Quote:

---

When Pope Benedict XVI inaugurates the life-size Nativity scene on Christmas eve, the sheep and hay will be gone.

In their place will be a model of three rooms.

Jesus will lie in Joseph's shop, complete with "the typical work tools of a carpenter".

On one side, the shop will be flanked with a "covered patio", while on the other there will be the "inside of a pub, with its hearth".

The news came in an official statement from the State Department of the Vatican, which organises and builds the giant presepe, or Nativity scene.

The gospel goes on to mention Jesus' birthplace as Bethlehem, but a spokesman for the Vatican said a decision had been made to place the scene in Nazareth regardless.

In addition, a giant, fully-adorned Christmas tree has been erected in St Peter's Square.

---

Quote:

---

Jewish Martial Law in Bethlehem: Christians of Palestine Decry `Absence of All Hope`

Rifat Kassis, a spokesman for "Kairos Palestine-2009," told Al-Ahram: Christian leaders in occupied Palestine have been deliberating the initiative for several months. "Ultimately we hope that Christian institutions, including churches around the world, will endorse this document and act on it in the same way churches related to the anti-apartheid regime in South Africa in 1985. In the final analysis, apartheid can't be wrong in South Africa and right in occupied Palestine."

http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m61319&hd=&size=1&l=e

---

Quote:

---

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM -- For the first time, Israel has tacitly admitted stealing Palestinian body parts for transplant in Jewish patients, vindicating accusations leveled by Palestinians and rights groups over the past years.

"We started to harvest corneas…whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family," pathologist Yehuda Hiss, the former head of the Abu Akbar Center, also known as the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine, told Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, now a professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in a documentary aired by the Israeli Channel Two.

The documentary revealed that in the 1990s, forensic specialists harvested corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Hiss said his doctors often sought to mask the removal of corneas from bodies.

"We’d glue the eyelid shut. We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Other body parts believed to have been harvested from deceased Palestinians and others included heart arteries, bones and corneal tissues.

"The skins were taken from the bodies and transmitted to Hadasah hospital in West Jerusalem on the request of the Israeli army to be transplanted to wounded soldiers and in case of disaster," said Hiss.

Hiss revealed that in the early 1990s, military surgeons began removing a thin layer of skin from bodies to treat burn victims, which he said was done without family consent.

Ahmed Teibi, a member of the Israeli Knesset and head of the Arab nationalist Party, insists that the new evidence incriminates the Israeli army and government.

"If such is what they are willing to admit, imagine how much they are concealing," he told IslamOnline.net.

http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m61299&hd=&size=1&l=e

---