Written in 411 AD, the text was hidden for over 1,000 years in a vault used to store olive oil
By Martin Bailey
Fragments of the earliest dated Christian literary manuscript have been found at Deir al-Surian, an ancient monastery in the Egyptian desert. Dating from 411 AD, these were discovered under a collapsed floor of a ninth-century tower. The fragments are from the final page of a codex written in Syriac (an Eastern Aramaic language) which was acquired by the British Museum library in the 19th century.
Few manuscripts have had such an astonishing history. In 1847, British Museum librarian William Cureton said that “among all the curiosities of literature, I know of none more remarkable than the fate of this matchless volume”. We can now add a final chapter to the story.
The manuscript on Christian martyrs was written in Edessa (now Sanliurfa, Turkey), and at some point in the next five centuries it was taken eastwards. In 931, the abbot of Deir al-Surian travelled to Baghdad and brought it back to Egypt.
In 1086, a monk added a marginal note in the middle of the manuscript, expressing concern that the last page with its colophon (the scribe’s ...   more »

By Yoav Stern and Barak Ravid,
Israel has decided to send a letter of protest to the United Nations Security Council, after the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Monday that Israel was a "cancerous germ" that would soon be destroyed by the "hands of Hezbollah," Army Radio reported.
Guards commander-in-chief Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted by the Fars News Agency as saying: "In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous germ of Israel by the powerful and competent hands of the Hezbollah combatants."
The Foreign Ministry has instructed Israel's delegation to the UN to write a missive saying that the comments call for the destruction of Israel and represent severe anti-Semitism and racism, Army Radio reported.  
The letter is also expected to call on the UN to censure Iran over the comments.
Jafari made the comment in a letter to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, to offer condolences after the killing of senior guerrilla commander Imad Mughniyah in a car bomb last week in Damascus.
Iran does not recognize Israel's right to exist, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has often predicted the imminent demise of Israel.
Western analysts say the Revolutionary Guards, an ideological wing ...   more »

By DPA   
Tags: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel  
Tehran on Monday said that even after 60 years, Israel still has neither legitimacy nor any role in the Middle East, ISNA news agency reported Monday.
"The West has tried to impose a fabricated regime on the Middle East but even after 60 years, the Zionist regime (Israel) has neither gained any legitimacy nor played any role in this region," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said.
Calling United States policies in the Middle East a failure, Mottaki predicted the collapse of Israel.  
Mottaki was in Beirut last week to participate in the funeral procession for Imad Muganiyeh, a military leader of the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah who was killed in a bomb attack in Damascus last week.
Tehran, an avid supporter of Hezbollah, blamed Israel for Muganiyeh's assassination but said that such moves could not stop the struggle against Israeli "atrocities."
"The era of imposing policies on other states by military threats is over. The nations in the region will no longer surrender to any threats," Mottaki said.
Iran does not acknowledge Israel as a sovereign state and historic hostilities reached their peak following the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who ...   more »

  The United States is floating an idea to temporarily deploy NATO troops in the West Bank after Israeli troops eventually withdraw, a newspaper said on Wednesday, quoting Israeli defence officials.
General James Jones, the US special Middle East envoy, is spearheading the idea, the Jerusalem Post reported.
It said Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak had been briefed but had not finalised his position. Israel has traditionally been hostile to any suggestions of using foreign troops to help achieve peace in the region.
Under such a deal, third-party troops would be stationed in the West Bank to secure the area between the time of an Israeli withdrawal and when the Palestinian Authority is able to take over full security control.
"The deployment of such a force has come up in talks, and Jnes is known to be working on it," a senior defence official was quoted as saying. "At the moment, it's just an idea and yet to be accepted or adopted by Israel."
Asked about the report, US embassy spokesman Stewart Tuttle said only that "General Jones hasn't said anything in public about any discussions he may be having in private, and it is very early in the process." ...   more »

Negotiations focusing on a divided Jerusal must be halted, as such a move would only lead to a vacuum which would be filled by Hamas and Iran, opposition leader and Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu warned on Wednesday.
  Netanyahu says dividing Jerusalem would be a tremendous mistake
"I am not saying what to do, but what should definitely not be done is to retreat from Jerusalem, and to allow for another base of terror here, in the heart of the state," Netanyahu said during a speech at the Jerusalem Conference. "Let's be clear: Wherever we retreat, Hamas goes in. An agreement with weak Palestinian officials in the Palestinian Authority weakens them even more."
The Likud leader pointed to past Israeli withdrawals as examples of the danger posed by a divided Jerusalem.
"Two of our withdrawals brought Hizbullah and Hamas to positions of power - the withdrawal from Lebanon strengthened Hizbullah, and the withdrawal from Gaza strengthened Hamas," Netanyahu said.
"When there is an agreement with a Palestinian government which is this weak, it signals to Hamas and to Iran that Israel is leaving and Iran is able to fill the vacuum," he continued. "If we withdraw from Jerusalem, Hamas will ...   more »

By Stan Goodenough
Echoing the sentiments of his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards General Mohammed Ali Jaafari last week described Israel as "cancerus bacterium" which would soon be destroyed by "the radiation of Hizb'allah's fighters."
Jaafari expressed this belief, shared by millions throughout the Muslim and Arab world, in a letter conveying condolences to the leader of the Iranian and Syrian-supported Hizb'allah organization on the death of top terrorist Imad Mugniyah.
Similar letters of commitment to the destruction of the "Zionist entity" flooded Hizb'allah's offices, sent by, among others, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad himself.
Israel's Foreign Ministry responded to Jaafari's comments by lodging a letter of protest with the president of the United Nations Security Council.
"Jaafari's remarks express hope for the destruction of Israel. This is an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic and racist remark. We hope that the Security Council will address Israel's complaint and will publish a letter of condemnation as it has done twice in the past following statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Israel's destruction and Holocaust denial," the Ministry said.
In the words of a ministry spokesman, the comment was "shameful and unprecedented" and one UN member state ...   more »

County law gives special rights to those with 'gender identity' issues
Nearly 30,000 petition signatures are being delivered to officials in Montgomery County, Md., demanding that a public vote be held to allow citizens to decide on a law providing special rights to people with "gender identity" issues, including apparently the choice of whether to use men's or women's locker rooms and other public facilities.
Officials with Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government told WND that the organization had counted 28,000 signatures ready for delivery Monday night, and several thousand more had arrived today.
The new county law states, "Gender identity means an individual's actual or perceived gender including a person's gender-related appearance, expression, image, identity or behavior, whether or not those gender-related characteristics differ from the characteristics customarily associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."
The law, when being proposed, at one point included a specific exemption for facilities such as locker rooms, but it was deliberately removed before adoption. A county spokesman earlier told WND that he didn't think it necessary to state such issues specifically.
Michelle Turner, a spokeswoman for the citizens group that has had as many as 200 volunteers spending their weekends at shopping ...   more »

The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago.
In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth.
But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth, turns a coppery, orange or even brownish hue.
Lunar eclipses have long been associated with superstitions and signs of ill omen, especially in battle.
The defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great in the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC was foretold by soothsayers when the Moon turned blood-red a few days earlier.
And an eclipse is credited with saving the life of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1504.
Stranded on the coast of Jamaica, the explorers were running out of food and faced with increasingly hostile local inhabitants who were refusing to provide them ...   more »

There's a bold new political and cultural push on in America to make everyone dependent on government.
You don't need guns to defend yourself and your family, just call 911.
You don't need to prepare for disasters, just call 911.
You don't need to worry about paying for health care yourself, just call 911.
There isn't anything government can't do for you.
That's what we're being told.
We're all going to live in brand new utopian world, according to the swirling rhetoric of Barack Obama and the shrill demands of Hillary Clinton. We'll just tax the rich, then the rest of us will be on Easy Street. All our basic needs will be met. We'll live in a just and fair society.
It's amazing so many people actually believe this stuff – especially after social experiments like this have failed miserably over the last century – resulting in massive suffering and deaths numbered in the hundreds of millions.
But believe they do.
I'm not sure there's any way to reason with people who are intellectually dysfunctional – whose own greed and envy motivate them to resemble the French revolutionaries far more than our own American revolutionaries.
Having said that, let's ...   more »

When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of "some damn fool thing in the Balkans."
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the first world war.
In the spring 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation's cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War.
We bombed Serbia, we were told, to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But there was no genocide. This was propaganda. The United Nations' final casualty count of Serbs and Albanians in Slobodan Milosevic's war did not add up to 1 percent of the dead in Mr. Lincoln's war.
Albanians did flee in the tens of thousands during the war. But since that war's end, the Serbs of Kosovo have seen their churches and monasteries smashed and vandalized and have been ethnically cleansed in the scores of ...   more »