Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been killed.

Fox News is reporting:

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally.

Bhutto was shot in the neck and chest as she was entering her vehicle, and then the bomber blew himself up, FOX News has confirmed.

The former prime minister died in Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she had been rushed to surgery. She was 54.

“At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at the hospital.

Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,” referring to Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf.

Some of them smashed the glass door at the main entrance of the emergency unit, others burst into tears. Top party leaders were outside the hospital, crying.

One man with a flag of Pakistan People’s Party tied around his head was beating his chest.

Sen. Babar Awan, Bhutto’s lawyer, said, “The surgeons confirmed that she has been martyred.”

*Update* In related news to this mornings assassination of the former Prime
Minister.

Jihad Watch is reporting the following:

US Special Forces to increase presence in Pakistan — Al-Qaeda’s new central battlefield

US Special Forces are to increase their presence in Pakistan amid assessments that the country is to become the central battlefield for al-Qaida as it is driven from Iraq.
“Pakistan should be carefully watched because it could prove to be a significant flashpoint in the coming year,” US think tank Strategic Forecasting said in an evaluation of al-Qaida’s tactics as the Islamist group comes under mounting pressure in Iraq.

This is a development which will become ever more necessary if we are to see peace in this area of the world. The events of today perhaps will speed the deployment of these forces and perhaps help keep some sanity in a country which will no doubt be in terrible turmoil in the coming months.

Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel offer their predictions of what we should expect in 2008 here.

Cal: In the immortal wisdom of baseball great Casey Stengel, “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” Yet what fun is political punditry if you can’t look into the crystal ball every once in a while?

Bob: Besides, if politics isn’t a guessing game, I don’t know what is. I mean, who would have predicted in 2000 that George W. Bush would be a two-term president?

If there is one thing we can be sure about it’s that as soon as you are positive something will happen, the winds change direction.

What an interesting year 2008 is shaping up to be, not only here at home but in events across the globe.

Anyone who knows me knows I don’t get all tied up with the commercialism of Christmas. I love to give gifts more than receive them.

Christmas is not biblically correct anyway. There is no way shepherds would have been sleeping with their sheep in December, as the weather in that part of the world gets cold and I have read the sheep get put up for the winter by October.

The Bible does not tell us a specific date for when Christ was born, but it does give us the specific time He died, which was His main purpose when He left heaven to become God as man. We know His death and resurrection took place during Passover.

Some pope arbitrarily decided December 25 was a good date to celebrate the birth of Christ. Many Christians don’t feel comfortable celebrating Christmas at all because there is no biblical reference as to when it actually happened.

The three Wise Men had to have arrived quite a while after Jesus was born as Herod had all boys under the age of two killed to make sure he got Jesus, Whom he was afraid would take his throne. If the Wise Men had arrived at the birth of Christ Herod would have had infants only killed.

I get pleasure out of watching and hearing what my grandchildren got for gifts and seeing their happy faces and hearing their happy voices on the phone.

We had lunch with our daughter and family and then cooked our own meal the night after Christmas because we were all so stuffed from Christmas dinner at our daughter’s house.

On Christmas Eve I noticed my husband had what looked like a plumb in his right cheek. After checking it in better light and asking him how he felt he told me his top tooth that has a crown on it was hurting.

Knowing he probably had an abcess I called the dentist who called the pharmacy with a prescription for an anti-biotic. Several hours later the pharmacy claimed they didn’t have the prescription. This has happened before with them so I called the dentist again and told her what was going on and also told her the redness was going below the jaw line and he said his eye hurt.

She called back and said instead of leaving the message on the voice mail this time she waited to speak directly with the pharmacist and we could pick up the medicine in 15 minutes. She apologized to us for the pharmacy making the mistake.

Wednesday morning she called my husband and had him go to her office to have the tooth checked and X-rayed. She saw the abcess and is going to do a root canal on him on Dec. 31. This will give the infection time to go down too.

She will take off the existing crown, do the root canal, put the existing crown back for a few weeks and then put a new crown in there once she’s sure everything is fine.

This reminded me of the Christmas he had a hernia and couldn’t get off the couch. He soon had that repaired.

I had a busy day running to doctors’ appointments on Wednesday and today we are going to have an HD Tivo receiver and dish installed to replace one of our Tivo receivers and the dishes outside.

We have one TV that is HD compatible, but as we replace other TVs they will be HD compatible so we might as well be ready for it.

I think we have a free day Friday, and we’re looking forward to it.

Now if my husband will just stop being stubborn and go to the doctor to see why his foot hurts him so much I’d feel much better.

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and wish you all a Happy New Year.