A 65-year-old man had his finger bitten off Wednesday evening at a health care rally in Thousand Oaks, according to the Ventura County Sheriff's Department. About 100 protesters sponsored by MoveOn.org were having a rally supporting health care reform. A group of anti-health care reform protesters formed across the street. A witness from the scene says a man was walking through the anti-reform group to get to the pro-reform side when he got into an altercation with the 65-year-old, who opposes health care reform. The 65-year-old was apparently aggressive and hit the other man, who then retaliated by biting off his attacker's pinky, according to Karoli from DrumsnWhistles. The man took his finger and walked to Los Robles hospital for treatment. Neither man has been identified. Sheriff's officials are investigating the incident.
The Greek Cypriot government cancelled scheduled talks with Turkish Cypriot side on Thursday after more than 650 Orthodox pilgrims were turned back from an attempt to visit the Agios Mamas church in northern Cyprus for a service. "The Turkish side must take steps which also match ours when it comes to the negotiations," said Stefanos Stefanou, a spokesperson for the Greek Cypriot government. He said Greek Cypriot president Dimitris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat discussed the issue over the telephone on Thursday and decided to resume peace talks on September 10. Greek and Turkish Cypriots launched renewed peace talks last September, but the pace has been slow after nearly 40 meetings at an abandoned airport inside the UN-controlled buffer zone. The eastern Mediterranean island has been divided since a Turkish invasion in 1974. EU officials have said that progress in the Cyprus reunification talks will be essential to move Turkey's slow-moving EU accession process forward. Ankara's EU membership talks, which began in October 2005, have been partially frozen because of the situation on the island.
Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has called for early general elections to give his beleaguered conservative party a fresh mandate, officials say. The need is imperative, he told a national television audience, to push through reforms and tackle the global financial crisis impact. Karamanlis laid the blame for early polls at the feet of the main opposition party, PASOK, accusing it of creating an "unbearable protracted pre-election climate," Kathimerini news reported. The new vote is expected Oct. 4, sources said.
That İstanbul is a real treasure chest for history, art and architecture freaks is no secret. Its colorful mosaic of historical city structures -- mosques, churches, synagogues, palaces, castles and towers -- reflects the many, many social and cultural influences of a number of foreign communities that have left their indelible footprints across the city throughout its long history. The oldest settlement on the land that is now İstanbul was, however, Greek. Already, in 685 B.C., settlers from the ancient Greek town of Megara chose to colonize the town of Chalcedon, in today's Kadıköy district, thus aiming to secure the Bosporus as a channel of trade between the Greek polities and the Black Sea region. Some years later, in 667 B.C., famous Greek King Byzas went on colonizing the European side of the Bosporus further, thus founding the city of Byzantion. Two prominent examples of ancient Greek architecture are the Serpentine Column and Leander's Tower. Being approximately 2,500 years old, the Serpentine Column is said to be İstanbul's oldest remaining Greek monument. Erected to honor the triumph of the Greeks over the Persians at Plataea, it originally stood at Delphi (both ancient cities on Greek ground) and was moved to İstanbul in 324 B.C. by Constantine the Great to mark the declaration of the new capital city of the then-founded Roman Empire under the name of Constantinople. However, with the fall of Rome in 476, all that remained of the Roman Empire was its eastern part, which then came to be known as the Byzantine Empire. Distinctly Greek in culture and the center of Greek Orthodox Christianity, its capital, Constantinople, was adorned with many magnificent churches, including probably the most well known, Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia), once the world's largest Christian cathedral. After the capture of the capital of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Empire, under the command of Sultan Mehmed II (Mehmet the Conqueror) in 1453, naturally many city structures were destroyed. According to a census of 1477, there were 9,486 houses occupied by Muslims, 3,743 by Greeks, 1,647 by Jews, 267 by Christians from Crimea and 31 by Gypsies. Nearly every third inhabitant of the city was Greek at that time, so the Greek population played a significant role in the social, political and economic life of the city and the multiethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire in general. The leader of the Greek community within the empire officially became the ecumenical patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, which was moved to the Church of St. George in İstanbul's Fener district in 1586.
Members of a South Bend church believe that a traveling scam artist ripped them off for several hundred dollars. St. Joseph County police suspect 33-year-old Alan Farah, originally from Missouri, is the person who stopped at Sts. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church during its Sunday morning service. The man, using the name Michael Husson, collected $400 after saying he was a stranded college student traveling from Detroit to his father's funeral in Kansas City. Police say a church member later became suspicious and found an Internet photograph of Farah, who is wanted in at least two states in connection with similar scams.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew prayed together with hundred’s of Orthodox Christian’s in the Patriarchate’s church, in Istanbul, for the environment’s protection. Since 1989, every September 1st (the beginning of the ecclesiastical calendar) has been designated as a day of prayer for “the protection of the environment” throughout the Eastern Orthodox Church consisting of some 300 million Christians worldwide. Instituted by the late Patriarch Dimitrios of the Greek Orthodox Church, the tradition has since been shepherded by his successor Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople who has been dubbed “The Green Patriarch.” Bartholomew was the first major religious leader to have initiated since 1991 various events to promote environmental protection. Exercising his influence on the Catholic Pope, Bartholomew in 2002 orchestrated a coming together in joint environmental efforts that witnessed the first liturgy spoken by the Greek Patriarch in Italy for over 1,000 years since the Vatican and the Orthodox Churches excommunicated one another in the Great Schism of 1054. Elected Ecumencial Patriarch in 1991, Bartholomew was born Demetrios Archontonis on the Aegean Island of Imvros (Turkey) on February 29th,1940. He studied at the renowned Orthodox Theological School of Halki, graduating with high honors in 1961. He holds a doctorate from the Institute of Eastern Studies of the Gregorian University in Rome, and completed further studies in Switzerland and Germany. He is fluent in seven languages, including Greek, English and Turkish. He is the 270th Successor to the Apostle Andrew who brought the Christian faithful to the shores of the Bosphoros, ancient Constantinople, now Istanbul. Constantinople eventually became the seat of the Church in the East.
A Muslim teenager from Ohio says her father threatened to kill her because she converted to Christianity. Rifqa Bary, 17, ran away from her family in Columbus, Ohio, in July and took refuge in the central Florida home of the Rev. Blake Lorenz. The teenager, in a sworn affidavit, claims her father, Mohamed Bary, 47, was pressured by the mosque the family attends in Ohio to "deal with the situation." In the court filing, Rifqa Bary stated her father said, "If you have this Jesus in your heart, you are dead to me!" The teenager claims her father added, "I will kill you!" Mohamed Bary told CNN a lot of false information has been given and "we wouldn't do her harm." He knew his daughter was involved with Christian organizations. "I have no problem with her practicing any faith," he said, but Bary admitted he would have preferred his daughter to practice the Muslim faith first. In a court filing Monday, John Stemberger, Rifqa Bary's attorney and president of the Christian advocacy organization Florida Family Policy Council, accused the parents' Ohio mosque of having ties to terrorism and radical Islam. The Noor Islamic Cultural Center has denied the allegations.