The chance that Israel will launch a military strike against Iran before next July is over 50 percent, according to an article to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal the Atlantic. The article's author, Jeffrey Goldberg, gleaned this information from interviews he conducted over the last year-and-a-half with forty current and past Israeli decision makers.

Goldberg claimed to have spoken with people in and out of government from various political parties. The consensus among them was that Iran is one to three years away from the being able to create a nuclear weapon. This fact, coupled with Iran's publicly displayed animosity toward Israel, makes a nuclear Islamic republic a threat to Israel's existence, and therefore a likely candidate to face an Israeli military strike.

Read more at jpost

Verizon and Google have announced that they hope to regulate the internet by controlling access and the speed of the internet to different websites. In other privacy news, Air France has announced that they will install cameras into every seat to watch their passengers; civil rights activists are crying foul saying it invades people’s privacy too much.

Read more at Prison Planet

“Collision Course” is a one-hour TV special that examines geopolitical trends in the Middle East in light of Bible prophecy. It includes a brief documentary opening on the tensions in the Middle East, followed by extended excerpts of addresses by Mosab Hassan Yousef, Lt-General (ret.) Boykin, Tim LaHaye, Pastor Skip Heitzig, Pastor Greg Laurie and Joel C. Rosenberg delivered at the Harvest Prophecy Conference in April 2010.

Read more by Joel Rosenberg

Times are dire, anti-Semitism is on the rise and the world is becoming a more perilous place for the Jews to live in by the day, if you ask Prof. Robert S. Wistrich, the head of the Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and the author of a recently published book on the subject called A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism - From Antiquity to the Global Jihad.

The evidence to support his claim is all around us, he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Read more at jpost

Panicked residents of Vanuatu raced for higher ground after a powerful earthquake rattled the South Pacific island nation and generated a small tsunami on Tuesday.

The 9-inch wave was observed off the capital Port Vila, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. Police said there were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries from the wave or the 7.5 magnitude quake that preceded it, though buildings shook and power lines were down.

Read more at Fox News

More than 104,400 people flew out of Moscow yesterday, topping the previous 2010 record of 101,000, according to the Federal Air Transportation Agency. On Aug. 7, 95,000 left the city by plane, 20 percent more than the year-earlier date, agency spokesman Sergei Izvolsky said by telephone today.

Moscow set a daily heat record of 35.5 degrees Celsius (95.5 degrees Fahrenheit) today, the seventh such record this month and the 19th of the summer, said Tatyana Pozdnyakova, a spokeswoman for the city’s weather service. The city reached 38.2 degrees Celsius, the highest ever, on July 29.

Read more at Bloomberg

Defying the UN Security Council, Iran activated a second centrifuge Monday to enrich uranium more efficiently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog said Monday Iran has started using a second set of 164 centrifuges linked in a cascade, or string of machines, to enrich uranium to up to 20 percent at its Natanz pilot fuel enrichment plant. Another cascade there has been producing uranium enriched to near 20 percent since February.

It is unsurprising that the 9/11 attack fostered a massive expansion of America’s already sprawling Surveillance State. But what is surprising, or at least far less understandable, is that this growth shows no signs of abating even as we approach almost a full decade of emotional and temporal distance from that event. The spate of knee-jerk legislative expansions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 trauma — the USA-PATRIOT Act — has actually been exceeded by the expansions of the last several years — first secretly and lawlessly by the Bush administration, and then legislatively and out in the open once Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006. Simply put, there is no surveillance power too intrusive or unaccountable for our political class provided the word “terrorism” is invoked to “justify” those powers.

Read more at Cato Unbound

It hasn't been the coolest summer on record, but it's been close, forecasters say.

The average temperature in July was 79 degrees, five degrees below normal, and the first eight days of this month also have been five to six degrees below normal, weather experts said.

Read more at Whittier

Since Barack Obama was inaugurated and began to implement his anti-Israel policies, the Democratic Party has been strangely silent about Israel and while the GOP has been cheerleading for the Jewish State. Sure most Democrats signed non-binding letters in support of Israel (Republicans also), and Chuck Schumer complained on a small Jewish-targeted radio station (he backed off his comment when it reached the general media), but with few exceptions, members of the President’s party have refused to stick their head above the cloak of anonymity provided by a  letter with the signatures of  300+ colleagues  to publicly support Israel or to disagree with the President’s misdirected one-side policy on Israel.

Read more at BreitBart