become a special coordinator to help Israel carry out its handover of Gaza to the Palestinians, the Bush administration has announced. The appointment of Wolfensohn, who has mobilized financial aid and worked with Israeli and Palestinian leaders for 10 years at the World Bank, was made Thursday with the support of the European Union, the United Nations and Russia, the other members of the quartet of powers behind the Middle East road map to peace.
Ruth Turek blinked back tears in Belsen concentration camp yesterday and recalled the moment, 60 years ago, that the British Army moved in. “It was funny, just like today and the soldiers seem to come like angels,” she said. The day that the British saved the life of the 17-year-old Polish Jew was also the day that the Holocaust came home to Britain. The piles of corpses; the sweet stench of decaying flesh; the dazed, emaciated inmates: they became almost instantly part of the icon- ography of war crimes.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende criticized his country's collaboration with its Nazi occupiers during World War II, shortly before commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the country's main deportation camp. The prime minister spoke about the issue at an international conference on the Jewish community in a changing society organized by CIDI, the Center for Information and Documentation in Israel, said Eran Nagan, CIDI spokesman.
Abraham Rabinovich is a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and a United States Army veteran. He is the author of the new book The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East. 
Since she made her debut at the age of 12 in the 1994 thriller Leon, Natalie Portman has become one of the hottest young stars around, combining roles in blockbusters (the Star Wars series, Cold Mountain) with such cult favorites as Beautiful Girls and Mars Attacks!
A historic excavation has been taking place in an eastern Jerusalem valley for the past six months: the first-ever archaeological examination of the Temple Mount. In November 1999, the Islamic Wakf carried out an illegal construction project on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. The unsupervised digging caused irreparable damage to the important site, as well as to untold priceless artifacts contained in rubble removed during the construction and dumped clandestinely in the Kidron Valley. 
New exhibition in Paris looks at history of Yiddish music and theatre, highlighting central role of East European klezmer music. “Klezmer and Klezmorim: A Yiddisher Tam, a Yiddisher Tempo,” an exhibit dedicated to 19th- and 20th-century history of East European Jewish music, has opened at the House of Yiddish Culture - Medem Library in Paris.
Once, before Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York City, Harlem was a closed area, a ghetto. The police did not dare enter the main street, not to mention the alleyways, of the black neighborhood. Harlem is no longer as it was. But similar neighborhoods exist in many places in the world. Sadr City, for example, is a neighborhood of fanatic Shi'ites in Baghdad that even the American army does not dare to enter. There are no neighborhoods like this in Israel. But if someone wishes to find the old Harlem, or the Jewish Sadr City, he should go to the center of the city of Hebron, to the ghetto called Avraham Avinu.
A Russian immigrant turned Israeli policeman has won the Jewish state’s second-highest military honor. Known only by his initial, Y., the commander of the border police undercover unit called Yasam was awarded the Ribbon of Valor on Tuesday for a string of deadly counterterrorist missions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
