Apparently, the sort of people who think the world is coming to an end next week got very, very excited because they believed that an old Irish manuscript psalter (a book of Psalms) that was recently found in a bog was evidence that Israel was about to be wiped off the face of the Earth. The news reports said that Psalm 83 was visible. This got the gullible into a lather, because in the King James Bible favored by a certain kind of Protestant literalist, Psalm 83 laments the attempts by her enemies to wipe the people of Israel out.…

Woman killed by own car | Chicago Tribune Natividad Andrea Torres, of Wheeling, suffered fatal head and leg injuries and died this morning at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, a Cook County medical examiner’s office spokesman said. At 10:38 a.m. Thursday, Torres was backing up her 1998 Ford Contour in the middle lane of westbound Lake Cook Road just east of Milwaukee Avenue on the border of Wheeling and Buffalo Grove, when she fell out of the driver’s side door, Buffalo Grove Police Sgt. Mark Bucalo said. So many things wrong with this picture: backing up in the…

Israel set war plan more than a year ago / Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon I saw this cited at NewsHounds and realized this is why Condi was so adamant against an immediate cease-fire – it’s a timetable thing. Also, she probably wanted our shipment of smart bombs to be delivered and signed for before she started hollering about stopping the carnage.

adn.com | alaska : Ship’s crew rescued Nearly two dozen crew members were hoisted to safety in rescue helicopters late Monday night from a giant car-carrying ship that had listed onto its side in the North Pacific Ocean, according to the Alaska Air National Guard and the U.S. Coast Guard. The 23 crew members of the Cougar Ace, wearing red survival suits, perched on a wall of the ship’s superstructure in choppy seas as two Air Guard HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters and a Coast Guard helicopter lowered slings and pulled them to safety. The rescue operation began shortly after 9…

Middle East” href=”http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1193108.ece”>Independent Online Edition > Middle East “Iraq as a political project is finished,” a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: “The parties have moved to plan B.” He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. “There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west,” he said. … “The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous one and they have left the streets to the…

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Wear | Two killed as artwork ‘lifts off’ Two people have been killed and 12 injured after a giant, inflatable sculpture blew free from its moorings in the north-east of England. Many were inside the artwork, which consists of connected rooms, when it lifted 30ft into the air at Riverside Park, Chester-le-Street, County Durham I like modern art, and I like edgy installation pieces – when I lived in Seattle, the annual arts festival Bumbershoot was one of my favorites during the year (aside from being really expensive). But entering a large art…