Links of the Day

• Indonesia Muslims to guard churches

  Volunteers from Indonesia's largest Islamic organisation will guard churches across the world's most populous Muslim nation on Christmas amid fears of terrorist attacks.

• Some buried bones are best left undug (Robert Fisk)

  After all, there are 17,000 Lebanese missing from the civil war. Are we to dig them all up? Or just those whose enemies or murderers happen to be on our current list of pet hates - Syria being pretty much at the top of America’s list at the moment - when a demonstration of Syrian bestiality would go down well with the State Department?

• Children killed in air crash

  An aeroplane has crashed in Nigeria, killing 103 people, mostly children returning from school for their Christmas holiday.

• IAEA chief calls for nuclear-free world

  "If we hope to escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience, and no role in our security," ElBaradei said at Saturday's awards ceremony in Oslo.

• Berliners divided over fate of palace

  It's a conspiracy theory that chimes with a more general feeling of disillusion in eastern Germany with what followed unification - not only mass unemployment, but also the erasure of East German identity.

• Sunday Times: Sharon readying IDF to attack Iran

  According the report, military intelligence stationed out of northern Iraq has discovered secret uranium enrichment sites on Iranian soil. These sites have been reportedly disguised as civilian structures and have gone undetected by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency.

• Politics, Iraqi Style: Slick TV Ads, Text Messaging and Gunfire

  In a sense, it is the first full-scale political contest here since the fall of Mr. Hussein. The Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the January election, are now campaigning fiercely, and voter turnout is expected to be considerably higher as a result. All told, 226 political groups will compete in the elections, representing more than 7,000 candidates.

• 'Sesame Street' is adapting to appeal to local viewers

  Thirty-six years after the original "Sesame Street" made its debut in the United States, Elmo has left his familiar neighborhood for a fresh wave of globalization, bound for countries that are discarding dubbed American versions for local productions inhabited by denizens with names like Nac, Khokha and Kami.

posted by Lazarus, 7:23 AM