Pope Francis on Thursday said the Catholic Church will not accept a Middle East without Christians, who often find themselves forced to flee areas of conflict and unrest in the region. “We will not resign ourselves to imagining a Middle East without Christians,” LINK

A new island has appeared in the Pacific. A submarine eruption just off Nishino-Shima Island Japan has erupted for the first time in 40 years. The Japanese Navy noticed the explosions as boiling lava met sea water giving rise to plumes of steam and ash. LINK

Wednesday in what experts say was a last-ditch attempt to persuade Russia to slow the international community’s momentum toward a nuclear deal with Iran, as talks open today in Geneva.LINK

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When it falls, some people will be shut in; others will be shut out. It will be up to bureaucrats and agents with guns to decide which one of those people you are. LINK

The National Disaster Management Authority was preparing on Thursday to evacuate nearly 100,000 people in four districts of coastal Andhra Pradesh as Cyclone Helen is expected to make landfall late Friday. LINK

Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, said “it’s not clear” why immigrants from India are using the same route as Central Americans.  One reason may be that many South American countries don’t require visas, Eleanor Sohnen, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, LINK

The 8-kilometre-high ash cloud from Mount Sinabung dwarfs this villager in the north of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, on Monday. The volcano rumbled back to life in 2010 after lying dormant for hundreds of years. LINK

Caleb Kaltenbach was shopping at Costco, 2660 Park Center Drive, on Nov. 15 when he noticed the peculiar labeling of the holy book. Kaltenbach, a pastor at the non-denominationalDiscovery Church, took a picture of the “$14.99 Fiction” Bible, and tweeted it out to his nearly 1,300 followers. LINK

Both of these images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children, but the brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right. LINK

Foreign troops could soon be going door-to-door, inside the United States, in order to seize legally owned American guns whose gun owners are presumably protected under the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Why would Obama sanction foreign troops to carry out such a task? Because Obama knows that he cannot totally trust the military to seize American guns.LINK

“The big danger is that through a further earthquake or any kind of impact, the water in the pool gets drained beyond a level that can’t be topped up. That would lead to the spent fuel overheating and potentially burning.” LINK