Olmert’s acquittal qualifies him to lead a new left-of-center bloc

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

Ehud Olmert leapt agilely from deep pit of disgrace straight into the political limelight Tuesday, July 10 as a potential political game-changer. After living under the cloud of corruption for four years, he was cleared for lack of proof “beyond reasonable doubt.”by the Jerusalem District Court of the two most heinous counts which forced his resignation as prime minister.  Surrounded by political allies and friends, he smilingly warned reporters: “You’ll soon be seeing plenty of me around.”

He moved so smoothly that it was hard to remember that he was convicted of one of the three charges: breach of trust while serving as Minister of Trade and Industry; or that he still faced trial for graft in the big Holyland case while Mayor of Jerusalem.

Olmert clearly expects to land on his feet as the great unifier of a left-of-center political bloc. He sees himself as the only man capable of merging an amorphous assortment of left-wing, socialist, protest and otherwise angry groups and parties, which are too small, weak and fragmented to form a viable opposition to the broad right-of-center government coalition headed by Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud.

Aside from being a remarkably slick politician, Olmert has another qualifier: Before his forced resignation in 2008, he was the Israeli prime minister who came closest to a deal with the Palestinians by offering uniquely generous concessions.

As such, Olmert is in a position to attract the dwindling far-left Meretz, the fledgling Yesh Atid (There is a Future) and Socialist Labor, although Labor’s Shelly Yachimovitch will fight hard for her dream of restoring Labor to its old preeminence.

He would be able to rally factions in the Kadima party he once led, who are disgruntled with their current leader Shaul Mofaz for joining the Netanyahu government as deputy prime minister.

Olmert could also provide a home for anti-Likud, out-of-work, dovish ex-security and army heads like the former Mossad director Meir Dagan, former chiefs of staff Gaby Ashkenazi and Meir Halutz and ex-Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin.

The burgeoning social protest movements may also be swept up in the unifying momentum, particularly as most of them draw their ideas and funding from the same, often foreign, sources and share the same hankering to overturn the government in power.

All these groups and figures would temporarily throw their differences to the winds in their rush for a place in a new left-of-center coalition - however short-lived it may be. The long-stalled negotiations with the Palestinians would provide a handy political slogan for factional fusion.

Even before this nascent process takes off, the politicians who succeeded Olmert as leaders of Kadima: Tzipi Livni and the man who beat her to the top, Shaul Mofaz, look like shadows.

As foreign minister in the Olmert government, Livni will not be forgiven for conniving with (the then and now) Defense Minister Ehud Barak to drive him out of the prime minister’s office when he was accused of suspected corruption. He was hounded out even before he was indicted.

Just four days ago, Livni made a well-publicized appearance at a big demonstration in Tel Aviv on behalf of a new law for ending exemptions from military duty for ultra-religious yeshiva students and Arab citizens (Equal Sharing of the Burden). Tuesday, her image and hopes of a comeback were quickly overlaid by the triumphant former prime minister.

Some scrambling was also detected in the ruling camp under Netanyahu’s unchallenged leadership. His popularity has recently taken a knock from the way he wavered over legislation for making compulsory conscription universal. His actions were criticized for being prompted by the narrow political motive of preserving his government coalition against the loss of Kadima’s Mofaz who championed the Equal Burden movement, rather than meeting a just popular demand.

Prime Minister Netanyahu feels the need to shore up his government against the loss of a senior coalition partner: The hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of Israeli Beitenu goes on trial next month for alleged financial wrongdoing including money laundering. For the duration of the trial and in case of his conviction, Lieberman has chosen an able successor, Yair Shamir, son of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir who passed away on June 30.

Shamir is close to Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon of Likud. They are emerging as possible leaders of a solidified right-of-center alliance against a future left-of-center bloc. It would bring together Likud, Israeli Beitenu, Independence (led by Ehud Barak) and the National Union.

Israel’s political anatomy is historically dominated by two big rival alliances which operate on opposite sides of the aisle most of the time, but tend to join forces for national unity in some national emergencies.

The two camps have this in common:  Each traditionally enlists ultra-religious groups, Shas and Degel Hatorah, as tie-breakers to gain the lead in forming a government, and then builds them safe niches in their coalition governments.

Barack Obama's Brother to Make Film Debut in Anti-Obama Documentary

by Paul Bond

An interview with George Obama, who lives in a hut in Kenya "like something out of 'Slumdog Millionaire'" is featured in the upcoming movie "2016: Obama's America."

Barack Obama’s half-brother, George Obama, is about to make his film debut, and in a feature-length documentary that is critical of the president, no less.

In the movie, 2016: Obama’s America, based on Dinesh D’Souza’s best-selling book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza refers to a news report four years ago about George Obama living in a hut in Nairobi, Kenya, “like something out of Slumdog Millionaire.” He’s intrigued, so he tracks him down.

In the film clip embedded above, D’Souza and George Obama are seen chatting on what appears to be a park bench, and D’Souza seems most curious to know why the half-brother of the most powerful man on the planet lives in poverty and without any financial help from President Obama.

“I think he has a family of his own,” George Obama says. “I’m a member of his family, but I’m over-age, so I help myself.”

D’Souza presses him by using the Biblical admonition – one that the president has also cited -- that Americans ought to be “our brother’s keeper,” and George Obama shrugs off that insinuation, as well.

“He’s got other issues to deal with,” he says. “He’s taking care of the world, so he’s taking care of me.”

The focus of the movie, though, is the alleged anger at colonialism that President Obama inherited from his (and George’s) father.

As D’Souza puts it in the book: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

D’Souza, therefore, presses that theory with George Obama, and seems to get agreement from him, as the president's brother argues that Kenya has fallen behind since its independence.

D’Souza clearly enjoys getting to know George Obama and at one point during the interview (though not in the above clip), he jokes that America elected the wrong Obama to be its president.

George Obama is the youngest of several children that Barack Obama, Sr. had with his four wives. He co-wrote a book in 2010, and D’Souza tracked him down through its publisher. D’Souza told The Hollywood Reporter that he met George Obama at a hotel in Nairobi and then they toured his village in Huruma Flats, spending about 12 hours together.

“George is the rebel in Obama’s family. He’s the black sheep,” says D'Souza, who has penned several right-leaning books, such as Letters to a Young Conservative and What's So Great About America.

“George doesn’t go along with the worship of the father and he is politically incorrect on a lot of topics," says D'Souza. "And he’s particularly interesting because he lives in rubble on a few dollars a day while his powerful, multimillionaire brother doesn’t lift a finger to help him.”

2016 was produced by Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Rain Man and Minority Report, and it was bankrolled by a couple of dozen wealthy investors allegedly from across the political spectrum, the most prominent being TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, who also backed The Conspirator, Robert Redford's movie about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His daughter, Laura Ricketts, is one of 27 high-profile, openly gay "super-bundlers" for Obama's 2012 campaign, according to Forbes magazine.

Molen, who doesn't talk politics while producing blockbusters for Steven Spielberg and other A-list moviemakers, has been incrementally outing himself as a rare conservative in the entertainment industry through interviews with THR, Breitbart.com and other outlets.

The movie opens in Houston this week and is screening by invitation-only in Los Angeles next week. It gets a national limited release on July 27.

WATCH VIDEO

$15 Trillion To Be Added To Money Supply & Gold To Ascend

KWN has been getting bombarded from readers around the world on the Michael Pento piece titled, “This Major Fed Move Is About To Cause Gold To Skyrocket.”   Today we followed up with Michael Pento because there was such tremendous interest in knowing more about this major move he expects from the Fed.  Today Pento told King World News that this move he is predicting could add a staggering $15 trillion to the money supply. 

Pento, of Pento Portfolio Strategies, also said that if this move happens, “you will see the gold market fly far past its nominal record high in extremely short order.”  Here is what Pento had to say:  “So let me put it together for your listeners.  We have $1.42 trillion of excess reserves.  We are now going to be told that there will be no capital reserve requirements on owning sovereign debt.  You will have commercial banks flooding the market with the purchase of sovereign debt.  Not just US debt, Portuguese debt, Spanish debt, Greek debt, all of that debt will have zero capital requirements.”

“Let me be clear on this, I’m not saying it could increase M2 money supply to $15 trillion, this could increase it by $15 trillion.  So we’re talking perhaps about $24 trillion.  It has the potential to increase to rapidly increase the global money supply, and it would be a tremendous boost to commodities, oil and precious metals. 

However, I would add that it will only vastly exacerbate the stagflationary environment that we see gripping the entire developed world....

“It’s much worse than a QE3 because QE1 and QE2, because the vast majority of that money created is sitting with the central bank, it’s laying fallow at the central bank.  But if you have a mechanism like I just described, no longer having sovereign debt have any capital reserve requirements, the notion to stop paying interest on these excess reserves, you will have all of that money that was laying fallow, flood into the economy at once.

So there is no easy answer.  Bernanke doesn’t know what he’s doing.  He spent too much time studying the Great Depression.  He’s going to get a chance to study one firsthand in my opinion. 

What he needs to do is let the free market work, and I can tell you that unleashing $1.5 trillion into the American economy, and having that money roll-over and multiply (to $15 trillion), through the money-multiplier-effect, is not a very good idea.”

Pento also added: “I am a big advocate of hard money policies around the world, and I love gold.  However, I am not a broken clock.  If gold was going to go into a bear market, I’d be the first one to tell you.  I have been on the record, on King World News, telling people when I thought gold was overbought.

I’ve been on record telling people that we’re in this cyclical period of truncated deflation, but if they do the two things I just described in this interview, which is to implement the Basel III Accord, and cease paying interest on excess reserves, you will see the gold market fly far past its nominal record high in extremely short order.”

Scientists Demo Thought-Controlled Robots

By Adario Strange

In the 2009 film Surrogates, based on the popular graphic novel, Bruce Willis is shown struggling in a world dominated by realistic robot avatars controlled by humans sitting comfortably in their homes.

Often injured or somehow disfigured, opting to interact with the world from a distance, the people are shown seamlessly operating their metal doppelgangers via a brain link apparatus that goes mostly unexplained in the film.

Now, a team of researchers based in laboratories around the globe, have developed a system similar to the one depicted in the film, designed to assist the chronically bedridden and those suffering from paralysis.

The development represents the first time an fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine has been used to allow a person to control a robot's movements simply by thinking of a command. By monitoring the brain's blood flow, the fMRI can detect neural activity associated with various commands, such as movement. In a recent demonstration of the technology, the team had a human subject sitting in a lab in Israel control a small robot in another lab located in France.

The demo not only allowed the person to control the robot, but he was also able to see from the robot's perspective via a small camera mounted on the robot's head. This fMRI real-time link, along with the camera perspective, reportedly gave the subject the sense of actually being in the room in France.

The test subject, Tirosh Shapira, was enthusiastic about the out-of-body experience, telling NewScientist, "It was mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around… You need to concentrate, and you have to calculate a few steps in advance because there's a small delay between thinking of a movement and it actually happening. But once you get used to it you feel like a puppet master."

Although controlling robots using EEG (electroencephalogram) set-ups has been demonstrated in the past, experts believe the fMRI technique may afford more precise command of a robot avatar. In future iterations of the fMRI system, the researchers hope to allow for more finely tuned controls in which the human subject could actually regulate the speed and dexterity of a robot's individual finger movements.

The consortium, operating under the collective name VERE (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment project), includes scientists from Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, the U.K., Portugal, and Israel. The most recent demonstration video shows Shapira controlling a tiny humanoid robot roughly two-feet tall, but the group hopes to conduct future tests with the HRP4 robot (video below), a human-sized robot that would give the human operator an even greater sense of experiencing the world through a robot's body.

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Israel perturbed by Obama’s outreach to Mursi - against his word

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

Israeli government and military leaders were taken aback by the news of US President Barack Obama’s invitation to the new Egyptian president Mohammed Mursi to visit Washington in September - in breach of the president's assurances to US Jewish leaders at the White House last month, debkafile’s exclusive Washington and Jerusalem sources report. His key assurance was that Mursi would not be invited to the White House and Obama would not maintain direct telephone contact with him until he met certain conditions, the foremost of which concerned a public and unambiguous commitment to Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

They American Jewish delegation was assured that President Mursi would be required to devote a section of his earliest speech on foreign affairs to the specific affirmation of his profound commitment to the peace pact with Israel. The unspecific pledge to uphold Cairo’s international accords he made upon his election on June 24 would not satisfy the US president, the American Jewish delegation was promised. Indeed the new Egyptian president would also be required to table the peace pact with Israel in the new Egyptian parliament for ratification.

With these assurances, the Jewish delegation was satisified.

However, it turned out Monday, July 8, that, instead of standing by his promises, President Obama had sent Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to Cairo for two days of interviews with Egyptian officials, in none of which did  future relations with Israel figure. President Mursi’s spokesman then announced that the US official had handed the new president an invitation to visit the White House in September. Neither Burns nor the White House contradicted him.

Furthermore, in a briefing to reporters after he saw Mursi, Burns vehemently denied that the peace pact had been discussed.

Next Saturday, July 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is due in Cairo after a visit to Israel.

To signal disapproval and concern over the impact on Israel’s security of Washington’s unconditional outreach to Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Cairo, Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu has ordered the speeding up of construction on the fortified fence on the Israel-Egyptian border, known for decades as “the peace border,” and completion of the expanded military deployment in the border region.

In Jerusalem, the Obama administration is seen as suddenly backtracking on the conditions set the incoming Egyptian president in the last week of June, which essentially made US support of his regime conditional on his performance in key fields:

Those conditions were first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly:

1. Observance of a democratic agenda;

1. Respect for human rights, namely women’s’ status and minority rights, especially relating to the Christian Copts;

2.  The formation of a broad national unity government representing the country’s active mainstream parties - not just his own Muslim Brotherhood.

3.  Making the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel a central pillar of his foreign policy;

4.  Public affirmation of his commitment to uphold peace relations with Israel.

5.  A resolute effort to curb the terrorist elements running wild in Sinai and threatening Israeli security by restoring Egyptian control.

6.  An end to the rabid anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric pervading Egyptian media and the persecution of Western NGOs operating in Egypt.

The last three points give those demands the weight of an ultimatum:

7. Not until all the above steps are taken, will President Morsi be welcomed in Washington as an official guest.

8. Furthermore, not until the Egyptian president has satisfied Washington on all these scores will the Obama administration use its influence with the World Bank to ease Egypt’s dire liquidity problems and help find the cash to buy food on world markets. If Morsi can’t find the money to feed the population, hungry Egyptians will be out on the streets of their cities once again - clamoring this time for his and the Muslim Brotherhood’s removal.

Those conditions have mostly gone by the board along with President Obama’s promises, debkafile’s sources report.