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Back in the ‘60s when lots of people were experimenting with lots of things, a Stanford professor was experimenting with marshmallows. In his now legendary study, Walter Mischel gave children a single marshmallow, but explained that if they waited to eat it until he returned to the room, he would give them a second marshmallow, and then they could eat both. Naturally, some kids didn’t wait for the second marshmallow, preferring to eat the first one as soon at it hit the desk. But others, even at the age of four or five, were able to hold off long enough...

Is Iran's Ahmadinejad a messianic medium? By Kenneth R. Timmerman Friday, December 30, 2005 With negotiations over Iran's nuclear program looming once again, understanding Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is critically important. Perhaps the best place to start is the moment the world first gained a glimpse of Ahmadinejad's character and hard-line program. When Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations in New York last September, he suddenly felt himself surrounded by light. It wasn't the stage lighting, he said. It was light from heaven. Ahmadinejad related his otherworldly experience in a videotaped meeting with a prominent ayatollah in Tehran. A transcript...

"There's no peace at the end of this," warns Avner, the morally anguished Mossad assassin, as Steven Spielberg's new film, "Munich," draws to a close. And by "this" he means the targeted killings that Israel is said to have begun after 11 of its athletes were murdered at the 1972 Olympics by members of the Palestinian Black September offshoot of Fatah. But Mr. Spielberg, in collaboration with his screenwriters, Eric Roth and the playwright Tony Kushner, also has a different "this" in mind. The camera pointedly settles on the period's skyline of lower Manhattan, showing the World Trade Center in...

By Nir Hasson and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents, and Haaretz Service Palestinians in the Gaza Strip launched early Saturday 21 Qassam rockets at Sderot wounding three people, the third such attack in as many days. The casualties are three civil guard volunteers who were hurt by shrapnel, Israel Radio reported. One of them was moderately wounded, the other two lightly. They were taken for treatment to the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. One Qassam fell next to a sports hall in the center of town. Others fell on a school, a factory and a residential building, none of which caused...

The FBI had reportedly arrested last week four American Muslims who were planning an attack on the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, Channel 2 News reported Friday evening. According to the report, the four - all African-Americans who had converted to Islam - admitted to attaining a map of the consulate, as well as address of synagogues in the Los Angeles area. Cell members also gathered information on El Al flights to and from LA. It remained unclear how close the cell members were to carrying out an attack against Israeli and Jewish targets in LA.

Released: August 30, 2004 Half of New Yorkers Believe US Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9-11 Attacks and “Consciously Failed” To Act; 66% Call For New Probe of Unanswered Questions by Congress or New York’s Attorney General, New Zogby International Poll Reveals On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," according to the...

ASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The Pentagon official under suspicion of turning over classified information to Israel began cooperating with federal agents several weeks ago and was preparing to lead the authorities to contacts inside the Israeli government when the case became publicly known last week, government officials said Sunday. The disclosure of the inquiry late on Friday by CBS News revealed what had been for nearly a year a covert national security investigation conducted by the F.B.I., according to the officials, who said that news reports about the inquiry compromised important investigative steps, like the effort to follow the trail...

Filed at 10:31 p.m. ETNEW YORK (Reuters) - Dozens of demonstrators heckled and jeered Broadway theatergoers on Sunday, seeking confrontations with Republican delegates who arrived in New York City to back President Bush's reelection bid.Police arrested up to 60 protesters who assembled in Times Square at dusk chanting anti-Bush slogans after hundreds of thousands had marched in Manhattan to decry the president's policies before the Republican convention begins on Monday.But individual protesters kept tensions high, some of them hissing or cursing at well-heeled couples heading to popular Broadway musicals like ``Thoroughly Modern Millie'' and ``Fiddler on the Roof.''``Republican murderers go...

Last update - 01:56 30/08/2004 Analyst at center of spy flap called naive, ardently pro-Israel By Nathan Guttman WASHINGTON - Larry Franklin, the Pentagon analyst suspected of passing classified material about Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never hidden his unequivocal support of Israel. Colleagues from the Near East and South Asia desk at the Defense Department said yesterday that his sympathy for Israel was overt and public - he didn't refrain from praising Israel and he held aggressive views about several Arab governments, primarily the ayatollahs' regime in Iran and Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq. "Everyone knew he...

MSNBC - And Now A Mole?  MSNBC.com And Now A Mole?In the Pentagon, a suspected spy allegedly passes secrets about Iran to IsraelBy Michael Isikoff And Mark Hosenball Newsweek Sept. 6 issue - It was just a Washington lunch—one that the FBI happened to be monitoring. Nearly a year and a half ago, agents were monitoring a conversation between an Israeli Embassy official and a lobbyist for American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as part of a probe into possible Israeli spying. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, in the description of one intelligence official, another American "walked in" to the lunch...

ASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - The F.B.I. is in communication with a Pentagon official suspected of passing secrets to Israel and is seeking to gain his cooperation in their espionage investigation, government officials said. The Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, a midlevel analyst who works in the policy office of the Defense Department, has been in contact with investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said. It could not be learned whether he was talking with the bureau directly or through a lawyer. Government officials say they suspect that Mr. Franklin provided classified documents to officials at the American Israel Public...

FBI espionage probe goes beyond Israeli allegations, sources sayBy Warren P. StrobelKnight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday. The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group has kidnapped two French citizens and is demanding the French government end a ban on Muslim headscarves to free them, Arabic television station Al Jazeera said Saturday. The channel, quoting unidentified sources, named the group as the Islamic Army of Iraq. It gave no further details.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan electoral officials on Sunday extended voting hours for the recall referendum on the rule of left-wing President Hugo Chavez until 12 a.m. to accommodate massive voter turn out. Venezuela's National Electoral Council had earlier extended voting until 8 p.m. from the original closing time of 4 p.m. In the past, Venezuelan polling stations have usually stayed open until 6 p.m. Link to full text of the article

Filed at 6:42 p.m. ETWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush has named controversial Middle East commentator Daniel Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace to the dismay of a major American Muslim organization, which described Pipes on Monday as a ``Muslim-basher'' with bigoted views.Institute spokesman John Brinkley said on Monday that Bush had nominated Pipes to replace Zalmay Khalilzad, who left the institute in 2001 to work in the White House.The nomination needs confirmation by the U.S. Senate because the institute, a Washington think tank set up to promote peace, relies on federal government funds.The Council on American-Islamic...

Scenes from Baghdad Airport Caroline Glick Apr. 6, 2003 "We are on an offensive-oriented mission. Our job is to destroy the enemy. We defend the airfield by destroying the enemy around us." So explained Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, commander of the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, at a command briefing to his officers Saturday afternoon. The 2-7 Battalion, together with the 3-69 Battalion from the 3rd Infantry Division First Brigade, took over Saddam Hussein International Airport on the western edge of Baghdad late Thursday night. The airport is surrounded on all side by sites of vital importance to the Iraqi regime....

Monday, January 20, 2003 Arab street 'explodes' in the wake of 'illegal Zionist occupation' of Earth orbitDUBAI, United Arab Emirates (al-Jee'ef) - The Arab League "strongly condemned" today the launch of the NASA space shuttle Columbia with Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon on board. "This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space," said Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla. "We will not sit idly by and permit this usurpation of a cosmos that by birthright belongs to the Palestinian people and their Arab and Muslim brethren. The Israeli occupation of Palestine must end,...

ASHINGTON, May 19 — Tens of thousands of foreigners are illegally obtaining Social Security numbers by using fake documents, a typical first step to identity theft and other crimes, but federal officials still have not found a way to search immigration records to prevent the practice, federal investigators say. In a new report, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration, James G. Huse Jr., said that 1 in 12 foreigners receiving new Social Security numbers had done so using fake documents. Preliminary results from an investigation still under way show that 100,000 Social Security numbers were wrongly issued to...

Yasser Arafat’s major policy speech this week was greeted by the White House as a “positive” step in re-starting the Arab-Israeli peace process, but it was anything but that. An in-depth examination of the prepared speech in Arabic as well as video footage of the 40-minute address show that the speech was actually part of an elaborate and successful confidence game played by the Palestinian Authority on Western media and the Bush Administration.. “President Arafat: ‘Peace was and will remain our strategic choice and we will not give up the choice of peace,’" read the headline on the English language...

A radio broadcast on 'the world's most dangerous terrorist'By David Duke Today, I want to focus on the world's most dangerous and murderous terrorist. His name is Ariel Sharon, and he makes Osama Bin Laden look like an amateur when it comes to murder and mayhem. But first, there is a pressing matter that needs to be addressed. In the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, the stench of hundreds of rotting human bodies fills the air. Surviving mothers and fathers search through the rubble of hundreds of homes to recover the remains of their sons and daughters. And, sons and...