Between blasts of rockets and mortar fire, Syrians used loudspeakers to call for blood donations and medical supplies Thursday in the stricken city of Homs, where a weeklong government offensive has created a deepening humanitarian crisis.

Government forces are trying to crush pockets of violent resistance in Homs, the epicenter of an 11-month-old uprising that has brought the country ever closer to civil war. The intense shelling in restive neighborhoods such as Baba Amr has made it difficult to get medicine and care to the wounded, and some areas have been without electricity for days, activists say.

“Snipers are on all the roofs in Baba Amr, shooting at people,” Abu Muhammad Ibrahim, an activist in Homs, told The Associated Press by phone.

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We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway””an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries….

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Eliat, Israel–Vacationers in this glittering holiday city by the Israeli-Egyptian border, stroll along a seaside promenade trying to forget their nation’s troubles.

“We try not to think about politics too much,” said Nikhama Prat, pushing her 3-year-old son in a carriage along the wood-planked walkway. “There is always something happening with Israel. We’re threatened all the time.”
In a country endemic with strife, there are mixed feelings among Israelis over whether growing threats from Iran, or immediate localized issues, are of greatest concern.

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Heavy artillery fire has been rocking Homs, as Syrian troops step up an assault on the restive city.

A BBC correspondent there describes almost constant blasts, in the fiercest attack in the 11-month uprising.

US President Barack Obama said it was important to resolve the conflict without outside military intervention.

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Heavy artillery fire has been rocking Homs, as Syrian troops step up an assault on the restive city.

A BBC correspondent there says attacks resumed early on Monday with almost constant explosions.

Rebels say a clinic is being targeted in one of the fiercest assaults on the city in the 11-month uprising.

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Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams met with Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar on Thursday during a week-long personal pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank.

The office of the Diocese of Jerusalem of the Anglican Church said that during Williams’ visit he emphasized “the importance of constructive dialogue and co-existence between all religions,” and the need to “consolidate the peace process between the people of this region.”

Invited by the head of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem Bishop Suheil Dawani, Williams was on a private tour and so did not make any public statements.

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Western commentators typically attribute such behavior to Putin’s personal paranoia or to attempts to rekindle the nation’s wounded pride and assert Russia’s superpower status. Look a little closer, however, and Russia’s actions seem motivated more by calculated — albeit sometimes miscalculated — realpolitik than by psychological impulses.

First, strategic interests are at stake. In Tartus, Syria hosts the sole remaining Russian naval base on the Mediterranean, currently being refurbished by 600 Russian technicians after long disuse. To have to give up this Middle Eastern beachhead would be a shame, as far as the Russians are concerned.

Second, although limited, Russia has real commercial interests in Syria.

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The Egyptian government intends to prosecute at least 40 people, including some U.S. citizens, as part of an investigation into nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funding, state media reported Sunday.

The announcement came a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the Egyptian Foreign Ministry that failure to quickly resolve the probe could jeopardize the more than $1.3 billion Egypt expects to get this year in U.S. aid.

“We are very clear that there are problems that arise from this situation that can impact all the rest of our relationship in Egypt,” Clinton told reporters while attending an international conference in Munich in which she met with her Egyptian counterpart. “We don’t want that.”

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as a “travesty” Russia and China’s veto of a UN resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown against anti-government protesters.

Speaking in Bulgaria, Mrs Clinton said efforts outside the world body to help Syria’s people should be redoubled.

The US, she said, would work with “friends of a democratic Syria” to support opponents of Syria’s president.

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Thirty-five Ethiopian Christians, 29 of them women, face deportation from Saudi Arabia for “illicit mingling” after police raided a private prayer gathering, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.

The New York-based watchdog said the women were subjected to “unwarranted strip search,” while the men were beaten and insulted as “unbelievers”.

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A defiant Russia resisted intense pressure from the West and several Arab countries yesterday for a strong United Nations resolution demanding President Bashar al-Assad steps aside to end the political violence in Syria and speed a transition to democracy.

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Alain Juppé, the French Foreign Minister and several Arab ministers were in New York for a Security Council meeting as fighting between government troops and regime opponents worsened.

However, as negotiations on the final text continued, there was no sign that Moscow, Syria’s most important ally, would consent to any wording that called on Mr Assad to go or that authorised military action.

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From her home in a labyrinth of stonewalled alleyways, Samia Ramsis holds a key chain bearing the face of the Virgin Mary as she sits in her yellow pajamas on the morning of Orthodox Christmas.

Sunlight pours in through a window. Outside, visitors come to look upon the spot where Egypt’s Christians ”” most known as Copts ”” believe the Holy Family found refuge after fleeing Bethlehem and assassins sent by King Herod to kill the baby Jesus.

Once crowded with Christians, Cairo’s Coptic quarter where Samia lives with her husband, Mounir, and two children is home to fewer than 50 Christian families.

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After a violent weekend in Syria, European diplomats have had enough. Both British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe confirmed on Monday that they are heading for New York on Tuesday to urge the United Nations to pass a resolution aimed at the violent Syrian crackdown against anti-regime demonstrations.

Juppe and Hague hope to be able to persuade China and Russia to support such a resolution, one that has the backing of the Arab League. Both countries vetoed a draft resolution last October that threatened Damascus with sanctions and Moscow remains wary of any resolution that could authorize foreign military intervention. Both countries hold a veto in the UN Security Council.

The diplomatic offensive comes following widespread fighting in Syria over the weekend, which saw tanks and troops deployed to enable the Syrian army to regain its grip on a number of Damascus suburbs….

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A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Some senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering to field unarmed surveillance drones in the future in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

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Traveling to Israel with Jewish colleagues earlier this month had a transforming effect on the Rev. Susan Sica, vicar of Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Parsippany.

“It would have been easy to go to Israel and have a sanitized experience that only touched on Christian sites ”” where Jesus walked, and that sort of thing. But then we would never have really looked at what Israel is today,” she told NJJN in a phone conversation a few days after returning.

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Thousands of Egyptians are gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to mark one year since the start of the uprising which toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Some are celebrating the success of Islamist parties in the first post-Mubarak elections, while others are calling for further political reforms.

The decades-old state of emergency law has been partially lifted to mark the anniversary.

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Iran has said an oil embargo adopted by European Union foreign ministers over the country’s nuclear programme is “unfair” and “doomed to fail”.

The measures would not prevent Iran’s “progress for achieving its basic rights”, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said.

The sanctions ban all new oil contracts with Iran and freeze the assets of Iran’s central bank in the EU.

The EU currently buys about 20% of Iran’s oil exports.

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The President of the Palestinian Authority has met with leaders of the Christian Churches of Britain in London following his talks with the British government over the stalled Middle East peace process.

The meeting between Mahmoud Abbas and Dr. Rowan Williams comes at a nadir in Anglo-Israeli relations and on the same day the Israeli Foreign Ministry chided Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as being grossly “ill informed” about the conflict in the Middle East.

According to a statement released after the 17 Jan 2012, President Abbas told the church leaders that Israel and the Palestinians must resume peace talks. The Arab Spring provided a “rare opportunity” to bring peace to the region, the Palestinian leader said.

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Iran’s rulers are feeling the heat. The Islamic Republic was forced to prop up its currency on Jan. 4, just days after the U.S. imposed tough new sanctions to goad it into abandoning its nuclear weapons program. A European curb on Iranian crude imports would add to pressure on Tehran ahead of elections in March.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a problem. But more sanctions may not be a solution. If China doesn’t co-operate, they may just end up distorting oil markets.

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[Nine months after the rising protests against Mubarak]…the Brotherhood had reclaimed its status as Egypt’s most powerful political force following decades of suppression. In the country’s first free parliamentary elections, its newly created Freedom and Justice party won more than 35 per cent of the vote in the first round, and slightly more in December’s second round.

Even more worrying for those hoping the Arab world’s largest nation would adopt a liberal, pro-western face, fellow Islamists from the puritanical Salafi movement emerged with more than 25 per cent, a score likely to be confirmed in the third and final round of voting in January.

“This is the real Egyptian revolution,” says Jon Alterman of the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of the international observers at the Egyptian elections. “In February, the military removed Hosni Mubarak. This is the revolution that reorients power in Egypt.”

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The Coptic Orthodox Church will send out invitations to presidential hopefuls and all political parties, including Salafi ones, to attend the Christmas holy mass on 7 January, a papal source told Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The source said that Pope Shenouda III insisted on inviting both Muslim and Coptic Egyptians to the celebration.

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Faith is risking entering the road of those who, like Him, can forget themselves in favour of others ”“ whoever they are ”“ and can take on the attitudes that derive from this: forgiveness, welcome, listening, solidarity ”¦
The path of losing, marked out by these stages, becomes the path of finding.
Those who take this path, find God, the brother finds himself.
Life is transformed this way.
It may be ”“ usually it is this way ”“ that outside nothing seems to change, that history and, in particular the history of our Holy Land, continues to be the dramatic reality that we see and experience: hatred, divisions, fears, suspicions, prejudice, paralysis”¦
But inside, everything changes!
The way of looking at life changes, the way of being changes and ”“ by grace!- we are pleased with this life, because this life is not only a field, but it is the field that hides the treasure.

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Kirolos Andraws had every reason to be excited about the January uprising in his native Egypt, figuring democracy would bring hope for young people like him.

Then one day in February, says Mr. Andraws, a gang of thugs beat him and told him, “you deserve to die.” His offense, he says: refusing to convert to Islam.

In late March, Mr. Andraws, a 23-year- old engineer, used a tourist visa to board an Egyptair flight for New York City. He let a room in a friend’s apartment, hired an immigration lawyer and applied for asylum. He has survived mainly on wages and tips from jobs as a cook, cashier and delivery man.

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The Americans have gone now, and Iraq’s Christian communities ”“ some of the world’s oldest ”“ are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale.

Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled. Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.

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Iraq’s Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi has said Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is to blame for a sudden surge of violence in the country.

Dozens of people were killed in a string of blasts across the capital, Baghdad, on Thursday.

Mr Hashemi, who is subject to an arrest warrant on terror charges, said that Mr Maliki should be focusing on security not “chasing patriotic politicians”.

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The founders of Neve Shaanan, a neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, planned their streets in the shape of a seven-branched candelabra – a symbol of their Jewish faith. Ninety years later, the streets are full of Christmas decorations, reflecting a flowering of Christianity in Israel’s economic and cultural capital.

Tens of thousands of Christian foreigners, most of them laborers from the Philippines and African asylum seekers, have poured into the neighborhood in recent years. They pray year-round in more than 30 churches hidden in grimy apartment buildings. But in late December, their Christian subculture emerges in full force in the southern streets of Tel Aviv, whose founders called it the “first Hebrew city.”

On the Saturday before Christmas, the center of festivities was the city’s central bus station, a hulking seven-story maze of concrete.

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“Congress’s point of view is that we may be running a risk that this will increase the price of oil but that compared to [the risk of ] Israeli or U.S. military strikes on Iran or a nuclear-armed Iran, the oil market impact of these sanctions will pale in comparison,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Energy analyst Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says there are no easy answers.

“There are only trade-offs, and many of the trade-offs are difficult ones,” Yergin says.

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Thousands of Egyptian women have held rallies in Cairo against their treatment by security forces.

Demonstrators brandished photos of a woman who was beaten and dragged along the ground, exposing her underwear – an incident that has outraged Egyptians.

The rally took place in Tahrir Square, which has seen five days of deadly clashes between protesters and troops.

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Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta landed in the Iraqi capital on Thursday for the ceremony officially ending the military mission here and closing out a bloody and controversial chapter of American relations with the Islamic world.

Pentagon officials said Mr. Panetta would thank all American service members who served here since the 2003 invasion, and would laud them for “the remarkable progress we have seen here in Baghdad and across this country.”

Mr. Panetta also was expected to note that the American effort “helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to this country’s future generations.”

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