Israel has begun moving ground forces into Gaza, according to Israel Defense Forces spokesmen. The IDF says in a statement that its goal is to take out sites from which Hamas has launched rockets into southern Israel. The assault is intended to “bring about an improved and more stable security situation for residents of Southern Israel over the long term.” The statement adds that “infantry, tanks, engineering forces, artillery and intelligence with the support of the Israel Air Force, Israel navy, Israel Security Agency and other security agencies” have been moved into Gaza. The invasion comes under the cover darkness after airstrikes calmed as daylight waned.

A new poll in the Military Times makes for uncomfortable reading for the new president. Six out of 10 active-duty service members say they are uncertain or pessimistic about their new commander in chief. Only a third said they are optimistic about Obama. Some expressed concern about his lack of military service and experience. “Being that the Marine Corps can be sent anywhere in the world with the snap of his fingers, nobody has confidence in this guy as commander in chief,” said one lance corporal. Underlying much of the uncertainty is Obama’s 16-month timetable for pulling combat troops out of Iraq, as well as his calls to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military. The caution among active-duty service personnel is reasonable and need not be a problem for Obama, argues Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University. “Those numbers don’t convince me he has got a big problem on his hands because what he is seeing is not military hostility but rather military caution, and caution that is reasonable because he has never been in the position of this office,” he said. “It’s sensible and understandable that they have doubts about him.”

The man tasked with salvaging the remnants of the Madoff hedge fund business, Irving H. Picard, is hoping to sell the $50 billion Ponzi schemer’s legitimate stock trading business “by the end of next week.” Lazard Frères has been hired by Pickard to help find a buyer, reports The New York Times. Investment bankers estimate the Madoff business to be worth between $200 million and $400 million. Pickard is also trying to contact all Madoff customers who had dealings with the company within the last year and has made an urgent request to the court to subpoena witnesses and documents to determine what Madoff did with investors’ money. New allegations suggest Madoff was pulling in fresh investors—and at least $10 million in cash—within a week of his arrest on December 11 on federal fraud charges.

John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, are in mourning for their son, Jett, who was found dead in a bathtub in the Bahamas after enduring a seizure, according to Michael Ossi, the family lawyer. The Travoltas said Jett had for many years been suffering from Kawasaki Syndrome, a rare condition characterized by high fever, skin rashes, swelling of the lymph nodes, and heart attacks caused by inflammation of blood vessels in the coronary arteries. In 2002, Preston said her son had become “very, very sick with high fever and swollen glands and peeling fingers and rash all over his body” when he was 3 years old. She attributes the condition to exposure to carpet-cleaning chemicals and as a result she became a crusader for safe household chemicals. Travolta said recently he and his wife were hoping to have another baby. They married in 1991 and have a daughter, Ella, 8.

Deposit Insurance Corp. for $1.3 billion in cash. The FDIC has run the California-based IndyMac since its failure on July 11. After searching for a buyer among the failed bank's competitors, the FDIC was forced to open bidding to non-bank investors. The purchase includes IndyMac's 33 branches, the $6.5 billion in deposits, and a securities and loan portfolio of about $23 billion. Dune Capital Management and J.C. Flowers & Co and affiliates of George Soros and Michael Dell were also involved in the purchase. "The current economic climate is challenging for selling assets, but this agreement achieves the goals that were set out by the chairman and board when the FDIC was named conservator of IndyMac in July," FDIC Deputy Director James Wigand said in a statement.

Why can’t American politicians give quotations like this one, from Boris Johnson, mayor of London, to Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister: “Bring it on, you great big quivering gelatinous invertebrate jelly of indecision.” (This gem, about possible elections June 4, comes from today’s Wall Street Journal profile.) The journalist turned popular mayor has long been known for his ability to provide a great, and sometimes ridiculous, quote. But he’s increasingly becoming better known as an effective member of the Tory Party and its potential leader if David Cameron, the current leader, stumbles in his bid to force Labour from power in the next election. Though Johnson unexpectedly won election to the mayoralty in 2008, he has thrived in the job, helping the city thorough the financial crisis and passing small but important laws, like banning alcohol from public transportation, something that didn’t win him many fans among the city’s youth. “Thousands of young people were hurling execration at my name,” he said. “I thought: This is fantastic. It took Margaret Thatcher 10 years before she had mobs of urban youth denouncing her.”

Obama faces an early test over his attitude to the rule of law. Should he proceed with the trial of “enemy combatant” Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student the Bush administration believes to be an Al Qaeda sleeper agent who was a legal resident of America when arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001? As The New York Times reports, “The legal principles established in [Marri’s] case are likely to affect the roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo.” Intelligence officials say Marri is exceptionally dangerous, making deportation problematic, while trying him on criminal charges could be difficult, too, because evidence against him may have been obtained through torture. The prosecution case rests partly on info supplied by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the September 11 attacks, but the CIA admits Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, and evidence obtained from him may therefore be inadmissible. Obama must decide his administration’s course of action by February 20.

Veteran political observer Peggy Noonan has some rare words of wisdom about Caroline’s bid for Hillary’s Senate seat: “If you’re going to run as the princess of a dynasty, you have to act and be like a princess…Her problem in part has been that she spent a quarter-century trying to blend in and not call attention to herself. She made herself convincingly average—not distinguished. She has her parents’ dignity but not their dash. She radiates a certain clueless class.” Caroline’s difficulty? “To succeed as a candidate…she needed the talents of an extremely gifted natural, which she’s not...Hillary Clinton understood that New York demands glamour. She had less natural clay to work with, and yet she got in the stylists and makeup artists and through her enormous self-discipline transformed herself into a chic, well groomed, bustling little engine that could.” And our love affair with the Kennedys was all a long time ago. “JFK went to Dallas 45 years ago last November. It is as if Jenna Bush…decided in the year 2053 to run for office…saying ‘I’m a Bush.’ The reaction, one assumes, would be: So what?”

Can you compare Heath Ledger with the great Marlon Brando? Jeremy McCarter does while reviewing Somebody, a new life of the Godfather star by Stefan Kanfer in Sunday’s New York Times. “Thinking about Brando’s legacy now leads to one name above all others: Heath Ledger,” McCarter writes. “As an introverted gay ranch hand in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and the quivering, maniacal Joker in ‘The Dark Knight,’ [Ledger] touched the far extremes of a film actor’s range, and made both look as natural as Brando in his prime.” Noting that “even as a novice, Brando made other actors look as if they were painting with rollers,” McCarter observes that, like Orson Welles, Brando’s greatest work was always behind him. “Brando had barely reached his 30s before he entered his Elvis-in-the-jumpsuit phase,” he writes. And though Kanfer digs up little new about the brooding, difficult superstar, the attribution of his genius to the Method, the technique Lee Strasberg adopted from the great Russian stage director Stanislavsky, is wrong. “In fact Brando despised Strasberg,” writes McCarter. “He learned much more from [the legendary actress and teacher Stella] Adler, though she knew better than to take credit for his success.”

On Monday, Malia, 10, and Sasha Obama, 7, start at their new school, Sidwell Friends School, Chelsea Clinton's alma mater, which has been teaching presidents' kids since Teddy Roosevelt. But while all efforts will be made to ensure their privacy and  safety, in the age of Facebook, texting, and blogging, they will be subject to unprecedented press demand for every detail of their new lives, reports Politico. “Bodyguards will be around, for sure, but hard to spot. And their teachers will have a brand new worry in the digital age—cell phone cameras,” writes Nia-Malika Henderson. Some parents likely will push their kids to befriend the girls. “It is hard to not come across as snobby when you are 12 and you don’t want to deal with all of these people around you who want to be your friend,” said one of Chelsea’s old schoolmates. The Obama sisters will attend school on different campuses—Sasha, a second-grader, in Bethesda, and Malia, a fifth-grader, in Washington, D.C. Fees for the Quaker school are $28,442 for the elementary school and $29,442 for middle and upper school. Nearly 40 percent of students are non-white.

The technology website Fudzilla reports that Microsoft has told staff that 15,000 of the computer giant's 90,000 global workforce will be given pink slips on January 15. "The rumor that Microsoft was set to lay off people on January 15 is no longer a rumor but a fact,” the site reports. “So far, we haven't managed to confirm what departments or regions will be hit the worst, but we're hearing that MSN might be carrying the brunt of the layoffs. We're also hearing rumors about the possibility of somewhat larger staff cuts at Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).” According to Fudzilla, one Microsoft division “has cut their expected sales for 2009 by as much as 90 percent,” and the R&D division is being pared back “so we have a feeling that some of the more exotic projects might be put on ice.” Microsoft declined to comment, though Steve Ballmer, the company's chief executive, has a chance to confirm or deny the news at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, where he is expected to release a new version of the Windows operating system.

Former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris, nominated by Blago to succeed Obama in the Senate, is determined to take his seat in the Upper Chamber on Tuesday, despite opposition in his home state and on Capitol Hill. And he is invoking the US Constitution in his support. Burris has asked the Illinois Supreme Court to move swiftly to order Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who has refused to co-sign the petition from Blago appointing Burris, to approve his appointment. "Failure of this court to act very quickly would deprive [Burris] and the citizens of Illinois of the representation to which they are entitled" under the US Constitution, the motion reads. Meanwhile, the Democratic Senate leadership has made it clear Burris will not be provided with credentials to take his seat in the Senate, and may not even make it in the door of the Capitol.

Imagine Christmas at Oscar de la Renta’s holiday home in the Dominican Republic. Among the guests, the late Brooke Astor and Henry Kissinger. “We had a rule that on walks you could not talk about any subject, only people,” recalls Kissinger. “You could not say a good word about anybody. Brooke lived up to it.” This and other tidbits are found in Meryl Gordon’s Mrs. Astor Regrets, described by Dominique Browning in her review in The New York Times this Sunday as a “painstakingly detailed narrative of the events leading to the indictment of [Astor’s son and heir] Anthony Marshall.” Browning reports that “Gordon seems to have left no diary unread, no servant unsolicited, no socialite unturned.” Right to the end, suffering from dementia, a cruel son, and a pushy daughter-in-law, “Mrs. Astor still dressed for dinner every night, adorned in jewels, carrying an evening bag—to eat at a TV tray, alone.” The book is a convincing condemnation of Marshall and his greedy ways. “With the publication of ‘Mrs. Astor Regrets,’ Marshall is, effectively, guilty until proven innocent—at least in the social court of law,” writes Browning. The book is no easy read. “I took no pleasure in reading this book,” Browning reports. “Perhaps it’s a matter of taste: for mine, the story is too tawdry, too pathetic. I felt heartsick by the end, for all concerned. There are no redeeming figures, no interesting tragic flaws, no sympathetic characters.” A tragic end to an exemplary life.

It’s not the first time someone has been counted out before their time. When PBS’ lugubrious late night chat show host Charlie Rose announced on his New Year's Eve program that one of the most significant deaths of 2008 was that of his old pal the British-born filmmaker George Butler, he intended it as a mark of affection. Up flashed a tombstone on screen showing that Butler had lived from 1943 to 2008. Butler first introduced us to Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the 1977 movie Pumping Iron, and recorded on film John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War antics. It being New Year’s Eve, Butler had to pinch himself a couple of times to ensure it was Rose’s mistake, not an out of body experience. "I am bemused," Butler said. "It's very disconcerting." Turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: Another George Butler, a jazz record exec who signed Wynton Marsalis, died on April 9. Rose called Butler three times on New Year’s Day, to apologize and to make sure his friend was still breathing. Butler gains extra kudos for resisting the temptation to use Mark Twain’s tired quote, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

A lot of celebratory joints will be lit this weekend as Deadheads everywhere rejoice in the news that the seminal jam band the Grateful Dead is reuniting for a tour. The band's four surviving members, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Bill Kreutzmann, will tour for the first time since 2004 this April and May. Obama inspired the reunion: The Dead began to smooth over years of infighting after performing at an Obama fundraiser in October. "It broke the ice," drummer Mickey Hart told Rolling Stone. "We were able to let some of these skeletons in our closet just fall away." Of course, the Dead will be without Jerry Garcia, the band's leader, who died in 1995, making this reunion tour a bit like The Pips without Gladys Knight, the Family Stone without Sly, and the Experience without Jimi Hendrix.