Word: northerners
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There's precious little light in Iceland during the winter, which makes the upper latitudes ideal for viewing the northern lights--especially on New Year's Eve. In Reykjavík, Icelanders gather around dozens of massive bonfires to sing traditional folk songs accompanied, according to local legend, by trolls, fairies and elves. (Iceland's Tourist Board claims that 80% of Icelanders believe in little beings.) At midnight the city explodes in a massive fireworks display. The dancing and partying that follow last until the sun comes up, which in Iceland is at about lunchtime...
...Lebanese sources hostile to Hizballah told TIME that the organization has been busy restocking its arsenal with help from Iran and Syria. Hizballah has taken delivery of Syrian-made Katyusha missiles with a range of almost 60 miles, able to strike the Israeli port of Haifa and maybe the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv. The Israeli military estimates that Hizballah's arsenal now has over 20,000 short-range missiles and hundreds of medium-range ones. This arms pipeline starts in Iran, where shipments are usually loaded onto trains as disguised cargo, and wend their way across Turkey to Syria...
Through a pair of high-powered binoculars, an Israeli officer scans the Lebanese side of Israel's northern border. Three shepherds and 20 goats come into his view, moving across an olive grove. It seems like an innocent pastoral scene until the Israeli notices that one of the shepherds is speaking into a walkie-talkie, while another is staring back at the Israeli through his own state-of-the art binoculars. They are Hizballah, and they're stalking back, along the Lebanese-Israeli border...
...constant refrain by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during last summer's war in Lebanon was that Israel could not be expected to return to "the status quo ante," in which it lived under threat from a heavily armed Hizballah across its northern border. And yet, the signs are unmistakable that the status quo was not significantly altered by Israel's military operation and the truce that followed. Neither the U.N. force nor the Lebanese Army appears likely to even try and disarm Hizballah, which has agreed simply to refrain from openly bearing arms in the border zone...
...persistence of that threat on its northern border remains intolerable to the Israeli security establishment - particularly in light of mounting tension between Israel and Iran, Hizballah's sponsor, over that country's nuclear program. And that's why Israeli military officers and Hizballah sources in Beirut say both sides are preparing for a new shooting war, which could come sooner rather than later...