In The News:

Morsi Says He Won't Visit Or Warm Ties With Israel

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi said he wouldn’t visit Israel, nor would he host an Israeli leader in Egypt, before peace is achieved between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a lengthy two-hour interview with the Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera on Saturday, Morsi stressed Egypt’s commitment to the peace accords signed with Israel in 1979 as an expression of “the free will of the Egyptians,” but added that true peace couldn’t exist as long as Palestinians were denied their rights.

Relations between Israel and Egypt sharply deteriorated in the wake of the popular Egyptian uprising of January 2011. Egyptian demonstrators stormed and ransacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September 2011, and the embassy has yet to be reopened. The appointment of a new Egyptian ambassador to Israel last October unleashed a flurry of condemnation against Morsi’s administration.

Asked about the prospect of normalization with Israel, Morsi said he could not foresee such a possibility materializing in the future.

“We must always talk about reality, not imagine future things which are impossible as we observe reality,” he said. “There are attempts [by Israel] to change the landscape, aggression, marginalization, and decades-long expansion. This must stop by international pressure, and Egypt will be at the heart of this [effort]. Can anyone imagine peace or stability in the Middle East without Egypt?”

Missile Movement: Two Scuds 'Deployed' To N Korea's East Coast

The two mobile missile transporter-erector-launchers (TEL) enhanced the ballistic missile division in South Hamgyeong Province where seven more TELs were deployed earlier in April, according to Yonhap. Also, two mid-range Musudan missile complexes have been positioned near city of Wonsan, a mere 180km away from the South Korean capital, Seoul.

South Korea is “closely watching” any suspicious activities of its north neighbor, the agency adds.

Pyongyang’s most recent muscle-flexing comes after the US Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement made on April 12 during his visit to Seoul. Kerry said there will be no talks between Washington and Pyongyang unless North Korea makes tangible steps to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Earlier North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper wrote that talks with the US are possible but not on the denuclearization of the DPRK.

"The US should not think about the denuclearization on the [Korean] Peninsula before the world is denuclearized," the newspaper commented.

Just last Thursday South Korean’s Chief of National Security Kim Jang-soo announced that Pyongyang is not capable of conducting a full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula, though localized ‘provocations’ are still possible.

Now the US-backed South Korea awaits a possible launch of a DPRK missile on April 25. On that date, a military parade in Pyongyang called to demonstrate country’s military might and decisiveness might require a more substantial argument in a 60-year-old dispute.

Moderate Earthquake Strikes Western Mexico

A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck western Mexico on Sunday, shaking buildings in the capital, but there were no reports of significant damage or injuries, officials said.

The quake, initially reported as a magnitude 6.2 off the coast, was centered 33 km (20 miles) northwest of La Union, on the border between Guerrero and Michoacan states, close to the Pacific coast, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Islamists Trying To Draw Israel Into Conflict

The gunshots and mortar shells fired at soldiers on the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights recently may have come from Islamists who have begun to fill the void left by the departure of Syrian troops from the area

Israel, however, is concerned that jihadist elements among the rebels fighting the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are taking advantage of the conflict to attack the Jewish state.

During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria and annexed it as part of Israel in 1981 – an action that still hasn’t been recognized by the United Nations.

Israel has become increasingly concerned with the Golan Heights being used by jihadists as a staging ground to launch attacks, now that Syrian soldiers recently have been withdrawn to fight the rebels in other areas of Syria, especially around Damascus.

As a consequence, it has jeopardized the presence of United Nations peacekeeping troops there, raising the prospect that Israel may have to intervene in the conflict to fight the rebels. Austrians comprise most of the U.N. observer force on the Golan Heights.

FBI Hunting 12-Strong 'Sleeper Cell' Linked To Brothers

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

A specialist team of CIA and FBI interrogators was yesterday flown to a Boston hospital to grill wounded Dzhokhar, 19, about the secret group. The University of Massachusetts student was caught on Friday after hiding out in a boat parked in a garden in locked down Watertown the day after a gun battle with police left his 26-year-old brother and a rookie cop dead.

Earth Day: A Pagan Holiday

The environmental religionists are calling for us to repent.  We are doomed, they say, as a result of pollution, global warming, running out of oil, the whole list of tribulations the environmentalist faithful are so sure are coming.

They believe that man and nature should coexist in one accord. Humans have never done that.  Why …  because it is impossible!  Man has always been at nature’s mercy. Nature is unforgiving.  Nature will kill you in a split second!  The evidence is all around me as I sit here writing in North Carolina awaiting the annual hurricane season to begin(officially) on June 1st.  Those of us who live in “Hurricane Alley” are well acquainted with nature’s force and nature’s fury.  We learned, long ago, to respect nature, but not worship it!  Believe me, those who find themselves praying to God for mercy in the midst of one of these horrific storms, is not the least bit confused as to who the Supreme Being is! 

Today, we have all the preachers of the Church of Environmentalism, preaching at us non-stop.  They preach fear.  They preach gloom and doom. They preach forsaking progress and returning to the days when man lived in harmony with nature, even though no such period ever existed in the history of mankind.

Many feel that inside that outer shell of green, the environmentalists so proudly wear, is the red of communism.  Like a watermelon, on the outside it is green.  Conversely, on the inside it is red.  And therein lies the connection with Earth Day’s observance on the birthday of Vladimir Lenin one of the founders of communism.

The environmental movement is in direct conflict with the Christian religion and, in this scribe’s opinion, Christians should steer clear of any involvement with the “greenies,” the “useful idiots” of the Marxists and communists, intent on the destruction of all those rights granted to man by God.

Earth Day is a pagan celebration, and I want no part in it.

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