MFS - The Other News

                         Afternoon Posting.

• Two Christian brothers killed in Mosul.Iraq’s Christian community comes under attack, again. Gunmen shoot and kill two shop owners in cold blood. Iraqi Christians issue an appeal: “Pray for us persecuted Christians”.Anti-Christian violence and persecution continue in Iraq. Two days after a Christian home was attacked in Mosul (northern Iraq), two Iraqi Christians were killed in the city’s Sina’a neighbourhood.Sources told AsiaNews that unknown thugs entered a store owned by two Christian brothers, Hanna and Saad Wahad, 40 and 43 respectively, and shot them in cold blood. Saad died instantly, Hanna, two hours later.Hmmmm....outrage of the U.S. President in 3..2...."Islam is a great religion" - America is no longer a Christian country?Read the full story here.

• Holiday Drivers Face Highest Gas Prices in More Than 6 Months.Americans preparing for Thanksgiving travel face the highest gasoline prices in more than six months, with prices at the pump topping $3 per gallon in New York and on the West Coast.The average retail gasoline price was $2.89 a gallon on Nov. 15, the latest weekly reporting period, up almost three cents from the week before, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. At the end of August, drivers were paying 21 cents less a gallon, or $2.68.Analysts blame the recent price increases on temporary shutdowns at refineries in the U.S. and France, as well as on weakness in the dollar in early November, which led to higher oil prices.They predict the cost of gasoline will stop rising or will fall by the end of the year.Hmmm that falling price must be at the time that pigs start to fly and crows wear shoes?Read the full story here.

• Hundreds feared dead following festival stampede in Cambodia.Hundreds of people are believed dead following a stampede at a festival in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.The celebrations turned to tragedy this evening after a bridge on the Tonle Sap river became blocked with festival-goers heading to a concert.Officials have so far been unable to confirm the number of victims, but latest news reports have put the death toll at 339, with a further 329 injured. According to eye-witnesses, several members of the packed crowd collapsed while crossing the bridge to Koh Pich Island - a long spit of land in the river where the concert was being held to mark the end of the three-day holiday.Read and see the full story here.

• Jews have no right to Western Wall, PA 'study' says.Official paper by published by PA Ministry of Information claims Al-Buraq Wall, as it is known to Muslims, constitutes Waqf property.The Western Wall belongs to Muslims and is an integral part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Haram al-Sharif [the Noble Sanctuary], according to an official paper published on Monday by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Information in Ramallah.The paper, which has been presented as a “study,” was prepared by Al-Mutawakel Taha, a senior official with the PA Ministry of Information to “refute” Jews’ claim to the Western Wall.The new paper claims that the Western Wall, or Al-Buraq Wall as it is known to Muslims, constitutes Waqf property owned by an Algerian-Moroccan Muslim family.It claims that there isn’t one stone in the wall that belongs to the era of King Solomon.The PA ministry’s study also warned that “no Muslim or Arab or Palestinian had the right to give up one stone of the Al-Buraq Wall or other religious sites.”Hmmm....amazing how much things have improved and became clearer since Barack Hussein Obama started his peaceplan.Read the full story here.

• HT:TechDirt.President Obama, After Traveling With Naked Scanner CEO, Defends Naked Scans.From the well,-look-at-that... dept.As the whole mess with the TSA scanners has received a lot more attention in the last week or so, a few folks are noticing that ex-Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff, who's been quite busy defending the naked scanners, happens to be making a ton of money from one of the main ones, Rapiscan, made by OSI, a client of Chertoff's consulting firm. Of course, similar concerns were brought up a year ago when Chertoff was busy promoting the scanners, but it appears that many in the mainstream press continue to highlight his old Homeland Security title, while downplaying his current role making money from seeing those scanners sold. However, perhaps even more interesting is the news that President Obama was finally asked to address the whole thing this weekend, and (not surprisingly) defended the scans and the pat downs as "the only [procedures] right now that [the TSA] considers to be effective," to prevent terrorism (while also admitting that he doesn't have to go through security to get on airplanes, so he hasn't experienced the scans. No surprise there. Of course, what he didn't mention is that he just got done traveling with the CEO of OSI, the parent company of Rapiscan, the makers of the main naked scanner that is being purchased and put into all these airports. Apparently, OSI CEO, Deepak Chopra (no, not the new agey guy), "was selected to accompany US President, Barack Obama, to Mumbai and attended the US India Business Entrepreneurship meeting..."Hmmm....the best of both worlds?Read the full story here.

• CBC Investigation: Who killed Lebanon's Rafik Hariri? It wasn't until late 2007 that the awkwardly titled UN International Independent Investigation Commission actually got around to some serious investigating.By then, nearly three years had passed since the spectacular public murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri.Hariri, the builder. The billionaire tycoon who'd reclaimed Beirut's architectural heritage from the shattered cityscape of a civil war and made it his mission to restore Lebanon's mercantile leadership.Hariri, the nationalist who'd had the courage to stand against Syria, Lebanon's longtime occupier; and in his day was the most important reformer in the Middle East.The massive detonation that killed him on Feb. 14, 2005 unleashed forces no one knew were there. All of Lebanon seemed to rise up in the murder's aftermath, furiously pointing at the country's Syrian overlords.The not unreasonable assumption was that Hariri had died for opposing Damascus.Lebanon's fury quickly accomplished what the assassinated leader had failed to achieve in his lifetime.The murder gave rise to the so-called Cedar Revolution, a rare Lebanese political consensus. Syria, cowed by the collective anger, withdrew its troops.Read the full story here.Related : Kuwaiti Daily: Hizbullah Is Monitoring International Tribunal Investigators.Source. 

• Turkish, Iranian Foreign Ministers talks on phone.Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke to his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki on the phone after the NATO summit in Lisbon ended.Turkey's efforts for Iran not to be cited as the source of threat regarding the missile shield system and the outcome obtained as a result have been welcomed by the regional countries.Mottaki thanked Turkey for its principled attitude at the summit and draw attention to the importance of this attitude.Foreign Minister Davutoglu also spoke on the phone to Iran's nuclear negotiator Said Celili.The two made an assessment of the latest developments ahead of the critical meeting on December 5, of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Hmmm....."His masters voice"?Read the full story here.

• Over 1,650 German mortar shells unearthed near site of First World War's Battle of Verdun.Some 1,652 German mortar shells have been found in a small French village in the Hinterland between France and Germany - a flash point in the First World War.The village Coucy-lès-Eppes, where the shells were unearthed after a house was being constructed, is very near to the site of the Battle of Verdun, one of the major battles on the Western Front.Locals have been evacuated until Friday for safety reasons and the shells, which are almost 100 years old, will be destroyed in nearby military camps.Read the full story here.

• HT:AmnonandJonathan.Torture ? At the interrogation center! Not in the prison !Inmates have surprising amount of leeway in a maximum security jail they built themselves, writes Jason Koutsoukis in Gaza City. Naser Suleiman has what many Gazans can only dream of: a well-paid job that he loves.The director of Gaza's new maximum security prison, Suleiman is proud of the facility that he says is the territory's first prison to be built by inmates.''It's like a five-star hotel here,'' he says, pointing to the freshly painted architrave in his office.The most striking aspect of the prison is the atmosphere of leeway. Friends and relatives of the inmates walk in and out of the main entrance unhindered, more like visitors to a hospital.Also absent are the steel bars, razor wire and electric fences that are standard features in most modern prisons.''Where would anyone escape to?'' Suleiman asks, explaining the laissez-faire approach. ''The Gaza Strip is … a prison from which there is no escape.''Read the full story here.

• Sarah Palin drops 2012 presidency hint with staff visit to Iowa. Palin scouts for office space in early voting state, suggesting next week's visit will be 'more than just a book signing'.Sarah Palin has dropped another hint of her intention to run for the White House in 2012, dispatching aides to scope out office space in Iowa, the first stop in the presidential race.The "will she, won't she?" speculation about Palin in 2012 has become a Washington parlour game – as well as generating free publicity for her new book, which goes on sale this week.Palin's 16-stop schedule, unusually for a book tour, includes no readings in Los Angeles, New York or Washington DC, but has Palin spending time in states such as Iowa, Ohio and South Carolina.In addition to stoking speculation about her political ambitions, the book has escalated Palin's running feud with the media. On Saturday she obtained a court order forcing the Gawker website to take down 21 leaked pages from her new book.Hmmm..."There will be blood" - Obama might need more then Golf balls in 2012? Read the full story here.

• HT:TheBlaze.Man Arrested for Trying to Record Underwear Strip-Down at TSA Checkpoint.Planning on filming any “minimally invasive” TSA pat-downs this travel week? Think again. After trying to film his over-the-top stunt at a San Diego TSA checkpoint, Samuel Wolanyk was arrested and charged with refusing to complete the security process and trying to videotape the event.On Friday, Wolanyk opted out of the advanced imaging screening at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. When told he would need to get a pat-down, he instead stripped down to his underwear, the NBC San Diego affiliate reports.“TSA needs to see that I’m not carrying any weapons, explosives, or other prohibited substances, I refuse to have images of my naked body viewed by perfect strangers, and having been felt up for the first time by TSA the week prior (I travel frequently) I was not willing to be molested again,” Wolanyk said in a statement on Friday.TSA requested that Wolanyk put his clothes back on in order to complete the pat-down, but he refused, according to his attorney.While it’s not surprising that Wolanyk was taken into custody for stripping down (and we already knew that failure to complete the screening process could carry consequences), the charge of unlawfully recording the event is new.Read the full shutzstaffel story here.

• HT:ElderofZion.Iran's involvement in a Nazi website .Is Iran’s government sponsoring an Internet site that extols the German Nazis, their history and achievements, including the antisemitism that the current Iranian regime also supports? Or is it merely permitting one to operate in its highly censored communications' system?Here are the facts. There is a discussion group site entitled IranNazi that has an Iranian internet URL. It is written in Persian and seems to have begun on August 24. All the material on the site is pro-Nazi and features pictures of Adolph Hitler, the swastika, and goose-stepping German soldiers. There is an English-language part as well.This site pretends to be an association for the research of Nazism and to be "completely historical and scientific."It includes such topics as claims that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the well-known antisemitic forgery is true; insistence that the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis never happened and is in fact a lie; makes the prediction that Israel will collapse in five years; and highlights cartoons and satire ridiculing the Holocaust. All four of these positions are also taken by the Iranian government and official media.Iran does not have freedom of speech and certainly not freedom of the Internet. Given the tight censorship in Iran and the fact that all sites are closely monitored, permission to publish--especially to claim government sponsorship--is evidence of state backing.So is this, then, a state-backed site, showing just how far the regime has gone in boosting Nazism historically and antisemitism or a private initiative by some Iranian immigrants in the United States who are supporters of the Iranian regime? Is the statement on the site, which has not been suppressed by the government, accurate? It isn't completely clear. A very well-informed and highly credible Iranian notes that the fact that it isn't blocked "is a significant indication that the government at least does not have problem with it." The deputy minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance is Muhammad Ali Ramin, who was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's advisor on Holocaust issue and founder of Holocaust Institute in Tehran and the president of the conference of Holocaust; A Global Perspective, which denied that the mass murder of Jews never took place. Hmmm....Iran.....Turkey....hating who?Read the full story here.

• Mosque Money Shocker.The so-called Ground Zero mosque recently applied for a $5 million federal grant from a fund designed to rebuild lower Manhattan after 9/11, reports The Daily Beast’s John Avlon.Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from Ground Zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11th, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.The audacious move stands to reignite the embers of a divisive debate that dominated headlines surrounding the ninth anniversary of the attacks this fall, say people vested in the issue."If Imam Feisal and his retinue want know why they're not trusted, here's yet another reason,” says Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam and Director of the Moral Courage Project at NYU, when I asked her about the grant proposal. “The New Yorkers I speak with have questions about Park51. Requesting money from public coffers without engaging the public shows a staggering lack of empathy—especially from a man who says he's all about dialogue."Hmmm...reward for the "good" work in Indonesia 2 1/2 weeks ago?Read the full story here.

• HTLIsrael.Matzav.Video: The Obama administration shames America.Two and a half weeks ago, I reported on the United States' periodic review at the UN 'Human Rights Council.' At the time, I said that the Republican party ought to get a hold of the video for use in the next election cycle. I now have that video and it's even worse than I thought it would be.Let's go to the videotape. I'll have more afterward.The last comment on the tape was the key one: Demeaning the United States is apparently in President Obama's political interests. The key foreign policy goal of the Obama administration is to destroy the notion that America is an exceptional nation, and to cut it down to the same size as brutal dictatorships around the world. Trying to cut down America's most feisty ally by forcing it into a situation where it will have to fight for its very existence is part of the same 'strategy.'Read and see the full story here.

• Islamic Knifeman stabs Russian cop because they prevented him from living according to Sharia law.A traffic cop was stabbed at his desk in what police believe is a revenge attack following a crackdown on religious extremism.The attacker, an unemployed 18-year-old man, burst into a police station in Baskortostan, shouting “Allah-u-Akhbar” (God is great).He then stabbed Chief Lieutenant Vilmir Minnikhanov in the neck, chest and left forearm.A second officer, Seargeant Radkhika Shakirov, was also injured in the ensuing scuffle.The attacker was arrested and religious texts were found among his belongings. The literature has been taken away to be assessed for extremist content.And he told police that he had intended to kill any police officers he found because they prevented him from living according to Sharia law, Bashkortostan’s deputy interior minister Ruslan Sharafutdinov told Interfax.“We view this attack as a kind of revenge for the effective control of extremism in the country,” he added.Read the full story here.

• Israel - Archaeologists: 1,800-Year-Old Pool an Important Historical Find.It's a case of history repeating itself – at least partially. Archaeologists who have been helping to prepare an area in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City for construction of a mikveh (ritual bath) were stunned to discover that the exact same spot had been used for bathing purposes thousands of years ago. They uncovered an empty stone pool there, apparently part of an ancient Roman-era bathhouse that stood on the spot.The archaeologists dated the pool to between the years 200 and 300 C.E., meaning that the structure is at least some 1,800 years old.Read the full story here.