The latest advances in stem-cell research mean someone could some day become a biological single parent, the source of both the egg and the sperm needed to make a baby.

“In theory, a single individual could be both mother and father to a child. The individual does not even have to be living if there is a stored sample of their cells,” the University of Alberta’s Tim Caulfield and his colleagues write in a paper in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Their paper, The Challenge of Regulating Rapidly Changing Science: Stem Cell Legislation in Canada, documents how the speed and unpredictability of scientific advances in the stem-cell field pose a challenge to policy makers.

For example, scientists in a number of countries are now able to turn adult skin cells into stem cells. Once they have been reprogrammed, these cells regain the superhero-like powers of embryonic stem cells and can be turned into many of the specialized cells that make up the human body, including blood, brain or muscle cells.

But what if some of the reprogrammed stem cells originally taken from an individual were coaxed into becoming sperm, while others were transformed into eggs?

It hasn’t happened yet, but research suggests it is possible, Dr. Caulfield says.

Egg and sperm created from stem cells from one person could be used to create an embryo, which could then be transferred to the womb of the mom-pop, or in the case of a pop-mom, a surrogate mother.

The result could be something “very strange and dangerous,” warns Shinya Yamanaka, the Japanese stem-cell pioneer who discovered how to reprogram adult skin cells to stem cells. His breakthrough made headlines around the world in 2007.

Dr. Yamanaka’s work, recognized this year with a prestigious Gairdner award, offered an alternative to research involving stem cells from aborted fetuses, which some people find repugnant on moral or religious grounds.

But it also raised other troubling possibilities about where stem-cell science could be heading, questions that both scientists and ethicists are now considering. Should biological single parenthood be allowed if it proves possible? What are the risks to a child created in this way? Could skin cells from one child be used to create another son or daughter? Could someone steal a skin cell from someone famous and have their baby?

It is a hot topic, Dr. Caulfield says, and an example of how it is difficult to design legislation that keeps up with the unpredictable advances in fields such as stem-cell research.

It is unclear, he and his colleagues say, if Canadian legislation governing reproductive technologies and embryonic stem-cell research would prohibit making sperm and egg from skin cells.

Canada’s legislation bans the genetic altering of sperm or eggs.

Until last month, researchers reprogramming adult cells into stem cells did so by inserting a number of key genes that orchestrated the transformation to an embryonic-like state. That’s a genetic alteration.

But now, Canadian scientists have found ways to get rid of any trace of those genes – which can cause cancer – once they have done their work. Is that a genetic alteration? Would it be covered by legislation if a stem cell derived from an adult skin cell was turned into sperm or egg? It might circumvent the ban, Dr. Caulfield and his colleagues say.

“It really shows how the approach of rigid rules and rigid legislation inevitably isn’t going to work,” Dr. Caulfield says.

Canada has one of the most restrictive laws governing stem cell-research of any pluralistic society with a wide mix of religious beliefs – and non-beliefs.

He argues that it is better to have a clearly articulated set of principles that a regulatory body could interpret as research moves in new directions.

A child created with egg and sperm derived from one person wouldn’t be a clone – or genetically identical to the parent – because of the mixing and matching in the chromosomes that takes place when egg and sperm are formed.

Researchers have made substantial progress in coaxing stem cells to become sperm or eggs, work that could provide new treatment for infertility but that also opens the door to biological single parenthood.

- From Prophecy News Watch

They have no fear, they never tire, they are not upset when the soldier next to them gets blown to pieces. Their morale doesn’t suffer by having to do, again and again, the jobs known in the military as the Three Ds – dull, dirty and dangerous.

They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication may herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on fighting war. “Science fiction is moving to the battlefield. The future is upon us,” as Brookings scholar Peter Singer put it to a conference of experts at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania this month.

Singer just published Wired For War – the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, a book that traces the rise of the machines and predicts that in future wars they will not only play greater roles in executing missions but also in planning them.

Numbers reflect the explosive growth of robotic systems. The U.S. forces that stormed into Iraq in 2003 had no robots on the ground. There were none in Afghanistan either. Now those two wars are fought with the help of an estimated 12,000 ground-based robots and 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the technical term for drone, or robotic aircraft.

Ground-based robots in Iraq have saved hundreds of lives in Iraq, defusing improvised explosive devices, which account for more than 40 percent of U.S. casualties. The first armed robot was deployed in Iraq in 2007 and it is as lethal as its acronym is long: Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS). Its mounted M249 machinegun can hit a target more than 3,000 feet away with pin-point precision.

From the air, the best-known UAV, the Predator, has killed dozens of insurgent leaders – as well as scores of civilians whose death has prompted protests both from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Predators are flown by operators sitting in front of television monitors in cubicles at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 8,000 miles from Afghanistan and Taliban sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The cubicle pilots in Nevada run no physical risks whatever, a novelty for men engaged in war.

TECHNOLOGY RUNS AHEAD OF ETHICS

Reducing risk, and casualties, is at the heart of the drive for more and better robots. Ultimately, that means “fully autonomous engagement without human intervention,” according to an Army communication to robot designers. In other words, computer programs, not a remote human operator, would decide when to open fire. What worries some experts is that technology is running ahead of deliberations of ethical and legal questions.

Robotics research and development in the U.S. received a big push from Congress in 2001, when it set two ambitious goals: by 2010, a third of the country’s long-range attack aircraft should be unmanned; and by 2015 one third of America’s ground combat vehicles. Neither goal is likely to be met but the deadline pushed non-technological considerations to the sidelines.

A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a “rush to market” mentality and the “common misconception” that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do.

“Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to the time when computers were simpler and their programs could be written and understood by a single person,” the study says. “Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways.”

That’s what might have happened during an exercise in South Africa in 2007, when a robot anti-aircraft gun sprayed hundreds of rounds of cannon shell around its position, killing nine soldiers and injuring 14.

Beyond isolated accidents, there are deeper problems that have yet to be solved. How do you get a robot to tell an insurgent from an innocent? Can you program the Laws of War and the Rules of Engagement into a robot? Can you imbue a robot with his country’s culture? If something goes wrong, resulting in the death of civilians, who will be held responsible?

The robot’s manufacturer? The designers? Software programmers? The commanding officer in whose unit the robot operates? Or the U.S. president who in some cases authorises attacks? (Barack Obama has given the green light to a string of Predator strikes into Pakistan).

While the United States has deployed more military robots – on land, in the air and at sea – than any other country, it is not alone in building them. More than 40 countries, including potential adversaries such as China, are working on robotics technology. Which leaves one to wonder how the ability to send large numbers of robots, and fewer soldiers, to war will affect political decisions on force versus diplomacy.

You need to be an optimist to think that political leaders will opt for negotiation over war once combat casualties come home not in flag-decked coffins but in packing crates destined for the robot repair shop.

- From Prophecy News Watch

A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Panayiotis Zavos has broken the ultimate taboo of transferring cloned embryos into the human womb, a procedure that is a criminal offence in Britain and illegal in many other countries. He carried out the work at a secret lab-oratory, probably located in the Middle East where there is no cloning ban. Dr Zavos, a naturalised American, also has fertility clinics in Kentucky and Cyprus, where he was born. His patients – three married couples and a single woman – came from Britain, the United States and an unspecified country in the Middle East.

None of the embryo transfers led to a viable pregnancy but Dr Zavos said yesterday that this was just the “first chapter” in his ongoing and serious attempts at producing a baby cloned from the skin cells of its “parent”.

“There is absolutely no doubt about it, and I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” Dr Zavos said in an interview yesterday with The Independent.

“If we intensify our efforts we can have a cloned baby within a year or two, but I don’t know whether we can intensify our efforts to that extent. We’re not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one,” he said.

His claims are certain to be denounced by mainstream fertility scientists who in 2004 tried to gag Dr Zavos by imploring the British media not to give him the oxygen of publicity without him providing evidence to back up his statements. Despite a lower profile over the past five years, scores of couples have now approached Dr Zavos hoping that he will help them to overcome their infertility by using the same cloning technique that was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.

“I get enquiries every day. To date we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry is serious. The criteria is that they have to consider human reproductive cloning as the only option available to them after they have exhausted everything else,” Dr Zavos said.

“We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don’t participate in this.”

It took 277 attempts to create Dolly but since then the cloning procedure in animals has been refined and it has now become more efficient, although most experts in the field believe that it is still too dangerous to be allowed as a form of human fertility treatment. Dr Zavos dismissed these fears saying that many of the problems related to animal cloning – such as congenital defects and oversized offspring – have been minimised.

“In the future, when we get serious about executing things correctly, this thing will be very easy to do,” he said. “If we find out that this technique does not work, I don’t intend to step on dead bodies to achieve something because I don’t have that kind of ambition. My ambition is to help people.”

Dr Zavos also revealed that he has produced cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old child called Cady, who died in a car crash. He did so after being asked by grieving relatives if he could create biological clones of their loved ones.

Dr Zavos fused cells taken from these corpses not with human eggs but with eggs taken from cows that had their own genetic material removed. He did this to create a human-animal hybrid “model” that would allow him to study the cloning procedure.

Dr Zavos emphasised that it was never his intention to transfer any of these hybrid embryos into the wombs of women, despite Cady’s mother saying she would sanction this if there was any hope of her child’s clone being born.

“I would not transfer those embryos. We never did this in order to transfer those embryos,” Dr Zavos said. “The hybrid model is the thing that saved us. It’s a model for us to learn. First you develop a model and then you go on to the target. We did not want to experiment on human embryos, which is why we developed the hybrid model.”

Dr Zavos is collaborating with Karl Illmensee, who has a long track record in cloning experiments dating back to pioneering studies in the early 1980s. They are about to recruit 10 younger couples in need of fertility treatment for the next chapter in his attempts at producing cloned babies.

“I think we know why we did not have a pregnancy,” said Dr Zavos. “I think that the circumstances were not as ideal as we’d like them to be. We’ve done the four couples so far under the kind of limitations that we were working under.

“We think we know why those four transfers didn’t take. I think with better subjects – and there are hundreds of people out there who want to do this – if we choose 10 couples, I think we will get some to carry a pregnancy.”

All the cloning attempts, which date back to 2003, were filmed by Peter Williams, a distinguished documentary maker, for the Discovery Channel, which will show the programme tonight at 9pm.

Williams said that he was present at the secret laboratory when the cloning was carried out by Dr Illmensee. “There’s never been any question of concealment, because we’d have known about it,” Williams said.

Frontiers of fertility: The key questions

Q. What does he claim to have done?

A. Panayiotis Zavos says he has created 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women. Some of these embryos only developed to the four-cell stage before being transferred, but some developed to the 32-cell stage, called a morula. He also claims to have created human-bovine hybrid clones by transferring the cells of dead people into the empty eggs of cows. However, these hybrid embryos were used for research purposes and were not transferred to the womb.

Q. How does this compare to scientists’ previous achievements?

A. Other scientists have created human-cloned embryos but not for the purposes of transferring them to wombs in order for women to give birth to babies. Those researchers created cloned human embryos in the test tube to extract stem cells for research. Dr Zavos has gone further (and broken a taboo) by creating embryos specifically for human reproduction, and he has attempted to create a viable pregnancy by transferring the cloned embryos into women.

Q. Hasn’t he made similar claims before?

A. In 2004, Dr Zavos claimed to have transferred a cloned human embryo into a woman’s womb but did not produce hard evidence. He has now produced more cloned human embryos, some at an advanced stage, and transferred them into the wombs of three more women. An independent documentary maker vouches for him.

Q. Why is this such a controversial thing to do?

A. Studies on animal cloning have shown time and time again that it is unsafe. The cloned animals suffer a higher-than-normal risk of severe developmental problems and the pregnancies often end in miscarriage. Mainstream scientists believe cloning is too dangerous to be used on humans.

Q. How likely is it that he will succeed?

A. He is determined to succeed and has a long line of people eager to sign up to his cloning programme, at a cost of between $45,000 and $75,000. Cloning attempts in other species, including primates, suggest there is no insuperable barrier to cloning humans.

- From Prophecy News Watch

Robots are gaining on us humans.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer “brains” now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.

At a “Robobusiness” conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.

A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.

Intel, the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as “please clean this mess,” according to Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer.

In a talk last year titled “Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,” the widely respected Rattner lent some credibility to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people.

“The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago,” Rattner said. It’s conceivable, he added, that “machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.”

Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability.

Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers

“One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,” wrote Rodney Brooks, a robot designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. “But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.”

“We’re in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind’s children,” agreed Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. “Eventually, we’re going to reach the point where everybody’s going to say, ‘Of course machines are smarter than we are.’ ”

“The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,” Saffo said. “If we’re very lucky, they’ll treat us as pets. If not, they’ll treat us as food.”

Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.

According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called “Turing test.” In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can’t tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence.

“We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,” Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.”

To Kurzweil, the “singularity” is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It won’t come in “one great leap,” he said, “but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.”

Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” that’s due in theaters this summer.

Intel’s Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens.

Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco, doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.

It’s “extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,” Kapor said. “While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning ‘Jeopardy’ — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.”

Nevertheless, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with “humanoid” robots, with faces, movements and voices resembling their human masters.

A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan, sashays down a runway, turns and bows when “she” meets a real girl.

“People become emotionally attached” to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.

At a technology conference last October in San Jose, Calif., Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off “Leonardo,” a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls.

“Robot sidekicks are coming,” Breazeal said. “We already can see the first distant cousins of R2D2,” the sociable little robot in the “Star Wars” movies.

Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to “go to my room” or “take me to the cafeteria.”

So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. The Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States, second only to Japan. It’s estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.

- From Prophecy News Watch

One of the most massive and widespread occurrences of identity theft has happened, and it is not even attracting the attention of local, state or national leaders. This particularly insidious method targets a minority group, stealing their most precious possession, and yet even more compelling is that the perpetrator assumes nearly permanent “residency” in the victim’s identity.

The mastermind behind this worldwide ring has cells in every city and town in America – including operatives in many unsuspecting homes. The evidence of this outrage is right before our eyes, but we have simply chosen to ignore its existence, pretending that the consequences will be insignificant.

The “victim” is biblical Christianity, and the operatives of this fraud are millions of Americans, both clergy and laity, who are walking around using that identity with no right to do so. The consequences are a nation without the spiritual, moral, social and political anchor that held us firm through over 400 years of tempests and storms.

Maybe President Obama wasn’t so far off when he gushed to Islamic leaders that, “…we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation. … we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. I think modern Turkey was founded with a similar set of principles.”

His confusion in comparing American ideals – which have led us to fight, bleed and die to free others – with Turkey’s – which have led them to slaughter, oppress and persecute non-Muslims – is understandable. Why do I make such an outrageous claim?

Why have today’s churches become largely irrelevant?

Many will insist that we all have the right to practice Christianity as our conscience dictates. Wrong. We have the privilege of living out a faith based on absolute truth as given to us by the Author and Finisher of that faith without error or omission in His written word. If we want to invent our own religion, we are “free” to do so, “free” to reap the consequences and “free” to call it anything we want – but Christianity.

Former President William Jefferson Clinton may have had a difficult time defining the word “is”; however, we must have no hesitation defining what “Christian” is – and exposing the counterfeits.

For example, among the most recent illustrations of this crisis is a survey by Barna Research in which six out of 10 Christians surveyed believe “that Satan ‘is not a living being but is a symbol of evil.’”

In addition, only 25 percent strongly disagree that God the Holy Spirit is “a symbol of God’s power or presence but is not a living entity.” The coup de grace of this snapshot of anarchy is that less than one-half of Christians strongly disagreed that “Jesus Christ sinned when He lived on earth.”

The first of those beliefs reflects either complete ignorance or rejection of Scriptural truth, while the second and third are clear heresy against orthodox Christian doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the sinless nature and life of Jesus Christ. Those are “deal breakers.”

These are crises of orthodoxy – what we believe – and are the core of other sequential crises of belief that have destroyed the common principles that were essentials in creating our constitutional republic. The nation that has produced the greatest good for the greatest number is teetering on the precipice of civil tyranny and moral anarchy because, foremost, we have rejected the only Source of freedom, His sovereignty of all of His creation and the absolute truth revealed in His Son and written word.

In British scholar Harry Blamire’s “The Christian Mind,” he asserts:

For the secularist, God and theology are playthings of the mind. For the Christian, God is real, and Christian theology describes his truth revealed to us. For the secular mind, religion is essentially a matter of theory; for the Christian mind, Christianity is a matter of acts and facts. The acts and facts which are the basis of our faith are recorded in the Bible. They have been interpreted and illuminated in the long history of the church.

If 50 to 70 percent of students consistently fail to pass their exams, if professional sports teams lose most of their games and if corporate businesses regularly go deeply in the red (at least once upon a time prior to Bailout Mania), we expect the teachers and principals, coaches and CEOs to be reprimanded or replaced. When the vast majority of Christians – real and perceived – do not grasp and cannot explain or defend essential doctrines, the moment has arrived to challenge every pastor in the land to reassess how we are “doing business.”

Pastors, in this poll we are observing the SAT (Spiritual Aptitude Test) results of our congregants, and they – as well as we, their teachers – have failed.

It is obvious that the Christianity of our fathers has become an endangered species even as compared to 1892 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S. opinion that, “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those imposters.”

Conservative Republicans coined a term for those who claim affiliation with the party but do not adhere to any or most of the platform principles: RINO’s (Republican In Name Only). CINO doesn’t have quite the same ring; however, the application is the same.

Don’t tell us how much someone “loves the Lord” (including the president) if he or she denies “all that I commanded you.” Don’t call yourself a Christian if you are going to deny essential doctrines.

For the rest of us in pulpit and pew, we must reassert those truths FIRST if we want the power of God with us in the battle to rebuild the social, cultural and political foundations of this great nation.

- From Prophecy News Watch

DEBKAfile quotes senior Israeli military circles as staggered by the discovery that US president Barack Obama had approved a large Turkish arms sale to the Lebanese army, including the services of Turkish military instructors. This was taken as further proof that the US president is deaf to Israel’s immediate security concerns. Lebanese president Gen. Michel Suleiman has more than once threatened neighboring Israel. When he signed the arms deal in Ankara Tuesday, April 21, he once again pledged publicly to place the Lebanese army at the disposal of the Shiite terrorist Hizballah in any confrontation with Israel.

If that happened, said one Israeli source, Israel could find itself under attack not just by Hizballah as in the past, but by a Lebanese army, well trained and armed by Turkey. He noted that more than 50 percent of Lebanon’s fighting manpower are Shiites loyal to Hizballah.

The conviction is growing in Jerusalem that the US president endorsed the transaction as a means of breaking up the long-standing military pact between Israel and Turkey, because it interferes with his Middle East objectives. Our sources note that neither Washington nor Ankara bothered to inform Israel of the transaction or its scope.

After meeting Turkish president Abdullah Gul, Suleiman at the head of a large Lebanese military delegation signed the contracts for the sale and declared with deep satisfaction: “We reviewed the new [US] policies towards the region in the light of President Obama’s recent visit to Turkey.”

- From Prophecy News Watch

With quiet campaigning and moderate talk, Hizbullah is building its strength for Lebanon’s June 7 parliamentary elections – and the terrorist Shi’ite Muslim group and its allies stand a good chance of winning.

That could mean a stunning shake-up for one of the Middle East’s most volatile countries, replacing a pro-US government with a coalition dominated from behind the scenes by Hizbullah, the proxy of Iran and Syria in Lebanon.

The US ambassador in Beirut has already expressed concern, and Hizbullah’s opponents warn the consequence may be the West isolating Lebanon and Washington reducing its millions in aid.

But Hizbullah, whose name means “Party of God,” has taken the strategy of a low-key election campaign with a moderate message, aiming to show that a victory by its coalition should not scare anyone.

Hizbullah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has even said that if the coalition wins, it would invite its opponents to join in a national unity government to ensure stability. His deputy, Sheikh Naim Kassem, says the West will have to accept the election results.

Kassem said foreign diplomats are already approaching Hizbullah, “some wanting to open a new page.” Britain has said it is willing to talk to Hizbullah’s “political wing” and a Hizbullah member of the current parliament recently traveled to London.

The moderate tone is in part because Hizbullah does not want to suffer the same fate as Hamas, which won legislative elections in 2006 but was boycotted by the West and crippled by an Israeli-led closure of the Gaza Strip.

“There are pitfalls for winning or losing,” said Hizbullah expert Amal Saad-Ghorayeb. “They (Hizbullah) see the dangers of winning.”

Nevertheless, a Hizbullah win would almost certainly mean changes that would dismay the West and Israel. It would mean less pressure from Lebanon’s government to rein in Hizbullah’s arsenal of rockets pointed at the Jewish state and more backing for efforts to change Lebanon’s electoral system to solidify Shi’ite power further.

Israel’s worry is “whether Iran and Syria will succeed in adding Lebanon to their bloc,” said Israeli political analyst Barry Rubin. “It would be a huge defeat for the West.”

So far, Hizbullah has campaigned quietly, with none of its trademark fiery anti-Israel rallies. Its 11 candidates have been holding town hall meetings in Shi’ite villages, focusing on promises to root out corruption and improve government performance, and stressing government by consensus.

By contrast, leaders from the US-backed majority have held three splashy rallies since February before several thousand people in a Beirut hall, with balloons, confetti and speakers projected on a giant screen.

Nasrallah says Hizbullah knows that trying to dominate Lebanon’s politics would destabilize the country, which in the past four years nearly tumbled into a repeat of the 1975-1990 civil war as the pro-Syrian and pro-US camps struggled for the upper hand.

“In such a sectarian system, it is in the interest of Lebanon and its stability that there is understanding and partnership among Lebanese in running their country’s affairs,” he said in a recent televised speech.

Under Lebanon’s complex political system, no group can rule alone. The 128-member legislature must be half Christian and half-Muslim, with the Christians divided among Orthodox and Catholic parties and Muslims among Shi’ite, Sunni, Druse and Alawite sects. Moreover, in any government, the prime minister must be a Sunni, so Hizbullah would need allies from that sect.

Lebanon’s population of 4 million is roughly divided in thirds between Christians, Sunnis and Shi’ites, with smaller sects mixed in. The exact numbers are unknown because a census would be too politically risky – the last one was held in 1932.

The pro-US bloc – largely Sunnis with Christian allies – holds 70 seats in the 128-member parliament, so a handful of races could tip the balance.

Hizbullah’s 11 candidates will likely win easily given the movement’s overwhelming support among Shi’ites. Its coalition of pro-Syrian, Shi’ite and several Christian parties now has 58 seats in parliament. About 30 seats – from both camps – are reported to be toss-ups. But some political analysts believe Hizbullah’s coalition has a strong chance of winning a majority because smaller electoral districts created since the 2005 election favor its candidates. There are no reliable independent polls in Lebanon.

The leader of the pro-US bloc, Sunni billionaire Saad Hariri, has said a Hizbullah win would “put Lebanon into very difficult times,” threatening its economic growth.

In an interview with Beirut’s Naharnet news Website, US Ambassador Michele Sison warned that American relations with Lebanon – and future US aid – “will be evaluated in the context of the new government’s policies and statements.” Since 2006, the United States has committed over a billion dollars to Lebanon, including $410 million to the country’s security forces.

A victory by the pro-Syrian coalition would likely see Hizbullah pushing to fulfill its campaign promise to eliminate the sectarian distribution of parliament seats, which would boost the power of the growing Shi’ite population. Hizbullah would also see a win as a mandate for its opposition to US Middle East policies and its strong anti-Israeli line.

- From Prophecy News Watch

The new US president’s dramatic global policy steps have easily dwarfed the knotty Israeli-Palestinian peace issue handed down from one US president to the next over decades. Barack Obama’s outstretched hand to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s best friend in the Americas, on April 17, at the summit of American leaders in Port of Prince, made the talk surrounding Special Middle East Envoy George Mitchell’s mission to Jerusalem and Ramallah this week sound eerily like voices from the past.

After talking to Mitchell, Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak tried the usual bromides: They protested that Jerusalem’s ties with Washington and Jerusalem were as strong as ever and they would work together toward an agreed solution for the Palestinian problem.

But those words were lost in the black Iranian cloud hanging over the relations.

Barack Obama has set his sights and heart on friendship with the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their radical allies. The name and policies of the occupant of the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem do not matter – any more than Tehran’s determination to complete its nuclear weapons program in defiance of the world, or even its first A-bomb test in a year or two, for which intelligence sources report Tehran is already getting set.

Obama’s Washington believes America can live with a nuclear-armed Iran – a decision probably taken first under the Bush presidency. But Israel cannot, and may have no option but to part ways with the Obama administration on this point. As a nuclear power, Iran will be able to bend Jerusalem to the will of its enemies, make it unconditionally give Syria the Golan plus extra pieces of territory, tamely accept a Hamas-dominated Palestinian West Bank louring over its heartland and let the Lebanese Hizballah terrorize Galilee in the north at will. All three would make hay under Iran’s nuclear shield, while Tehran lords it over the region in the role of regional power conferred by Obama’s grace and favor.

In no time, Israel would be stripped of most of its defenses.

Israel is not the only nervous country in the region. But Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is the only Middle East leader brave enough to stick his neck out, albeit with Saudi backing, and stand up to the Iranian peril, direct and through Hizballah.

He has also outspokenly criticized Washington’s courtship of the revolutionary Islamic republic.

Cairo’s Al Ahram Saturday, April 18, accused Iran, Syria, Qatar, Hizballah, Hamas, al Jazeera TV of a conspiracy to overthrow Egyptian government.

But the US president is not daunted by the radicalism or enmity of his new friends or the loss of old ones. At the Summit of All Americas, Obama greeted Hugo Chavez 24 hours after the Venezuelan ruler said: “The United States Empire is on its way down and will be finished in the near future, inshallah!”

Using the Muslim blessing to underline the wish for America’s downfall was no bar to the smile and handshake; neither was Venezuela’s recent severance of its ties with Israel for no provocation or its willingness to host a delegation of Hizballah (internationally branded a terrorist organization) in Caracas.

What is relevant to Obama is Hugo Chavez’s role as co-architect of the joint Russian-Iranian campaign to displace American influence in the southern hemisphere. The US president has opted for winning America’s enemies over with smiles and embraces rather than punishing them like George W. Bush.

Obama continues to woo Bashar Assad apace despite his blunt refusal to loosen his strategic ties with Tehran or stop supporting the Lebanese Shiite group [with arms] because Hizballah is dedicated to fighting Israel, – as he is quoted as saying in the pro-Hizballah Lebanese publication al Akhbar on April 17.

For the first time in years, the administration this week sent a high-ranking delegation to Syria’s independence day celebrations at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, headed by Jeffrey Feltman, former ambassador and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.

The thaw in relations has gone so far that some Washington wags are calling Assad’s capital “Syria on the Potomac.”

The American storm besetting the Middle East leaves Israel’s most vital interests way behind. The condition Netanyahu put before Mitchell for progress in peacemaking – that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state, which was instantly rejected by Palestinian Authority leaders – aroused scant attention in Washington or anywhere else.

As Netanyahu will find when he meets Obama in Washington early next month, Israel is no longer a prime factor in US global policy, because America has fundamentally reshuffled its Middle East allegiances and alliances. Even Tzipi Livni at the helm in Jerusalem would not divert Obama from his détente with Ahmadinejad, Assad and Chavez.

To gain points with his new friends, Obama’s White House is not above nudging Israel to please them. This week, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Jewish leaders whom he met in Washington that if Israel wants America’s help for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program, it must first start evacuating West Bank settlements.

This was of course cynical claptrap.

Even if every single settlement were to be removed and Israel lined up with Obama’s quest for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the US president would not drop Tehran or help Israel strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. He has already ceded Tehran’s uranium enrichment program (and therefore its drive for nuclear arms), and would forcefully oppose any Israeli military action. US defense secretary Robert Gates indicated as much this week when he went to almost absurd lengths to play down the Iranian nuclear threat and Israel’s ability to handle it.

So what options are left to Israel at this juncture?

1. To bow under the Obama tempest until it blows over in keeping with the old proverb which says that trees bowing in the wind remain standing. This would entail going along with US acceptance of Iran as a nuclear power. The question is will Israel’s trees still be standing when the storm has passed and, if so, in what strategic environment?

2. To follow the example set by Likud’s first prime minister Menahem Begin in 1981. He stood up to Ronald Reagan’s fierce objections and sent the Israeli Air force to smash the Iraqi nuclear reactor before it was operational. Saddam Hussein never rebuilt the facility. By following in Begin’s footsteps before it is too late, Netanyahu would change the rules of the game regionally and globally.

(The London Times reported from Jerusalem Saturday that the Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government. Two civil defense drills have been scheduled to prepare the population for missiles that could fall on any part of the country without warning.)

3. Israel could go for a more modest target, one of Iran’s faithful surrogates – Syria or Hizballah – to warn Washington that a larger operation is in store for their boss. If the Gaza offensive against Hamas last January was meant to send this message, it failed. Hamas is still the dominant Palestinian power and Barack Obama was not swayed from forging ahead with his policies of rapprochement with Iran and other radical world leaders.

- From Prophecy News Watch

The timing of Saturday’s Times of London article, which claimed that the Israel Defense Forces is training for an attack on Iran on very short notice, is certainly no coincidence. Israel is trying to make clear that even though the United States plans to begin a diplomatic dialogue with Iran, it holds a realistic military option against Tehran’s nuclear program. Without a deal that assuages Israel’s concerns, there may be no other choice but to attack.

About 10 days ago, Maariv reported that the new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was briefed on the progress of the IDF’s planning on the Iranian question. Supposedly he was happy with what he heard. It’s highly probable we will hear and read many more reports of this sort in the near future, mostly in the international media.

Most senior defense figures believe that nothing positive will result from the dialogue between Washington and Tehran. They also acknowledge that Israel’s ability to influence the talks is very low and that it would be best for Israel not to be seen as obstructing efforts to resolve the confrontation with Iran peacefully.

However, the defense establishment is continuing with its preparations for an attack, as well as its signals to the international community and Iran that the plan is serious and feasible.

There appears to be also an American effort to link an operation against Iran with a more favorable approach by Israel to peace with the Palestinians. An article in Yedioth Ahronoth last week suggested that the United States is hinting that its willingness to attack Iran (or permit Israel to do so) will be directly related to the Netanyahu government’s flexibility on issues such as evacuating settlements, pullbacks from the West Bank and progress on a peace accord with the Palestinian Authority.

It’s too soon to tell if this is a trial balloon from Washington or a clear position. But even if the dialogue with Tehran fails, senior IDF officers doubt whether the United States will allow Israel to go ahead with an offensive operation.

What may be the timetable for a strike? Updated Western intelligence assessments talk of fast Iranian progress and make discussions of a “point of no return” academic. Tehran is near the point where the question of whether it produces a nuclear weapon will be only a matter of choice, not ability.

Sometime in 2010 the Iranians will have enough fissile material for a single weapon; the IAEA says 25 kilograms are necessary. It is unlikely the Iranians will waste the material on demonstrating their abilities through an underground explosion. Most likely they will wait a year or two and build up a stockpile of about 75 kilograms of fissile material, which will suffice for a demonstration and a weapon or two.

The Iranians have another problem: It seems they still have a way to go to be able to place a nuclear weapon on a ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel. It is highly unlikely they will be able to mount a nuclear strike on Israel using aircraft-borne weapons, considering the Iranian air force’s limitations.

Assessments about the year Iran will be a nuclear country vary, with Israel stressing 2010 (nuclear capable), and the United States estimating – according to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – 2013 (a nuclear weapon). Either way, it’s clear the next two to three years will be critical. It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu will discuss the Iranian threat publicly, as did Ehud Olmert, or work behind the scenes, as did Ariel Sharon. His choice will not necessarily indicate his decision on a strike against Iran.

- From Prophecy News Watch

If not for the Holocaust, there would be as many as 32 million Jews worldwide, instead of the current 13 million, demographer Professor Sergio Della Pergola has written in a soon-to-be published article.

Della Pergola, who holds the Shlomo Argov chair in Israel-Diaspora relations and is the director of the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attempts to estimate the demographic damage to Jews of the Holocaust. The Holocaust ‘struck a mortal blow particularly at the Jews of Eastern Europe because of their especially young age structure,’ and particularly the number of children. This led to significant long-term demographic damage. The quantitative ramifications are far beyond what we think,” he writes.

In the article, to be published in “Beshvil Hazikaron,” the periodical of the Yad Vashem Holocaust commemoration authority’s school of Holocaust studies, he writes: This was the destruction of a generation, and what we are lacking now is not only that generation, it is their children and their children.

According to Della Pergola, while the birth rate of the Jewish population outside Israel is relatively low, the young Jewish population of Eastern Europe has great potential for growth. “What would happen if there were another 10 million Jews in Eastern Europe? It raises questions that are like science fiction – for example, would the State of Israel have come into being?

Della Pergola says another demographic outcome of the Holocaust is the lower relative number of Jews in the world. “At present, the percentage of Jews in the world is constantly in decline. Before the Holocaust, the rate was eight Jews per thousand people in the world; today it is two per thousand.

- From Prophecy News Watch