ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) — Ethiopia’s [tribal junta] (the Woyanne regime) said on Friday it arrested three Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) rebels who beat up Chinese technicians in a raid on a dam construction site in the west.

State TV said three Chinese were in hospital after being badly beaten by the OLF gang during the attack this week at the Neshie Dam. The statement said they were planning “terrorist activities” there, and were later caught by security forces.

“The culprits beat Chinese technicians working at the site, robbed laptops, printers, digital surveying machines and other equipment at the site,” it said.

The three were paraded on TV, together with guns, communications equipment and bomb-making materials.

Prime Minister Warlord Meles Zenawi’s government blames the OLF, which has fought for autonomy for its southern homeland since 1993, for various explosions in the capital Addis Ababa.

[The Woyanne regime in] Addis Ababa accuses arch-enemy Eritrea of training and funding the OLF and other small rebel groups in Ethiopia’s remote, outlying areas. Asmara says that is an excuse to mask popular unrest with Meles’ government.

(Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse, Writing by Andrew Cawthorne)

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following update was posted today by New Wineskins blog:

It should have happened an hour ago. Not clear yet what’s going on, but I’ll update this post as often as I can throughout the day. Nothing scheduled on Vatican TV.

WND, at least, is picking up the story, beginning Wednesday as well as in this extensive top-story article they posted last night. It quotes Bob Cornuke at length, along with other scholars and investigators:

Bob Cornuke, biblical investigator, international explorer and best-selling author, has participated in more than 27 expeditions around the world searching for lost locations described in the Bible… Next week, Cornuke will travel to Ethiopia for the 13th time since he began his search for the Ark. He told WND he believes this artifact may be authentic.

“They either have the Ark of the Covenant or they have a replica that they have believed to be the Ark of the Covenant for 2,000 years,” he said.

“The Ark could have been taken out of the temple during the time of the atrocities of Manasseh,” he said. [link added] “We have kind of a bread crumb trail that appears to go to Egypt, and it stayed on an island there for a couple hundred years called Elephantine Island. The Ark then was transferred over to Lake Tana in Ethiopia where it stayed on Tana Qirqos Island for 800 years. Then it was taken to Axum, where it is enshrined in a temple today where they don’t let anybody see it.”

Cornuke said he traveled to Tana Qirqos Island and lived with monks who remain there today.

“They unlocked this big, four-inch thick wood door,” he said. “It opened up to a treasure room, and they showed me meat forks and bowls and things that they say are from Solomon’s temple. When the History Channel did this show, they said it was one of the largest viewed shows. People were fascinated.”

He said Ethiopians consider the Ark to be the ultimate holy object, and the church guards the suspected artifact from the “eyes and pollution of man.”

“In Ethiopia, their whole culture is centered around worshipping this object,” Cornuke said. “Could they have the actual Ark? I think I could make a case that they actually could.”

However, he said reports about Friday’s unveiling are somewhat perplexing because Ethiopia has traditionally shielded it from public view.

“That’s the surprise for me,” Cornuke said. “I have always thought that they would keep it under wraps.”

He explained that a special guardian lives inside the church [Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Ethiopia] and never leaves. Once a guardian is appointed, he stays until he dies and another man replaces him.

“We know for a fact that there have been 30 guardians in history who have never left that enclosure,” Cornuke said. “I know the guardian. When CNN and BBC went over there, he wouldn’t see anybody but me. So I went and talked to him, and he’s getting very aged. He told me they have the real Ark and he worships 13 hours a day in front of it. When he gets through, he is covered in sweat and he’s exhausted.”

He said he met a 105-year-old man who claimed to have seen the Ark 50 years ago when he was training a replacement guardian.

“It frightened him to death when he got a glimpse of it.”

Cornuke is also featured on the Koinonia House podcast series I linked on Tuesday. Although he doesn’t say a lot more in it than is outlined above in terms of the evidence itself, the podcast provides more Biblical context. I found it useful.

As several of our Ethiopian brothers have pointed out here, the unveiling is not without controversy, skepticism, disgust and fears of cascading consequences as a result of its unveiling. The Ethiopian Review writes, in a Thursday article that:

Abuna Pauolos Aba Gebremedhin (aka Aba Diabilos), the illegitimate Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, was in Rome this week to meet with Pope Benedict XVI.

The claim that the Biblical Holy Ark has been kept at the Church, in the city of Axum, is an old one, but this is the first time that the Church plans to actually reveal the actual container, or news of it. It is not known whether the Church claims that the actual Tablets of the Law are inside it.

Copies of the alleged Ark are kept in many other churches in Ethiopia.

This clip, out of Belgium, translated from the Dutch by Google doesn’t break any new ground, however it does give a glimpse as to how the world is likely to view this. In perhaps one of the greatest understatements of all time, they write: “the relic has major cultural-historical value”. And that’s all, in their view. The secular world insists on putting God (and His box) in their box. He won’t fit.

Rest in Peace

Billie Jean

Beat It

Thriller

You Rock My World

The way you make me feel

Bad

Smooth Criminal

Black or White

Jam

Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough

In the Closet

By Maggie Lee

CLARKSON, GA — In this small town on the edge of Atlanta, the FBI and local law enforcement are looking out for an alarming kind of crime: radical Islamist terrorists potentially trying to recruit the town’s young Somali-Americans to fight a war in Africa.

There is terrorist recruitment taking place already in Minnesota, said Clarkston police chief Tony J. Scipio. That’s why his department and the FBI are looking for anything similar in the Somali-American community here in Clarkston.

In Minneapolis, as many as 20 young men have been reported missing from their homes since last fall. They are thought to have been lured into the ranks of al-Shabaab in Somalia. That group got a terrorist designation from the U.S. State Department, which ties it to al-Qaeda, bombings, assassinations and attacks on peacekeepers. A powerful faction fighting Somalia’s transitional government, al-Shabaab’s agenda is extremely strict Sharia law.

To fight potential recruiters, the Atlanta FBI has spent the last several months in what the agent-in-charge called an “outreach” program to Clarkston Somali-Americans, including mosque visits and community meetings.

Supervisory special agent Andrew Young said radical violent Islamist recruiters use the same strategy as a street gang recruiter, or even a little league coach.

“From what we know about recruiters, whether they’re Islamic, drug gangs or the coach, they’re looking for those kids who are looking for something deeper inside. To one it could be geopolitics. To one it could be a friendship. They’re all looking for something,” he explained.

And terror recruiters are quickly becoming adept at online tactics, noted Young.

“That’s what we see as a trend hitting home,” he said. “We see a lot more Internet recruiting being targeted to our youth.”

If young people go to Somalia, the FBI’s biggest worry is that they may return with dangerous souvenirs, like bomb-making or demolition skills and a radical anti-U.S. agenda.

Atlanta’s Somali-American community mushroomed after 1991 with arrivals of war refugees. Between 2000 and 2007 alone, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement sent some 3,000 Somalis to Atlanta.

Because so many suffered in the war, they’re unlikely to see much appeal in returning to war, say Somali-American leaders in Clarkston.

But the alleged Minneapolis recruits spent little or no time in war-ravaged Somalia or in refugee camps. That may make young people vulnerable to a dramatic, nationalistic appeal, according to one Georgia leader.

“If al-Shabaab says, ‘We’re fighting Ethiopians,’ then they’ll have sympathy,” declared Omar Shekhey, president of the Somali-American Community Center, a statewide umbrella group.

Somalia’s transitional government is supported in part by the army of Somalia’s number one enemy, Ethiopia. The two countries have fought two formal wars in 40 years.

Al-Shabaab has no sympathizers in Clarkston, Shekhey insisted, but suggested that the other side -– the transitional government –- is frustrating, ineffective and unpopular. He jumped to criticize the transitional government’s power-sharing formula that he says reduces some Somalis to half-citizens, or non-citizens because it fixes quotas for parliamentary seats by clan.

U.S. support for that interim government rouses ire in some, Shekhey said, especially young people who reject the costs of that U.S. strategy.

“They can be angry,” he said. “‘Why is the U.S. doing this?’ they ask.”

Sharmarke Yonis, of the Georgia Somali Community, a non-profit headquartered in Clarkston, says that anger doesn’t always translate into a violent act.

“We might have some people who have sympathy, but not anyone who will commit a hate crime,” he said.

There’s sympathy because every religion spawns radicals who commit hate crimes, such as a person who would bomb an abortion clinic in the name of Christianity, he suggested, but emphasized that he sees no danger in Atlanta.

“In Georgia, we don’t have many, just a few listening,” Yonis said. He believes the threat is bigger in Columbus, Ohio, or Minneapolis, where the Somali-American populations measure in the tens of thousands.

No Somali-Americans are reported missing in the Clarkston area. A four-month police and FBI joint operation of surveillance and confidential informants turned up nothing, according to the police chief.

But “the word ‘FBI’ scares people,” said Hussien Mohammed, the director of Sagal Radio, a Clarkston-based station that broadcasts in English plus four languages spoken in east Africa: Somali, Afaan-Oromo, Amharic and Swahili.

“They’re coming from a country that has no law. They’ve been beaten, abused, harassed by security forces in their country … Some have been taken away in the middle of the night. People fear the same here.”

Mohammed seemed conflicted about the level of FBI involvement.

“Too many visits from the FBI have been seen in our community,” he said, but later added, “It’s their job. It’s why we’re safe.”

He’s very adamant on one point, which is backed up by other Somali-Americans and law enforcement: “These people are very peaceful like any other community. They’ve been terrorized at home enough. They want to be Somali-Americans, not just Somalis.”

(Maggie Lee (www.bottleofink.com) is a freelance writer in Atlanta.)

Washington (DPA) – Physicians at the UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles worked for more than an hour to resuscitate pop icon Michael Jackson, according to his brother Jermaine Jackson in broadcast remarks Thursday.

The sudden death of the rock star on a hot Thursday afternoon triggered not only worldwide mourning but also an odd disconnect as he came back to life with his star power in nonstop broadcasts of file footage.

Paramedics answered an emergency call at Jackson’s rented mansion outside Los Angeles to find him unresponsive, officials said.

“It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest at his home,” an emotionally-wrought Jermaine told reporters. “Upon arriving at hospital at 1:14 pm, a team of doctors including emergency physicians and cardiologists attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour.”

The Los Angeles County coroner Fred Corral confirmed Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26 pm (2126 GMT), but would not comment on the likely cause of his death.

A Los Angeles police official said that given the “high-profile nature” of the death, the case had been assigned to the robbery and homicide team. An autopsy would be carried out to determine the cause of death, with results to be released on Friday.

Fox News showed live images of the Los Angeles police helicopter delivering Jackson’s remains to the medical examiner’s office.

If cardiac arrest is confirmed, medical experts said there were a variety of possible causes, including a heart attack, an aneurism or a blood clot. One physician told CNN that the heart simply stops beating and only quivers in full cardiac arrest.

Jermaine, a one-time member of the Jackson 5 and Michael’s older brother, refused to take questions, ending his remarks to reporters with his own tribute: “We all will be with you Michael, always.”

ET that Jackson was transported from his residence in full cardiac arrest on Thursday. They say life-saving efforts were made by paramedics throughout transport to the hospital and efforts in the hospital emergency room continued on unsuccessfully.