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Damascus, Syria David Rosenberg (The Medi – As the Arab League agreed to go to the United Nations Security Council early this week with a resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down, Russia was reportedly doing a major arms deal with the beleaguered regime.

The $550 million agreement to sell 36 Yak-130 combat aircraft will not do anything to tip the balance in favor of the Al-Assad regime, which has been engaged in a 10-month conflict with anti-government opposition. But Russia is almost certainly providing arms Damascus needs to hold back the rebels as well as mounting a diplomatic defense of its friend at the U.N.

In a rare glimpse into the Russia-Syria arms trade, a ship loaded with ammunition from Russia was briefly detained in Cyprus earlier this month before continuing its journey unmolested to the Syrian port of Tartus. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has vowed that Russia will veto any sanctions as “unfair and counterproductive.”

“Syria is an important customer for the Russian military industry and the industry is quite keen to maintain the relationship,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow based foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs, told The Media Line. “Syria is one of the few remaining customers in the region and it hosts the only military base – a small one but still a base – that Russia still has outside its own borders.”

As the West – now joined by the Arab League – presses the Syrian president ever harder, Russia has emerged as his most important ally. Iran also backs the Damascus regime, but Tehran itself faces growing diplomatic isolation over its nuclear program and doesn’t wield a Security Council veto. China is opposed to Syrian sanctions, too, but analysts say it is likely to follow whatever line Moscow adopts.

Russia’s warm ties with Syria, and more exactly the Al-Assad family regime that has ruled the country four decades, starts with arms sales but it goes much deeper.

In the final two decades of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union was a superpower competing for global influence with the U.S., Syria was its staunchest ally in the Middle East. Bashar Al-Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez armed his troops with Soviet weapons and advanced Moscow’s interests in the region.

With the collapse of communism and with Syria’s deteriorating economy, the relationship is not what it once was. But Russia maintains a naval base at Tartus and the two governments share a distrust of the West and its motives.

Indeed, the view from Moscow of what is happening in Syria is very different than the one in Washington or Brussels. Where the West sees events in Syria as a popular uprising against a repressive regime, Russia shares Damascus’ take, which sees the rebellion as conspiracy by the Gulf countries to bring down an ally of their foe Iran.

“Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others see this as an opportunity, as a chance to push back Iranian influence,” Lukyanov said. “From Russia’s point of view, it’s part of a geopolitical struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, where Syria is just a card.”

For policymakers in Moscow, the situation in Syria looks remarkably similar to the one in Libya last year, where another long-time friend, Muamar Al-Qaddafi, faced what was seen in the West as a popular rebellion against autocracy. Russia reluctantly agreed not to veto a U.N. decision to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

The resolution, as Russia’s leaders understood it, was to prevent Al-Qaddafi from killing civilians with aerial firepower. But the NATO forces that largely enforced the decision, Russians say, used it to level the playing field in the Libyan civil war to Al-Qaddafi’s disadvantage. Moscow lost a friend and customer for its arms and is now out of favor with the successor National Transitional Council.

Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, said Russia’s Syria policy is driven by memories of its Cold War rivalry with the U.S.

“There’s an element of business in the arms deals, but it’s mainly a political move to show the flag and to show support for Syria. It’s mainly a function of Russian relations with America than with the Syrian regime,” Magen told The Media Line.

For that reason – and because Moscow realizes that Al-Assad’s days are numbered – it may be prepared to make a deal with the U.S. over Syria, he added.

Nevertheless, analysts agree that the importance of the arms trade as a factor in Moscow’s calculations should not be overlooked. In an economy with few other industrial exports, Russia’s military industry is an important earner of foreign exchange and a powerful domestic political force.

The Voice of Russia radio’s website said in December without citing a source that Russian arms exports reached $11 billion last year, a three-fold increase from 2000. While the country’s biggest customers are India and China, the Middle East had been a growing market until the Arab Spring eliminated Al-Qaddafi and sanctions on Iran removed another customer. Syria alone, according to some estimates, accounted for 7 percent of all Russian arms sales in 2010.

A U.S. government study in 2009 estimated Russia’s share of the Middle East arms market grew to more than 15 percent in the 2005-2008 period, five percentage points more than in 2001-2004 as it offered more creative financing and payment options, counter-trade, offsets, debt-swapping, and, in some cases, licensing production locally.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported in early December that Russia delivered $300 million of Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria.

With numbers like that, it is no wonder that Sergey Chemezov, the head of the state arms export company Rosoboronexport, made clear he had no intention of halting business with Syria.

“There are no sanctions whatsoever regarding Syria,” he told Interfax on Wednesday. “If international sanctions are imposed by the U.N. Security Council, everything will change. And if there are no sanctions, why should we refuse to cooperate with this country? This is business after all.”

Nevertheless, Magen said, Russia is careful not to sell Damascus weapons like S-300 surface-to-air missiles that could alter the regional balance of power.

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Mumbai, India (AHN) – Indian doctors have reported the country’s first case of totally drug-resistant tuberculosis.

It is not the first time highly resistant cases of the killer lung disease have been seen.

Since 2003, patients have been documented in Italy and Iran. While it has been mostly contained to impoverished areas and has not spread widely, experts believe there could be many cases that have been undocumented.

Experts are not fearful that the Indian TB strains will rapidly spread.

The disease is mainly transmitted through close personal contact and is not nearly as contagious as the flu. Most of the cases of the drug resistant Indian strain were not spread from person-to-person, but were mutations that occurred in poorly treated patients.

The Indian hospital that saw the initial cases tested a dozen medicines and none of them worked. A TB expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they do appear to be totally resistant to available drugs.

Usually, TB is easily treated and cured by taking antibiotics for a period of six to nine months. However, if that treatment is interrupted, or the dose is reduced, the persistent bacteria battles back and mutates into a stronger strain that can no longer be killed by standard drugs. The disease then becomes much more difficult and expensive to treat.

Indian doctors detailed the first four cases in a letter to a U.S. medical journal in December. They blame private doctors for prescribing inappropriate drug plans that sparked greater resistance in three of the four infected patients.

Tuberculoses is an age-old affliction that lies dormant in an estimated one in ratios people. About 10 percent of those people eventually develop active TB, which kills roughly 2 million people a year, the World Health Organization reports. Each victim infects an average 10 to 15 others every year, most typically through coughing or sneezing.

An estimated 20 percent of the world’s multi-drug resistant cases are found in India. which is home to a quarter of all types of tuberculosis cases globally.

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Israel (The Media Line) – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has presided over a period free of war or major terror attacks, but the quiet is showing signs of boomeranging on him as long-simmering discontent over the direction of the economy comes to a boil.

Tens of thousands of protestors marched through Tel Aviv and clashed with police Saturday night as they called for “social justice” and the prime minster’s resignation. Along the city’s Rothschild Boulevard and other towns across the country, tent cities erected to protest the high cost of housing began sprouting a week ago. Doctors are now marking their 17th week on strike.

The housing protest is the latest in a serious of campaigns that have surfaced in the last half year. Last month, a massive Facebook campaign forced dairies to lower the price of cottage cheese. New drives are targeting disposable diapers and other products. Before that, it was gasoline prices. Strikes have been called by social workers and Foreign Ministry diplomats.

What has characterized all these actions, note economists and political scientists, is that they are being led by Israel’s middle class — the kind of people who should be enjoying the fruits of a fast-growing economy, falling unemployment, and peace and security the country has enjoyed since Netanyahu took office just over two years ago. But, in fact, most Israelis feel worse off.

“There’s been a policy of lowering taxes and many people grew wealthy. But the middle and lower income groups got fewer services. The labor market has changed. Once, everyone worked full time. Now many people, even the middle class, work part time or without social benefits or tenure,” Roni Kaufman, a lecturer in the social work department of Ben-Gurion University, told The Media Line.

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A poll released last week by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and Tel Aviv University, found that three-quarter of those surveyed said their economic conditions had worsened in recent year or remained the same. Only 3% said it had “greatly improved,” according to the poll of 599 people take June 27 and 28.

Israel’s economy is among the fastest growing in the developed world, with gross domestic product expanding at a 4.6% annual rate in the first quarter, while the jobless rate- 5.8%, compared with 9.2% in the U.S. — is the lowest in more than two decades. But wage growth has been stagnant while prices for everything from humus to houses are high by Western standards.

The number of average monthly salaries it takes to buy a new home has jumped from 100 in 2000 to about 130 this year, according to the Yediot Ahronot daily.

An ad on the home page of the newspaper’s website touts a great deal on apartments for sale in Tel Aviv’s trendy Florentine neighborhood – two rooms totaling 50 square meters (540 feet) for a mere one million shekels ($295,000). The same day, The Chicago Tribune had a three-bedroom, 2 1/12 bathroom apartment with parking and appliances listed for sale for $6,000 less.

For decades, Israelis didn’t aspire to a standard of living that matched the West’s. The country was more preoccupied with fighting wars and terrorism, and absorbing waves of new immigrants.

But over the past two decades, the country has vaulted into the league of wealthy countries, with GDP per capita at $28,700 number 27th in the world. Netanyahu talked about Israel entering the top-10 list within a decade. Two years ago, it was admitted to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the clubs of the world’s most advanced economies.

Along with rising expectations, Israel has enjoyed an unusually long period of quiet since the 2006 Lebanon war. In previous periods of quiet -after the 1967 Six-Day War when the Israeli Black Panthers emerged or after the 1993 Oslo agreement – Israelis often turn their attention to social and economic issues.

“When there are security problems, there isn’t a lot social activism,” Ben-Gurion’s Kaufmann said.

On Sunday, Netanyahu acted quickly to take hold of the housing issue as his own and count himself among those demanding change “The housing problem is real,” he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. “We not only relate to it, we’ve been relating to it for many years now. Even before I formed a government I sought a solution.”

While Netanyahu doesn’t have to call elections until 2013, the IDI/Tel Aviv University survey contained some worrying trends on the public’s attitude toward his government’s policies and its responsibility for middle class distress.

Among those surveyed, 61% called the government’s socio-economic policy “moderately poor” or “very poor.” Two thirds said they would prefer the state concentrate focus on closing the gaps between the rich and the poor rather than a growth and stability, which has been the priority over the last decade.

Dan Schueftan, deputy director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa, said the protests and strikes reflect real “discontent,” but he doubts that for now at least it is strong enough to push Israel into early elections

“The question is not what the magnitude of discontent is. The question is if there is a weak link in the coalition that would let the government fall. At the moment, I don’t see a danger to the stability of government.” Schueftan told The Media Line. “It will be a problem, but it won’t be a major problem.”

But some analysts say the protests could change policy direction in favor of more regulation, increased social benefits and higher taxes to help pay for it. As of Sunday, there was little sign of that, with the prime minster using the housing crisis to press for more free-market reforms of the real estate market.

The question is whether the Israeli public is ready to disown many of the policies that have brought economic growth.

A survey asking Israelis who was the country’s best finance minister in recent years gave the highest ranking to Netanyahu, who held the job between 2003 and 2005 and used it to push an agenda of privatization, lower taxes and deregulation. That, said Avi Simhon, a senior lecturer in agricultural economics and management at The Hebrew University, suggests there is little support for an economic counter-revolution.

But Yakir Plessner, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics and management at The Hebrew University, said he believed Israelis remain wedded to the socialist ideals on which the country was founded.

“Historically Israelis were educated for a very long time to see government as responsible for everything that happening in the Israeli economy,” he told a conference two weeks ago. “I don’t know for a fact that has changed in recent years.”

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