Israel began moving troop reinforcements to its border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday, defense officials said, raising the possibility of an expanded military operation in the Palestinian territory in response to intensifying rocket barrages.

The movement of tanks and artillery forces came after another night of heavy rocket fire, including barrages that struck two homes in the southern border town of Sderot. Israel's last major operation in Gaza, a territory controlled by the Hamas militant group, took place in late 2012.

The rocket fire comes at a time of heightened tensions following the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank. Israel has accused Hamas of being behind the deaths, and arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives in the West Bank as part of a broad manhunt in the largest ground operation in the West Bank in nearly a decade.

The Palestinians have meanwhile accused Israeli extremists of abducting and killing a teenage boy in east Jerusalem in a revenge attack, and stone-throwing youths clashed with Israeli police throughout the day Wednesday.

The weeks since the Israeli teens disappeared have seen militants in Gaza fire scores of rockets at Israel, which has responded with airstrikes against alleged militant targets. Two Palestinian militants were killed in an airstrike last week, and a young Palestinian girl was killed by an errant rocket attack. There have been no serious casualties on the Israeli side.

Since the bodies of three missing Israeli youths were discovered in the occupied West Bank on Monday, Israeli politicians have whipped the public up with demands for "revenge."

The videos in this post show disturbing footage of significant crowds of young Israelis marching through the streets of Jerusalem on Tuesday evening chanting "Death to the Arabs" - "mavet la'aravim" in Hebrew.

In some of the footage those chanting appear to be young children.

Preface: Two weeks ago, well-known economist Tyler Cowen (a professor at George Mason University) argued in the New York Times that wars - especially "major wars" - are good for the economy.

Cowen joins extremely influential economists like Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein - and various talking heads - in promoting this idea.

Also, many congressmen assume that cutting pork-barrel military spending would hurt their constituents' jobs. It is vital for policy-makers, economists and the public to have access to a definitive analysis to determine once and for all whether war is good or bad for the economy. That analysis is below.

Top Economists Say War Is Bad for the Economy

Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that war is bad for the economy:

Stiglitz wrote in 2003:

War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon. Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.

Stiglitz has also said that this decade's Iraq war has been very bad for the economy. See this, this and this.

A showdown from the June 29 episode ABC's This Week went viral, as Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel decided to confront ABC pundit and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol over his stance on the Iraq War:

And I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man.... I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, there should be accountability.

We should not - if there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have so grievously wounded this nation, I don't know what happened to our politics and media accountability. But we need it, Bill, because this country should not go back to war.

We don't need armchair warriors.

It's clearly a good thing that someone like Kristol is being held accountable for his Iraq advocacy. In the late 1990s, he helped found the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think tank that played a critical role in planning and selling the Iraq War. His magazine was similarly devoted to the cause (Extra!, 9/09), including making the claim that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were in cahoots (Extra!, 1/04).

The former French President was kept in custody for hours of questioning

The former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been charged with corruption and illegally using his influence after a day in custody.

The disgraced politician was questioned by police for 15 hours, Le Monde reported, and was left without a lawyer when Thierry Herzog was also arrested along with two senior judges.

Mr Sarkozy, 59, has become the first former French President taken into custody in a criminal investigation, making his widely anticipated political comeback look ever more unlikely.

The right-wing leader has been accused of multiple illegal dealings, mostly linked to the financing of his 2007 and 2012 election campaigns.

The deputy head of Russia's supreme security body says US international dominance is being replaced by multiple centers of power. He urged a global agreement on the results of the Cold War, warning that the world could otherwise become engulfed in chaos.

"The United States has an impression that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the only result of the Cold War. This is arguable, and this is possible. But no one has attempted to analyze the results or make any conclusions from the situation. The unipolar world headed by Americans simply appeared," Evgeny Lukyanov told the RIA Novosti.

"However, this status quo was not built to last. New power centers have appeared on the international arena, including the BRICS nations, and Russia itself has managed to regain its stance. Nations openly declare their interests and demand respect to their basic rights. This is how the US hegemony on the international arena has ended and of course Washington officials cannot agree with this," the Russian official stated.

Lukyanov emphasized in the interview that the USSR was no more.

"Russia is a different state, a participant of international processes and we want to have a say, we have national interests which we intend to defend," he said.

"This caused the West to overreact, on the verge of hysteria. But you cannot ignore the 'Russia factor' in the world," the official added.

The Infamous "Oded Yinon Plan"

Global Research Editor's Note:

The following document pertaining to the formation of "Greater Israel" constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government, the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.

According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, "the area of the Jewish State stretches: "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates." According to Rabbi Fischmann, "The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."

When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

"Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).

According to Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya in a 2011 Global Research article, The Yinon Plan was a continuation of Britain's colonial design in the Middle East:

"[The Yinon plan] is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military's Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

Greater Israel" requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states."The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation... This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme." (Yinon Plan, see below)

Viewed in this context, the war on Syria is part of the process of Israeli territorial expansion. Israeli intelligence working hand in glove with the US, Turkey and NATO is directly supportive of the Al Qaeda terrorist mercenaries inside Syria.

The Zionist Project also requires the destabilization of Egypt, the creation of factional divisions within Egypt as instrumented by the "Arab Spring" leading to the formation of a sectarian based State dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Home Office is facing calls to explain why a 1980s dossier about alleged paedophiles at Westminster was "destroyed" by officials.

The document was handed to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.

Lord Brittan passed concerns in it to the relevant authorities, but the file itself was not kept.

Labour MP Simon Danczuk said it may contain evidence that would identify child sex abusers.

The Home Office said a 2013 review found the "credible" elements of the dossier which had "realistic potential" for further investigation were sent to police and prosecutors while other elements were either not retained, or were destroyed.

In an earlier version of this story, we reported that the Home Office had launched a trawl for the missing dossier, but this had in fact already been carried out - even though most people, including Lord Brittan himself, appear to have been unaware of it.

Simon Danczuk had been pressing Lord Brittan to reveal what he knew about the dossier's contents - and for the Home Office to publish it in full - when officials released a statement saying they had already carried out a review that had found it had not been retained.

Hamas has warned Israel against waging war on the Gaza strip in retaliation for the deaths of three kidnapped Israeli youths, threatening that "the gates of hell will open" should action be taken.

The response came after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed: "Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay", following the discovery of the bodies of the three missing youths yesterday.


The Israeli military struck 34 targets across the Gaza Strip overnight after more than 20 rockets were fired from the territory into Israel since late Sunday.

Hamas, however, responded warning against any broad offensive on the territory. Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: "Netanyahu should know that threats don't scare Hamas, and if he wages a war on Gaza, the gates of hell will open on him."

Mr Netanyahu said the teenagers "were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by human animals", as he convened an emergency meeting of his security cabinet.

An exploding Ukrainian artillery shell that hit the city of Severodonetsk has been caught on CCTV. The city is one of many attacked by Ukrainian troops in the latest offensive against southeast regions of the country.

The video, published Wednesday, shows a moment from the shelling that happened a day before. The shell hits right next to a one-story building, sending a blast-wave and a cloud of smoke and dust in all directions.

Severodonetsk is a city of 110,000 residents in the Lugansk Region. Troops loyal to Kiev started bombarding it with heavy weapons as part of a major offensive launched by President Petro Poroshenko at midnight on Monday.

Kiev has intensified its military crackdown on the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, where armed militias have risen up in the wake of the February armed coup in Kiev to oppose the new government. The two-month campaign led to hundreds of people, many of them civilians, being killed, and thousands fleeing the violence.

Russia is calling on Ukraine to renew the ceasefire it terminated and negotiate with the protesting regions to secure peaceful coexistence.