Twelve people were killed Saturday when Muslims attacked a church in Cairo, in the second incident of its kind since March. The attack set off violent clashes that ended in hundreds of injuries and almost 200 arrests.
The incident began when a Muslim mob attacked the St. Menas church after hearing rumors that a Christian woman married to a Muslim man had been kidnapped and was being held in the church. There does not appear to have been truth to the rumors.
The mob threw firebombs at the church, chanting, “With our blood and our souls we will defend you, Islam.” The crowds attacked nearby homes and shops with firebombs as well.
Many in the mob carried knives and machetes, and witnesses said they heard gunfire, which apparently came from rooftops.
Clashes broke out as Christians attempted to defend the church. In total, at least six Muslims and three Christians were killed, and more than 230 people were injured, 11 of them critically.
Police attempted to quell the violence, but fighting continued. Later at night a Muslim mob set fire to the nearby Virgin Mary church. On Sunday morning the mob continued the attack, setting fire to a six-story residential building over rumors that Christians had fired on Muslims from its windows.
Many Muslims living near the two churches expressed anger at the Muslim mob, and several Islamic clerics denounced the violence as well.
Similar clashes took place in March. The earlier clashes were also sparked by a rumor of Muslim-Christian love; in that case, Muslims stormed a church and set it on fire after hearing that a Muslim woman was romantically involved with a Christian man, a relationship prohibited by Islamic law, which allows Muslim women to marry only Muslim men.
On New Year's Day a church in Alexandria was bombed, killing 23 people
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Marc Faber “The more things will go bad, the worse things become, the more the money printer at the Fed, Mr. Bernanke, will print,” “He will print endlessly. Even if things go bad economically, you could have no revenues at companies and no earnings and stocks will go up because of money printing.”
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It's official.
Home prices have double dipped nationwide, now lower than their March 2009 trough, according to a new report from Clear Capital.
It was inevitable, and it was predicted (by me for sure) that a surge in sales of foreclosed properties and a big push by banks to facilitate short sales would force home prices down dramatically.
Sales of bank-owned (REO) properties hit 34.5 percent of the market, according to the survey, resulting in a national price drop of 4.9 percent quarterly and 5 percent year-over-year. National home prices have fallen 11.5 percent in the past nine months, a rate not seen since 2008. Add short sales, where the bank allows the borrower to sell for less than the value of the mortgage, and prices have nowhere to go but down.
"With more than one-third of national home sales being REO (bank owned), market prices are being weighed down as many markets have not regained enough footing to withstand the strain of the high proportion of REO sales," says Clear Capital's Alex Villacorta.
You don't have to tell Los Angeles Realtor Bill Kerbox any of this. LA prices had been improving, and LA is still one of the nation's best performing metro markets right now. Recently, however, prices took a turn, now down 2.4 percent quarter to quarter thanks to 34 percent REO saturation.
"We have definitely seen a number of both short sales and foreclosed properties along the West Side here, and they have definitely taken a hit," bemoans Kerbox. "It hurts to have a very low comp pop up next to your beautiful new home."
While the usual subprime mortgage suspects, like California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada used to rule the foreclosure roost and still have high volumes of distressed properties, the mid-west is seeing a surge in REOs now, thanks to the plain old recession. 40 percent of the Chicago market is foreclosures, 43 percent in Cleveland and 51 percent in Minneapolis. Home prices fell 8.7 percent in the Mid-West during the past three months compared to the previous quarter.
While the foreclosure crisis is abating on the front end, with fewer loans going newly delinquent, the pipeline of seriously delinquent loans is enormous. Banks are now ramping up the foreclosure process after the "robo-signing" paperwork scandal, but at their current pace it would take about four years to process all the bad loans through foreclosure and even longer to sell those homes out on the open market.
CNBC
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Iranian power struggle between president and supreme leader sees arrests and claims of undue influence of chief of staff
Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).
Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".
The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached.
On Sunday, Ahmadinejad returned to his office after an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest over Khamenei's reinstatement of the intelligence minister, who the president had initiallyasked to resign.
Ahmadinejad's unprecedented disobedience prompted harsh criticism from conservatives who warned that he might face the fate of Abdulhassan Banisadr, Iran's first post-revolution president who was impeached and exiled for allegedly attempting to undermine clerical power.
Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader – who has the ultimate power in Iran – is equivalent to "apostasy from God".
Ahmadinejad has so far declined to officially back Khamenei's ruling over Heydar Moslehi, the minister at the centre of the row. In the first cabinet meeting since the president returned, Moslehi was absent.
Khamenei's supporters believe that the top-level confrontation stems from the increasing influence of Mashaei, an opponent of greater involvement of clerics in politics, who is being groomed by Ahmadinejad as a possible successor.
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Guardian
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If you get up any morning for the next few weeks, you’ll be treated to the sight of all the planets except Saturn arrayed along the ecliptic, the path of the sun through the sky.
For the last two months, almost all the planets have been hiding behind the sun, but this week they all emerge and are arrayed in a grand line above the rising sun. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are visible, and you can add Uranus and Neptune to your count if you have binoculars or a small telescope.
This sky map of the six planets shows how they should appear at dawn to observers with clear weather and an unobstructed view.
Astrologers have always been fascinated by planetary alignments, and the doomsayers of 2012 have been prophesying a mystical alignment on Dec. 21, 2012.
The modern tools of astronomers, such as planetarium software, show otherwise: absolutely no alignment at any time in 2012. But they also reveal a beautiful alignment visible during the month of May this year. [Planet Skywatching Guide for 2011]
Six planets at one time
While astrologers view planetary alignments as foretellers of disasters, modern amateur astronomers look forward to them as nothing more than grand photo ops.
If you go out any morning for the next four days, you’ll be treated to a view of the crescent moon and all but one of the naked eye planets.
Because the moon moves rapidly from one morning to the next, it will only be part of the lineup for the next four mornings, but the four naked-eye planets will be there for the next few weeks.
Venus is, as always, the brightest and most visible of the planets, and it can be your guide to spotting the others. About half way between Venus and the rising sun is Jupiter, the second brightest planet.
Mars will be a tiny speck just above Jupiter, and Mercury another tiny speck about half way between Jupiter and Venus. Uranus is slightly more than one binocular field above and to the right of Venus, and Neptune is much farther to the right, about 40 degrees away in Aquarius. The Moon will be just above Venus on Saturday morning, and just above Jupiter and Mars on Sunday morning.
How to photograph the planets
Capturing a photograph of this gathering of the planets couldn’t be easier.
Just about any camera will do, though a camera with a telephoto lens setting will be better. Let the camera’s exposure meter be your guide, though a slight underexposure will help bring out the colors of the dawn sky. [Astrophotography Telescopes for Beginners]
Try to place the silhouette of some foreground object to lend depth to the scene. The best pictures will be on the next few mornings, while the crescent moon is part of the grouping.
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Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the world seeks a new culture and system that would guarantee mankind's true happiness, noting that systems such as Marxism and Capitalism have failed.
“The self-proclaimed supporters of capitalism and democracy … have reached the end of the road and the world is looking forward to a new way, culture and system -- a thought that can literally guarantee social and individual happiness of mankind,” Ahmadinejad stated in a ceremony marking Teacher's Day in Tehran on Wednesday.
Iran's president highlighted the Islamic Republic's aptitude to guide the world in its pursuit of perfection. He noted that the enemy's concerns do not arise from the country's economic or defense capabilities.
“The only point that concerns them is that the Iranian nation has the capacity and capability to become a role model and a pioneer,” he added.
He recalled how Marxism, despite all the attention it received and promises it made, led to greater oppression than at the time of earlier tyrants.
“Then capitalism took momentum which resulted in poverty, discrimination in more than half of the world, war, massacre and occupation,” he pointed out.
Ahmadinejad did not single out the United States but denounced the September 11 and the events around militant al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a plot by superpowers to save themselves.
“They used it as a pretext; they invaded and occupied and told lies before the eyes seven billion people and killed more than a million,” he regretted.
Ahmadinejad said the West has failed to meet its pledge of a utopia replete with freedom, comfort and human values and that poverty and discrimination plagues people even in the so-called bastions of democracy and capitalism.
