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Cyber-Thieves ‘Target Christmas Shoppers’

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Cyber-thieves are preparing malware and spam campaigns in a bid to catch out retailers and shoppers during the run-up to Christmas, experts say.

One gang had updated the sophisticated malware it used to target tills in stores, security company iSight said.

There had also been an increase in spam and phishing emails crafted to catch out people seeking bargains.

And some crime groups had made fake copies of popular shopping apps in a bid to steal payment-card data.

The warnings are being given just prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which bracket the weekend following the US Thanksgiving holiday, when many online and offline stores offer special deals. (Read more from “Cyber-Thieves ‘Target Christmas Shoppers'” HERE)

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Watch a Green Comet Streak Across the Sky for Christmas

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green cometDiscovered only this past August, comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) is now quickly brightening to naked-eye visibility as it moves from the deep southern sky into prime viewing location for observers throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The comet is already putting on a Christmas show, glowing green thanks to molecules that glow when hit by the sun’s solar wind.

This icy visitor to the inner solar system was first spotted by its namesake, Terry Lovejoy, an Australian astronomer using a common backyard telescope with only an eight-inch mirror. He spotted the comet while it was still a very faint 15th magnitude.

The comet wasn’t predicted to become visible with the unaided eye until late January or February 2015. But comets can be unpredictable, with chaotic surface activity as they heat up and melt while nearing the sun during orbit. Since summer, the comet’s brightness has shot up by hundreds of times.

In fact, some observers in the Southern Hemisphere are reporting that it has brightened to magnitude 6, meaning that it has technically reached naked-eye levels already. It’s now an easy target to find with binoculars, showing up as a distinct hazy ball.

Read more from this story HERE.

Unexpected Christmas Miracles

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Christmas WWIIDad used to tell us his favorite Christmas story. In the boiling Pacific of World War II, Dad was on USS Cleveland and saw the intensity of naval warfare at places such as Midway, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Manila.

On Christmas Eve, 1944, the men got good news: A priest would come aboard for Midnight Mass! Dad would recall how they sure needed the “good news” of the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, during those clashing days.

But, when the priest arrived for Mass, the hundreds of gathered, expectant sailors began to growl, “He’s a Jap!” (to use the politically incorrect word of that time).

Dad would tell us that, although they would later learn he was actually a Filipino priest, the understandable hostility of the war still led the men to grumble, as they wondered about the worthiness of this “Oriental” (to use another outdated term) to offer Mass. . .

But . . . then came “O Come All Ye Faithful”; then came the sign of the cross; then the gospel of the first Christmas, and the suspect priest’s simple and sincere sermon of love for family at home and longing for peace on earth and sea; then came prayer and Holy Communion; finally came the priest’s blessing and “Silent Night,” with men crying and hugging, and the “Jap priest” cheered and engulfed with affection as he left the ship to visit another awaiting congregation.

Prejudice, hatred, suspicion and antagonism were changed into love, acceptance and joy on USS Cleveland. That’s the miracle of Christmas!

Read more from this story HERE.

Merry Christmas from Joe and Kathleen Miller!

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Watch Joe and Kathleen Miller in their timeless Christmas message. Merry Christmas to you and yours as you remember the Reason for the Season!

Defiant Christians Gather in Baghdad for Christmas Mass

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Iraqi Christmas EveBy Saif Hameed. Baghdad’s embattled Christian community worshipped defiantly Wednesday night at Christmas Eve mass.

The pews filled at Baghdad’s Sacred Heart church, as people remembered the darkest year in memory.

Blast walls shielded the church and seven policeman flanked the outside of the house of worship, in an indication of the government’s fear of an attack on the religious groups by jihadists who consider them non-believers.

The congregation sang in unison: “Praise Jesus, our Lord. Oh praise him” as incense burnt in the darkened church. Read more from this story HERE.

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In Iraq, displaced but defiant Christians gather for a somber Christmas

By Molly Hennessey Fiske. The children awoke the day before Christmas behind blast walls and armed guards, in a dingy Syrian Catholic schoolhouse strung with clotheslines. Their families have been cooking on hot plates and sleeping on pallets there in recent months, forced from their homes in northern Iraq by Islamic State militants.

They took turns showering in the communal bathroom, dressed in donated clothes and prepared to meet Santa.

This year, there would be no big holiday parties at Our Lady of Salvation, a local landmark topped by a towering cross that’s visible for miles. Christians are leaving Iraq, the population down from more than 1 million a decade ago to about 350,000, many of them displaced.

In the north, Islamic State fighters have forced thousands to flee. In Baghdad, where the security situation is still so tenuous that priests worried that celebrations could provoke an attack. Last Christmas, three bombings targeted Christians, including a Roman Catholic church, and killed 38 people.

Shortly before the 6 p.m. Christmas Eve service, the children and their families filed out of the school past concrete barriers topped with barbed wire and into the packed church for several hours of singing and prayer, the highlight of their day, hoping the strangers they met meant them no harm. Read more from this story HERE.
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Traditions of Christmas Found Only in Memory

By Tim Arango. For months now, since militants of the Islamic State stormed her hometown, Qaraqosh, in northern Iraq, near Mosul, and began killing and driving out Christians, home for Miriam and dozens of her old neighbors has been the run-down Al Makasid Primary School in Baghdad. To get by, they have relied on the kindnesses of the nearby church, and of local Muslims, too.

In the school’s dingy courtyard there is a tree, trimmed in balls and bells, and a Nativity scene. A few gifts have been donated — toys, clothes, dolls and candies. It is not much, and nothing like being at home, but Christmas has not been the same in Iraq for a long time now.

Two numbers tell that story. In 2003, when the Americans invaded, there were an estimated 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq. Today, experts say, there are fewer than 400,000, many of them on the run from the Islamic State. Read more from this story HERE.

Chinese Christmas Celebrations Explode Along With Persecution of the Church

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Chinese XmasWhy Christmas Is Huge in China

By Robert Foyle Hunwick. There’s a joke going around: “Santa Claus was descending into China from the sky. Due to the heavy smog, he fell to the ground, but no one dared help him up. While he was still lying in the snow, his bag was ransacked for presents, and his reindeer and sleigh taken away by the chengguan. Therefore, no Christmas this year.”

While some of the humor needs context—there are digs at China’s notorious bystander effect and much-despised urban-management officials, chengguan—the larger meaning is clear. Ironic jokes about Santa’s routine being disrupted with uniquely Chinese characteristics are a sure sign that, yes, they do know it’s Christmas time in communist China.

Retailers lead the way here: An annual spending season that once focused on Chinese New Year in the winter is now bloated and elongated, stretching from the invented Singles’ Day on November 11 through February, with Christmas as a kind of hump day. Even before December, shops, streets, and hotels begin filling with slightly off-kilter Yuletide scenes: performers in elf suits play traditional cymbals while a grinning plastic Santa Claus toots a saxophone outside his gingerbread cabin. Why the sax? Theorists point to everything from romantic associations with the avuncular Bill Clinton jamming on the instrument in the 1990s, to the smooth alto-sax muzak that is the preferred soundtrack of Santa’s typical dwelling, the shopping mall.

There’s no sign of Jesus, but in many big cities, you’re still more likely to see Father Christmas’s face than that of “Uncle” Xi Jinping, as state media has characterized the country’s president, presenting a homely, familial image that’s quite at odds with the repressive manner in which he’s coldly eliminated opponents. But Xi is not above the fray himself, visiting Santa’s official cabin in Rovaniemi, Finland in 2010.

The Western religious festival is so trendy, in fact, that it may be the second-most-celebrated festival in China . . . Read more from this story HERE.
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Communists Crackdown on Christians Ahead of Chinese Christmas

By DIDI TANG. Two days before Christmas, members of a rural Christian congregation in the eastern city of Wenzhou welded some pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of their worship hall to replace one that was forcibly removed in October.

Within an hour, township officials and uniformed men barged onto the church ground and tore down the cross.

“They keep a very close watch on us, and there is nothing we can do,” said a church official, who spoke to The Associated Press on Tuesday on condition of anonymity because of fear of government retaliation. “The situation is not good, as any attempt to re-erect the cross will be stopped.”

That means that the worshippers in Wenzhou, like many Christians in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, will worship this Christmas under a cross-less roof. Provincial authorities have toppled crosses from more than 400 churches, and even razed some worship halls in a province-wide crackdown on building code violations.

Many Christians say their faith has been singled out because authorities, wary of its rapid growth, are seeking to curb its spread in a campaign that has targeted China’s most thriving Christian communities. Read more from this story HERE.

The Extraordinary Christmas Truce of World War I

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nwjt3g9xl3mjjfpupo0fBy Christmas 1914, nearly one million men had died in less than five months of fighting along the Western Front. Men who had expected the war to be over by Christmas had settled into fortified trenches, and the war into a deadly stalemate.

But in the week leading up to Christmas something amazing happened. In scattered areas along the front, British and German soldiers began to cross the area between the trenches—known as “no man’s land”—and exchange small gifts and Christmas greetings.

Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade wrote that “First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words ‘Adeste Fideles.’ And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing—two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”

His German counterpart, Josef Sewald of the 17th Bavarian Regiment, recalled, “I shouted to our enemies that we didn’t wish to shoot and that we make a Christmas truce. I said I would come from my side and we could speak with each other. First there was silence, then I shouted once more, invited them, and the British shouted ‘No shooting!’”

This outbreak of human decency in the midst of what was arguably the most senseless carnage in human history culminated on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 1914. Along the front, some, but not all, British and German officers negotiated a 48-hour truce [and] men on both sides sang together, exchanged gifts, and even played soccer. Read more from this story HERE.
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Eyewitness Report of World’s Saddest Christmas Day

By Ishaan Tharoor. It was Christmas morning, 1914. In the muddy, bloody fields of Belgium, British and German soldiers peered across the way at each other from their miserable trenches. World War I was in full swing.

And then something miraculous and moving happened.

“About 10 o’clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German,” wrote Capt. A.D. Chater, in a letter to his mother, “waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trench and came towards ours.”

Chater, whose letter was released by the Royal Mail, goes on: “We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles, so one of our men went to meet them and in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas.”

Across the front lines, soldiers marked a somber Christmas together. Five months of war could not dampen holiday bonhomie. Soldiers exchanged pleasantries and cigarettes. They buried the dead that had been left strewn in no-man’s land. Read more from this story HERE.

25 Surprising Facts About Classic Christmas Songs

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Jingle Bells1. While we associate “Jingle Bells” with Christmas, the song was written by James Lord Pierpont to celebrate Thanksgiving.

2. “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” and “Holly Jolly Christmas” were written by Jewish songwriter Johnny Marks.

3. The first Christmas song to mention Santa Claus was Benjamin Hanby’s “Up On The Housetop.” Written in 1864, Hanby was inspired Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.”

4. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is one of the oldest Christmas hymns to still get airplay. Originally composed in Latin during the twelfth century, it was translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851.

5. Thurl Ravenscroft, the singer responsible for How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ classic song “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” also famously voiced Tony the Tiger, the mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Town Orders Homeowner to Remove Zombie Nativity Display

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zombie nativityTalk about a nightmare before Christmas.

An Ohio homeowner was ordered by town officials to remove a Nativity scene in front of his house that featured zombies instead of wise men and a baby Jesus.

“I wanted a Nativity and I worked with what I had,” Jasen Dixon, who manages a nearby haunted house, told Fox 19. “The neighbors don’t like it. My father hates it and anything bad that happens he blames it on that.”

The Nativity scene features life-size figures and a zombie baby Jesus, with pale skin and pure white eyes. At night, the figures are illuminated by red and green lights.

“I didn’t really pay it any attention until the different color lights came on, then finally the baby was put in the manger,” Dan Fluker, a neighbor, told the station.

Read more from this zombie nativity HERE.

Americans having a Holly Jolly, Stress Free Christmas

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Christmas Cheer‘Tis indeed the season to be jolly for Americans, who are experiencing their lowest levels of holiday stress in years, according to a new CNN/ORC nationwide poll.

The poll suggests they’ve already decked their halls with boughs of holly, as only 30% of the public said they’re feeling a great deal or fair amount of stress from all the things they need to do to get ready for Christmas.

That’s a steep drop from 2005, when a vast majority of Americans must’ve left the tree-trimming to the last minute, as 86% said they felt a great deal or fair amount of stress that year. In 1989, 76% felt the same, perhaps because they waited too long to buy the new Nintendo Game Boy, the hot toy released that year.

Read more from this story HERE.