I’m sure many of you are celebrating Halloween today (or yesterday, depending on the discretion of your local municipality), but for many Christians, Oct. 31 marks the 493rd anniversary of Martin Luther ushering in the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. And this year the anniversary happens to fall on the Lord’s Day.

Is your church recognizing the occasion in any particular way? Our evening worship will feature the Rev. Stephen Crotts, who will present a first-person portrayal of Luther in costume. We’ll follow that up with a bonfire, s’mores, and treats for the kids.

If you’re not familiar with Martin Luther and what he stood for, here’s a link to some great resources from Ligonier Ministries, including four free MP3 downloads of messages by R.C. Sproul on Luther and the Reformation.

And here’s the trailer for the 2003 film Luther, which would be a good movie to watch this evening:

The crowd I saw at the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally to Restore Sanity/Fear was white, under 35, hip, and carrying witty signs, like, “I HAVE A SIGN.” Or, “MY VIEWS ARE TOO COMPLEX TO FIT ON A SI.” All the organizations I saw who set up shop around the event were left-leaning (Amnesty International, Faith in Public Life), and the Democratic National Committee had set up phone banks for volunteers to man after the rally. People carried America flags with corporate logos as the stars and wore “Fight Fox” stickers. One young person held the sign, “Things are pretty OK.”

Three days before a game-changing election, while the nation struggles with deep unemployment and federal debt, the last thing Democrats might want is heavy media coverage of a rally of financially secure, young liberals. Stewart at one point described the event as being for people with “jobs and lives.”

Moreover, a number of Democrats have made the point that this hurts their campaign operations because thousands of potential get-out-the-vote volunteers were camped out at a Comedy Central rally. Associated Press reporter Phil Elliott tweeted today, “Clever signs don’t vote or phone bank.” President Obama even made the point to Pennsylvania canvassers today, in reference to a recent Democratic rally:

Coming to a rally, that’s not the hard part.  What I need this weekend is 20,000 doors knocked on by all the volunteers who are here today.

Stewart and Colbert stayed funny and relatively nonpolitical, with Stewart holding “serious talk” until the end of the show, when he skewered the media for its overreactive coverage of politics (And of this rally? One report noted that more than 1,000 journalists applied for credentials to the event – organizers issued only 400). Stewart said at the end:

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.

Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly opportunity to sound off about the week past.

Remember the rules:

• A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon (see Website Help to learn how to use emoticons, aka “smileys”).
• A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked off about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.
• You may Rant! about something a person said, did, or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person. IOW, no personal attacks allowed.

Have fun!

Hello!

Random question of the day: What will you do on Halloween?

My answer to yesterday’s question: Thanks for all your input about your thoughts on the News Briefs!

Remember: This is our daily (except for Sundays) open thread, where you can 1) answer my question, 2) talk about something else, or 3) say something truly encouraging to the commenter before you

Russian counternarcotics agents teamed up with U.S. and Afghan forces in an unprecedented joint raid that destroyed nearly $56 million worth of heroin near the Pakistani border, officials said Friday.

The seizure of four drug labs nestled in thick vegetation in Nangarhar province came less than a week after Russia’s anti-narcotics chief accused the United States of failing to dismantle such labs and slow down the flow of heroin into Russia.

The 932 kilograms confiscated in Thursday’s raid is unlikely to have a significant impact on Afghanistan’s drug trade. The country produces enough raw opium to manufacture 360 tons of heroin a year, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

But the level of cooperation between U.S. and Russian forces was significant and suggested an improvement in relations between the former Cold War foes, two decades after U.S.-financed Afghan militias chased the Soviet military out of this country.

The two nations nowadays occasionally cooperate on terrorism and drug issues, but Moscow has offered only lukewarm support for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the export of Afghan drugs is an issue of paramount concern to Russia, which now has 2 million opium and heroin addicts. Moscow had been urging the U.S. military to take action against Afghan drug labs, which process unrefined opium into heroin or morphine.

Nine helicopters and 70 men were involved in the raid, said Russian anti-narcotics chief Viktor Ivanov, adding that his agency told the U.S. where the labs were located.

A DEA press release said the raid originally targeted one lab but then found three others hidden by vegetation.

In addition to the 932 kilograms of heroin, agents seized 156 kilograms of opium in the raid in the village of Zerasari, part of the district of Achin. It takes about 10 tons of opium to make one ton of heroin.

Analysts said it will take fundamental reforms rather than just drug busts to shut down Afghanistan’s multibillion dollar drug industry. U.S. officials have argued that destruction of poppy fields would drive Afghan farmers who had no other employment into the arms of the Taliban.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Barack Obama declared Friday that authorities had uncovered a “credible terrorist threat” against the United States following the overseas discovery of two United States-bound packages containing explosives aboard cargo jets.

The events “underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism,” the president said. Both packages originated in Yemen.

Obama stepped to the podium just hours after officials disclosed that authorities in Dubai intercepted an explosive device bound for a Chicago-area Jewish institution.

The president refrained from assigning blame to Yemen’s al-Qaeda branch, but officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were increasingly certain that al-Qaeda was behind the attempted attacks. The same group was responsible for the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner last Christmas.

The second package was aboard a plane in East Midlands, north of London, and was also bound for a Jewish institution in the Chicago area. Officials said it contained a printer toner cartridge with wires and powder.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan later told reporters that the explosives “were in a form that was designed to try to carry out some type of attack,” but he provided no further details.

“The forensic analysis is under way,” he said, adding, “Clearly from the initial observation . . . the materials that were found in the device that was uncovered was intended to do harm.”

The White House says Obama’s travel plans to campaign ahead of the midterm elections will not be affected by the terror probe. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the president still plans to visit five states in the next three days, including stops in Philadelphia and Chicago, two of the cities involved in the investigation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

French workers ended their strikes at all oil refineries and at strategic fuel terminals following weeks of protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, union and French officials said Friday.

The protest movement has been losing steam since parliament approved the plan to reform France’s pension plan this week in order to keep it solvent.

Workers at the last four shut down oil refineries voted to return to the job, the CFDT union said Friday. At one point, all 12 refineries were off-line due to strikes that started Oct. 12.

It could take days to get refineries up to full speed to produce fuel after the lengthy shutdowns, the CFDT union said. Total, which owns six of France’s 12 refineries, said the start-up time would vary among facilities and could run over a week at some.

The state-run train authority said Friday that all fast trains would run normally over the weekend like most other train services.

The 33-day-long strike by fuel terminal workers in the Marseille area left 80 vessels stranded in the Mediterranean, unable to unload. Workers there and in the port of Le Havre, in the northwest, were ending their protests.

Marseille is still shoveling itself out of some 9,000 tons of garbage that piled up on sidewalks during garbage collectors’ strike.

France’s plan to raise the retirement age will still go before a council that will rule on whether it is constitutional, a move initiated by rival Socialist lawmakers.

Sarkozy said Friday that he would sign the legislation after the final challenge, conceding that some concerns are “legitimate.”

It was unclear whether unions would go ahead with plans for another nationwide protest Nov. 6.

Unions see retirement at 60 as a cornerstone of France’s social benefit system, but the government says the pension system is in jeopardy without the reform because French people are living longer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt killed at least 21 people, mostly Shiites, on Friday in a town north of Baghdad, shattering what had been weeks of relative calm, the town’s mayor said.

The blast in the town of Balad Ruz emphasizes the delicate nature of Iraq’s security gains and comes as the country is approaching its eighth month without a new government since the March elections.

The suicide bomber blew himself up inside a popular cafe in the town of Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad as people were gathered to play dominoes and drink tea, said the town’s mayor, Mohammed Maaruf. An additional 65 people were injured, he said.

The neighborhood where the explosion occurred is home to many Faili Kurds, a small sect of ethnic Kurds following the Shiite branch of Islam, and many of the dead were Shiites.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, blasts targeting Shiites are often the work of Sunni insurgents trying to stir up sectarian problems.

While scattered violence occurs almost daily in Iraq, Friday night’s blast broke what has been a time of comparative quiet across Iraq. The last such major attack came Sept. 19 when twin bombings in Baghdad killed at least 31 people.

Diyala province, with its mixed population of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, was once one of the most volatile in Iraq but recent years has seen a drop in violence.

Also on Friday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch denounced the Kurdish regional government’s investigation into the slaying of a Kurdish journalist critical of authorities in Iraq.

Freelance journalist Sardasht Othman’s handcuffed and bullet-ridden body was found near the restive northern Iraqi city of Mosul and authorities concluded he had been killed by insurgents.

But many Kurds in the autonomous region where he lived blamed the government for his killing and staged dozens of huge protests demanding the perpetrators be brought to justice.

Kurdish government officials have denied any involvement in Othman’s death and in a report in September concluded that he had ties to Sunni militants in nearby Mosul who ultimately killed him.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Authorities in Dubai intercepted an explosive device shipped from Yemen and bound for a Chicago-area Jewish institution aboard a cargo jet, officials disclosed Friday.

A second package—also from Yemen—was discovered aboard a plane in England. It, too, was addressed to a Jewish organization in the Chicago area, although there was no immediate confirmation about its contents.

Several other cargo planes at airports along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States also were searched, and officials said no explosives were found. An Emirates Airlines passenger jet carrying cargo from Yemen was escorted from the Canadian border to New York City by two military fighter jets as a precautionary action, U.S. officials said.

In a statement Friday afternoon President Barack Obama described the day’s findings as a “credible terrorist threat” against the United States. He added that the events “underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism.”

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan later told reporters that the explosives “were in a form that was designed to try to carry out some type of attack,” but he provided no further details.

“The forensic analysis is under way,” he said, adding, “Clearly from the initial observation, the initial analysis that was done, the materials that were found in the device that was uncovered was intended to do harm.”

Ross Rice, an FBI spokesman in Chicago, said both suspicious packages had been sent from the same address in Yemen.

U.S. officials said they were increasingly confident that the packages were part of a plot by Yemen’s al-Qaeda branch, the same group responsible for an attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner last Christmas. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the ongoing investigation.

Other officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the package found in England contained a printer toner cartridge with wires and powder. It was discovered aboard a plane in East Midlands, north of London.

One official said intelligence personnel had been monitoring a suspected plot for days. The packages in England and Dubai were discovered late Thursday after a foreign intelligence service picked up information related to Yemen and passed it on to the United States, this official said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A decision by officials at UNESCO, the UN body in charge of preserving historical sites, to define West Bank shrines sacred to both Jews and Muslims as Palestinian is “absurd,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday.

One of the sites, in the city of Hebron, has been in dispute for decades. Jews call it the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the Bible says the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were buried along with three of their wives.

Muslims call it the al-Ibrahimi mosque, reflecting their belief that Abraham is the father of both Judaism and Islam.

“The attempt to detach the people of Israel from its heritage is absurd,” Netanyahu wrote in the statement. “If the places where the fathers and mothers of the Jewish nation are buried, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, and Rachel some 4,000 years ago are not part of the Jewish heritage then what is?”

Hebron is a West Bank flash point because it is the only place where Jews live among Palestinians. About 500 Israeli settlers live in enclaves near the disputed holy site, guarded by Israeli soldiers who control part of the city of about 170,000 Palestinians.

Earlier this year Israeli officials registered the Hebron shrine as well as a tomb near Jerusalem believed to be the burial site of the Matriarch Rachel as national heritage sites. Both shrines are located in the West Bank, territory the Palestinians want as part of their future state. Palestinians view the additions of the shrines to Israel’s heritage list as a land grab.

“It is regrettable that the organization established to promote historical heritage sites worldwide is trying for political reasons to detach the ties between the Jewish people and their heritage,” Netanyahu’s statement said. “The state of Israel in contrast to its neighbors will continue to preserve freedom of religion at these sites and preserve them for future generations.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.