BY AMNON RUBINSTEIN-The pope's dictum about Islam and the inevitable follow up — demonstrations, church burnings, assassinations, and the expected apology — are part of a wider scene: the precarious position of Christian communities in the Middle East as a result of a radicalized Islam.Arab Christian communities identify with Arab nationalism — indeed, Christian Arabs were the founding fathers of this movement. They share with their Muslim brethren a common language, ethnic origin, and a total rejection of Israel. But the new mood of politicized Islam has made life harder for the members of these ancient communities. The result has been a massive emigration of Christians from the Middle East to the West and a dwindling of their numbers in the region.Ivan Rioufol, in a column in the French daily Le Figaro of May 26, 2006, breaks with the traditional French approach of blaming every ill on the Israeli-Arab conflict, highlighting the plight of Christian communities in the Muslim world. Mr. Rioufol estimates that the Christian population of Iran has been decimated and that similar "cleansing" has been "observed in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt."He notes other instances of anti-Christian persecution: 156 churches and convents destroyed in Bosnia and ...   more »

Scientists have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. To creatures or machines that see only in microwave light, the cloaked object would appear nearly invisible.
"The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region," said study team member David Smith at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. "So it looks as if they just passed through free space."
The device [image] only works in the microwave range of light, so cloaked objects are still visible to humans. Also, it only works in two dimensions and only for microwaves moving in a plane. A three-dimensional invisibility cloak would hide an object completely.The microwave cloak is also slightly reflective and casts a partial shadow.
Despite these shortcomings, however, the new device is "a very good achievement," said Ulf Leonhardt, a theorist at the University of St. Andrews in England who was not involved in the study.
"It's surprising that it's as simple as it is and that it works so well," Leonhardt said in a related news article about the work in the ...   more »

By Bob Unruh
If you like sexually transmitted diseases, shootings and high teen pregnancy rates, by all means, send your children to public schools. That's the word from a leader in the fast-growing movement within the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention for parents to pull their children from those schools in favor of homeschooling.
The program is called Exit Strategy and Pastor Wiley Drake, whose home state of California has done some things especially offensive to Christians this year, is a leading promoter.
In an interview with WND, he said that those problems and others are prevalent in public schools, and some Christian leaders even have said it could be considered child abuse just to register children in such a facility.
That's why resolutions encouraging members of the nation's largest Protestant church organization to exit public schools have been submitted in every SBC state and regional convention in the U.S., he said.
"Basically, (the education system) has been saying, 'You have to let us teach your kids anything we want,'" said Wiley, citing some of the pro-homosexual material being required in public education.
"Well, we don't like it and we're not going to put up with it," he said.
The ...   more »