Party poopers

Friday, August 29, 2003

God loves miniskirts painting by Silvia Rosenberg paper 35x65 cm.

An Israeli man was killed, his pregnant wife wounded in a shooting attack on the 'Alon Road' northeast of Ramallah, ambushed near the West Bank settlement of Kochav Hashachar. Settler leader Pinchas Wallerstein immediately attributed the attack to "Arafat and the Palestinian Authority," while the PA said it was hunting for the ambushers. Eyewitnesses in the settlers' car said that five men opened fire on the car as it passed them on the lonely desert road.

In Gaza, IDF bulldozers were "shaving" more wooded areas - mostly orchards and groves - in the northern part of the Strip where Qassam rockets are launched toward Israel. Yesterday, a Qassam reached the southern edges of Ashkelon, and defense establishment assessments are that the extended range of the primitive rockets will further increase. The Hamas said it would avenge the airborne assassination of one of its men who launched Qassams, but so far, since the Israeli assassinations resumed after last week's Jerusalem bus bombing that killed 21 - and as far as Israel was concerned, spelled the end of the hudna ceasefire - the Hamas leadership and its military echelon has gone underground. The Shin Bet is reporting a rising number of daily terror alerts, but so far, there has only been ineffective fire at settlements inside Gaza - and today's attack east of Ramallah.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom was meeting today with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov and would be raising Israeli concerns that Moscow is going ahead with technological aid to Iran's nuclear weapons program.

In a new development on the Sharon scandal front, Austria has indicated to the Israeli Justice Ministry that if Jerusalem updates its request to conduct its inquiry and take depositions in the matter of allegedly illegal financial transfers to the Sharon family, to include suspicions of bribery, Vienna would drop its objections to the Israeli inquiry on Austrian soil. That would greatly help the police inquiry. But the police are already planning to use Austrian permission to take depositions in Austria on the matter of relations between Transport Minister Avigdor Lieberman and casino magnate Martin Schlaff, to try to get some answers about Schlaff's involvement in the Sharon scandal.

In Tel Aviv meanwhile, the only thing that mattered was the sixth annual Love Parade, which filled the seaside promenade with 300,000 reveling youngsters dancing under the hot sun to the beats of a dozen competing sound systems. Police applied tight security to the event - every access road to the parade area was blocked and every pedestrian checked for weapons before being allowed through. But judging from the live radio reports - at least as of 2 P.M. today - everyone was having a fine time.

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