CiteULike

This is a short endorsement of a great web-based tool named CiteULike. It was created and is run by Richard Cameron, of Manchester Metropolitan University's Department of Computing & Mathematics. It is basically an online database for storing citations. As the citations can be exported to BibTex and Endnote-Format it can replace storing everything in your citation manager. The killer-app-advantage is a function that allows you to post an article from JSTOR or similar databases directly to your citation database. This is done via a bookmark in your browser... So it's basically a one click functionality - in my eyes superior to all citation import functions offered by the journal databases. Another feature is that you can browse other user's libraries so it can be quite useful for drawing on other peoples collection efforts to find articles related to a certain field. Here is my library. The registration and usage are extremly straightforward.... Great Tool !
Here again the link: CiteULike

Explosive means of communication

So six Israeli fighter planes overflew a vessel of the German navy which is part of the UNIFIL mission to control Lebanon's waters and apparently fired two shots and/or flares. First the IDF denied the incident but by now the first reports seem to be valid and: As the ship "Alster" is a so called "fleet service vessel", the Bundeswehr-Dubbing for a spy ship, there is a video of the situation which has not been published so far.

But apart from the media impact which is somewhat dampened by public attention being drawn to pictures of German soldiers posing with skulls in Afghanistan, the reasons of this incident remain interesting.

So... What the hell was this supposed to mean?

My guess is that someone in the IDF wanted to show UNIFIL who is really in charge, but this sabre-rattling gesture backfired massively, although the German and Israeli governments tried to downplay the situation. And viewed in combination with the French force commander's complaints about Israeli fighters patroling southern Lebanon and his threat to station anti-aircraft-systems to defend his ground troops, the situation becomes somewhat to explosive. And this is definitely not the best way of communication between allies.