Thursday, May 16, 2013
Netanyahu to Putin: ‘Your missile sales to Assad could trigger war’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly warned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that Moscow’s sale of a sophisticated missile defense system to President Bashar Assad could push the Middle East into war.
Netanyahu, who flew to meet Putin for emergency talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, told the Russian president that the S-300 had no relevance to Assad’s civil-war battles against rebel groups, and urged Moscow not to deliver the systems, Channel 2 reported on Wednesday night.
He said that if acquired by Assad, the S-300 — a state-of-the-art system that can intercept fighter jets and cruise missiles — “is likely to draw us into a response, and could send the region deteriorating into war,” the Channel 2 report said.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, asked last week about possible sales of the S-300 to Assad, said cagily: “Russia is not planning to sell. Russia has been selling for a long time, has signed contracts and is completing deliveries of technology that consists of anti-aircraft systems.”
Lavrov said the weapons were to help Syria defend itself against air attacks. Israel suspects that Russia plans to sell Damascus six S-300 missile batteries, as well as 144 missiles, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The Times of Israel
Embryonic stem cells: Advance in medical human cloning
Human cloning has been used to produce early embryos, marking a "significant step" for medicine, say US scientists.
The cloned embryos were used as a source of stem cells, which can make new heart muscle, bone, brain tissue or any other type of cell in the body.
The study, published in the journal Cell, used methods like those that produced Dolly the sheep in the UK.
However, researchers say other sources of stem cells may be easier, cheaper and less controversial.
Opponents say it is unethical to experiment on human embryos and have called for a ban.
Stem cells are one of the great hopes for medicine. Being able to create new tissue might be able to heal the damage caused by a heart attack or repair a severed spinal cord.
There are already trials taking place using stem cells taken from donated embryos to restore people's sight.
However, these donated cells do not match the patient so they would be rejected by the body. Cloning bypasses this problem.
The technique used - somatic cell nuclear transfer - has been well-known since Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned, in 1996.
Dolly's birth in 1996 was seen as a major scientific breakthroughSkin cells were taken from an adult and the genetic information was placed inside a donor egg which had been stripped of its own DNA. Electricity was used to encourage the egg to develop into an embryo.
However, researchers have struggled to reproduce the feat in people. The egg does start dividing, but never goes past the 6-12 cell stage.'Real deal'
Now a team at the Oregon Health and Science University have developed the embryo to the blastocyst stage - around 150 cells - which is enough to provide a source of embryonic stem cells.
Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov said: "A thorough examination of the stem cells derived through this technique demonstrated their ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells.
"While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine."
Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, said this looked like "the real deal".
"They've done the same as the Wright brothers really. They've looked around at where are all the best bits of how to do this from different groups all over the place and basically amalgamated it.
"The Wright brothers took off and this has actually managed to make embryonic stem cells."
BBC
You Need reality and the savior
My dear friends, I know I'm going to get it for this post but in love I must say it (2 Cor. 12:15). Someone has to and it might as well be me. For the past 5 years I have been feeling the spiritual temperature at Free Republic and other conservative forums and have found that moral and biblical relativism, biblical ignorance, conservative optimism, Christian ecumenicalism and the outright rejection of the TRUE Gospel of Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12, Rom. 10:2-4, 1 Cor. 15:1-4, Eph. 2:8-9) nearly dominate this and other conservative forums. Thank God for Free Republic, they do a great job, are sincere and mean well and are a great group of people who truly love America and conservatism as I do, but... that in itself is not enough to aid us in this dire hour. An individual today has to see the complete ETERNAL picture and that includes biblical REALITY and the reception of it.Conservatism without a saving relationship to Jesus Christ as the Holy Scriptures clearly teach is ETERNALLY bankrupt.
American conservatives of today are no different from the Pharisees of Jesus day. These were conservative, moral, go to "church" to put it in our day language and were quite familiar with the Old Testament, but when push came to shove they outright rejected Almighty God's righteousness and saving solution for their souls in SPIRIT and TRUTH and held their traditions and conservatism above the Word of Almighty God.
The temperature and climate of American conservatives who actually believe the Bible and its saving message is dead and ice cold and that is a heart breaking reality that God the Father has had to show me.
My dear friends, WHAT WILL YOU DO? Will you continue to look for worldly solutions and conservative human saviors or will you finally come to the end of yourself and receive the KING of kings and LORD of lords who is the WONDERFUL COUNSELOR and PRINCE of PEACE.
My dear friends, WHAT WILL YOU DO? Will you continue to look for worldly solutions and conservative human saviors or will you finally come to the end of yourself and receive the KING of kings and LORD of lords who is the WONDERFUL COUNSELOR and PRINCE of PEACE (Isa. 9:6-7, Rev. 19:11-16). All ETERNITY is before us and our brief existence in this fallen world is about gone. See the ETERNAL, see the Savior, see the REALITY and you will find the liberation and peace of Almighty God that will calm your hearts in America's last hours.
"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved!" (Acts 16:29)!
The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!
DJP I.F.
The Ignorant Fishermen Blog
Saudi health workers sickened by SARS-like virus
NEW YORK (AP) — A deadly new respiratory virus related to SARS has apparently spread from patients to health care workers in eastern Saudi Arabia, health officials said Wednesday.
The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia told world health officials that two health care workers became ill this month after being exposed to patients with the virus. One is critically ill.
Since September 2012, the World Health Organization has been informed of 40 confirmed cases of the virus, and 20 of the patients have died. The deaths occurred in Britain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
Experts have suggested calling the new virus MERS, for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, but officials have not signed off on that yet.
Experts are watching carefully for signs that the deadly virus can spread from person-to-person. Health officials say the virus has likely already spread between people in some circumstances, including hospital patients in France.
The new virus has caused severe respiratory disease in patients, some of them needing mechanical ventilators to help them breathe.
One of the Saudi health care workers is a 45-year-old man who is in critical condition. The other is a 43-year-old woman in stable condition. No other details about their jobs or where they work were released. Health workers were previously infected in a cluster in Jordan, though that was before the new coronavirus had been identified and before any special measures were taken to prevent its spread. That is not the case in Saudi Arabia and officials worry any new spread to health workers could suggest the virus is becoming more transmissible to people.
The new virus has been compared to SARS, an unusual pneumonia that first surfaced in China in late 2002 and erupted into a deadly international outbreak in early 2003. Spread of the virus in hospitals was a key development in the epidemic.
Ultimately, more than 8,000 cases were reported in about 30 countries, including eight people in the United States. The global tally included 774 deaths.
The SARS outbreak was declared contained by the summer of 2003, thanks to such measures as quarantines, hospital isolation of suspected cases, travel restrictions and the screening of airline passengers.
The WHO is currently not recommending any travel restrictions or special screening at airports or border crossings. Officials worry it will flare into an outbreak as big or worse. The new virus and SARS are both coronaviruses, a germ family that includes some cold viruses.
The new virus is distinct from SARS, but health officials worry it has potential to flare into a SARS-like international outbreak. But many questions remain about how it is spread, where it originated, and how deadly it truly is.
Yahoo News
Israel Hints at New Strikes, Warning Syria Not to Hit Back
WASHINGTON — In a clear warning to Syria to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Islamic militants in the region, a senior Israeli official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering additional military strikes to prevent that from happening and that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, would face crippling consequences if he retaliated.
“Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah,” the Israeli official said. “The transfer of such weapons to Hezbollah will destabilize and endanger the entire region.”
“If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”
The Israeli official, who had been briefed by high-level officials on Israel’s assessment of the situation in Syria, declined to be identified, citing the need to protect internal Israeli government deliberations. He contacted The New York Times on Wednesday.
The precise motives for Israel’s warning were uncertain: Israel could be seeking to restrain Syria’s behavior to avoid taking further military action, or alerting other countries to another military strike. That would increase the tension in an already fraught situation in Syria, where a civil war has been raging for more than two years.
There could be a secondary audience for the warning, analysts said, in Hezbollah and its primary supporter, Iran. Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, has said in recent days it could use weapons supplied by Iran to retaliate for recent Israeli strikes on Syria.
Nearly two weeks ago, Israeli warplanes carried out two strikes in Syria, the first hitting bases of Syria’s elite Republican Guard and storehouses of long-range missiles, in addition to a military research center that American officials have called the country’s main chemical weapons site.
A more limited strike on May 3 at Damascus International Airport was also meant to destroy weapons being sent from Iran to Hezbollah. The Israeli government did not confirm either of the attacks, which followed another earlier this year.
The Syrian government publicly condemned Israel for the assaults, saying it “opened the door to all possibilities.” The Syrian deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, declared, “We will respond immediately and harshly to any additional attack by Israel.”
Mr. Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, have each said in recent days that the Israeli-Syrian border, which has been relatively quiet despite the more than two years of civil war inside Syria, could become a “resistance front,” in response to Israeli attacks.
On Wednesday, mortar shells, fired from across the Syrian border, landed in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The shells landed on Mount Hermon, a popular tourist site, and were the latest in a series of what Israel has generally considered errant fire from internal Syrian fighting.
Israel did not fire back, as it had on several previous occasions, but it closed Mount Hermon to the public for several hours during a Jewish holiday on which hiking in the Golan is popular.
In his comments, the Israeli official said that “Israel has so far refrained from intervening in Syria’s civil war and will maintain this policy as long as Assad refrains from attacking Israel directly or indirectly.”
“Israel,” he said, “will continue its policy of interdicting attempts to strengthen Hezbollah, but will not intercede in the Syrian civil war as long as Assad desists from direct or indirect attacks against Israel.”
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, declined to discuss the meaning of the Israeli official’s statement. “We’re not going to comment on the story,” he said.
NY Times
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