One month ago, we began our first ever Signs of the Times fundraiser. The final results are shown above.

We are extremely thankful for the generous support we received from our readers. While we did not reach our goal, your support will certainly help us to continue to produce and improve the Signs page.

Thank you from the whole Signs Team!

For the first time, the Signs Team's most popular and discerning essays have been compiled into book form and thematically organized.

These books contain hard hitting exposés into human nature, propaganda, psyop activities and insights into the world events that shape our future and our understanding of the world.

The six new books, available now at our bookstore, are entitled:

• 911 Conspiracy
• The Human Condition
• The Media
• Religion
• The Work
• U.S. Freedom

Read them today - before the book burning starts!

WHEN he is not biking up hills or slashing overgrown brush, US President George W. Bush has 1,500 pages of reading material to fill his free time this month.

The White House said Mr Bush took three heavy books with him on his five-week stay at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

One is The Great Influenza: The Epic Story Of The Deadliest Plague In History. It tells the story of the virus that killed more than 50 million people worldwide in 1918 and argues that the US government ignored the crisis and created conditions that allowed it to thrive.

Another is Salt: A World History which tells the history of salt and how this rock shaped the world.

The third is Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar. This book by celebrated Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky does not go on sale until October.

Apparently, a perk of the presidency is getting advance copies of anticipated biographies.

A deadly strain of influenza B has claimed three young lives in the past six weeks and is now an epidemic among children in the North Island.

The Health Ministry appealed for vigilance yesterday after revealing that the flu outbreak, which has struck thousands of children and swept through schools around the country, had killed a third victim.

All three young people died after developing complications from the Hong Kong B strain of the virus. [...]

Elective surgery has been postponed as Hawke's Bay Hospital reels from the impact of the flu bug and other viruses which have hit staff and patients and filled its beds.

The hospital is "full to capacity", Hawke's Bay District Health Board's chief operating officer Ray Lind said.

It was the second time in as many months that the hospital has been hit hard by people suffering from seasonal illnesses.

Mr Lind urged people to take steps to look after themselves.

"If you or your children are sick, take time off to recover before going back to work or sending your children back to school," Mr Lind said.

"It's vitally important to seek medical attention early, from your GP or medical centre. In many cases a trip to the doctor for expert advice and treatment can stop people getting so sick that they have to be admitted to hospital," he said.

Mr Lind also made a plea to the local community to rally round and support elderly family and neighbours. [...]

New Zealand - This year's flu vaccine did not not offer protection against a virulent strain which has infected thousands.

Three young people have died from complications after contracting the Hong Kong strain of influenza B.

Ministry of Health Chief Advisor Pat Tuohy says the World Health Organisation did not issue a warning about this particular strain, so it was not included in this year's vaccination. He says the current outbreak is significant, with thousands of children affected.

The outbreak comes as a new campaign is launched, to reduce the spread of viruses amongst children.

Virologist Dr Lance Jennings says children are particularly susceptible to viruses and on average, have one respiratory infection every two months. He says germs spread through schools like wildfire.

Dr Jennings suggests the use of anti-viral tissues which kill bugs as soon as they hit the tissue. [...]

St Marks Church School in Wellington reopens this morning after more than a quarter of its pupils were off sick last week, due to an unidentified virus.

It is one of several schools in the region to struck by the illness, which has not yet been identified.

The school's classrooms were commercially cleaned over the weekend to help stop the bug spreading.

Schools across Auckland are also battling a winter virus outbreak and hundreds of students have been stricken. [...]

The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next 10 weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.

An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu sub-type that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918.

As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water, where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe, as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi and Mumbai.

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds".

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z", the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British Guardian newspaper in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake Qinghai.

"They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They should have asked for international support. These birds will go to India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from Europe." Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak zones in China.

In a paper published in the British science magazine Nature, Yi Guan and his associates also revealed that the Lake Qinghai strain was related to officially unreported recent outbreaks of H5N1 among birds in southern China. This would not be the first time that Chinese authorities have been charged with covering up an outbreak. They also lied about the nature and extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which originated in Guangdong but quickly spread to 25 other countries. As in the case of SARS' whistleblowers, the Chinese bureaucracy is now trying to gag avian-flu scientists, shutting down one of Yi Guan's laboratories at Shantou University and arming the conservative Agriculture Ministry with new powers over research.

Meanwhile, as anxious Indian scientists monitor bird sanctuaries throughout the sub-continent, H5N1 has spread to the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; to western Mongolia; and, most disturbingly, to chickens and wildfowl near the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk.

Despite frantic efforts to cull local poultry, Russian Health Ministry experts have expressed pessimism that the outbreak can be contained on the Asian side of the Urals. Siberian wildfowl migrate every fall to the Black Sea and southern Europe; another flyway leads from Siberia to Alaska and Canada.

In anticipation of this next, and perhaps inevitable, stage in the world journey of avian flu, poultry populations are being tracked in Moscow; Alaskan scientists are studying birds migrating across the Bering Straits, and even the Swiss are looking over their shoulders at the tufted ducks and pochards arriving from Eurasia.

H5N1's human epicenter is also expanding: in mid-July Indonesian authorities confirmed that a father and his two young daughters had died of avian flu in a wealthy suburb of Jakarta. Disturbingly, the family had no known contact with poultry and near panic ensued in the neighborhood as the media speculated about possible human-to-human transmission.

At the same time, five new outbreaks among poultry were reported in Thailand, dealing a terrible blow to the nation's extensive and highly publicized campaign to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile, as Vietnamese officials renewed their appeal for more international aid, H5N1 was claiming new victims in the country that remains of chief concern to the WHO.

The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity among migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.

Each new outpost of H5N1 - whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia or humans in Vietnam - is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.

This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has become so plangently insistent in recent months.

The new US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty", echoing repeated warnings from the WHO that it was "inevitable". Likewise, Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100%".

In the same grim spirit, the British media revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" - a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies, like the recent London bombings, from a secret war room in Whitehall - to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health, where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections", the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.

Prevention and cure

As the president was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent US pandemic strategy".

That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill Frist, had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary (and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June. Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of the crucial antiviral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of millions of doses on order".

The New York Times on its July 17 editorial page, a May 26 special issue of Nature and the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs have also hammered away at Washington's failure to stockpile enough scarce antivirals - current inventories cover less than 1% of the US population - and to modernize vaccine production. Even a few prominent Senate Democrats have stirred into action, although none as boldly as Frist at Harvard.

The Department of Health and Human Services, in response, has sought to calm critics with recent hikes in spending on vaccine research and antiviral stockpiles. There has also been much official and media ballyhoo about the announcement of a series of successful tests in early August of an experimental avian flu vaccine.

But there is no guarantee that the vaccine prototype, based on a "reverse-genetically-engineered" strain of H5N1, will actually be effective against a pandemic strain with different genes and proteins. Moreover, trial success was based on the administration of two doses plus a booster. Since the government has only ordered 2 million doses of the vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, this may provide protection for only 450,000 people. As one researcher told Science magazine, "it's a vaccine for the happy few".

At the least, gearing up for larger-scale production will take many months and production itself is limited by the antiquated technology of vaccine manufacture, which depends on a vulnerable and limited supply of fertile chicken eggs. It would also likely mean the curtailment of the production of the annual winter flu vaccine that is so often a lifesaver for many senior citizens.

Likewise, Washington's new orders for antivirals, as Frist predicted, will have to wait in line behind the other customers of Roche's single Tamiflu plant in Switzerland. In short, it is good news that the vaccine tests were successful, but that does little to change the judgment of the New York Times that "there is not enough vaccine or antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people, and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines quickly".

Moreover, the majority of the world, including all the poor countries of South Asia and Africa where, history tells us, pandemics are likely to hit especially hard, will have no access to expensive antivirals or scarce vaccines. It is even doubtful whether the WHO will have the minimal pharmaceuticals to respond to an initial outbreak.

Recent theoretical studies by mathematical epidemiologists in Atlanta and London have raised hopes that a pandemic might be stopped in its tracks if 1 to 3 million doses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were available to douse an outbreak in a fail-safe radius around the early cases.

After years of effort, however, the WHO has only managed to inventory about 123,000 courses of Tamiflu. Although Roche has promised to donate more, the desperate rush of rich countries to accumulate Tamiflu will be certain to undercut the WHO's stockpile.

As for a universally available "world vaccine", it remains a pipe-dream without new, billion-dollar commitments from the rich countries, above all the United States, and even then, we are probably too late.

"People just don't get it," Dr Michael Osterholm, the outspoken director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, recently complained. "If we were to begin a Manhattan Project-type response tonight to expand vaccine and drug production, we wouldn't have a measurable impact on the availability of these critical products to sufficiently address a worldwide pandemic for at least several years."

"Several years" is a luxury that Washington has already squandered. The best guess, as the geese head west and south, is that we have almost run out of time. As Shigeru Omi, the Western Pacific director of WHO, told a UN meeting in Kuala Lumpur in early July: "We're at the tipping point."

CRAWFORD, Texas - The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush's ranch nearly two weeks ago left the camp Thursday after learning her mother had had a stroke, but she told supporters the protest would go on.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital.

"I'll be back as soon as possible if it's possible," she said. After hugging some of her supporters, Sheehan and her sister, Deedee Miller, got in a van and left for the Waco airport about 20 miles away.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq, said the makeshift campsite off the road leading to Bush's ranch would continue.

The camp has grown to more than 100 people, including many relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. After Sheehan left, dozens of the demonstrators gathered under a canopy to pray for her mother.

Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., had vowed to remain at the camp until Bush met with her or until his monthlong vacation ended.

Her protest inspired candlelight vigils across the country Wednesday night, and she has drawn sympathy for the loss of her son, which says tore apart her marriage as well.

Bush has also said he sympathizes with Sheehan. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said earlier Thursday that the president said Sheehan had a right to protest but that he did not plan to change his schedule and meet with her. Bush is scheduled to return to Washington on Sept. 3.

Two top Bush administration officials talked to Sheehan the day she started her camp, and she and other families met with Bush shortly after her son's death and before she became a vocal opponent of the war.

Michelle Mulkey, a spokeswoman for Sheehan, said Sheehan hoped to be back in Texas within 24 to 48 hours. Mulkey said Sheehan's mother, Shirley Miller, was in a hospital emergency room and Sheehan didn't yet know how serious her condition was.

Sheehan and the other demonstrators have camped in ditches along the road to Bush's ranch since Aug. 6. After complaints from some neighbors, they planned to start moving the camp site Thursday and Friday to a private one-acre lot owned by Fred Mattlage, who opposes the war and offered his property to give them more room and safety.

FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and Sen. Becky Lourey, a Minnesota lawmaker whose son died in Iraq, were expected to join the demonstrators later Thursday.

Even after my repeated attempts to keep the focus of my protest on the war, the Drudge Report and others continue to try to make the issue about me. But I am not the issue. The issue is a disastrous war that's killing our sons and daughters and making our country less secure. They attack me because they can no longer defend this war.

I've come to Crawford to bring to the president's doorstep the harsh realities of a war he's been trying so hard to avoid. But no matter what they say or how many shotguns they fire or how many crosses they destroy, they're not going to stop me from speaking out about a war that needlessly killed my son.

PARIS - A handful of US expatriates living in France held a small protest Wednesday under the Eiffel Tower, their way of participating in a night of vigils against the Iraq war taking place later the same night across the United States.

The 16 people at the Paris gathering said they and the US-based demonstrators were showing support for Cindy Sheehan, the US woman who has been camped outside US President George W Bush's Texas ranch in protest against the US-led occupation of Iraq. Sheehan's son, a soldier, was killed in Iraq last year.

"We're also thanking the French government for not having joined the Iraq war," said one of the expatriate protesters, who identified herself only by her first name, Karen.

A fellow protester, who said his first name was Arnie, added: "I think these kind of things isolate the (Bush) administration."

The group sat quietly on the steps of a monument to peace located at the far end of a park from the Eiffel Tower, which loomed over the expatriates and hundreds of picnicking French people and tourists.

Anti-war movements supporting Sheehan organised hundreds of similar candle-lit vigils Wednesday across the United States.

They hope the media attention surrounding Sheehan's one-woman campaign will fuel the increasing disapproval of the war registered in US public opinion surveys and force Bush to bring home the 138,000 troops he has deployed in Iraq.

More than 1,850 US soldiers have died in Iraq since Bush ordered the March 2003 invasion of the country to rid it of a supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Damascus, Syria - MP George Galloway said in a lecture at the Assad Library in Damascus last week: "I came to declare that I am a friend to Arabs, at a time when it is not easy to be friend to Arabs, because nowadays those who have ambitions and interests would not befriend Arabs."

It is very true, as befriending Arabs and Muslims would brand one as a "suspect" associate of a group of people who prefer death to life due to incomprehensible reasons. In spite of the industrious effort of think tanks and research centers, this incomprehensibility has reached an alarming edge demanding a prudent solution.

One of the repercussions has been depriving Muslims and Arabs, wherever they were, of their civil and human rights, passing discriminating laws against them, and entrapping them in peculiar interrogations: "Do you feel more European or more Muslim? More British or more Muslim? Which feeling overwhelms the other the most?"

Hate-crimes have prevailed against the colored "suspects" in Western countries, giving new life to the racism and xenophobia the world has been fighting in Europe, the United States and South Africa over the last century. Today, it is a neo-racism against Arabs and Muslims.

Only last week, Anthony Walker was killed in Liverpool for his brown skin, and four Arabs on a bus near the city of Shafa Amro in occupied Palestine were killed in a vivid translation of the Israeli Prime Minister's mother's advice "Don't trust Arabs." No condemnation resonated anywhere in the civilized West.

Some Universities in the West have also started eliminating Muslim applicants, especially seekers of sciences, in fear they might use their education to produce bombs and feed terrorism.

The seventy's academic triumph in celebrating scholarly achievement regardless of race, color, religion or nationality has come to an end. As for travel, it has become a tormenting and humiliating hustle for the black haired, dark eyed or brown colored. It has become indeed, as PM Galloway put it "not easy to be friend to Arabs," to Muslims or truth.

Arabs and Muslims are required everywhere to abide by international rules and regulations; however they don't seem to enjoy any right under those very same rules and regulations. While newspapers casually refer to the heavy water supply to Israel's nuclear weapons production, they threaten and caution against any Muslim development of nuclear programs.

So, as long as the target was Arabs and Muslims, any nuclear threat is safe to maintain. The world cannot permit those who do not share the same level of "rationality and responsibility" to possess nuclear weapons. This is the driving logic behind legitimizing racism and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, and the very same logic that will eventually undermine the value system of "freedom" and "democracy."

Turning a blind eye on the oppression and occupation feeding Arab and Muslim frustration with the West is not the road to safety, neither are the racist crimes and statements used by western leaders to gather votes for an election or support for a policy.

The worst calamity of all is that the terrorists, who claim avenging Islam, are themselves the most lethal weapon in the hands of those who profit from locking Arabs and Muslims up behind the bars of suspicion and depriving them of their lands and resources.

The world should re-examine the core of such ideological policies of hate and pay more heed to the prudent, moderate truth-seekers like MP George Galloway, the late Robin Cook, Ken Livingston, Noam Chomsky, Henry Sigeman, Avi Shliem and their like, in stead of bypassing them as suspicious pro-Arab and pro-Muslim advocates.

Humanity has paid a high price fighting racism and discrimination over centuries; how could we loose the battle today to similar ideologies covered up in the cloaks of "freedom" and "democracy?" Whether President Bush's advisors concur to call it "international struggle against violent extremism" or "war on terrorism," prudence demands they listen first to the words of General Wallace Grigson of the American Marines base in the Pacific: "winning hearts and minds is more important than arresting and killing people."

The great majority of Muslims and Arabs today feel they are victims to the American war on terrorism; this majority will inevitably be decisive in how the war ends. This is a risk factor alarming enough for the United States to reconsider not names and titles, but more importantly policies and ideologies.

(KFAR DAROM, Gaza Strip) -- Riot troops stormed synagogues in two hardline Jewish settlements Thursday to evict hundreds of militant holdouts who locked arms in a human chain and pelted soldiers with acid, oil and sand, the most violent clashes in Israel's historic Gaza pullout.

By the close of the day, 14,000 unarmed forces had cleared all but four of Gaza's 21 settlements - including Kfar Darom and Neve Dekalim, pillars of resistance to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to cede Gaza to the Palestinians and alter the course of Mideast peacemaking.

Dozens of protesters at Kfar Darom sequestered themselves behind razor-wire on the synagogue roof, at first singing and waving flags, then attacking soldiers below with their arsenal of caustic liquids and objects, including paint-filled lightbulbs. Police and soldiers stripped off their clothes after being doused. Comrades poured water on their heads and torsos to wash them.

Breaking the siege, army cranes lowered metal cages filled with helmeted troops onto the roof, as cannon sprayed protesters with blasts of blue-tinted water. Other troops carrying wire cutters climbed ladders that became slick with oil.

At Neve Dekalim, troops wrestled for hours against some 1,500 extremists making their last stand inside Gaza's largest synagogue. Protesters lay on the floor with their arms linked, kicking against the Israeli forces while supporters held their shoulders in a tug-of-war.

After breaking the human chain, troops dragged protesters out of the synagogue one by one, holding them by their arms and legs as they twisted and squirmed. Other protesters chanted "blasphemy, blasphemy." One religious soldier, who wore a skullcap, suffered a panic attack and was taken away by medics.

Outside, teenage girls confronted a wall of troops surrounding the building, waving their fists and screaming, "You're driving Jews out of a synagogue. The last time this happened was the Holocaust. ... You're Jews, you have a Jewish heart, you don't have to do this."

For years, 8,500 Israelis lived among Gaza's 1.3 million Palestinians in perpetual tension and frequently lethal violence. The standoff at the synagogues was a symbolic climax to the withdrawal operation that started early Wednesday, since many of the settlers are Orthodox Jews who believe Gaza is the biblical birthright of the Jewish people.

Palestinians watched the drama in satisfaction from the rooftops of their nearby homes. "I'm standing here without any fear that Israelis will shoot at me because their battle today is against themselves," said Mohammed Bashir, a farmer in the town of Deir al-Balah, near Kfar Darom.

Thursday's evictions leave several hundred people still in Gaza. Evictions of the remaining four settlements, which will be suspended before Friday evening for the Jewish Sabbath, could be completed by next week, officials said - far earlier than planned.

President Bush was receiving regular updates on the withdrawal, White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, told reporters in Crawford, Texas.

"We understand the deep sentiments that are felt and the difficulty one feels when leaving their home," she said. "We agree that the disengagement will only make Israel stronger. We agree with Prime Minister Sharon on that. And the president has also said that this will bring our two countries closer together."

At least 41 police and soldiers and 17 civilians were injured during Thursday's raids on six settlements, including Neve Dekalim and Kfar Darom, police said. In Kfar Darom, about 50 people were arrested.

"What we saw here crossed all boundaries," said Maj. Gen. Dan Harel. "Everybody who was now on the roof will be arrested and put in prison." He said several troops were wounded by acid.

The daylong rooftop standoff recalled images from 1982 when Israeli troops evacuated Yamit, an Israeli town build on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula that was being returned to Egypt under a peace treaty between the two countries. That was the first time Israelis saw their army fighting their own civilians, and the army was equipped only with ladders to storm the roof - a lesson learned this time. [...]

Some Israelis were offended that the extremists chose houses of worship as their last redoubt. But experts on Judaism say it's not necessarily taboo for a synagogue to be used as a place of refuge.

In another standoff, at the beachfront settlement of Kfar Yam, settler Aryeh Yitzhaki clambered onto his roof at with an M-16 rifle slung over his shoulder. Three other extremists accompanied him.

"No one can ask me to hand over my weapon," he told Israel's Channel Two TV, speaking by mobile phone. "I have said very clearly that I will do everything to stop the uprooting, to stop it with my body."

He held off police for hours before negotiators persuaded him and the others to surrender and get on an evacuation bus.

Most of the extremists battling the troops Thursday came from Israel or the West Bank to reinforce the resistance. Faced with the threat of a loss of government compensation for their houses, the majority of settlers left Gaza before a deadline Sunday or during the two following days of grace before the forced evictions began.

Residents of Netzer Hazani set fire to homes, garbage and tires as columns of soldiers entered the settlement.

In Shirat Hayam, a small but hardline settlement, troops brought in a hydraulic platform to bring down more than a dozen protesters singing and chanting on a rooftop. In a nursery school, one young girl screamed, "You can't throw us out of our house."

The army sent in a bulldozer to douse flames raging from a barricade at the entrance. When the bulldozer arrived, settlers threw balloons with red and white paint at it.

One man collapsed in the sand in tears after soldiers came to evacuate him. "This is the land of Israel, people, this is the land of Israel," he shouted. "I just want to stay here."

COLOGNE, Germany (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI warned Friday of rising anti-Semitism and hostility to foreigners during a visit to a synagogue that was rebuilt after being destroyed during the Nazis' infamous Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.

Benedict became only the second pope to visit a synagogue, praying and remembering Holocaust victims with Cologne's Jewish community - Germany's oldest.

``Today, sadly, we are witnessing the rise of new signs of anti-Semitism and various forms of a general hostility toward foreigners,'' he said.

He reaffirmed his commitment to continue in the path of his predecessor, John Paul II, who made the first papal visit to a synagogue in Rome in 1986 and improved relations between Catholics and Jews.

Benedict said progress had been made, but ``much more remains to be done. We must come to know one another much more and much better.''

He did not elaborate on his warning except to call for more vigilance, receiving loud applause from the audience after his remarks.

Earlier, Benedict stood quietly with his hands clasped during a Hebrew prayer before a memorial to the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, and strode into the main hall as the choir sang, ``Shalom alechem,'' or ``peace be with you.''

The second-highest diplomat at the United States Embassy in Baghdad is one of the anonymous government officials cited in an Aug. 4 indictment as having provided classified information to an employee of a pro-Israel lobbying group, people who have been officially briefed on the case said Wednesday.

The diplomat, David M. Satterfield, was identified in the indictment as a United States government official, "USGO-2," the people briefed on the matter said. In early 2002, USGO-2 discussed secret national security matters in two meetings with Steven J. Rosen, who has since been dismissed as a top lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, who has been charged in the case.

Now if you read the indictment filed against Rosen, his AIPAC colleague Keith Weissman, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, you'll see that "USGO-2" is just one of a rather large cast of uncredited actors who appear in this movie. Others include:

• "USGO-1," which the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has suggested is someone "recently appointed to a senior Bush administration post."

• DoD employees "A and B," who accompanied Franklin on some of his clandestine meetings with AIPAC's dynamic duo.

• "A senior fellow at a Washington D.C. think tank."

• FO (foreign officials) 1, 2 and 3 -- all alleged diplomats at the Israeli embassy in Washington. FO-3 has been positively identified as Naor Gilon, former head of the embassy's political department, and a guy who, for a political officer, took an awfully keen interest in intelligence matters.

• "A person previously associated with an Israeli intelligence agency, now running a think tank in Israel." This individual has also been identified as ex-Mossad official Uzi Arad.

Like Satterfield, none of the American members of this supporting cast have been indicted, or disciplined, or even hindered in their career progress -- as Satterfield's posting to Baghdad indicates. Neither have any of Rosen and Weissman's fellow AIPACers, even though the indictment claims that classified information obtained from both Satterfield and Franklin was distributed to others within the organization -- continuing a pattern that stretches back to at least the early 1980s, according to this report and this one in the New York Jewish Week.

On the face of it, it's hard to grasp the legal logic for giving USG-01, USG-02 and DoD employees A and B a pass from prosecution (I kept waiting for the indictment to mention Little Cats C, D and E, but apparently the U.S. Attorney's Office doesn't read Dr. Seuss.) In Satterfield's case, for example, the indictment clearly states he leaked classified information -- including secret stuff about Al Qaeda -- to Rosen, who then passed it along to the Israelis. This is cited as one of the overt acts backing up the conspiracy charge against the AIPAC lobbyist.

But if Rosen committed a crime by promptly passing that information along to the Israelis, what about Satterfield, the guy who gave it to him? Or what about USGO-1? According to the indictment, Rosen was overheard in 1999 boasting that USGO-1 had given him "code-word protected intelligence." Such codes are normally used to protect what the spooks call SCI -- or "sensitive compartmentalized information" -- the highest possible level of classification.

According to the indictment, this particular SCI consisted of "national defense information concerning terrorist activities in Central Asia," which I'm guessing was code worded to prevent the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods (the most common use of the SCI designation). That ain't chicken feed -- nor is it the kind of harmless "policy-related" leaking that AIPAC and its media apologists have tried to portray in their spin on the scandal.

There are still other leakers who are not specifically listed in the cast, but whose existence can be deduced from the indictment. In June of 1999, for example, Weissman (Rosen's sidekick) told an Israeli official he had obtained a "secret FBI, classified FBI report" on the Khobar Towers bombing from three different sources, including at least two U.S. government officials. Who are these people? Does the FBI know? If not, does the Justice Department have any particular interest in finding out?

If it does, you sure can't tell from the statements and actions of Jay McNulty, the U.S. Attorney handling the case. As the New Pravda notes, USGO-2 (Satterfield) is "not believed to be the subject of a continuing investigation," and McNulty ruled out any further delving into AIPAC's activities when he announced the indictments against Franklin, Rosen and Weissman:

“We have no basis for charging anyone else for unlawful disclosure of classified information,” he said. “And I might add also that AIPAC as an organization has expressed its concern on several occasions with the allegations against Rosen and Weissman, and, in fact, after we brought some of the evidence that we had to AIPAC’s attention, it did the right thing by dismissing these two individuals.”

Yeah, sure. They were fired all right -- eight months after news of the investigation first broke, and long after it became clear the FBI had been tailing Rosen and his Israeli contacts (or should I say handlers?) for years. Of course, this hasn't stopped the usual fools and tools, like neocon fanatic Joel Malbray, from dismissing the whole scandal as a figment cooked up by the liberal media and (you had to expect this part) those sneaky pro-Arab diplomats in the State Department:

Now that the election is history—as are the secretary and deputy secretary of state who allowed such anonymous character assassinations—the smearing has stopped. No stories have run since September . . . Here’s what loyal readers of the Post won’t know: Mr. Franklin is back working for the Department of Defense. And he still has not been arrested, let alone charged. His security clearances remain pulled, but it would seem significant that after using up a combination of vacation and leave—though he was never suspended—he’s back at work.

That was a rather spectacular bit of bad timing on Mowbray's part, since Franklin was arrested and charged about three weeks after his column ran. But Mowbray's hardly the only media stooge trying to deny the obvious.

With few exceptions (I'll get to them later) the corporate media -- and the New York Times in particular -- have also rigidly toed the party line, with increasingly absurd results. Today's Times story, for example, professes to be "puzzled" by the FBI's focus on such a well-established (if informal) exemption from the rules normally applied to the handling of classified information:

The investigation is one of the more puzzling national security cases in recent years, focusing on the interactions between foreign affairs lobbyists and officials of the United States and other governments, who over the years, have routinely traded gossip and sometimes classified information. Under the Justice Department's theories of the case, it is no longer clear whether such conversations are legally permissible.

It would be interesting to hear the Times describe some of the other "interactions" between U.S. officials and lobbyists that somehow or another have resulted in highly sensitive compartmentalized information being passed to a foreign government that is:

a.) not a NATO ally,

b.) not bound by any formal defense treaty with the United States, and

c.) has been known to trade sensitive intelligence materials (like the satellite recon photos it received from Jonathan Pollard) with hostile foreign governments.

I won't hold my breath.

It's also amusing to note that the two U.S. officials quoted to back the Times's assertion that passing secret materials to Israel is an old and accepted custom inside the Beltway are former ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, an ex-AIPAC staffer, and Dennis Ross, former lead U.S. negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" and the director of a pro-Israel Washington think tank created by AIPAC.

Nobody here but us chickens.

But there's nothing new about making excuses for Israel's espionage activities in the United States, and nothing partisan about aiding and abetting it. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have been doing it for years, as Stephen Green, a former UN official and a diligent user of the Freedom of Information Act, makes clear in this article, which covers the unauthorized leaks -- and subsequent cover ups -- of many of the usual suspects (Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Ledeen, etc.) as well as some players most people have never heard of, like Stephen Bryen, ex-Senate Foreign Affairs Committee staffer, ex-deputy assistant secretary of Defense, and current member of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which is charged with monitoring the flow of advanced technology to the People's Republic.

Bryen had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be polygraphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed to be polygraphed and passed the test.

Update: 8/19 12:30 am ET: A well-informed source tells me that Rafiah was not, in fact, the Mossad station chief in Washington, but rather the head of Israel's defense procurement mission. Which, in light of Bryen's later career, is even more interesting.

A few years later, in his role as director of the Pentagon's Defense Technology Security Administration, Bryen was involved in an attempt to transfer extremely sensitive ballistic missile technology to Israel -- "without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force."

Other Pentagon officials (including one of Mowbray's "character assassins," then-DoD assistant secretary Dick Armitage) intervened and the deal was cancelled. But, according to Green:

Two senior colleague in DOD who wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by Bryen to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and was in fact "standard operating procedure" for him, recalling numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S. derived) weapons and technology to the intended customers/governments.

I could go on to explore the potential links between Bryen's current job on the China Commission and the long-running dispute over Israeli sales of military technology to Beijing. But I'm not trying to write a comprehensive history of the "special relationship" here -- just making the point that conduct that would be considered criminal, or even borderline treasonous, in any other context, has been a routine feature of U.S.-Israeli diplomacy for going on 25 years now, if not longer. To the point where you really have to wonder why the FBI got such a bug up its ass about Larry Franklin and his lunch buddies.

I mean, Ross and Weissman must have been flabbergasted when they were finally confronted by the gumshoes. It seems to have taken them a few days even to process the fact that they were in big trouble -- otherwise it's hard to believe they would have continued leaking the stuff Franklin gave them even after they were contacted by the FBI:

52. One or about August 9, 2004, WEISSMAN was interviewed by FBI agents and falsely told the agents Franklin had never discussed classified information with him and had never provided him with classified information.

53. On or about August 20, 2004, WEISSMAN contacted another member of the media and disclosed to that person classified national defense information obtained on July 21, 2004 from Franklin. WEISSMAN further advised that he was trying to arrange a meeting (!) between Franklin and the member of the media.

I'm not trying to make excuses for espionage here, but when you put the Franklin-Rosen-Weissman spy ring in the context of the overall U.S.-Israel relationship, you do start to see the point their apologists are trying to make.

Israel, for all intents and purposes, is no longer treated like a foreign country in Washington, but more like Puerto Rico -- an affiliated territory that enjoys most of the benefits of U.S. statehood, without actually being one. Except unlike Puerto Rico, Israel has nukes, and the upper hand in the relationship. To the point where when Franklin wanted a job at the White House, he knew who to ask:

19. On or about February 14, 2003, FRANKLIN and ROSEN discussed FRANKLIN's prospects for a position on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, and ROSEN told FRANKLIN that by working at the NSC that he would be "by the elbow of the president." FRANKLIN asked ROSEN to "put in a good word" for him, and ROSEN said "I'll do what I can."

It isn't clear from that paragraph whether Franklin was asking Rosen to put in a good word at the White House -- or the Israeli embassy. Nor is it clear that it would have made much of a difference.

This is all quite embarrassing for those who like to argue that there's nothing peculiar, nothing at all, about the behavior of the Israel lobby and its affiliates in the U.S. government -- and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a raving anti-Semite. (Or rather, it would be embarrassing, if the Washington press corps was devoting more than perfunctory coverage to the story.) But the minnows now wriggling in the net hardly seem to justify the effort and expense that clearly were poured into the FBI's big fishing expedition.

Did the guys in the shiny blue suits really spend six years (maybe more) following Israeli diplomats around Washington and New York in order to snag one low-level analyst with an obsession about Iran and a couple of pro-Israel lobbyists who never learned not to talk about their clandestine activities on their cell phones?

One theory is that the indictment is supposed to serve as a warning -- or, as one, ex-prosecutor puts it, a "brush back pitch," to let the Israelis and their U.S. agents know that while the relationship may be special, it's not that special:

"If I am the prosecutor, what I really want to prosecute is not AIPAC," says Rishikoff. "I want to start prosecuting anyone who thinks they can give information to AIPAC. I want to use this as a test case, to stop people feeling the US has a special relationship with this group."

On the other hand, a few establishment journalists have been treating the story like a legitimate spy scandal, and they've intimated that the FBI's fishing hole may contain much bigger trophies than the ones hauled up so far. Last September, the Washington Post's Steno Sue Schmidt, of all people, suggested that secret NSA intercepts -- the crown jewels of the American intelligence community -- might be involved:

The counterintelligence probe, which is different from a criminal investigation, focuses on a possible transfer of intelligence more extensive than whether Franklin passed on a draft presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran, the sources said. The FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic intercepts of communications, was also forwarded to Israel, they said.

Hmmmm . . . access to leaked NSA intercepts, a pro-Israel official recently appointed to a senior position in the Bush administration -- a conspiratorially minded person might try to connect the dots.

But there are already so many dots in plain view, clearly connected, that it hardly seems worth the effort. Like a grizzled old investigative reporter once told me: It's not the stuff they try to hide that's the real scandal; it's the stuff they think they can get away with right out in the open. And after more than 25 years of this particular stuff, the lines between Israeli influence peddling and Israeli espionage have gotten awfully blurry.

The Franklin case isn't likely to make them any clearer. It might, if USGO-1 and USGO-2 -- and the rest of the alphanumeric cast of characters -- were required to testify in court, or if the FBI decided to follow the trail a little higher up the bureaucratic food chain. But those avenues of investigation now appear to be blocked. And the smart money is betting that, rather than risk seeing all the beans spill out in court, the Justice Department eventually will settle for plea bargains from Rosen and Weissman. That would leave Franklin (a bit player in a minor sideshow) to take the fall -- something like 40 years worth. Maybe he and Pollard can become pen pals.

So: problem solved, harmony restored, a special relationship (which one particularly ardent pro-Israel Senator -- Frank Lautenberg -- once compared to a marriage) preserved. 'Til death do us part.

But while the marriage may look like perfect conjugal bliss from the Washington end, the Jerusalem end has a different point of view -- and always will. The Israelis understand, even if their American patrons do not, that they live in another country, one with its own national interests, its own strategic ambitions and its own enemies, none of which necessarily overlap with America's.

They don't even make much of an attempt to hide it, as this writer for David Horowitz's Frontpage (to Israel what the Daily Worker once was to the Soviet Union) makes clear:

A more independent Israel is determined to make its own mark on the world -- questioning US authority more frequently in order to establish its own autonomous relations with other countries.

A good idea. It's just a shame our own political lap dogs and their media water carriers won't do likewise.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Inmates at a maximum security prison in Southern California jumped guards in the prison yard, sparking a riot that left one inmate dead and at least 30 inmates and 20 guards wounded, officials said.

The riot at Calipatria State Prison near San Diego began Thursday afternoon when a guard was slashed in the head as he tried to search an inmate he suspected of concealing a weapon, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Prisoners rioted in the yard for about 45 minutes before guards could bring them under control. Another group of inmates then jumped into the yard and attacked the staff about 20 minutes later, said prison spokesman Lt. Ray Madden.

Some inmates attempted to breach a control booth by "throwing brooms and shoving sticks in," said Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

He said a tower guard broke up the rioters by firing his gun.

The inmate who died had been shot in the abdomen, officials said. Five inmates were taken to outside hospitals, while at least 25 inmates were treated at the prison.

Sixteen guards were treated at hospitals and released Thursday night, including the two most seriously wounded. Four others suffered minor injuries.

The prison in Imperial County east of San Diego houses more than 4,000 inmates. Ninety inmates were placed in administrative segregation after the riot, which means they will be locked up for 23 hours a day until they have an administrative hearing, Madden said.

The incident follows a riot at San Quentin Prison on Aug. 8 that left 42 inmates injured. That fight broke out between white and Hispanic inmates in a medium security dormitory-style unit that houses but only last six minutes, officials said.