Cnaan Liphshiz 

A group of visiting German intellectuals called on Berlin on Monday to change what they termed its Holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel, saying the creation of the State of Israel turned Palestinians into victims of the Nazi Holocaust as well.

The four, Dr. Reiner Steinweg, Prof. Gert Krell, Prof. Georg Meggle, and Jorg Becker, took part in a debate Monday evening at the Netanya Academic College on the future of German-Israeli relations. They were among 25 signatories to a petition on the issue that was circulated in the German media following the Second Lebanon War.

According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is "one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention." The paper goes on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about "the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable."

This, according to the manifesto titled "Friendship and Criticism," is because "without the Holocaust of the Jews, Israeli policy would not see itself as entitled - or forced to ride over the human rights of the Palestinians and the inhabitants of Lebanon."

These Germ "intellectuals" should shut the fuck up. What qualifies Germ intellectuals to talk about the Holocaust? Israel does not have the blind support of anyone, to the contrary it is the most examined nation in the world. As for the "Palestinians", they don't exist and never have and never will. So there.

In a statement, the http://zfa.org.il/Zionist Freedom Alliance said “we call on state officials, the President of the University of California, the Chancellor, the Dean of Students, faculty, and the student body to take a unified stand against the continued harassment of Jewish and pro-Israel students on this campus"

David Shamma

Arab students disrupted a pro-Israel event at the campus of the University of California at Berkeley Thursday night, unfurling a large Palestinian flag in front of a crowd of hundreds of supporters of Israel who were enjoying a pro-Israel hip-hop concert. The event was sponsored by the Zionist Freedom Alliance student group.

The Arab students unfurled the large flag on a balcony above the outdoor site where the concert was taking place, inciting a provocation right in front of the concert-goers, who were enjoying the event as part of the campus' Israel Liberation Week. Several Jewish concertgoers went into the building to ask the Arabs to remove the flag – but were viciously attacked, with one male concertgoer knocked down from a blow on the back of his head, witnesses said.

John Timmer

The Fomalhaut dust disk (left) and a time-lapse image of the planet orbiting within it (right)
P. Kalas, Berkeley

Over the past decade, researchers have made incredible strides in their quest to identify stars that are orbited by planets—you can track their accelerating progress right here at Ars. But most of these planets have been identified indirectly, either through their gravitational effects or when their orbit takes them between Earth and their host star. The few extrasolar objects that we have seen orbiting stars tend to be big and hot, awkwardly straddling the border between super-Jupiters and brown dwarfs. But today's issue of Science Express (where the journal Science puts its early, online-only releases) will contain two papers that describe direct observations of extrasolar planets, including three orbiting a single star.

The trick seems to have been knowing where to look. Both of the new systems are centered on young A-type stars, which tend to be fairly bright and are more massive than our sun. This extra weight extends their gravitational influence, allowing planets to form further from the host star. The youth of these stars, estimated at less than 300 million years in both cases, is also critical. Any nearby planets should be equally youthful, and thus still warmed by their gravitational collapse. That warmth should show up as an infrared glow, provided the emissions from the nearby star are blotted out.

An exciting discovery in Jerusalem constituting extraordinary remains of the wall of the city from the time of the Second Temple (second century BCE-70 CE) that was built by the Hasmonean kings and was destroyed during the Great Revolt, and also the remains of a city wall from the Byzantine period (324-640 CE) which was built on top of it, were uncovered in an extensive excavation that is currently underway on Mount Zion. (Credit: Copyright Israel Antiquities Authority)

The lines of these fortifications delineated Jerusalem from the south in periods when the ancient city had reached its largest size.

Will Barack Obama be another Bill Clinton?

Steve Chapman

Barack Obama's campaign mantras were "change we need" and "change we can believe in." His victory, and the enthusiasm of his more ardent supporters, may suggest that Americans dream of doing what Thomas Paine proposed we do in 1776: "begin the world over again." In fact, underlying the vote is yearning to return to how things were before: before the Iraq war, before torture, before the housing bust, before the recession.

Also before George W. Bush, who has a way of reminding people why Bill Clinton, for all his wretched foibles, left office with a 65 percent approval rating. As Hillary Clinton was fond of saying of her husband's critics during this campaign: "What part of the 1990s didn't they like—the peace or the prosperity?"

Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 assuming he had an electoral mandate to diminish the size of government. Once there, he found that Americans are a conservative people—in the sense of wanting to conserve what they have, especially any benefits they get from Washington. Result: The welfare state survived with little change. Obama may likewise discover that the appetite for new policies is smaller than it appears.

In his speeches, the candidate spent more time extolling the need for change than specifying exactly what form it should take. His calculated imprecision allowed voters to assume that the change he was offering was pretty much the same as the change they wanted.