According to Rabbi, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews. The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat. According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.

Khalid Amayreh: Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews "Whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word human, they normally [don't] refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law."

Union says 1,500 petrol stations have run dry as workers step up action in protest against pension overhaul. Petrol stations across France are running out of fuel as refinery and port workers continue a strike against the government's plan to raise the retirement age. Around 1,500 petrol stations attached to French shopping centres had dried up by Monday morning, the AFP news agency reported, adding that such services supply the majority of the country's motorists. "Twenty to 25 per cent of our distribution capacity is either stopped or in trouble," Alexandre de Benoist, a senior official with Union of Independent Petroleum Importers, which represents the sector, said. He said the situation was "very worrying" in some regions with fuel distribution stations on strike or blockaded by workers from other sites. "There are at least 1,500 stations that have run out of at least one fuel product or are totally dry," he said. France has around 12,500 petrol stations, with 4,500 of those attached to supermarkets or shopping centres.

NYT: France Asks Airlines to Cut Flights Ahead of Strikes

As you drive north on the coast road, you pass a Hamas police checkpoint, and past that point, all the buildings are abandoned. Many are bombed out shells. Some appear to be the remains of seaside restaurants. Another has a rusted sign that reads “Palestinian Authority Ministry of Youth and Sport.” Others are half-built skeletons of buildings that will never be completed.

In the afternoon I take a taxi to the Sudaniyya area, which is along the coast, close to the border with Israel. It’s an area so close to the Green Line, you can see the smokestacks of factories in the Israeli city of Ashkelon (which my driver refers to both by its Hebrew name and the name of the Palestinian town that stood there before the expulsion of 1948, Al-Majdal).

It’s an area that has been emptied of people by Israel’s military actions, especially the 2008-2009 onslaught. As you drive north on the coast road, you pass a Hamas police checkpoint, and past that point, all the buildings are abandoned. Many are bombed out shells. Some appear to be the remains of seaside restaurants. Another has a rusted sign that reads “Palestinian Authority Ministry of Youth and Sport.” Others are half-built skeletons of buildings that will never be completed.

China's state-run media is pursuing its campaign against the Nobel committee for awarding the Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, demanding an apology to the nation. The Global Times - the tabloid sister publication of the People's Daily, the ruling Communist party's mouthpiece - on Monday accused the Oslo-based committee of provoking a "serious ideological clash" between Beijing and the West. Liu, 54, was named the winner of this year's peace prize earlier this month. He was sentenced to 11 years in jail in December after co-authoring Charter 08, a bold petition calling for political reform in one-party China. His win has incensed China, which has angrily warned that ties with Norway will suffer, cancelling planned meetings and a touring musical performance.

Former Irish President Mary Robinson, chairing a delegation of global Elders visiting the Gaza Strip, has called the situation in the territory "shocking."

“I was last here in 2008, just before the Gaza war. The situation has deteriorated to a shocking extent since then," she said during the visit, The Irish Times reported on Monday.

The delegation, which also includes former Indian parliamentarian Ela Bhatt and former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, met Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya on Saturday. Following the meeting, Robinson said that Hamas should not be excluded from the Palestinian-Israeli talks. The Elders strongly criticized the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has been in place since 2007.

“It is unconscionable and unacceptable that Israel and the international community have not lifted the blockade fully to allow Gazans to rebuild their lives and be part of the interconnected world that we take for granted,” Robinson declared.

Wikileaks is planning to release 400,000 more classified documents on the Iraq War, making it the single largest military leak in the US history. The Pentagon set up a 120-person taskforce several weeks ago to go through the documents and determine their release impact. The documents are expected to be released on Monday. Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman said the documents, obtained from an Iraq-based database, included "significant acts, unit-level reporting, tactical reports, things of that nature," AFP reported. The documents contain "Significant activities" (SIGACTS), including information on attacks targeting coalition forces, Iraq's security forces, the civilian population and infrastructure, the US Defense Department announced.

Newsweek earlier reported that some of the documents reveal US forces being involved in a "bloodbath." The Pentagon has asked the whistleblower website to return the classified documents to the US military. It is expected that The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany will be publishing the documents simultaneously. In July, Wikileaks published 77,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan.

BBC: Wikileaks to release 400,000 Iraq War documents, dwarfing the 70,000 documents released this July
Al Jazeera: Pentagon braces for Iraq Wikileaks

The latest reports regarding the investigations into allegations of fraud in last month’s Afghanistan parliamentary election continue to turn up evidence beyond all reason, with the latest evidence showing conclusively that fraud was pervasive across the nation in the vote.

Which is sort of old news, but the definition of “pervasive” continues to expand, and now officials familiar with the investigation say that roughly a quarter of the votes cast, or roughly one million votes, will be thrown out on the basis of fraud.

The Afghan Presidential election last year saw heretofore unprecedent levels of fraud in an ostensibly free election, and officials had expressed concern that very little had changed with regard to the oversight in the election. In the end this concern was vindicated, as both violence and complaints of overt fraud far exceeded even last year’s vote.

The fact of the matter is that nearly a quarter of polls didn’t even open on the day of the election, and that a quarter of the votes are being thrown out because of fraud, while violence, ballot stuffing and intimidation were reported nationwide. It seems impossible that anything resembling a truthful result can emerge from this fiasco, even assuming (however unlikely) that the election commissions are honest.

The Taliban have ''overwhelmed'' foreign troops and cannot be defeated by military means, one of Australia's top combat soldiers has warned. Brigadier Mark Smethurst says securing Afghanistan could take decades, but success is uncertain without a fundamental change in strategy. His critical assessment comes in a report that contrasts sharply with federal government claims of progress in Afghanistan. While the key role of Australian troops is mentoring local forces, he says the Afghan army cannot operate independently, despite seven years of training, and the police are even worse. The Afghan government is ineffective and has failed to deal with corruption, human rights abuses and a non-existent justice system. Aid distribution, he says, has been ''wasteful, ineffective and insufficient''.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding near each other in relative comfort in northwest Pakistan, a senior NATO official said Monday. The two men are believed to be living in homes near one another and are protected by members of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI, and locals, the network reported. Pakistan strongly denies protecting members of the terror network, according to a CNN report. "Nobody in Al Qaeda is living in a cave," the unnamed official was quoted as saying. Bin Laden is believed to have escaped from Afghanistan's Tora Bora region, a Taliban stronghold, during a U.S. bombing raid in 2001 and has moved around Pakistan since.

AWIP: Even Limbaugh Admits the Obvious: Osama bin Laden is Dead.

On Sunday, Oct. 17th, 2010, Israeli settlers from Gush Etzion flooded Palestinian farmland in Beit Ommar with thousands of liters of raw sewage. The sewage flooded fruit trees and partially submerged a bulldozer, which had to be towed away. This is the fourth time this year that this particular farmland has been flooded by the settlers.

AWIP: Israel settlers start fires amid West Bank harvest.