An Israeli basketball team fled to the changing room Tuesday as hundreds of fist-pumping, chanting Turkish fans protested the violence in Gaza.

And what is this Old Testament, who is this Yahweh and who are these forefathers they aspire to emulate? Well, the Old Testament is like their family album they open on a regular basis for guidance. In it, Yahweh speaks to them and tells them what to do, the constant theme of which is that he loves them and ONLY THEM and hates everyone else and that it’s their duty as his loyal subjects to act as the instruments of his hatred for everyone else, meaning they are to invade, murder, tear down, burn down, enslave, rape, dispossess and steal from those on his shitlist.

Bitch and moan about it all you want fellow earthlings, but facts are facts, and if you can’t see that this Old Testament is the playbook these people are using in causing murder and carnage in the Middle East and beyond, than I don’t know what to say. It’s as incontrovertible as the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer and anyone who argues otherwise has obviously checked out of the Hotel Reality.

As if access to credit wasn't already tight, credit card companies are slashing consumer credit lines and closing inactive cards - a move that could harm borrowers' credit scores and restrict access to loans.

"Card issuers are playing defense, "trying to limit their risks in "the poor economic climate and against the prospect of continued consumer defaults," said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

But the lenders' actions could bring more worries for consumers.

Israel said its soldiers had come under fire from militants inside the school.

How likely is it that Osama bin Laden, the defender of the oppressed Moslems, “the perpetrator of 9/11” as they tell us, would remain silent in the face of the Israeli massacre of the helpless Palestinians in Gaza? Asks Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich.

The long-held assumption that US assets - particularly government bonds - are a safe haven will soon be overturned as investors lose their patience with the world's biggest economy, according to Willem Buiter.

On 29 February last year the BBC's website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a "holocaust" on Gaza. Headlined "Israel warns of Gaza 'holocaust'" the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over the headline would read "Gaza militants 'risking disaster.'" (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedaling Vilnai's comments). An Israeli official threatening "holocaust" may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its specter to deflect criticism from the state's criminal behavior. With the "holocaust" reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of "Gaza militants" instead.

In an article entitled "Will There Be a Recovery?", Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and former editor of the Wall Street Journal editor, Paul Craig Roberts pens the best one-liner of the week:

What we are witnessing is a once great power engaging in fantasy to disguise from itself that it is a failed state.

He's referring, of course, to the U.S.

Former Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris was turned away from the U.S. Senate this morning.

"My name is Roland Burris, the junior senator from the state of Illinois," Burris told reporters later as he stood in the rain outside the Capitol. "I was advised that my credentials were not in order."

The information below was collected from the book "Crying Wolf - Hate Crime Hoaxes in America" written by Laird Wilcox.

Israeli tank shells killed at least 40 Palestinians today at a UN school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international calls for a halt to Israel's Gaza offensive.

German luxury sportscar maker Porsche has taken over Volkswagen, the biggest European car manufacturer, after purchasing more than 50 percent of VW shares, Porsche said.

"We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

Israeli warplanes have reportedly overflown southern Lebanon amid speculation that Tel Aviv may be seeking to provoke Hezbollah. The warplanes overflew the Lebanese port city of Sidon on Tuesday morning, a Press TV correspondent reported.

Hamas and Hizbullah are the ideological step-children of the Likud Party and especially Ariel Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the primary means of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to resist. The trio currently carrying on Sharon’s legacy of brutality -- Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni -- seem genetically blind to the fact that the more force and brutality Israel uses against Arabs, the greater is the response in the form of more effective resistance movements that have wider public support.

Details of Obama's proposals began to emerge on Monday, and it is clear that the US president-elect is proposing a relatively small "stimulus" package, which will include further massive tax incentives for corporate America. The provisions for ordinary people will do next to nothing to alleviate the impact of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

This weekend the Obama transition team revealed that 40 percent of the estimated $675-775 billion it plans to spend over the next two years on its economic package would be earmarked for tax cuts, with about half going to big business.

Indeed, Israeli paper Haaretz is quoting sources at the UN who say Khalilzad had been ordered by the State Department to “torpedo any initiative proposed by the Arab bloc which is designed to grant the Security Council the status of an official arbiter that will have direct involvement with disentangling the Gaza crisis.” And a tangled mess it is.

An airline passenger forced to cover his T-shirt because it displayed Arabic script has been awarded 240,000 dollars in compensation, campaigners said Monday.

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

Gaza Strip, Israeli War on Gaza still rise up in various points through the occupied Gaza Strip. More civilians killed in opposition of Israeli announced aim of hitting the Hamas militants. Monday morning a massacre happened in Al Zaytoun Quarter as Israeli army gathered around 30 persons in one house and then bombed them. Medical sources said that 14 killed and 60 injured. Around 10 of them children some are women and some other youth old people.

The Iranian industry ministry on Monday ordered the suspension of all trading by foreign firms "whose shares could be owned" by Israelis
in response to the Israeli assault on Gaza, the ISNA news agency reported on Monday.

Israeli strikes hit two separate schools run by the United Nations in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing at least five Palestinians, medics and UN officials said.

The FBI said on Monday it had launched one of the largest hiring blitzes in its 100-year history involving 2,100 professional staff vacancies and 850 special agents aimed at filling its most critical vacancies.

The agency, which seeks to protect the United States from terrorist attack, fight crime and catch spies, among other duties, said it currently has more than 12,800 agents and about 18,400 other employees.

Once again New Yorkers gathered to rally in Midtown Manhattan this week to protest the zioterror against the people in Gaza.

Gaza's hospitals are said to be at a breaking point, with medical supplies running low and paramedics among the many attacked. Western media have not been allowed into Gaza so far to witness and report on the situation there.

Why do so many Americans - especially politicians and media talking heads - believe that criticizing Israel is wrong, no matter what it does (see this and this)?

I think the main reason is that the wrong lessons have been drawn from the Holocaust . . or at least the wrong lessons are pushed on the American people.

Specifically, the lessons touted by the elites are:

(1) The Jewish people were given a homeland to protect Jews from persecution; and

(2) We must allow the Israelis to use all means necessary to protect that homeland.

The way events played out yesterday did not stir the political leadership into thinking of stopping the ground offensive and moving toward a cease-fire. On the contrary, Israel is moving toward a decision to occupy the whole Gaza Strip.

Health insurer Cigna Corp. said Monday it will cut 1,100 jobs, or about 4% of its workforce, and consolidate certain operations as it copes with the economic downturn.

As a result, the company said it expects to record after-tax restructuring charges of $30 million to $40 million in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Every week photographers wielding their cameras in public find themselves on the receiving end of warnings either by police, who stop them under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, or from over-eager officials who believe that photography in a public area is somehow against the law.

Groups from journalists to trainspotters have found themselves on the receiving end of this unwanted attention, with many photographers now fearing that their job or hobby could be under threat.

Hoping to prevent convicts from being shut out of the work force, some major U.S. cities are eliminating questions from their job applications that ask whether prospective employees have ever been convicted of a crime.

Toyota is suspending production at all 12 of its Japan plants for 11 days over February and March, a stoppage of unprecedented scale for the nation's top automaker as it grapples with shrinking global demand.