The FBI arrested New York state Sen. Malcolm A. Smith (D) and five others including Republican New York City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III in an elaborate plot to secure Smith the Republican mayoral nomination for New York City. According to the New York Times, Smith paid bribes to multiple individuals in hopes of securing their endorsements to run as a Republican.

Smith, 54, was taken from his Queens home Tuesday morning in handcuffs. Halloran was arrested at the same time. Among others taken into custody included Republican leaders from Queens and the Bronx, Noramie F. Jasmin, who is the mayor of Spring Valley, New York, as well as her deputy, Joseph A. Desmaret.

Gerald L. Shargel, attorney for Smith, told reporters that his client has done nothing wrong, "Malcolm Smith is a dedicated and highly respected public servant and he steadfastly denies these charges." The lawyer said he would address the charges further when he has had a chance to study them.

Smith and the Republicans are charged with an elaborate scheme in which Smith paid Halloran to provide him with access to Republican officials so that they would agree to sign statements that Smith should be allowed to run for mayor as a Republican even though he is a registered Democrat. In return, they were paid lavish fees and promised that Smith would steer lucrative projects to their districts.

Gaza City (Ma'an) --Israeli warplanes bombed the Gaza Strip early Wednesday, causing damage but no injuries, in the first airstrike on the enclave since a November ceasefire.

Two airstrikes hit a tile factory in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood, east of Gaza City, and farm land in Beit Lahiya in the north, locals said.

The raids were the first since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire on Nov. 21 to end an 8-day war on the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military said the two attacks were in response to rocket fire from the enclave.

"In response to several rocket fire incidents directed at Israel, an Israel Air Force aircraft targeted overnight two extensive terror sites in the Northern Gaza Strip," it said in a statement.

A Dutch court has ruled that the pedophile club Martijn cannot be outlawed, Michael van Poppel of BNO news reports.

Martijn is a Dutch association that advocates the social acceptance of pedophilia and the legalization of sexual relationships between adults and children.

In June 2012 a Dutch court deemed the group to be illegal and ordered it to disband immediately. Prosecutors had successfully argued that the club's work and ideas were contrary to public order and morality - especially since the harmful effects of child sexual abuse infringe upon the rights and interests of children.

Israel has a population of approximately 7.8 million, or a million fewer than the state of New Jersey. It is among the world's most affluent nations, with a per capita income similar to that of the European Union.[1] Israel's unemployment rate of 5.6% is much better than America's 9.1%,[2] and Israel's net trade, earnings, and payments is ranked 48th in the world while the US sits at a dismal 198th.[3]

Yet Israel receives approximately 10% of America's foreign aid budget every year.[4] The US has, in fact, given more aid to Israel than it has to all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined - which have a total population of over a billion people.[5] And foreign aid is just one component of the staggering cost of our alliance with Israel.

Given the tremendous costs, it is critical to examine why we lavish so much aid on Israel, and whether it is worth Americans' hard-earned tax dollars. But first, let's take a look at what our alliance with Israel truly costs.


Direct Foreign Aid

According to the Congressional Research Service , the amount of official US aid to Israel since its founding in 1948 tops $112 billion, and in the past few decades it has been on the order of $3 billion per year.[6] (In 2011, for example, this amounted to over $8.2 million every single day.)

But this money is only part of the story. For one thing, Israel gets its aid money at the start of each year, unlike other nations.[7] This is significant: It means Israel can start earning interest on the money right away. And it costs the US more than the typical year-end disbursements because the US government operates at a deficit, so it must borrow this money to pay Israel and then pay interest on the amount all year.

Israel is also the only recipient of US military aid that is allowed to use a significant portion annually to purchase products made by Israeli companies instead of US companies. (The costs to Americans caused by this unique perk are discussed below.)

In addition, the US gives roughly $2 billion per year to Egypt and Jordan in aid packages arranged largely in exchange for peace treaties with Israel. The treaties don't include justice for Palestinians, and are therefore deeply unpopular with the local populations.[8]

On top of this, the US gives roughly half a billion to the Palestinian Authority each year,[9] much of it used to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by Israel and to bolster an economy stifled by the Israeli occupation.[10] This would be unnecessary if Israel were to end the occupation and allow the Palestinians to build a functioning and self-sustaining economy.

Yet there's still much more to the story, because parts of US aid to Israel are buried in the budgets of various US agencies, mostly the Department of Defense. For example, since at least 2006, the American Defense budget has included between $130 and $235 million per year for missile defense programs in Israel.[11]

In all, direct US disbursements to Israel amount to approximately 10% of all U.S. aid abroad, even though Israelis only make up 0.001% of the world's population. In other words, on average, Israelis receive 10,000 times more US foreign aid per capita than other people throughout the world, despite the fact that Israel is one of the world's more affluent nations.[12] And that number rises significantly when one considers disbursements to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority and Defense spending on behalf of Israel.

An Israeli teenager has been sentenced to 14 days in jail, his eighth term in the past six months. He's served more than 100 days for refusing to serve in the IDF and "participate in a cynical game," referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

On Tuesday, conscientious objector Nathan Blanc came to the IDF Recruitment Bureau for the eighth time since November. There, at a military base near Tel Aviv, as with the previous seven times, he informed the army that he refuses to undertake the duty every Israeli teenager is required to perform.

In accordance with Israeli law, following his refusal to enlist, Blanc was arrested. The sentence requires between 10 and 20 days in Military Prison Number 6.

Blanc belongs to a tiny minority of those who refuse to serve on grounds of principle. Out of the 300-400 prisoners housed in the prison, he has been the only conscientious objector since November.

So far, in total he has spent 116 days in jail, of which 11 were taken off for good behavior, Haaretz reports.

Blanc first declared his refusal in November 2012.

Military service in Israel is required upon graduation from high school, and lasts three years for boys and two for girls. It has become synonymous with carrying out one's duties as an Israeli citizen, refusal is not an option.

"It was a very hard decision, it took me a long time to get to it," the Guardian quoted Nathan.

Officials in Florida on Monday said that an elected Florida Republican Party committeeman had been arrested on multiple charges of possessing and transmitting child pornography.

Walton County Sheriff Mike Adkinson confirmed to The Northwest Florida Daily News that Lane Rees, a former Walton County Commissioner, was taken into custody around 5 p.m. on Monday after a month-long investigation.

Deputies recovered "multiple images" of child pornography after serving a search warrant on his home in Santa Rosa Beach.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is being sued by a woman who says that officers violated her civil rights when they pepper-sprayed her entire family - including a 2-year-old child and a 5-month-old baby.

In the lawsuit obtained by Courthouse News Service on Monday, Marilyn Taylor accuses Officers Maripily Clase, Suranjit Dey and Jermaine Hodge overacting when they saw her pushing the stroller through a service entrance instead of going through the subway turnstile.

According to the complaint, officers told her 4-year-old child that "everything will be OK," but then began pepper-spraying the entire family.

"The pepper-spray caused the children to scream out and choked the two-year old, who went into fits of vomiting," the lawsuit says. "Ms. Taylor was then placed in handcuffs as the minor children cried in fear and pain."

Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday explained to his viewers that "sophisticated" Americans received less miracles because they had learned "things that says God isn't real" like evolution.

On Monday's episode of CBN's The 700 Club, Robertson responded to a viewer who wanted to know why "amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?"

"People overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," the TV preacher laughed. "We're so sophisticated, we think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn't real."

Colorado, and apparently Texas (next) are being targeted with an attempt to set up a federal authority framework that will enable Secret Service agents (not just those guarding the president), and others of the U.S. Secret Service including uniformed division officers, physical security technicians and specialists, and other 'special officers', to arrest and remove an elected sheriff for refusing to enforce the law (or anyone breaking the law).

The bills being introduced defines law as including any rule, regulation, executive order, court order, statute or constitutional provision.

Why are they doing this? Here's why...

It would establish federal authority police powers in a State, enabling an enforcement arm reporting directly to the president (the Secret Service).

It would potentially lead to enabling the president / executive branch to theoretically override the actions and preventative measures that are now being taken by many States throughout the country who are trying to preserve 2nd Amendment gun rights and who are prohibiting the enforcement of unconstitutional law passed by Congress or pushed by executive order.

As some of you may know, a growing list of sheriffs (more than 340 so far) across the country have expressed that they will not enforce a Washington mandate that clearly violates the Second Amendment.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market's last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later - within a few years, I predict - this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation's bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.