AARON KLEIN
 
RAMALLAH

American-run programs that train Fatah militias were instrumental in the "success" of the Palestinian intifada that began in 2000, a senior Fatah militant told The New York Sun.

"I do not think that the operations of the Palestinian resistance would have been so successful and would have killed more than one thousand Israelis since 2000 and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without these [American] trainings," a senior officer of President Abbas's Force 17 Presidential Guard unit, Abu Yousuf, said.

America has longstanding training programs at a base in the West Bank city of Jericho for members of Force 17, which serves as de facto police units in the West Bank, and for another major Fatah security force, the Preventative Security Services.

Maurice Shohet

Preface

The deliverance of Iraqi Jewry, that rose almost as one man and migrated to the newly founded State of Israel, in the years 1948 - 1952, could be considered not only as a glorious chapter in the annals of Zionism, but also as a demonstration of the potency of the Zionist idea.

The exciting tidings of the establishment of the State on the one hand, the persecution and feeling of insecurity that often beset members of the community in Iraq on the other, combined and joined together with the love and yearning for the Land of Zion and Jerusalem, giving birth to a wonderful phenomenon. Almost an entire Jewish community, of about 120,000 souls, the most ancient of the Diaspora – if not the oldest of all – picked itself up, young and old alike, and immigrated to Israel; first by way of illegal and convoluted routes, and later as an officially sanctioned airborne migration. If the concept of Zionism has any meaning, then this combination is its fullest realization.

WASHINGTON

The United States soon will begin training officers of a Palestinian security service to better protect officials visiting the West Bank, the State Department said Sunday.

The training is part of a U.S. effort to bolster moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' government in the West Bank, formed after Hamas seized power in Gaza in mid-June.
 
The Bush administration has made clear that it sees the Palestinians' internal split as an opportunity to push for a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, using the West Bank as a model.

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina

People in the United States are living in a world of pain and they are popping pills at an alarming rate to cope with it.

The amount of five major prescription painkillers sold at retail establishments rose 88 percent between 1997 and 2005, according to an Associated Press analysis of statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

More than 200,000 pounds (90,720 kilograms) of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during the most recent year represented in the data. That total is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country.

Toby Sterling

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands

It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.

An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as compact discs, a product that turns 25 years old today - and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, said Holland's Royal Philips Electronics, which jointly developed the CD with Sony of Japan.

BERLIN

A German court said on Friday it would release a former member of Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF) convicted for the murder of a U.S. soldier and the deaths of another U.S. soldier and an American civilian in a bomb attack.

Eva Haule will be paroled on Tuesday, after serving her minimum sentence, with a five-year probation period, the court said in statement. The Frankfurt court had previously ruled that Haule would serve a minimum of 21 years in prison.

"The convicted person currently poses no threat to the general public," the statement said.

Haule was an RAF member from 1984 until her arrest two years later. She was convicted in 1994 for her part in the murder of a U.S. soldier and a 1985 bomb attack on the U.S. Rhein-Main Air Base in West Germany which killed another U.S. soldier and a female civilian.