Monday, February 13, 2012

Evening Update: Israel Boosts Alert Level After Embassy Attacks

Israel Boosts Level Of Alert After Embassy Attacks

Israel raised the level of alert at all of its embassies and consulates overseas following a coordinated attack against embassy personnel on Monday in Georgia and India.

The attacks came the day after the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Hezbollah’s military commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008. Hezbollah has tried a number of times in recent years to strike back at Israel, which it holds responsible for Mughniyeh’s death.

The defense establishment is concerned the attacks on Monday were just the beginning and Hezbollah is plotting additional attacks that could be launched in the coming days.

The level of alert was also raised in additional countries where Israeli delegations are believed to be under threat.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Iran on Monday for twin attempts to bomb people affiliated with the Israeli embassies in New Delhi and Tbilisi, Georgia.

The wife of an Israeli official in New Delhi and her driver were injured in a blast from explosives slapped on their car by a passing motorcyclist, authorities said. Around the same time, a grenade-type device was found duct-taped to the bottom of a car affiliated with the embassy in Tbilisi. It was defused without anyone being injured.

Netanyahu quickly pointed a finger at Iran, which has vowed revenge for recent assassinations of scientists involved in its nuclear program, and at Hezbollah, a terrorist group sponsored by Iran that had pledged to avenge the assassination four years ago of one of its leaders.

Ticking off places where he said recent attacks on Jews and Israelis had been thwarted, including Thailand and Azerbaijan, Netanyahu accused Iran of orchestrating Monday’s plots and called the government in Tehran “the greatest exporter of terror in the world.”

“In all these cases, the elements behind the attacks were Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah,” Netanyahu said. “We will continue to act with a strong hand, systematically and patiently, against international terrorism, whose source is Iran.”



Gene Sperling, director of the White House's national economic council, said today at an official meeting that "we need a global minimum tax":

"...we need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually subsidized and facilitate people moving their funds to tax havens," Sperling said.


Director of the White House’s national economic council Gary Sperling’s announcement that a plan for a “global minimum tax” is in the works continues the efforts of Barack Obama himself to oversee a massive transfer of wealth under the auspices of the UN.

The call also echoes similar rhetoric out of the United Nations which recently announced an agenda to impose a world tax on all financial transactions to “help the poor”.


“We need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually subsidized and facilitate people moving their funds to tax havens,” Sperling said today at an official meeting.

He added that more details about the proposal would be forthcoming before the end of the month.


The Commission on Social Development met earlier this month at UN headquarters in New York to advance the agenda for a world tax imposed on all financial transactions to fund a global model of social services that will provide “needy people” with a basic income, free healthcare, education and housing.

According to the report, the new global tax is designed to be a progressive scale, with higher earners paying more to help provide “all needy people with a basic income, healthcare, education and housing."



Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to "sound the alarm" about potentially untreatable forms of the disease.

"During the past three years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea," Gail Bolan, director of the CDC's sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine last week.



Can there be any lingering doubts over the idea that we are headed directly into the Tribulation era?

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