* IDF forces met with pre-planned violence when attempting to board flotilla Early this morning (31 May), IDF naval forces intercepted six ships attempting to break the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

* Gaza flotilla participants created war atmosphere before confronting Israel Participants chanted Islamic battle cry invoking killing of Jews and called for Martyrdom.

* Report: Israel to deploy nuclear-armed submarines off Iran coast Sunday Times quotes IDF official saying the 3 German-made long range submarines will gather intelligence, act as deterrent and potentially land Mossad agents.

* New Video: Israel’s Critical Security Needs In light of the upcoming Obama-Netanyahu meeting at the White House next week, the video below, presented by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, details Israel’s critical security needs and explains they are basic to any peace agreement that sees Israel’s continued existence as a given.

* Flotilla Upstages Obama, Netanyahu on Way Home Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is leaving Canada to fly home to oversee the flotilla crisis, instead of flying to Washington to meet U.S. President Barack Obama.

* ECB ups bond purchases as Spain vows labor law The European Central Bank disclosed increased purchases of euro zone government bonds on Monday as Spain assured investors it would reform its rigid labor market even if employers and trade unions cannot agree.

* Istanbul rally: Israel will drown in blood Some 10,000 protestors hold demonstrations in Turkey’s main cities following deadly IDF takeover of Gaza aid flotilla, call to close down ‘Zionist embassy’

* Several Israeli Arab protesters arrested in mass rallies over Gaza flotilla deaths Israeli forces on high alert on Lebanon, Gaza and Syria borders; Hezbollah demands ‘international punishment’ of Israel.

* Can the EU survive Europe’s crisis? Forged out of the ashes of World War II and the end of the Cold War, the European Union was meant to create peace and prosperity across the region.

* China aims to be become supercomputer superpower China is ramping up efforts to become the world’s supercomputing superpower.

* UN talks back conference on nuclear-free Middle East Nearly 200 nations, signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), have agreed to work towards a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

* ‘Israel is an obstacle to peace’ Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal on Friday called Israel “the obstacle” to peace in the Middle East and urged the US to “deal with this reality and not put pressure on the Palestinian or the Arab side.”

* Satellite Pictures Seen of Hizbullah Base on Syrian Soil Hizbullah terrorists are running weapons to Lebanon from secret arms depots in Syria where the terrorists have been accorded their own living quarters, arms storage site and a fleet of trucks, according to the London Times.

* Israel: NPT deal hypocritical Jerusalem sources wonder why Israel only state mentioned in Non-Proliferation Treaty conference, which called for inspection of its nuclear facilities.

* Hamas: Flotilla shows whole world opposes Gaza siege The Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh said Saturday that if Israel behaved like pirates and attacked the international Freedom Flotilla carrying 10,000 tons of aid meant for Gaza, then the Palestinians will have won.

* Iraq’s al-Maliki says he’s only party PM nominee Iraq’s prime minister said Saturday he is the only nominee from his political party to run the nation’s next government, rejecting suggestions of a consensus candidate to satisfy those concerned about his leadership.

* ‘Iran critics must get rid of nukes’ Nations criticizing an Iranian nuclear fuel-swap deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey should eliminate their own nuclear weapon stockpiles, Turkey’s leader said Friday.

* US turns ‘charm offensive’ on Jews The first-ever Jewish America Heritage Month celebration at the White House on Thursday underscored the Obama administration’s determination not to be locked into Washington’s conventional notions of Jewish leadership.

* China faces pressure to act over North Korea at summit China is to face renewed pressure from South Korea to censure North Korea over the sinking of one of the South’s warships, amid rising tensions.

* Toronto prepares to walk with Israel Residents of Toronto, Canada will get a chance to show their love for Israel on Sunday, when an expected 15,000 supporters will join the annual day-long UJA Walk with Israel.

After a deliberately much-trumpeted visit by its president to Syria last week, Russia has been heralded, for the umpteenth time in recent years, as making a Middle Eastern comeback through Damascus. However, it would be more accurate to say that Russia sees Syria for what it is, a chip with which the Kremlin can play a game it masters with bigger players: perpetually leveraging arms sales to rogue regimes to extort never-ending concessions and to maximize its advantage at a time when the US, under the Obama administration, is entirely missing in action.

The fact that every so often we revisit this narrative of Syrian triumphalism on the back of a Russian regional resurgence ought to be enough to show that this isn’t about Syria or tilting the regional balance of power to its advantage. Rather, this is about Russian leverage against the US and Israel, and opportunism at a moment of American fecklessness. Arms sales are Russia’s instrument of influence in the region, not Syria.

Moscow sees a weak US administration in retreat from the region and is stepping into the void to see what it can claim for itself. Russian diplomacy has so far managed to balance the US, Israel and Iran, while safeguarding its commercial interests, which in turn allows it to continue extorting all three states in the future.

In return for effectively meaningless sanctions on Iran, the Obama administration lifted sanctions on four Russian companies, including state arms trader Rosoboronexport, which had been sanctioned for arms sales to Iran and Syria. Russia continues to string along the Iranians over the delivery of the S-300 air defense system, which Israel does not want to see in Teheran’s hands.

And the Israelis have something the Kremlin wants: aerospace technology – specifically in developing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Moscow has purchased 15 Israeli drones for testing, and last month, state technology corporation Rostekhnologii expressed interest in possibly establishing a joint venture with Israel Aerospace Industries to produce UAVs. According to media reports, Russia had invested $172 million in developing a drone project of its own that was a bust.

In fact, Russian avionics are inferior and their products suffer from poor quality control. Russia has teamed up with India to manufacture a fifth-generation stealth fighter jet. Part of the avionics is sourced from Israel, which is also one of India’s top defense suppliers. The final product could rival the US-made F-35 fighter jet, which Israel has sought to buy. But it also wishes to update it with Israeli avionics, which has caused some complications (reportedly now resolved). So, Israel has been involved in a delicate dance between its traditional ally, the US, and a potential future partner: Russia.

Which brings us back to Syria. The Assad regime is clearly nowhere near this league. For one, Syria is broke. Besides, Bashar Assad had tried to enter this level of play in 2008 in the aftermath of the Georgia crisis with Russia. He transparently urged the Russians to station Iskander-E batteries on Syrian soil and was curtly turned down. Two years later, the type of weaponry discussed with Syria remains the same: the Pantsyr-S1 air defense system, anti-tank weapons and MiG-29 fighter jets, of which Syria already has 50. The unreliability of the MiG-29 is causing nations to refuse or retire them, and last year Russia had to ground them due to crashes. Syria wants but cannot afford upgrades, nor do Syrian pilots stand a chance against the Israel Air Force anyway, and so in many respects, this is a sucker deal.

As for the Pantsyr, it would be a nuisance especially if transferred to Hizbullah (assuming they don’t have them already), but it would not seemingly be a game changer.

This is the Russian game of leveraging arms sales for concessions that David Samuels described so well last year. The fanfare of President Medvedev’s visit to Syria could be in part Russia’s way of signaling displeasure or impatience with Israel over avionics cooperation and drone technology.

A possible hint of this dynamic came in a report in As-Sharq al-Awsat. The paper’s correspondent in Tel Aviv related disagreements between the Israeli Foreign and Defense ministries over Russia’s move with Syria. The Foreign Ministry, according to the report, blames Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his aides, “for they have rejected proper military cooperation with the Russians, and refused to modernize old Russian fighter jets, and refused to buy anything for the Israeli Army from Russia.”

The Defense Ministry insists that since none of the weapons Russia promised to Syria were game changers, there was little to worry about. It’s also arguable that such a decision by Israel, if true, was a concession to the Pentagon.

If this is indeed the game being played, then it would be another instance of Russian opportunism at its finest. Russia cannot rebuild its old empire any more than it can bury the US. However, it sees local actors like Turkey and Iran asserting themselves, while the US flounders and hemorrhages influence. So it moves in to secure a cut for itself, gathering bargaining chips that, depending on how the regional scenario plays out, it will cash with the US and Israel.

Last year, Asia Times columnist Spengler summarized this dynamic as follows: “The game now is in the hands of the spoilers … and first among them is Russia.” The Obama administration’s policy, Spengler wrote, is allowing “the unimaginable to occur”: Russia’s influence in the Middle East rivaling that of the US.

This is what a world without American power looks like. Regional middle powers trying to act like superpowers, while opportunists move in like hyenas over the carcass of the American order.

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.

In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.

The secretive effort seeks “no offensive capabilities,” Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. “The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.”

The secretive flight, civilian specialists said in recent weeks, probably centers at least partly on testing powerful sensors for a new generation of spy satellites.

Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”

In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky.

“This looks very, very good,” Mr. Molczan said of the identification. “We got it.”

In moving from as far as 40 degrees north latitude to 40 degrees south latitude, the military spacecraft passes over many global trouble spots, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.

Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.

Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up — standard for a space shuttle — and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

A fair amount is known publicly about the features of the X-37B because it began life 11 years ago as a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the nation’s space shuttles. The Air Force took over the program in 2006, during the Bush administration, and hung a cloak of secrecy over its budget and missions.

The X-37B has a wingspan of just over 14 feet and is 29 feet long. It looks something like a space shuttle, although about a quarter of the length. The craft’s payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites. The X-37B can stay aloft for as long as nine months because it deploys solar panels for power, unlike the space shuttle.

Brian Weedon, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a private group based in Superior, Colo., said the duration of the X-37B’s initial flight would probably depend on “how well it performs in orbit.”

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the “development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems.”

Mr. Payton, a former astronaut and senior NASA official, has acknowledged that the spacecraft is ultimately meant to give the United States new advantages on terrestrial battlefields, but denies that it represents any kind of space weaponization.

On April 20, two days before the mission’s start, he told reporters that the spacecraft, if successful, would “push us in the vector of being able to react to war-fighter needs more quickly.” And, while offering no specifics, he added that its response to an “urgent war-fighter need” might even pre-empt the launching of other missions on expendable rockets.

But he emphasized the spacecraft’s advantages as an orbiting laboratory, saying it could expose new technology to space for a long time and then “bring it back” for inspection.

Mission control for the X-37B, Mr. Payton said, is located at the Air Force Space Command’s Third Space Experimentation Squadron, based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. He added that the Air Force was building another of the winged spaceships and hopes to launch it next year.

The current mission began on April 22, when an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida fired the 5.5-ton spacecraft into orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, said the secrecy surrounding the X-37B even extended to the whereabouts of the rocket’s upper stage, which was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. In one of his regular Internet postings, he said that appeared to be the first time the United States had put a space vehicle into a solar orbit that is “officially secret.”

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said many aerospace experts questioned whether the mission benefits of the X-37B outweighed its costs and argued that expendable rockets could achieve similar results.

“Sure it’s nice to have,” he said. “But is it really worth the expense?”

Mr. Weedon of the Secure World Foundation argued that the X-37B could prove valuable for quick reconnaissance missions. He said ground crews might rapidly reconfigure its payload — either optical or radar — and have it shot into space on short notice for battlefield surveillance, letting the sensors zoom in on specific conflicts beyond the reach of the nation’s fleet of regular spy satellites.

But he questioned the current mission’s secrecy.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with weapons,” Mr. Weedon said. “But because of the classification, and the refusal to talk, the door opens to all that. So, from a U.S. perspective, that’s counterproductive.”

He also questioned whether the Pentagon’s secrecy about the spacecraft’s orbit had any practical consequences other than keeping the public in the dark.

“If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”

Hizbullah guerrillas are promoting themselves to the folks at home, and winning credibility and legitimacy in the process, with weekly tours of southern Lebanon in what the group is calling “Jihad Tourism.” The tours were created to mark the 10th anniversary of Israel’s pullout from the area.

After 22 years of Israel’s having maintained its security buffer zone, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak abruptly made the decision in May 2000 to withdraw all IDF troops. The vacuum left in the region was quickly filled with Hizbullah terrorists, who honeycombed the area with tunnels and concrete bunkers. Their kidnapping of Israeli soldiers caused the 2006 Lebanon War.

The bunkers, packed with weapons, ammunition, food and other supplies, eventually became the backbone of the Hizbullah war effort against Israel in the hard-fought 2006 Second Lebanon War. Since that time, Hizbullah has acquired more than 60,000 missiles of varying sizes and ranges, including, according to IDF military intelligence, long-range Scud missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond.

A “tourist jihad center,” a new war museum and a parade of ordnance accompanied by strutting terrorists are part of what one commentator called the “Disneyland,of  Islamic Terror” show for tours of hundreds of university students. Wide-eyed, the students hear a first-hand, Hizbullah version of of the guerrillas’ battlefield experiences against the Israeli army.

Another special spot on the Jihad Tour is found in the woods on the hills of Sojod, just north of the area evacuated by Barak. This is the spot where Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s son Hadi died while leading a raid against Israel in 1997, explains a Hizbullah tour guide. “This is the spot where he was martyred,” the guide says, indicating a blue prayer mat laid out among the trees. As students snap photos, the guerrilla fighters make themselves available for the shots, but ask that their faces not be seen.

Nasrallah himself has come to understand the importance of tourism and of positioning his group politically. Hizbullah now has representatives in the Lebanese government, although Nasrallah himself is in hiding.   “Everywhere you go there is a Holocaust museum, regardless of authenticity, accuracy or magnitude,” he told an Associated Press reporter, missing the irony in the comparison.

“This is an excellent, very well-organized trip,” a 19-year-old university student commented on the tour. “I think it’s very important to get a first-hand look at Hizbullah because there are a lot of prejudices out there.”

And indeed, the Hizbullah war museum in Mlita, some 60,000 square meters large, includes a gallery, caves and a 250-meter-long simulated terrain with replicas of a Hizbullah-IDF battlefield scene.

At its opening this past Friday, Lebanon’s president and prime minister both sent representatives. Noam Chomsky, an American Jew who is pro Hizballah and Iran but a damaging, fierce critic of Israel, was present as well.

Explains Jihad Hammoud, one of the tour organizers, “We are bringing students to the area previously occupied by Israel, to show them how the resistance, with its meager capabilities, was able to defeat the strongest army in the world.”