In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012 photo, a pair of women beg outside a pharmacy display window decorated for Christmas, in downtown Dakar, Senegal. As Christmas approaches in mostly Muslim Senegal, vendors ply the streets selling tinsel, artificial trees, and inflatable Santas, and the main boulevards are all aglow in holiday lights. Senegal, a moderate country along Africa's western coast, has long been a place where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully and share in each other's holidays. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012 photo, Christmas lights reading "Welcome to Dakar," light up a highway alongside a mosque in Dakar, Senegal. As Christmas approaches in mostly Muslim Senegal, vendors ply the streets selling tinsel, artificial trees, and inflatable Santas, and the main boulevards are all aglow in holiday lights. Senegal, a moderate country along Africa's western coast, has long been a place where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully and share in each other's holidays. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

A bouquet of inflatable Santa toys tied to a nearby tree bobs in the air at this outdoor market in the seaside capital as he makes his picks.

It looks a lot like Christmas in Senegal, where 95 percent of the 12.8 million residents are Muslim. Even the Grande Mosquee, a mosque that dominates the city's skyline, is aglow in holiday lights.

"When they go to school, the children learn about Santa," says Lo, wearing a flowing olive green robe known as a boubou. "We are born into the Senegalese tradition of cohabitation between Muslims and Christians. What is essential is the respect between people."

Senegal, a moderate country along Africa's western coast, has long been a place where Christians and Muslims have coexisted peacefully. Most Christians here are Catholic and live in the south of country and in the capital.

Hadim Thiam, 30, normally sells shoes but during December he's expanded to an elaborate spread of tinsel, cans of spray snow and fireworks.

"It's not linked to God. It's for the children," says Jean Mouss, 55, a Christian out shopping for holiday decorations at Thiam's stand. "We wish Muslims a Merry Christmas and invite them into our homes for the holiday."

Signs of Christmas are prevalent in this tropical seaside capital.

Green and flocked plastic trees of every size are sold on street corners alongside Nescafe carts and vendors splitting open coconuts. "My First Christmas" baby sleepers are folded neatly on the top of the piles of second-hand clothing for sale on the streets. There are French "buches de Noel" and chocolate snowmen for sale in the upscale patisseries.

At lunchtime, a chorus of schoolchildren singing "Silent Night" echoes across a courtyard. The main cathedral is now a spectacle of lights each night — no easy feat for a city often subjected to power cuts.

Still, not everyone in Senegal thinks embracing Christmas is all in good cheer. Mouhamed Seck, a Quranic teacher and imam for a mosque in a Dakar suburb, says taking part in the holiday is supporting a non-Muslim's religion.

"Islam forbids Muslims from taking part in these festivities," he says.

Parents who celebrate Christmas, though, say it's a secular time to celebrate with their families on a national holiday.

"To make my two children happy, I buy gifts for them and ask their mother to prepare a very hearty meal but we don't go to Mass," says Oumar Fall, 46, who has a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old.

Santa Claus, known in this former French colony as Pere Noel, also makes the rounds at upscale shopping centers and grocery stores in the weeks before Christmas.

Mamadou Sy, 40, had been working at a hotel in Morocco until his visa recently expired. Now back in Senegal, he's making extra money this December as a Santa at the seaside Magicland amusement park.

Like children everywhere, some are frightened by him, but most just want pictures — and presents.

"Senegal is a unique case where 5 percent of the country is Christian," he says, seeking shade while wearing his red fur costume and hat. "Christians celebrate Muslim holidays and Muslims celebrate Christian holidays."

The tradition even extends to Senegalese schools. Therese Angelique Soumare's students all get together for a Christmas party the weekend before the holiday with their parents. The teachers put presents under a tree and Santa Claus shows up to hand them out.

"Everyone celebrates because it's for the children. Here in Senegal we are good neighbors," she says as she picks out gifts for the party. "We sing, we dance and we love seeing the children's joy."

___

Associated Press writer Sadibou Marone contributed to this report.

Ben Fulford: The New World Order has been defeated but the Old World Order is still fighting, December 24, 2012

There are growing signs that the Bush/Nazi New World Order Nazi faction

has been defeated but that the Rockefellers and their allies in the Old World Order faction are still fighting to preserve their power. It has also now been confirmed that the new Japanese government headed by Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party was put in place via a disguised military coup d’etat, according to Japanese military intelligence sources. This implies the Rockefellers and their minions are being forced out of Japan, a CIA source added. This means 66 years of hostile foreign occupation of Japan may be about to end. There is still secret fighting going on though.

The gnostic illuminati faction in the West, for its part, is claiming victory and saying that “President Obama will leave the White House hanging by his neck from a helicopter.”

Of course the jury is still out on all this and only actual events and not talk, will determine if what the various sources are saying is true. However, it looks like it will be a Merry Solar New Year (even the pope now admits Christmas was not Christ’s birthday), and the power of love and friendship is winning over the forces of fear and hate.

There is also strong evidence emerging that the new Japanese government is planning to end the cabal’s monopoly on the creation of money by government money or Japanese greenbacks. Doing this would allow the Japanese government to write off its entire debt with the stroke of a keyboard. This plan is no longer something mulled on internet “conspiracy” sites but is actually the subject of discussion at major government sponsored conferences.

The IMF, for example, issued a report in August calling for government currency creation.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.pdf

That report stimulated a recent conference of top policy makers in Japan who proposed their own version of this plan. The notes of this conference (in Japanese) can be seen at this link:

http://aspos.web.fc2.com/20121123-25abstract.pdf

One of the lead economists behind this plan in Japan is Kaoru Yamaguchi, who says he worked with the authors of the IMF paper and that academic and government economists in Japan, the US and Europe are abuzz with talk of the concept of government created currency. Not only that, Japan’s military, yakuza and most police also support such a plan meaning that men in black sent by the Rockefellers etc. are not going to be able to stop it.

However, it is clear that there is still some fighting going on in the back-ground. Yoshinori Watanabe, the former head of the Yamaguchi Gumi Yakuza syndicate was killed earlier this month, according to Yakuza sources. Japanese newspapers reported the cause of death as illness but Yamaguchi, who retired in favour of Shinobu Tsukasa, the current head, was killed and that revenge attacks are being carried out.

Yamaguchi was forced to retire after former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi cut off his government funding and money he earned from the meat business. However, despite the loss of funds he remained very influential and was working against the cabal.

The North Koreans are also now saying they will stop working for the cabal in Japan and in North Korea. However, they have been cut off from their “super K” CIA forged money as well as from the amphetamines business and need new sources of legitimate income to replace these important sources of foreign currency. They are asking for Japanese help. The White Dragon Society has suggested that a tunnel linking Japan to Korea would be a good way to help North Korea because a rail link from Tokyo to London, via the Korean peninsula, would cut freight costs from Europe to East Asia and provide legitimate income to North Korea.

The North Koreans also want to build a pipeline to ship Russian LNG to South Korea. The new regime in South Korea is likely to be amenable to this sort of proposal.

In any case, the cabal is running out of thugs for hire in Japan and that means they are losing control of this formerly lucrative enclave of theirs. Time to pack your bags Michael Green.

There are also signs that something is changing within the Japanese royal family. In specific it is being said the current crown prince may not inherit the throne, according to a royal family source. That is because he was forced to marry princess Masako, the daughter of Rockefeller stooge and International Court of Justice judge Hisashi Owada. This is the opposite of the conventional story being put out in the media and on the rumour-mill that he forced Masako to marry him. The reason the crown prince was forced into the marriage was because the Sabbatean mafia wanted to substitute a cabal family member as his heir and take over the royal family of Japan. Of course, as with anything connected to the Japanese royal family, information from anonymous sources needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

It is clear though that the Abe government in power is a military regime and it has already taken on emergency powers. However, Abe will not provoke Korea, China or Russia because they are not the real enemies. He will also work closely with the Pentagon white dragon sympathizers. The Pentagon good guys already won kudos by seizing a Nazi nuclear device, destined for Tokyo, from a submarine in the Indian Ocean. Events over the coming days will make it clear exactly how much Japan has really changed.

However, we are also hearing that a fundamental sea change has happened in England as well. It turns out that a lot of the gold in the vaults of the Bank of England has been stolen and replaced with tungsten laced bars, according to an MI5 source. The theft has been traced to the Bushes and to funds that were used to finance the Euro. For that reason the English are now openly talking about leaving the European Union, the MI5 source said. Tony Blair is also going to be taken in for rigorous questioning on his involvement in all this.Jacob Rothschild and James Sassoon will be too.

The situation is less clear in the US but it seems that the Sandy Hook murders have provoked the exact opposite reaction from what was intended. The inconsistencies in the official story, the videos of laughing actors suddenly turning into “grieving parents,” the reports of multiple gun-men etc. have outraged military and law enforcement types. It was, as a gnostic illuminati leader put it, “a fatal mistake.”

However, many of these dangerous and desperate criminals are on the loose and can still carry out other atrocities. That is why we must keep our powder dry and stay alert so that we can make sure to finish the job.

Nonetheless, it looks like the tide has turned and the coming new year will be happy. Merry Christmas and solar new year.

U.N. approves new debate on arms treaty opposed by U.S. gun lobby

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Monday to restart negotiations on a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global trade inconventional arms, a pact the powerful U.S. National Rifle Association has been lobbying hard against.

U.N. delegates and gun control activists have complained that talks collapsed in July largely becauseU.S. President Barack Obama feared attacks from Republican rival Mitt Romney before the November 6 election if his administration was seen as supporting the pact, a charge U.S. officials have denied.

The NRA, which has come under intense criticism for its reaction to the December 15 shooting massacre of 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, opposes the idea of an arms trade treaty and has pressured Obama to reject it.

But after Obama's re-election last month, his administration joined other members of a U.N. committee in supporting the resumption of negotiations on the treaty.

That move was set in stone on Monday when the 193-nation U.N. General Assembly voted to hold a final round of negotiations on March 18-28 in New York.

The foreign ministers of Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya and the United Kingdom - the countries that drafted the resolution - issued a joint statement welcoming the decision to resume negotiations on the pact.

"This was a clear sign that the vast majority of U.N. member states support a strong, balanced and effective treaty, which would set the highest possible common global standards for the international transfer of conventional arms," they said.

There were 133 votes in favour, none against and 17 abstentions. A number of countries did not attend, which U.N. diplomats said was due to the Christmas Eve holiday.

The exact voting record was not immediately available, though diplomats said the United States voted 'yes,' as it did in the U.N. disarmament committee last month. Countries that abstained from last month's vote included Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Belarus, Cuba and Iran.

Among the top six arms-exporting nations, Russia cast the only abstention in last month's vote. Britain, France and Germany joined China and the United States in the disarmament committee in support of the same resolution approved by the General Assembly on Monday.

NRA THREATENS "GREATEST FORCE OF OPPOSITION"

The main reason the arms trade talks are taking place at all is that the United States - the world's biggest arms trader, which accounts for more than 40 percent of global transfers in conventional arms - reversed U.S. policy on the issue after Obama was first elected and decided in 2009 to support a treaty.

Obama administration officials have tried to explain to U.S. opponents of the arms trade pact that the treaty under discussion would have no effect on gun sales and ownership inside the United States because it would apply only to exports.

But NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told U.N. delegations in July that his group opposed the pact and there are no indications that

it has changed that position.

"Any treaty that includes civilian firearms ownership in its scope will be met with the NRA's greatest force of opposition," LaPierre said, according to the website of the NRA's lobbying wing, the Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA).

LaPierre's speech to the U.N. delegations in July was later supported by letters from a majority of U.S. senators and 130 congressional representatives, who told Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that they opposed the treaty, according to the NRA-ILA.

It is not clear whether the NRA would have the same level of support from U.S. legislators after the Newtown massacre.

U.S. officials say they want a treaty that contributes to international security by fighting illicit arms trafficking and proliferation but protects the sovereign right of states to conduct legitimate arms trade.

"We will not accept any treaty that infringes on the constitutional rights of our citizens to bear arms," a U.S. official told Reuters last month.

The United States, like all other U.N. member states, can effectively veto the treaty since the negotiations will be conducted on the basis of consensus. That means the treaty must receive unanimous support in order to be approved in March.

Arms control activists say it is far from clear that the Obama administration truly wants a strong treaty. Any treaty agreed in March would also need to be ratified by the parliaments of individual signatory nations before it could come into force.

(Reporting By Louis Charbonneau; editing by Christopher Wilson)

New poll shows Israel's leader losing altitude