Rice Visits Birthplace of ‘My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’
  US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prayed at the Biblical birthplace of Jesus Christ on Wednesday, promoting religion in the quest for Middle East peace during intense diplomacy.
"Being here at the birthplace of my lord and saviour Jesus Christ has been a very special and moving experience," said the top US diplomat, a devout Christian whose father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers.
Blanket security was clamped across the West Bank town of Bethlehem, whose tourism lifeline has been hard hit by the violence which erupted following the breakdown of the last US-sponsored peace talks.
Armed Palestinian security officers lined the streets as her armoured convoy swept past shuttered shops and practically empty streets as few locals turned out to see the first visit by a US secretary of state in nearly a decade.
Wearing a light green trouser suit, Rice spent about half an hour inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, visiting its Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic chapels and the exact spot where Christians believe Christ was born.
She prayed and later emerged, saying her visit had been a personal reminder of the power of ...   more »

By Stan Goodenough
The head of the Likud Party's foreign relations department gave a massive boost to the claims of Islam - Israel's most implacable enemy - Tuesday when he inferred that Jerusalem's Temple Mount was not sacred to the Jewish people.
The Temple Mount is the Jewish people's holiest site.
Arab and other Muslim leaders and clerics, who assert that the hill is Islam's third holiest site, have long and fiercely maintained that the Jews have no historical connection or claim to the outcrop the Bible calls God's "holy hill."
While secular Jews often appear content to limit their "right" to the Western Wall, Israelis who have the fear of the Lord and who know that their nation's First and Second Temples were built on top of the mount will not agree to relinquishing it to the followers of another god.
Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to the United States, and traditionally a right thinker on Israeli security issues, told a meeting of the Foreign Press Association that the Likud - which is led by former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - could allow an Arab or Muslim country to administer the site for the sake of securing peace for ...   more »