Israel warned on Saturday that it would cut the supply of water and electricity to the Gaza Strip if rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas form a unity government.

"The foreign ministry is examining the possibility of Israel pulling out of the Gaza Strip in terms of infrastructure," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the daily Yediot Aharonot website.

A unity government deal "would transform the Palestinian Authority into a terrorist authority and would put an end to any hope for a peace agreement" with Israel, said Ayalon, who is also a Knesset deputy from the nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party.

On Friday, Israeli ministers decided to maintain a freeze on the transfer of tens of millions of dollars in tax monies to the Palestinian Authority hours after Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas held top-level talks with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal at which they announced a new era of "partnership."

The transfer of funds, which make up a large percentage of the authority's monthly budget, was frozen on November 1 as a punitive measure after the Palestinians won full membership of the UN cultural organisation.

Thousands of Palestinians rallied on Friday all over the Gaza Strip in protest to the Israeli measures in East Jerusalem.

Called on by the Islamic Hamas movement, which rules the coastal enclave, and the less influential Islamic Jihad (Holy War) movement, two separate demonstrations took place in the Gaza Strip.

Coinciding with rallies to support Jerusalem in both Jordan and Egypt, demonstrators in the Gaza Strip called on the Muslim and Arab nations to move as quickly as possible to rescue the holy city of Jerusalem, saying that Jerusalem is an Arab city and will remain so.

The Al-Aqsa Association for Waqf and Islamic Heritage in Jerusalem had earlier warned in a statement of the recent Israeli measures in East Jerusalem to change the characteristics of the city, mainly destroying the temporary woody bridge near the Mughrabi Gate and building a new bridge. Also, Israel decided late October to demolish an access ramp to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.

Israel never embraced democratic values. More than ever today that's true. Many Jews understand. As a result, they're voting with their feet and leaving.

Gideon Levy remarked that "(i)t's really an irony of history, because Israel was established to become a shelter to the Jewish people. Now Europe becomes a shelter for the Jews living in Israel."

So does America. New millennium exodus has a whole new meaning. Last year, Haaretz writer Bradley Burston headlined, "I envy the people who hate Israel," saying:

"....this is not the same country I moved to, so long ago. I learned when I first came that Israel was not the country I'd thought I was moving to."

Now it's worse than ever because "Israel at its highest level has taken an executive decision. Unable to beat the forces who want to see Israel as one of the world's primary pariah states, it has resolved to join them" and succeeded.

With its paymaster/partner America, it's out in front leading. Growing numbers know it, Jews and non-Jews alike. A 2008 Menachem Begin Heritage Center survey showed 59% of Israelis consider leaving by inquiring about foreign citizenship and second passports. Growing numbers hold them.

In 2005, the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics said 650,000 Israelis away for over a year haven't returned. Most were Jews.

Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers.

Fake posters can "poison" debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.

Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.

The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.

Some of the country's best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don't want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Some of the same companies that do not report their jobs breakdown, including Apple and Pfizer, are pushing lawmakers to cut their tax bills in the name of job creation in the United States.

But experts say that without details on which companies are contributing to job growth and which are not, policymakers risk flying blind as they try to jump-start the hiring of American workers.

"It's an important piece of information that the American people should have," said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "Should you listen to the kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when their record and their model indicates they've cut jobs? . . . Or should we talk to people who actually do create jobs in the United States?"

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt.

The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB's charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds.

If Germany's creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany's failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy's successful bond auction two days later.

Strange, isn't it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy's, Greece's and Spain's bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Blogger, owned by Google. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wants Google to add a "terrorist" flag so readers can label terrorist content.

Lieberman sent a letter (yes, on paper, but that's the best way to show the United States Senate letterhead) to Google CEO Larry Page taking him to task because "Blogger's Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content," and some other details. Lieberman goes on to point out that YouTube, also owned by Google, does ban terrorist content. He adds, quote, "Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online." So Blogger could hold back terrorists if it wanted to?

Unfortunately, Lieberman doesn't define what he considers "terrorist content" or whether deleting posts with such content is within the purview of Blogger or the First Amendment. Google, not surprisingly, has yet to comment. Wonder if Larry Page still wished he had Eric Schmidt to handle such political fun and games.

A young Israeli woman convicted of spying and leaking classified military documents to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, began her four-and-a-half year prison sentence on Wednesday.

Former soldier Anat Kam, 24, entered Neve Tirza women's prison, at Ramle near Tel Aviv, on Wednesday morning an AFP photographer at the scene said.

She was convicted in February under a plea bargain which saw her admitting to charges of "serious espionage" and "passing on classified data" in return for the prosecution dropping a charge of intent to harm state security, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Last month she was sentenced to 54 months in jail, with an additional 18 months suspended for three years from completion of the term.

The killing under torture in a maximum security prison in Cairo of Essam Ali Atta Ali, a 24-year-old Egyptian, raises concern on the role of the Egyptian military in the "New Egypt." His death was likened to that of Khalid Said, who was beaten to death by the police in Alexandria last year. What Atta's death show is that the same abuses that were perpetrated under former president Hosni Mubarak continue, and that true democracy and respect for people's rights are still a long way off in Egypt.

Atta was arrested last February, convicted of "thuggery." He was sentenced to two years in prison. According to the Interior Ministry, he was also carrying an unlicensed weapon. He is one of 12,000 cases who, according to human rights activists in the country, have been tried by military, instead of civilian, courts. In contrast, Mubarak and his cronies are being tried in civilian courts and their trials are expected to last for months or even years.

"The military justice system should never be used to investigate or prosecute civilians. Military courts are fundamentally unfair, as they deprive defendants of basic fair trial guarantees," states Amnesty International. One may recall, in this regard, George Clemenceau's statement that, "Military justice is to justice as military music is to music."

What makes his case special, however, is that it proves that torture and assassination continue to be practiced in Egyptian jails. Atta was sodomized to death by prison guards who used hoses to inject water into his mouth and anus which produced profuse bleeding leading to his death. A statement from the military government attributed Atta's death to "unknown poisoning" and said that prison guards tried to save him.

The office of Ukraine's prosecutor general has announced there is "irrefutable evidence" that former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was involved in the murder of a Ukrainian lawmaker in the 1990s.

"Money has been transferred to the killers' bank accounts from firms owned by [former Prime Minister Pavel] Lazarenko and Tymoshenko," Russian news agency Ria Novosti quoted first deputy Chairman of the Prosecutor General's office Renat Kuzmin as saying on Saturday.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office previously said it was examining Tymoshenko's possible involvement in Yevgeny Shcherban's murder case.

Tymoshenko's spokeswoman Natalia Lysova has dismissed the accusations as "rubbish."

In November 1996, Shcherban, a member of Supreme Rada (Ukraine's Parliament) and chairman of the financial corporation Anton, was shot and killed along with his wife and an airport employee at the airport in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk.