MFS - The Other News

                        Morning Posting.

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity Japan 5.1 ! More info here.

• Japan : For the most accurate info on the nuclear disaster go to : Paul Langley's Nuclear History Blog.Here.

• Live Video From New York's "March on Wallstreet" events : Here.

• Breaking story - Germany four Islamists arrested before German reunification festivities.(DWWorld).By David Levitz.German authorities have arrested four suspected Islamists believed to have plotted a "state-endangering act" ahead of festivities to celebrate German reunification.Police announced Sunday that three men were arrested near the western German city of Bonn, where around 100,000 were expected to take part in German Unity Day celebrations attended by both Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff. A further suspect was taken in custody and later released in the state of Hesse.Authorities had received information that the men, whom they described as being "from the Islamist scene," had illegally obtained weapons ahead of the events. But police found "no weapons or other dangerous objects" during their searches."There is neither evidence that the accused had links to terrorist groups nor that there were concrete preparations for an attack," said a spokesman for the Federal Prosecutions Office.The agency, which handles domestic terrorist threats and has said it is tracking some 200 potential Islamist terrorists in Germany, did not see sufficient grounds for it to take over the investigation from the local police force.Authorities also said they did not know of any concrete threats to the festivities, which are are set to continue through Monday October 3, the 21st anniversary of German reunification.Prior to the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, police in Berlin arrested two suspected terrorists, who are still being held for questioning.Read the full story here.

• Wall Street protests spread to other cities.(AlJazeera). Protests inspired by "Occupy Wall Street" movement have emerged in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.Members of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement have vowed to stay through winter in a park near New York's iconic financial district, where they are protesting issues including the 2008 bank bailouts, foreclosures and high unemployment in the United States.Protests inspired by New York's have emerged in other US cities in recent days, including Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.A group in Boston has taken on the tactics of New York's protesters and on Friday night set itself up in the city's Dewey Square. Activists remained camped out at what they called "the heart of the financial district" on Saturday."We are establishing our subsection of a national dialogue on finance reform and governance reform," Nadeem Mazen, an organiser with Occupy Boston, told Al Jazeera.Mazen said that the Boston protest quickly drew a thousand people. "It shows that we're experienced and that we've all been independently thinking about what change we want to see. .. I think we're all very hungry for change."The New York campaign is based in Zuccotti Park - formerly Liberty Plaza Park - just across from the World Trade Center site.The movement has gained the support of five New York labour unions, as well as celebrities and academics such as Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, rapper Lupe Fiasco and the musical group Radiohead.More than 1,000 demonstrators, who have camped out in New York's financial centre for over two weeks, marched on Friday to New York's police headquarters to protest to what they viewed as a heavy-handed police response earlier on in their demonstration.Some held banners criticising police, while others chanted: "We are the 99 per cent" and "The banks got bailed out, we got sold out".Police observed Friday's march and kept protesters on the sidewalk, but no clashes were reported. They said no arrests were made before protesters dispersed from the police headquarters after the march by 8pm."No to the NYPD crackdown on Wall Street protesters," organisers had said on their website, promoting the march.Other online flyers for the march critiqued local police policies: "No to Stop-and-Frisk in Black and Latino neighborhoods" and "No to Spying and Harassment of Muslim Communities".The protest came less than a week after police arrested 80 Occupy Wall Street members during a march toward a main shopping district - the most arrests by New York police at a demonstration since hundreds were detained outside the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 2004.A city police commander used pepper spray on four women at last weekend's march and a video of the incident subsequently went viral on the internet, angering many protesters who vowed to continue their protests indefinitely.Hmmm......'Obama's Army' on the march?Read the full story here.

• Who’s Behind The ‘Occupy Everywhere’ Faux-tests?(BigGovernment).With the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests starting the catch on in the media after the arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge and protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Occupy Whatever meme is coming to a city near you. Occupy Dallas! is coming to my town October 6th and I’ll head down there to interview people because that’s what I do. While I was looking up info about the event, I came across a Facebook page that really sums up what is really going on here.

This isn’t a protest against the government

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Not really. The is the guise that it’s under. It’s using the iconography of protest to actually SUPPORT the government status quo – specifically public employees. See, they can’t get a lot of support if they come out and say “Protest to keep out cushy pensions!” because who is going to show up for THAT, right?Look who is holding the event on civil disobedience.. it’s the North Texas Association of Public Employees – -a group connected to the Steelworkers.Public Employees are going to be showing people how to protest effectively against other public employees, like the police? This is a puppet show Play a little Rage Against The Machine for a soundtrack and the kids won’t notice that they are actually protesting to support the government bureaucrats.Hmmmm.......Anyone starting to see a 'command structure' behind it?Read the full story here.

• The states hardest hit by the economic crisis are also the ones that President Obama may need the most to win reelection.(NationalJournal).The nine states that switched from voting for George W. Bush in 2004 to Barack Obama in 2008 experienced a greater decline in their median family income than did the nation overall.It’s the same story in the partially overlapping list of 14 states in which Obama attracted between 45 and 55 percent of the vote last time. Both groups, according to separate employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, have also lost a higher percentage of their jobs since 2008 than the nation overall.That’s because the economic crisis did much of its deepest damage in the Rust Belt, which includes many of American politics’ traditional battlegrounds, and in the Sun Belt, which contains many of the newly emerging swing states. This concentration compounds President Obama’s political challenge as he works to assemble a 270-vote Electoral College majority. “It will force him to play defense and put into play states that he didn’t expect to have to defend,” Republican pollster Glen Bolger says.The president still has some time for the economy to show more signs of life—and a potential case to make even if it doesn’t. Across the country, the pain under Obama’s watch is a continuation of the crisis that began late in George W. Bush’s presidency. But, even so, the census results suggest that in essentially no state could the president feel safe asking voters the question that Ronald Reagan made famous: Are you better off than you were four years ago?No state avoided losses on at least one of the three major census measures that NJ analyzed: median family income, poverty, and access to health insurance. The pictures on income and poverty are especially sobering. From 2008 through 2010, the median family income, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, declined in every state except North Dakota, which enjoyed a 5 percent increase thanks to an oil and natural-gas boom.Twenty states saw their median family incomes plummet at least a dizzying 5 percent over those two years. The largest losses were clustered in the twin poles of Sun Belt and Rust Belt states: on the one hand, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Nevada, Alabama, North Carolina, California, and South Carolina; on the other, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. (Oregon was the only state among the dozen largest losers that is not in either the Sun Belt or the Rust Belt.) A more diverse list of 17 other states lost between 3 and 5 percent of median family income.On poverty, the damage was equally dispersed, although the patterns of distress were less uniform. From 2008 to 2010, the share of people living in poverty increased in every state except Montana (whose small improvement in its poverty rate was within the survey’s margin of error). In a dozen states, the proportion of residents living in poverty increased by at least 20 percent over just those two years; in another 25 states, the poverty rate increased by at least 10 percent. After this rapid deterioration, at least one in 10 residents are now living in poverty in every state except Alaska, Maryland (both registered a hardly comforting 9.9 percent), and New Hampshire (at 8.3 percent).The picture is more mixed on access to health insurance. From 2008 to 2010, the share of residents without insurance rose in 35 states, with Hawaii, Rhode Island, Kansas, Virginia, and Kentucky experiencing the largest increases. In another 15 states, the percentage of uninsured people declined. But in each direction, most of the changes were quite small and in many cases within the survey’s margin of error (which varies by state). In no state did the pool of people without insurance increase or decrease by more than 1.8 percentage points. On health care, then, the overall picture is one of stagnation over the past two years.At least 10 percent of residents are uninsured in all but nine states. Massachusetts—with just 4.4 percent, the lowest rate in the union—is the bookend to the unequaled 23.7 percent who are uninsured in Texas.The trends in employment complete the picture of a continent-sized storm. From December 2008 through August 2011, the latest month for which BLS figures are available, the number of people with jobs declined in every state except three big energy producers: Texas (where employment increased a slim 0.4 percent), Alaska (up 1.9 percent), and North Dakota (up 7.2 percent). Nevada was the biggest loser: It has shed a stunning 8 percent of its jobs since 2008. Georgia and Arizona also suffered losses greater than 5 percent, followed by Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas, Delaware, California, and Indiana.Measured in absolute rather than percentage terms, 10 states have lost at least 100,000 jobs since December 2008. Once again, the big losers cluster around the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt. In the former, they include California (by far the most affected with nearly 600,000 jobs gone), Florida (276,000 lost), Georgia (211,000), North Carolina, and Arizona. The big Rust Belt losers were Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. (Among the biggest losers, New Jersey is the only state to break that regional pattern.)In parallel fashion, the unemployment rate increased over that same period in every state except North Dakota. As of August, nine states reported double-digit unemployment, most of them along the Sun Belt: from North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida in the East to California and Nevada in the West. (Michigan and Rhode Island are the other two.)Across all these fronts, only a few factors appeared to provide even partial shelter from the storm. On many measures, as noted above, the energy-rich states of Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Alaska performed somewhat better than other states. Likewise, the 10 states with the highest proportion of college graduates suffered proportionally smaller losses in income and jobs than the other 40. But even that defense wasn’t impregnable: The states ranked 11 through 20 in college graduates experienced even greater income and job losses than those below them on the educational ladder.Read the full story here.

• 'Muslims Against Crusades' Hold Memorial Prayers for Anwar Al-Awlaki in London - Led by Anjem Choudhary.(Memri).On October 1, 2011, at a demonstration it held outside the Syrian Embassy in London, the radical Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades condemned the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Addressing the protesters, group leader Anjem Choudhary condemned Awlaki's killing, calling it a "murder." He said that Awlaki died as a martyr, and that the jihad will continue despite his death. After he finished speaking, Choudhary led the protesters in a memorial prayer for Al-Awlaki.Choudhary's address and the prayer are seen in a clip uploaded to YouTube channel of the Muslims Against Crusades group.Read and see the full story here.

• Scantily-clad 'slutwalk' women march on New York after police tell them to 'cover up' to avoid rape.(DailyMail).Protesters dressed in their underwear have taken to the streets of New York today after it emerged the NYPD were warning women in Brooklyn to cover up in the face of sex attacks.The latest 'slutwalk' protest comes a day after women in Park Slope were warned short skirts should not be worn and shorts that show too much leg have been deemed inappropriate.On today's march the protesters chanted 'No means no - however we dress, wherever we go.Speaking to the New York Post, organiser Sammy Lifson, 21, said: 'The cops in Park Slope have really stepped up their presence and they're trying to be helpful.'But to focus on women isn't going to help catch the perpetrator.'The international series of protests known as SlutWalks, sparked by a Toronto police officer's flippant comment that women should avoid dressing like 'sluts' to avoid being raped or victimised, is taking root in the United States.Some women and men who protest dress in nothing more remarkable than jeans and T-shirts, while others wear provocative or revealing outfits to bring attention to 'slut-shaming,' or shaming women for being sexual, and the treatment of sexual assault victims.The police officer made his comments in January to a group of York University students at a safety forum.He later apologised, but his comments were publicised widely on Facebook and Twitter.They inspired a march in Toronto that drew more than 3,000 people, as well as SlutWalks since then in Dallas, Asheville, North Carolina, and Ottawa, Ontario.The movement has since spread around the world, with slut walks organised in several countries.Yesterday's ‘advice’ was given out in response to at least 10 unsolved sexual attacks that have taken place in the area since March.But in Park Slope, which is famous for being liberal and feminist, the campaign has provoked fury.Jessica Silk, founder of neighbourhood watch group Safe Slope, told the Wall St Journal that such a measure was 'completely inappropriate'.One of the women who had been spoken to, who identified herself only as Lauren, told how she was three block from her home when she was stopped for wearing shorts and a T-shirt.The 25-year-old claimed a cop asked to speak to her then did the same to two other women wearing dresses.Lauren claimed he asked if she knew about the sex attacks and when they all replied yes he 'pointed at my outfit and said, "Don't you think your shorts are a little short?"'He pointed at their dresses and said they were showing a lot of skin,' she said.Lauren claimed the cop said such clothes could make the rapist think he could get 'easy access'.The officer then said that they were 'exactly the kind of girl this guy is targeting'.Read the full story here.

• Israel formally accepts Quartet formula for resuming talks.(JPost).Israel on Sunday formally accepted the Quartet's proposal for re-starting negotiations with the Palestinians, following a meeting between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his senior ministers."Israel welcomes the Quartet's call for direct negotiations without pre-conditions with the Palestinian Authority, which was already suggested by US president Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, even though Israel has a number of reservations which it will bring up in the negotiations."The statement called on the PA to enter negotiations without delay.Asked about Netanyahu's acceptance of the Quartet's initiative, Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said "returning to negotiations requires Israel to commit to stopping settlement."Abu Rdainah said that Israel also must recognize the "1967 borders" lines that existed before its occupation of the West Bank in a Middle East war that year.Following Netanyahu and Abbas's speeches to the UN last month, during which Abbas said he was filing a request to the Security Council for full UN membership for "Palestine," the Quartet issued a formula for renewing talks.The statement urged the parties "to overcome the current obstacles and resume direct bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without delay or preconditions." It proposed a "preparatory meeting" between the parties within a month to agree to an agenda and "method of proceeding in the negotiation," and suggested that the two sides commit to the objective of reaching an agreement "within a timeframe agreed to by the parties but not longer than the end of 2012."The statement also said the expectation is that the parties will come up with a comprehensive proposal on territory and security within three months, and to have made "substantial progress" within six months. To facilitate this, an international conference will be held in Moscow "at the appropriate time."Netanyahu has in the past objected to the idea – as presented in the Quartet proposal – of isolating security and territories from the other core issues of Jerusalem and refugees, saying that if an agreement on the territorial issue was reached, the Palestinians would have no incentive to compromise later on the issues of refugees and Jerusalem. Rather, his position in the past was that all issues should be discussed simultaneously.Read the full story here.

• Report: Biden torpedoed Pollard's pardon.(YNet). Did US Vice President Joseph Biden stop President Barack Obama from pardoning convicted spy Jonathan Pollard? According to the New York Times, the answer is yes. The NYT reported Saturday that in a recent meeting between Biden and 15 rabbis in Florida – meant to bolster the Jewish community's support of the Obama's 2012 presidential campaign – the vice president was asked about the Obama administration's reluctance to release Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1986 after he was convicted of spying for Israel. “President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, 'Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time is up,'" Biden reportedly told the group. “If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life.” The issue of Pollard's pardon has been the proverbial thorn in all recent US administrations' side: Jerusalem and a seemingly ever-growing group of Pollard supporters say that after serving 25 years in prison, Washington can afford to release Pollard without losing face. Washington, however, has so far refused.Obama is said to be relying on Biden for help with one particular core group of voters – American Jews. The US Jewish community tends to vote Democratic, but given their disapproval of the Obama Administration's policies towards Israel, those votes can no longer be considered "a sure thing."Biden has been tasked with fund-raising among Jewish Democrats, while reassuring the party’s base that the Obama administration remains a loyal friend to Israel.According to the NYT, Biden admitted to the rabbis that "the administration had made a few missteps in its handling of the Israel relationship," but made no further reference to the Pollard issue.The NYT believed that Washington's adamant refusal to pardon Pollard is unlikely to cost Obama the support of US Jews, especially after his pro-Israel speech at the United Nations last week.Read the full story here.

• I was blindfolded, then tortured and sexually attacked until I 'confessed': Doctor facing jail after treating Bahrain riot victims tells of her terrifying ordeal.(DailyMail).She says her only crime was treating the injured as they were brought to hospital during the riots that engulfed the kingdom of Bahrain.For this offence, Dr Fatima Haji was dragged out of her house at midnight by 30 plain-clothes police officers brandishing guns. She says she was then taken blindfolded to a secret interrogation centre, before being tortured and repeatedly sexually assaulted until she signed documents confessing her ‘crimes’.And she was kept in solitary confinement for another 22 days, before being released on bail. Now the 33-year-old doctor has been sentenced to five years in jail. Though not yet imprisoned, she waits anxiously for government forces to drag her away at any moment.Dr Haji, who has a three-year-old son, Yusuf, said: ‘Every time I hug my boy, it could be my last. Every time I call him to me, I know it could be the last time I hold him.’Dr Haji was one of 20 doctors and nurses who were sentenced to jail terms of between five and 15 years at a special military tribunal on Friday.They were accused of conspiring to overthrow the monarchy by supporting the anti-government protests that broke out earlier this year.The medics were accused of using ambulances to transport protesters and ammunition. Dr Haji herself was accused of stealing blood bags to give to the protesters who used them to fake injuries. She claims the court refused to send for witnesses the defendants had requested, so some turned up of their own free will and demanded to be heard. Even then, the judge directed the lawyers to ask certain questions only.Dr Haji is on bail as she appeals, but the authorities can put her in jail any time and insist that she challenges her sentence from prison. The Arab Spring that had swept through Tunisia and Egypt arrived at the tiny island kingdom in the Persian Gulf in February. Hundreds of protesters gathered in the capital, Manama, demanding more democratic freedoms from the ruling Al-Khalifa family. At least 35 people have since been killed in a government crackdown. Friday’s sentencing was condemned by Western governments and human rights groups. Foreign Secretary William Hague said: ‘I am deeply concerned. These are worrying developments.’Dr Haji was among 3,000 staff working at the Salmaniya Medical Complex hospital in Manama when the protests erupted. Speaking to The Mail on Sunday by telephone, she said that the majority of the casualties were taken there for treatment, and the hospital became a focus for the world’s media.‘We were filmed treating patients. This meant we appeared on the Al-Jazeera TV news channel and the government did not like that,’ she said. At midnight one night in April, about 30 plain-clothes police officers barged into her house and dragged her out. Her 34-year-old husband, Jalal Al-Marzook, a doctor at the same hos¬pital, was not at home. But they were not looking for him. Dr Haji says she was taken to an interrogation centre and punched and kicked while blindfolded. Then she was kept standing for several days without food and water, and sexually molested.‘I don’t know how many men there were as I was blindfolded, but I heard many voices. They said they would rape me,’ she said. ‘They told me they knew which nursery Yusuf was in, and would get him. That’s when I broke and said I’d do anything they wanted.’She then signed a number of documents which she later learned were confessions. She was kept in detention for another three weeks, then released on bail. Dr Haji still can’t believe how the year has changed so drastically for her – at the start of 2011 she was on holiday in London with her family. Now, though, she is in despair. ‘I am innocent. I was just doing my job. Now I feel scared for my life and my son.’The Bahraini government said it has firm evidence against the 20 people sentenced on Friday. An official at the country’s embassy in London said suspects in custody in Bahrain were not tortured. And a spokesman added: ‘They [the medical staff] were convicted of very serious offences. ‘But this is just the first stage in the judicial process and they have the right of appeal in a civilian court.‘We have appointed an independent commission to investigate the other allegations.’Read the full story here.

• Egypt’s tourism down 80 percent, says minister.(BikyaMasr).CAIRO: Egypt’s tourism industry was down 80 percent during the last period, the country Tourism Minister Munir Fakhry Abdel Nour said in an interview with al-Dostour newspaper.He said that Jordanians made up the largest number of visitors to the country in the last quarter, with the Red Sea becoming a popular destination for the country’s travelers.Abdel Nour said the problem of decreasing Arab tourists could “only be resolved with joint Arab cooperation.”In areas such as Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada, tourism has made a huge recovery. Moustafa al-Fayomee, a Hurghada resident and tour guide told Bikyamasr.com he believes tourism in the aforementioned areas are currently booming.“The nightclubs and bars are crowded,” he said. “Red Sea tourism is still very popular, but not many people want to stay in Cairo, they prefer to do small excursions there. Luxor and Aswan are still quite empty according to my friends in the industry there.”Official figures have shown that the decline in tourism is slowly receding. During the first quarter of the year, tourism fell by 45.7 percent compared to the previous year. In the second quarter that decrease was 35.4 percent and the figures for July have shown a decrease of 28 percent.The tourism industry is the main source of income for roughly 10 percent of the Egyptian workforce.While the leisure tourism industry in prominent party areas such as Hurghada are making a steady recovery, places like Aswan and Cairo have yet to see the conventional tourist return en masse.“Traditionally the volume of tourism is split around 80 percent on the Red Sea coast and 20 percent in the Nile valley for the archaeology there,” Abdel Nour said.“But in this period, tourists have avoided the valley because the political activity is centred in the capital and in the large cities, so people have preferred to head to the beaches, which are relatively far away,” he added.Egypt has launched an enormous promotional campaign to revitalize all sectors of tourism in the country. According to Abdel Nour, Egypt “is totally secure” and “does not present any danger to visitors.”Abdel Nour has also said he wishes to promote Egypt to the emerging markets of China, Brazil, India and Argentina. “We want to get off the beaten track. We must look at new economic forces, which have become important markets,” he said.The minister has also revealed their plan to expand on the types of tourism that are already present, and tapping in to markets such as ecological tourism and therapy tourism, both fairly recent types of tourism which have greatly expanded over the last decade.Eco-tourism is a growing market which focuses on maintaining a sustainable form of tourism, to minimise the carbon footprint in an area and to foster a greater respect and understanding for the local culture and environment. Eco-tourism itself is one of the fastest growing forms of tourism worldwide, and many environmentalists have been in favor of promoting a sustainable form of tourism.“When people arrive en masse anywhere they naturally cause damage to the environment,” Marie-Lou Meslin, a student who has lived in Indonesia most of her life, told Bikyamasr.com, “in Bali specifically, the tourism has been so emphasized that it has had a very negative impact on the environment as well as the culture. The ramifications for it are enormous.”Referring to tourism in general, Meslin spoke of the dramatic change she has seen in the last two decades in the ‘paradise’ island of Bali as a general view of mass tourism.“Without a sustainable system in place which limits the passive impact tourists have, many natural environments which were once considered pristine, or heritage sites themselves which slowly deteriorate over time, will be spoiled at an increased rate,” she added.There were more than 10 million tourists that had visited Egypt in 2008. With Egypt boasting the oldest structures in existence, the pyramids, mitigating the damage caused by tourists would in the long run allow them to maintain such a tourist attraction in better form.Hmmmm.....Perhaps covering up the Sphinx might help?Read the full story here.

• Christians dispossessed and silenced Muslim population in Mindanao.(AsiaNews). Manila - In Jolo, Marawi, Basilan and other areas of Mindanao, the Christian minority is suffering harassment and pressure from the Muslim population, AsiaNews' sources in Mindanao say. Government officials are forcing Christians to sell their land to make room for Chinese industries. According to sources, the climate of impunity, the abductions, the continuing clashes between the army and extremist Islamic groups and the economic crisis have created an unbearable atmosphere for the Christian population, who are afraid to express their faith in public."Jolo Cathedral", they explain, "is located at the center of the city, and has always been a symbol of unity and friendship between Muslims and Christians. Until a few years ago, the main door was open at all hours, but due to the continuous episodes of vandalism, the Cathedral can now be accessed only through the side entrance. The churchyard is guarded day and night by military and police." Sources say that the situation is the same in Basilan and Cotabato. Here in recent weeks both churches were hit with paper bombs that damaged the part of the walls and windows. These acts provide publicity for the young extremists, who learn intolerance against Christians from unscrupulous preachers, often funded by foreign countries, who aim to spread a restrictive and fundamentalist vision of Islam. "The situation is very difficult", AsiaNews sources explain, "Christians are not permitted to react. The only alternative to escape is to suffer these abuses in silence." For Fr. Sebastiano D'Ambra, PIME missionary in Zamboanga and founder of Silsilah ("chain"), a movement for interreligious dialogue, there are nevertheless some signs of hope that could change the future situation of these provinces, considered the most dangerous on the entire archipelago. "In Basilan", he says, "we have organized a series of meetings with Muslim and Christian leaders where we recounted our experience of interreligious dialogue made in other cities and listened to the problems experienced by the local population. This has sparked a relationship among the various local religious leaders, including the bishop and high Islamic authorities, who for several months have been collaborating to address the problems of the two communities." From this experience of dialogue was born the Interfaith Council of Leaders, which aims to get Christians and Muslims to meet to discuss concrete facts and not theoretical problems. For example, the priest explains that Basilan's population has no access to electricity. To solicit the government, representatives of the Christian and Muslim communities wrote a manifesto of protest, with some concrete proposals useful in addressing the problem. "What we propose", said Fr. D'Ambra, "is a spirit of dialogue that touches on all aspects, not only matters of religion. Our task is not simply to speak of dialogue, but to respond in a concrete way to the reality that surrounds us."Read the full story here.