Summary: A look at the 4 new Kindle Fire models

Amazon.com Inc. started shipping a large-screen version of its Kindle Fire tablet computer on Thursday, ahead of schedule. Here is a look at the new Fires announced in September:

— Kindle Fire, with 7-inch screen, 1024 by 600 pixels. $ 159, with 8 gigabytes of storage. Weighs 14.1 ounces. Battery life of 8.5 hours. Started shipping Sept. 14.

— Kindle Fire HD, with 7-inch screen, 1280 by 800 pixels. $ 199 with 16 GB of storage or $ 249 with 32 GB of storage. Weighs 13.9 ounces. Battery life of 11 hours. Started shipping Sept. 14.

— Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, with 8.9-inch screen, 1920 by 1200 pixels. $ 299 with 16 GB of storage or $ 369 with 32 GB of storage. Weighs 20 ounces. Battery life of 10 hours. Started shipping Thursday.

— Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE Wireless, with 8.9-inch screen, 1920 by 1200 pixels. $ 499 with 32 GB of storage or $ 599 with 64 GB of storage. Can connect to AT&T Inc.‘s 4G LTE wireless network. Weighs 20 ounces. Battery life of 10 hours. Will start shipping Tuesday.

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Questions of Blame Linger 34 Years After Jonestown

From the age of 13, Leslie Wagner Wilson had been indoctrinated in the California-based Peoples Temple, led by the charismatic Jim Jones, whose mission was to foster racial harmony and help the poor.

But on Nov. 18, 1978, she and a handful of church members fought their way through thick jungle in the South American country of Guyana, escaping a utopian society gone wrong where followers were starved, beaten and held prisoner in the Jonestown compound.

She walked 30 miles to safety with her 3-year-old son, Jakari, strapped to her back and a smaller group of defectors. But just hours later, the mother, sister and brother and husband she left behind were dead.

“I was so scared,” said Wagner, now 55. “We exchanged phone numbers in case we died. I was prepared to die. I never thought I would see my 21st birthday.”

Today, on the 34th anniversary, Wilson said it’s important to remember the California-based Peoples Temple Jonestown massacre, especially the survivors who have wrestled with their consciences for decades.

PHOTOS: Jonestown Massacre Anniversary

Nine members of her family were among the 918 Americans who died that day, 909 of them ordered by Jones to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the largest ritual suicide in history.

Her husband, Joe Wilson, was one of Jones’ top lieutenants who helped assassinate congressman Leo Ryan and his press crew when they tried to free church members who were being held against their will.

After arriving back in the United States, Wilson said she “went through hell” — three failed marriages, drug use and suicidal thoughts she describes in her 2009 book, “Slavery of Faith.”

“I was like Humpty Dumpty, but you couldn’t put me back together again,” she said.

Survivors, many of them African-American like Wilson, say they felt guilt and shame and faced the most agonizing question surrounding the nation’s single largest loss of life until 9/11: Was it suicide or murder?

Full Coverage: Jonestown Massacre

In the now-famous “death tape,” supporters clapped and babies cried as Jones instructed families to kill the elderly first, then the youngest in protest against capitalism and racism. Mothers poisoned 246 children before taking their own lives.

“We really can’t understand the Peoples Temple without looking at the historical time period when it arose,” said Rebecca Moore, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University.

“With the liberation movements of the ’60s and ’70s, the collapse of the black-power movement, the Peoples Temple was the main institution in the San Francisco Bay area that promoted a message of integration and racial equality.”

Moore lost her two sisters and her nephew, the son of Jim Jones. “They were hardcore believers,” she said of her siblings.

Jim Jones, who was white, came from a “wrong side of the tracks,” poor background in Indiana where in the 1950s he became known as a charismatic preacher with an affinity for African-Americans.

“A number of survivors, including those who defected, believe to this day he had paranormal abilities,” said Moore, who met him years later. “He could heal them and read their minds.”

In the 1960s, Jones moved to San Francisco, where at the height of the Peoples Temple there were about 5,000 members.

WATCH: A Look Back at Jonestown Massacre

“They wanted my parents to join,” she said. “Like most outsiders, we didn’t have any idea what was happening outside closed doors.”

Jones ingratiated himself with celebrities and politicians, mobilizing voters to help elect Mayor George Moscone in 1975 and becoming chairman of the city’s housing authority.

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Israel, Gaza fighting rages on as Egypt seeks truce

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel bombed Palestinian militant targets in the Gaza Strip from air and sea for a fifth straight day on Sunday, preparing for a possible ground invasion though Egypt saw “some indications” of a truce ahead.

Militant rocket fire into Israel subsided during the night but resumed in the morning with three rockets fired at the nearby coastal city of Ashkelon, the Israeli army said.

“As of now we have struck more than 1,000 targets, so Hamas should do the math over whether it is or isn’t worth it to cease fire,” Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, over Twitter.

“If there is quiet in the South and no rockets and missiles are fired at Israel’s citizens nor terrorist attacks engineered from the Gaza Strip, we will not attack.”

Forty-eight Palestinians, about half of them civilians, including 13 children, have been killed in Israel’s raids, Palestinian officials said. More than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.

Israel unleashed intensive air strikes on Wednesday, killing the commander of the Hamas Islamist group that governs Gaza and spurns peace with the Jewish state. Israel’s declared goal is to deplete Gaza arsenals and press Hamas into stopping cross-border rocket fire that has plagued Israeli border towns for years.

Air raids continued past midnight into Sunday, with warships shelling from the sea. A Gaza City media building was hit, witnesses said, wounding 6 journalists and damaging facilities belonging to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV as well as Britain’s Sky News.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the strike had targeted a rooftop “transmission antenna used by Hamas to carry out terror activity”.

Two other predawn attacks on houses in the Jabalya refugee camp killed two children and wounded 13 other people, medical officials said.

These attacks followed a defiant statement by Hamas military spokesman Abu Ubaida, who told a news conference: “This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning.”

The masked gunman dressed in military fatigues insisted that despite Israel’s blows Hamas “is still strong enough to destroy the enemy”.

An Israeli attack on Saturday destroyed the house of a Hamas commander near the Egyptian border.

Casualties there were averted however, because Israel had fired non-exploding missiles at the building beforehand from a drone, which the militant’s family understood as a warning to flee, and thus their lives were spared, witnesses said.

Israeli aircraft also bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police headquarters.

Among those killed in air strikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding motorcycles, and several civilians including a 30-year-old woman.

ISRAELI SCHOOLS SHUT

Israel said it would keep schools in its south shut on Sunday as a precaution to avoid casualties from rocket strikes reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the past few days.

Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile interceptor system destroyed in mid-air a rocket fired by Gaza militants at Tel Aviv on Saturday, where volleyball games on the beach front came to an abrupt halt as air-raid sirens sounded.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it had fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, but there was also a growing number of calls from world leaders to seek an end to the violence.

British Prime Minister David Cameron “expressed concern over the risk of the conflict escalating further and the danger of further civilian casualties on both sides,” in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a spokesperson for Cameron said.

London was “putting pressure on both sides to de-escalate,” the spokesman said, adding that Cameron had urged Netanyahu “to do everything possible to bring the conflict to an end.”

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said the United States would like to see the conflict resolved through “de-escalation” and diplomacy, but also believes Israel has a right to self-defense.

Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said in Cairo as his security deputies sought to broker a truce with Hamas leaders, that “there are some indications that there is a possibility of a ceasefire soon, but we do not yet have firm guarantees.”

Egypt has mediated previous ceasefire deals between Israel and Hamas, the latest of which unraveled with recent violence.

A Palestinian official told Reuters the truce discussions would continue in Cairo on Sunday, saying “there is hope,” but it was too early to say whether the efforts would succeed.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli official declined to comment on the negotiations. Military commanders said Israel was prepared to fight on to achieve a goal of halting rocket fire from Gaza, which has plagued Israeli towns since late 2000, when failed peace talks led to the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising.

Diplomats at the United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt in the coming week to push for an end to the fighting.

POSSIBLE GROUND OFFENSIVE

Israel, with tanks and artillery positioned along the frontier, said it was still weighing a ground offensive.

Israeli cabinet ministers decided on Friday to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000 and around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.

Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”

“We have a plan. … It will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.

A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Netanyahu, favored to win a January election.

The last Gaza war, a three-week Israeli blitz and invasion over the New Year of 2008-09, killed 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died in the conflict.

But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s maneuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.

(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Douglas Hamilton)

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“Partners” Canceled by CBS

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – CBS’s freshman comedy “Partners” has been canceled, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap on Friday.

“Partners,” which starred Michael Urie and David Krumholtz, and centered around the “bromance” between two co-workers, one gay and one straight, premiered September 24 and occupied the Monday at 8:30 slot.

Its most recent episode scored a 1.8 rating/5 share in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 demographic – down 14 percent from the previous week, and its poorest showing to date. While the show had strong network support, it proved to be the weak link in CBS’s Monday night comedy lineup, the rest of which – “2 Broke Girls,” “How Met Your Mother” and “Mike & Molly” – has been on an upward trajectory.

“Partners” was created by “Will & Grace” writers David Kohan and Max Mutchnick and was loosely based on their own lives.

A “Two and a Half Men” repeat will air in the show’s former timeslot next week.

This makes the second cancellation for the network so far this year, following “Made in Jersey.”

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Canadian October home sales dip, latest sign of cooling

TORONTO (Reuters) – Sales of existing homes in Canada fell in October from September and year-over-year sales were down as well, the Canadian Real Estate Association said on Thursday in the latest signal that the housing market is slowing.

The industry group for Canadian real estate agents said sales were down 0.1 percent in October from September. Actual sales for October, not seasonally adjusted, were down 0.8 percent from a year earlier.

The housing market, which roared higher in 2011 and the first half of 2012, started to slow after the government tightened rules on mortgage lending in July in a bid to cool the market and prevent home buyers from taking on too much debt.

“Housing market trends in Canada for 2012 can be characterized as before and after regulatory changes,” TD Economics senior economist Sonya Gulati said in a research note.

“In the first half of the year, sales and price gains were modest, but positive. More stringent mortgage rules and tighter mortgage underwriting rules have ‘purposely’ knocked the wind out of the housing market sails,” she said.

The home sales data showed diverging paths in Canadian housing depending on location. In Toronto and Vancouver, where sales and price gains were red hot in 2011 and early in 2012, the market has been cooling. But markets in the resource-rich western provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta have been gaining strength.

“Opinions differ about how sharply sales have slowed depending on the local housing market,” Gregory Klump, CREA’s chief economist, said in a statement.

Led by Calgary, sales in October were up from a year earlier in almost two-thirds of local markets. Sales remained blow year-earlier levels in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, CREA said.

“These results suggest that the Canadian housing market overall has returned to a more sustainable pace,” Klump said.

CREA’s Home Price Index rose 3.6 percent in October from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month in which gains in prices slowed, and the slowest rate of increase since May 2011.

While tighter mortgage rules have worked to slow the market, TD’s Gulati said the big question is what will happen when that temporary cooling effect wears off in early 2013.

“What happens thereafter is less certain. The low interest rate environment could pull homeowners back onto the market, causing home prices to once again trek upwards. Alternatively, an absence of pent-up demand may leave the market in a bit of a lull until interest rate hikes resume in late 2013,” she wrote.

“Under either scenario, it is safe to say that there is a low probability of out-sized home price gains over the near-term.”

A total of 402,322 homes traded hands via Canadian MLS systems over the first 10 months of 2012, up 0.8 percent from the same period last year and 0.4 percent below the 10-year average for the period, the data showed.

The number of newly listed homes fell 3.8 percent in October following a jump in September. Monthly declines were reported in almost two-thirds of local markets, with Toronto and Vancouver exerting a large influence on the national trend.

Nationally, there were 6.5 months of inventory at the end of October, little changed from the reading of 6.4 months at the end of September.

(Editing by Peter Galloway)

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“Sister” Director Tackles Taboo of Switzerland’s Class Divide With Her Oscar Contender

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Director Ursula Meier can hardly believe that her film “Sister” – which depicts tenements, poverty and a seemingly rigid class system in lovely Switzerland – has made it over the Alps to Hollywood for Academy consideration.

“It shows a not-very-usual aspect of Switzerland,” Meier told the audience at a showing of “Sister” Thursday night at the Landmark, part of TheWrap’s Academy Screening Series. “We don’t show the beautiful mountains and the green and the lush life … For me it was important to show another point of view on this country to the world. Because usually it’s Montblanc, chocolate, and Swatch.”

Indeed, with her second film, Meier has given international audiences something else to associate with Switzerland: larcenous snow urchins.

“Sister” centers mostly around 12-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), who lives in a high-rise tenement in a not-so-snowy valley far below a ski resort and takes gondolas to the top to steal wealthy tourists’ skis right out from under their goggles.

Wily Simon is financing not just his own existence but that of Louise (Lea Seydoux), the title character, who just might be the worst parental figure or caretaker in a cinematic year that did, after all, include “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

It would involve spoilers to explain why Simon’s older sis is not everything she’s cracked up to be. But there’s nothing misleading about this boy-crazy, substance-abusing twentysomething gal’s unfitness to watch over Simon, the breadwinner of their sad two-person family.

He has to empty out his cash drawer to bribe Louise into snuggling with him, and when he entrusts her with the mere task of waxing skis, she can’t even do that without spilling cigarette ashes on the stolen merchandise.

“It was important for me, when we were at the ski resort, to showing the back door of the restaurant, and the workers inside … And it’s just at the end, when it’s finished, when there is no more snow and the ski resort is closed, for the first time Simon looks at the landscape. And we can see how beautiful this place is, but it’s too late now.”

Meier worked with her young leading man on her first theatrical feature, 2009′s “Home,” where he played Isabella Huppert’s son when he was just 7. She’s emphatic that Klein is not the kind of child actor who has to be tricked into giving a performance.

“During the first casting, I ask him, ‘What do you like to do in your life, Kasey?’ And he told me, ‘Thinking.’ So I said ‘OK, think,’ and I turned on the camera, and he was amazing … He understands that acting is to be, not to look like. So I really wanted to write for him with this film, because it was such an amazing experience on my first film.”

The role of the severely neglectful “sister” was tougher to nail down, both for the director and her leading actress.

“This character was the challenge of the film,” Meier said. “Because Kacey’s character is a child, so for the spectator, of course he’s a victim. But with the character of Louise, for Lea as an actress, at the beginning for her it was very hard to find the fragility of the character. I showed her a lot of films like ‘Vagabond’ … I explained to her, you were 14 when you were pregnant; it was too young for a girl, and you stopped your studies and got bad jobs you cut with your family.”

Sometimes, she said, they’d fight because “she couldn’t find the fragility of the character, and suddenly, months later, wow – it was like we cut something open and all the emotion that came out from her was very deep. I was afraid of the spectators judging the character. It was not easy, in the writing, or in the directing with the actors, because I wanted that they would love these characters, even if they’re sometimes terrible. But I like terrible characters.”

Pond told Meier that when it came to supporting actress Gillian Anderson, of “X-Files” fame, “the first time I watched, I didn’t realize it was her till the end credits” – an experience probably shared by most of those in attendance at the screening.

“I’m very happy that you say that,” said Meier, “because if you recognize the actress, you think about the actress.” But the director did want Armstrong to provoke a where-have-I-seen-you-before vibe.

“I really wanted to be played by a star – not to have a star in my film, but because it was important for Simon to have a kind of phantasma this lady, of what he wants as a mother.

And as a spectator, you can have a phantasma on the star. So I like that she came from another country, and not speak French, because she’s almost an apparition.”

Meier admitted she was frightened before the Swiss premiere – before “Sister” went on to play various fests and win the special Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.

“When I had the first screening in Switzerland, a lady came back to me and was very moved by the film, because it’s usually a taboo to show poverty in Switzerland. She cried and told me, ‘I grew up in exactly the same place. My father was a worker in the factory we saw in the film, and as a child we never had the money to go up.’ I liked that she just said up.”

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Tulsa Town Hall: Nutrition a valuable tool in health care

Weil spoke as part of the Tulsa Town Hall series of speakers.

The United States has an expensive health-care system that doesn’t produce good results, he said.

“Something is very wrong with this picture,” he said. “We’re spending more and more and we have less and less to show for it.”

Changes in diet can be an effective treatment for many conditions, but American physicians are functionally illiterate in nutrition, he said.

“The whole subject of nutrition is omitted in medical education,” he said.

There are many ways of managing diseases other than drugs, he said. Integrative medicine, which can include dietary supplements and practices like meditation, is the future of health care, he said.

The health system is resistant to change because of entrenched vested interests. That includes pharmaceutical companies that do direct-to-consumer advertising, which should be stopped, he said.

“As dysfunctional as our health-care system is at the moment – and it is very dysfunctional – it is generating rivers of money,” he said. “That money is going into very few pockets.”

Weil has developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet but with Asian influences.

Inflammation is associated with some heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and some cancers, he said. And as a result, people should be eating real, unprocessed foods and whole grains. They should stay away from sugar-sweetened beverages, including fruit juice, he said.

“The new research that’s being done on sugar is not very comforting,” he said.

The aging process can’t be avoided, but age-related diseases can be avoided by proper care, he said.

“The goal should be to live long and well with a big drop off at the end,” he said.

Weil is the director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine.

Tickets to the Tulsa Town Hall series are sold as a $ 75 subscription and cover five lectures. Tickets for individual lectures are not available.

To subscribe, visit tulsaworld.com/tulsatownhall, call 918-749-5965 or write to: Tulsa Town Hall, Box 52266, Tulsa, OK 74152.

Future speakers include journalist Ann Compton on Feb. 8; author James B. Stewart on April 5; historian and cinematographer Rex Ziak on May 10.

Original Print Headline: Speaker highlights nutrition

---

Shannon Muchmore 918-581-8378
shannon.muchmore@tulsaworld.com
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Israel hits Hamas government buildings, reservists mobilized

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the prime minister's office, after Israel's cabinet authorized the mobilization of up to 75,000 reservists in preparation for a possible ground invasion.

Palestinian militants in Gaza kept up cross-border salvoes, firing a rocket at Israel's biggest city Tel Aviv for the third straight day. Police said it was destroyed in mid-air by an Iron Dome anti-missile battery deployed hours earlier, and no one was injured.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, said Israeli missiles wrecked the office building of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh - where he had met on Friday with the Egyptian prime minister - and struck a police headquarters.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

With Israeli tanks and artillery positioned along the Gaza border and no end in sight to hostilities now in their fourth day, Tunisia's foreign minister travelled to the enclave in a show of Arab solidarity.

Officials in Gaza said 41 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children and a pregnant woman, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket on Thursday.

In Cairo, a presidential source said Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi would hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in the Egyptian capital on Saturday to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Egypt has been working to reinstate calm between Israel and Hamas after an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo unraveled over the past few weeks. Meshaal, who lives in exile, has already held a round of talks with Egyptian security officials.

Israel uncorked its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years. The salvoes recently intensified, and are now displaying greater range.

The operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel's right to self-defense, along with appeals to both sides to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas, shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, says its cross-border attacks have come in response to Israeli strikes against Palestinian fighters in Gaza.

"We have not limited ourselves in means or in time," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Israel's Channel One television. "We hope that it will end as soon as possible, but that will be only after all the objectives have been achieved."

Hamas says it is committed to continued confrontation with Israel and is eager not to seem any less resolute than smaller, more radical groups that have emerged in Gaza in recent years.

The Islamist movement has ruled Gaza since 2007. Israel pulled settlers out of Gaza in 2005 but maintains a blockade of the tiny, densely populated coastal territory.

RESERVE TROOP QUOTA DOUBLED

At a late night session on Friday, Israel's cabinet decided to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000, political sources said.

The move did not necessarily mean all would be called up or that an invasion would follow. Tanks and self-propelled guns were seen near the sandy border zone on Saturday, and around 16,000 reservists have already been summoned to active duty.

The Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt next week to push for an end to the fighting in Gaza, U.N. diplomats said on Friday.

Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for Saturday's rocket attack on Tel Aviv, saying it had fired a longer-range, Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of the Gaza Strip.

After air raid sirens sounded, witnesses saw two white plumes rise into the sky over the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv and heard an explosion when the incoming rocket was hit.

The anti-missile battery had been due to take delivery of its fifth Iron Dome battery early next year but it was rushed into service near Tel Aviv after rockets were launched toward the city on Thursday and Friday. Those attacks caused no damage or casualties.

In Jerusalem, targeted by a Palestinian rocket on Friday for the first time in 42 years, there was little outward sign on the Jewish Sabbath that the attack had any impact on the usually placid pace of life in the holy city.

In Gaza, some families abandoned their homes - some of them damaged and others situated near potential Israeli targets - and packed into the houses of friends and relatives.

ISRAEL'S GAZA TARGETS

The Israeli army said it had zeroed in on a number of government buildings during the night, including Haniyeh's office, the Hamas Interior Ministry and a police compound.

Taher al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government, held a news conference near the rubble of the prime minister's office and pledged: "We will declare victory from here."

A three-storey house belonging to Hamas official Abu Hassan Salah was also hit and totally destroyed early on Saturday. Rescuers said at least 30 people were pulled from the rubble.

In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama commended Egypt's efforts to help defuse the Gaza violence in a call to Mursi on Friday, the White House said in a statement, and underscored his hope of restoring stability there.

On Friday, Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil paid a high-profile visit to Gaza, denouncing what he called Israeli aggression and saying Cairo was prepared to mediate a truce.

Egypt's Islamist government, freely elected after U.S.-backed autocrat Hosni Mubarak fell to a popular uprising last year, is allied with Hamas but Cairo is also party to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

In a call to Netanyahu, Obama discussed options for "de-escalating" the situation, the White House said, adding that the president "reiterated U.S. support for Israel's right to defend itself, and expressed regret over the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives".

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-09, killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

But few believe Israeli military action can snuff out militant rocket fire entirely without a reoccupation of Gaza, an option all but ruled out because it would risk major casualties and an international outcry.

While Hamas rejects the Jewish state's existence, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in areas of the nearby West Bank not occupied by Israelis, does recognize Israel but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Jeffrey Heller and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem and Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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Israel hits Hamas government buildings, reservists mobilized

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the prime minister's office, after Israel's cabinet authorized the mobilization of up to 75,000 reservists in preparation for a possible ground invasion.

Palestinian militants in Gaza kept up cross-border salvoes, firing a rocket at Israel's biggest city Tel Aviv for the third straight day. Police said it was destroyed in mid-air by an Iron Dome anti-missile battery deployed hours earlier, and no one was injured.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, said Israeli missiles wrecked the office building of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh - where he had met on Friday with the Egyptian prime minister - and struck a police headquarters.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

With Israeli tanks and artillery positioned along the Gaza border and no end in sight to hostilities now in their fourth day, Tunisia's foreign minister travelled to the enclave in a show of Arab solidarity.

Officials in Gaza said 41 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children and a pregnant woman, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket on Thursday.

In Cairo, a presidential source said Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi would hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in the Egyptian capital on Saturday to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Egypt has been working to reinstate calm between Israel and Hamas after an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo unraveled over the past few weeks. Meshaal, who lives in exile, has already held a round of talks with Egyptian security officials.

Israel uncorked its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years. The salvoes recently intensified, and are now displaying greater range.

The operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel's right to self-defense, along with appeals to both sides to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas, shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, says its cross-border attacks have come in response to Israeli strikes against Palestinian fighters in Gaza.

"We have not limited ourselves in means or in time," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Israel's Channel One television. "We hope that it will end as soon as possible, but that will be only after all the objectives have been achieved."

Hamas says it is committed to continued confrontation with Israel and is eager not to seem any less resolute than smaller, more radical groups that have emerged in Gaza in recent years.

The Islamist movement has ruled Gaza since 2007. Israel pulled settlers out of Gaza in 2005 but maintains a blockade of the tiny, densely populated coastal territory.

RESERVE TROOP QUOTA DOUBLED

At a late night session on Friday, Israel's cabinet decided to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000, political sources said.

The move did not necessarily mean all would be called up or that an invasion would follow. Tanks and self-propelled guns were seen near the sandy border zone on Saturday, and around 16,000 reservists have already been summoned to active duty.

The Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt next week to push for an end to the fighting in Gaza, U.N. diplomats said on Friday.

Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility for Saturday's rocket attack on Tel Aviv, saying it had fired a longer-range, Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of the Gaza Strip.

After air raid sirens sounded, witnesses saw two white plumes rise into the sky over the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv and heard an explosion when the incoming rocket was hit.

The anti-missile battery had been due to take delivery of its fifth Iron Dome battery early next year but it was rushed into service near Tel Aviv after rockets were launched toward the city on Thursday and Friday. Those attacks caused no damage or casualties.

In Jerusalem, targeted by a Palestinian rocket on Friday for the first time in 42 years, there was little outward sign on the Jewish Sabbath that the attack had any impact on the usually placid pace of life in the holy city.

In Gaza, some families abandoned their homes - some of them damaged and others situated near potential Israeli targets - and packed into the houses of friends and relatives.

ISRAEL'S GAZA TARGETS

The Israeli army said it had zeroed in on a number of government buildings during the night, including Haniyeh's office, the Hamas Interior Ministry and a police compound.

Taher al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government, held a news conference near the rubble of the prime minister's office and pledged: "We will declare victory from here."

A three-storey house belonging to Hamas official Abu Hassan Salah was also hit and totally destroyed early on Saturday. Rescuers said at least 30 people were pulled from the rubble.

In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama commended Egypt's efforts to help defuse the Gaza violence in a call to Mursi on Friday, the White House said in a statement, and underscored his hope of restoring stability there.

On Friday, Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil paid a high-profile visit to Gaza, denouncing what he called Israeli aggression and saying Cairo was prepared to mediate a truce.

Egypt's Islamist government, freely elected after U.S.-backed autocrat Hosni Mubarak fell to a popular uprising last year, is allied with Hamas but Cairo is also party to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

In a call to Netanyahu, Obama discussed options for "de-escalating" the situation, the White House said, adding that the president "reiterated U.S. support for Israel's right to defend itself, and expressed regret over the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives".

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-09, killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

But few believe Israeli military action can snuff out militant rocket fire entirely without a reoccupation of Gaza, an option all but ruled out because it would risk major casualties and an international outcry.

While Hamas rejects the Jewish state's existence, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in areas of the nearby West Bank not occupied by Israelis, does recognize Israel but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Jeffrey Heller and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem and Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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