In The News: Israel Begins Prisoner Release

Of course, many of us are still waiting to see what concessions Mr. Abbas is going to bring to the table.

Israel Prison Service Names 26 Palestinian Prisoners To Be Released

The Israel Prison Service published on Sunday overnight a list of 26 Palestinian prisoners who will be released from Israeli jails ahead of renewed peace negotiations after aministerial panel approved their release. 

The prisoners to be released are as follows. Click here for a detailed list of the prisoners, the charges for which they were jailed and their victims.

Fourteen of the 26 Palestinian prisoners are to be released to the Gaza Strip, and the remaining 12 will go to the West Bank, the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement close to midnight.

Responding to the move, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday that no released Palestinian prisoner will be deported "from any part of his homeland," confirming that although some prisoners are to return to the West Bank, others are to be transferred to the Gaza Strip.

In a meeting at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah with Palestinian Minister of Prisoner Affairs Issa Qaraqi, Abbas stressed the continued effort on the part of the authority in releasing all detainees held in Israeli jails, stating the issue was of "top priority" for the PA, their official news agency Wafa reported.

Among The Terrorists To Be Released, The Murderer Of A Holocaust Survivor

The Israel Prisons Service publicized early Monday the list of the first 26 convicted terrorists who will be released as part of Israel’s confidence-building measures to help the restart of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

The list included 17 names of prisoners who had murdered Israelis, including Abu-Musa Salam Ali Atia of Fatah, who murdered Holocaust survivor Isaac Rotenberg in a Petah Tikvah construction site in 1994.

According to Almagor, an organization of terror victims’ families that has campaigned against the prisoner release, Rotenberg’s family perished in the Sobibor extermination camp during World War II. Rotenberg escaped and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. He arrived in Israel in 1947, joined the IDF and fought in Israel’s Independence War on the Lebanese front.

A plasterer by trade, Rotenberg was attacked by Abu Musa and an accomplice at a construction site where all three men worked in March 1994. He sustained repeated blows to the neck with axes. His wounds induced a coma, and he died two days after the attack. He was survived by his brother and sister, who were also survivors of Sobibor, and by a wife and two children. Rotenberg was 67 when he died.

Also on the list was Kour Matwah Hamad Faiz of Fatah, convicted of killing Menahem Dadon and Salomon Abukasis in 1983 and planning to murder then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Another two prisoners to be released, Fatah members Sualha Fazah Ahmed Husseini and Sualha Bad Almajed Mahmed Mahmed, were imprisoned for a stabbing attack on a crowded Ramat Gan bus on the 66 line in 1990. The two, together with a third accomplice, stabbed passengers at random, killing 24-year-old Baruch Heizler and wounding three young women. Heizler was named after his grandfather, who was killed during the Jordanian bombardment of the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem during the 1948 Independence War.

Sha’at Azat Shaban Ata was imprisoned in 1993 for helping to orchestrate the murder of 51-year-old Simcha Levi, a woman who made her living transporting Palestinian day laborers to work in Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. In March 1993, three of the women laborers were disguised male attackers, who beat and stabbed her to death.

Maslah Abdallah Salama Salma, a Hamas member likely to be sent to the Gaza Strip after his release, was imprisoned in 1993 for the brutal murder of Petah Tikvah convenience store owner Reuven David. Abdallah, together with an accomplice, entered David’s convenience store on May 20, 1991, bound David’s arms and legs and beat him to death, before locking the store and fleeing the scene. Born in Iraq in 1932, David was 59 at the time of his death, and was survived by a wife, three children and multiple grandchildren.

Livini: EU Doesn't Determine Borders

[This is both interesting and unexpected, coming from Tzipi Livni]

The European Union is not the body to determine issues relating to Israel’s borders, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday.

Livni made the comments during a meeting with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who met with Israeli officials on Sunday on a visit to support the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

"This meeting comes after we relaunched the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and I know that Germany is deeply supportive of the need of direct, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians," Livni said ahead of the meeting, according to AFP.

She also warned against making the "linkage between Israel, the EU and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", referring to the new EU guidelinesexcluding Jewish entities located beyond the Green Line from financialcooperation accords with the bloc.

"The future borders of Israel and the future borders of the Palestinian state will be discussed in the negotiations room between Israel and the Palestinians and not as a EU decision, as we saw in the guidelines," she stressed.

"The EU should wait to see what's going to happen with the outcome of the negotiations," said Livni, according to AFP.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu clarified last week that Israel will not sign any contracts with Europe so long as its boycott of Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and even the Golan Heights - as per the new guidelines - continues.

Also see:

The World Is Now On The Edge Of A Massive Collapse

With continued uncertainty in key global markets, today Egon von Greyerz warned King World News that the world is now on the edge of a massive collapse.  Greyerz also cautioned investors that banks are now making it harder for their clients to get physical gold out of the banking system.  Below is what Greyerz, who is founder of Matterhorn Asset Management out of Switzerland, had to say in this powerful interview. 

When you look at debt worldwide it’s out of control.  Total debt-to-GDP in most countries in the world is at a staggering 300% to 400%, and we know this is debt that can never be repaid.

We have talked about the exponential growth of debt in the U.S. and the fact that not only is the debt continuing to grow, which forces the U.S. to borrow more, but also the fact that the Fed has to buy all of the debt.  The Fed now owns $2.2 trillion of federal debt, in Treasury bonds, out of $3.6 trillion.  Of course in 2013 the Fed has purchased all of the debt that has been issued.

But it’s not just in the U.S., in Switzerland, since 2008 the Swiss National Bank has printed as much money as it has in its entire history since the bank was first created.  So this is happening everywhere in the world.  Debt is one of the primary factors pointing to the fact that we are at the end of an era because it is an unsustainable debt level that we are now seeing.  There are also massive excesses in the world, and there is also a decline of moral and ethical standards.  

Of course non-productive countries are redistributing up to 60% of GDP.  Just take the U.S. as an example, federal spending is up 300% in 40 years, and yet earnings are only up 24%.  It’s just unsustainable. 

Another factor which is pointing to the world having difficulties getting out of this cycle is the demographics.  In many countries we are seeing more older people and fewer younger working people that can actually take care of the aging populations.

When you look at unemployment, southern Europe has a remarkable 25% unemployment, but the youth unemployment is over 60% in many countries.  And the real U.S. unemployment is not 7%, it’s 23%.  Young people today will have no chance of repaying the massive debt levels that the world has.

So in my view we are now at the beginning of a secular decline of the world.  How long will this last, and how bad will it be?  Only history will tell us afterwards.”

The Continuing Brutal Legacy Of Religion Of Peace

Mighty Comet Ison: Space And Earth Telescopes To Track 'Comet Of The Century'

All eyes on the sky that can do so will be pointing toward Comet ISON soon, as a massive international observing campaign gets underway to watch what could become the "comet of the century," scientists say.

Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012, and is due to swoop in close to the sun in November. When it does, it may become as bright as the full moon, visible to the naked eye even in daylight. 

"I don't need to tell this audience why ISON is such an unusual opportunity," said BRRISON's principal investigator, Andrew Cheng of the Applied Physics Laboratory. "It's a sungrazer, unusually bright, it's also an Oort cloud comet, probably on its first visit to the inner solar system, preserving icy material that was formed in the very early days of our solar system."