News @ A Glance
Turkey Agrees to Help Hamas Financially
Hamas' Gaza chief Ismail Haniyeh’s recent official tour opened the door to financial cooperation between the terror group and Turkey, a high-ranking Hamas official told the Al-Sharq newspaper on Thursday.
The official told the newspaper that Turkey has agreed to carry out a project to support Hamas and rebuild Gaza. According to the official, Hamas will open an official office in Turkey in the coming weeks.
Iran recently cooled its relations with Hamas, after Hamas refused to support Syrian president Bashar Assad. Despite the cool relations, however, Haniyeh indicated Wednesday he has added Iran to the itinerary of his next international tour. -Source
Who the Watcher's are Watching
Former IDF Chief: Israel Must Prepare for War
Former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi warned, Thursday, that Israel could not afford to cut its defense budget and should prepare itself for war.
“In comparison to 10 years ago, the possibility of a conflict is not something that we just need to talk about," Ashkenazi said during a lecture at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. "We never saw it coming. It happened on my watch, so it must be said. But if it's any consolation, Egypt never saw it coming either," Ashkenazi said of the so-called Arab Spring protests that have no turned into an Islamic winter in elections throughout the Arab world.
"The Middle East's plates are shifting. What the Egyptian army didn't know, I couldn't have known. (Egypt's) leaders did not know either," he said, adding the ultimate strategic picture was still changing. -Source
Discerning The Times
Bible Conference 2012
Saskatoon, April 13-14
Email the DTTO Network
Christian Persecution Movie
March 7 or March 11
IPC 2012
Tampa, Florida
March 1-3
Davos 2012: Setting the Gloom Level to 11
Is there any good news for the economy? Not much, if this year's meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is anything to go by.
For starters, the global economy seems to have become so unpredictable that the organisers ditched one of the forum's big opening events, the annual session making an economic forecast for the year ahead. They replaced it with a session that asked a more fundamental question: does capitalism have a future?
Still, economic worries dominate all discussions here: will the eurozone fall apart? (Not if Germany's Chancellor Merkel has her way.) Are bubbles building up in Asia's economies? (The housing market is cooling a bit, asserted one Chinese speaker.) Is austerity or free spending the right answer to our economic troubles? (I haven't heard from too many fans of austerity here.)
Last year, at least, investors were still confident that big risks could deliver big rewards; it seems to have worked for many of them. -Source
Syria Killings Spike With 120 People Killed as U.N. Eyes Resolution
Syrian forces intensified their crackdown on Friday, with activists reporting 120 people killed in two days, as European and Arab nations pressed the U.N. Security Council to call on President Bashar al-Assad to stand down.
The head of an Arab League monitoring mission said unrest had soared this week “in a significant way”, especially in the flashpoint central cities of Homs and Hama and in the northern Idlib region. The violence, which on Friday for the first time also cost lives in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, “does not help ... to get all sides to sit at the negotiating table,” General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi said.
For a second day, Syrian forces kept up their attacks on Homs, as Morocco presented a draft U.N. resolution, drawn up by Britain, France and Germany with Arab states, seeking to end months of U.N. deadlock. Backers of the new resolution hope opponents will be swayed by a new upsurge in violence in Syria and Arab League leadership in efforts to end the deadly crackdown on protests which the U.N. says has left more than 5,400 dead. -Source
