AMMAN, April 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Petra, one of Jordan's leading tourist attractions, has drawn around 100,000 visitors and earned 1.41 million US dollars during the first quarter of this year, a Jordanian tourism official said on Sunday.
Visitors to the ancient city of Petra in the first quarter this year accounted for around 35 percent of total arrivals in 2004, said Malek Amarat, head of the Tourism Department in Petra.

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A vast array of previously unintelligible manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome are being read for the first time thanks to infra-red light, in a breakthrough hailed as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail.
The technique could see the number of accounted-for ancient manuscripts increase by one fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling of some lost Christian gospels.

A team at Oxford University is using the technology to bring back into view faded ink on thousands of papyrus scrolls salvaged from an ancient rubbish dump in the 19th century.

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Van Impe pays tribute to Pope John Paul and explains why is embracing Roman Catholicism - he compares his conversion to the Apostle Paul and his Damascus Road experience - he states that he was once a right-wing fundamentalist who put down Roman Catholics but now he has been converted...
This commentary documents the current agenda in the church to promote a number of popular trends that are preparing Christians to embrace an experiential, liturgical, sacramental and extrabiblical form of Christianity that may well be a bridge to the Roman Catholic Church and eventually a one-world religion.

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By Joseph Farah
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower, say U.S. intelligence sources, top scientists and western missile industry experts.

The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight.

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By DAVID E. SANGER
 
WASHINGTON, April 24 - The Bush administration, facing a series of recent provocations from North Korea, is debating a plan to seek a United Nations resolution empowering all nations to intercept shipments in or out of the country that may contain nuclear materials or components, say senior administration officials and diplomats who have been briefed on the proposal.

The resolution envisioned by a growing number of senior administration officials would amount to a quarantine of North Korea, though, so far at least, President Bush's aides are not using that word. It would enable the United States and other nations to intercept shipments in international waters off the Korean Peninsula and to force down aircraft for inspection.

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April 24, 2005
ANGRY Arab protestors mobbed the Greek Orthodox patriarch during a religious procession in Jerusalem's Old City, enraged over a scandal involving the alleged sale of politically sensitive land to Jewish investors.

As hundreds of Christian pilgrims waving palm branches flocked to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate Orthodox Palm Sunday, scores of Arab Christians joined the crowds, booing and shouting "Shame on you" as Patriarch Irineos I left the basilica following a three-hour service.

Shouting angrily in Arabic and Greek, they waved posters bearing slogans denouncing Irineos, one of which read: "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" in reference to the betrayal of Jesus by one of his disciples just before he was crucified.

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By Jon Kyl
Saturday, April 16, 2005; Page A19

Recently a Senate Judiciary subcommittee of which I am chairman held a hearing on a major threat to the American people, one that could come not only from terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda but from rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies -- terrorist or otherwise. And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years.

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