There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

— Louis L’Amour

There’s an assault going on right now against the terrorists holed up in Chabad’s Nariman House. IBNLive.com has live streaming video in WMV format.

Registration is now open for a Thanksgiving evening. Please read all the rules and commit them to memory, don’t register with a proxy, don’t register with a throwaway email address, don’t register more than one account, don’t be a jerk, do play nice, and everything will be groovy.

UPDATE at 11/27/08 6:09:10 pm:

Now closed after one hour, with 87 hatchlings.

Another reworking of a classic Gershwin tune, from Keith Jarrett’s 1987 solo concert in Tokyo.

Every once in a great while we point out particularly good deals at Amazon or other sites; it has to be exceptional or we don’t bother mentioning it. Amazon’s Black Friday 2008 is one of those exceptional deals, lots of cool gadgets, camera gear, DVDs and other stuff at 40-50% discounts. Check it out.

Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali man who lived in the Twin Cities, apparently blew himself up last week in northern Somalia—and there are almost a dozen others who recently disappeared from the Minneapolis area.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has learned that federal law enforcement sources believe that a Twin Cities man blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Northern Somalia last month. The FBI and Homeland Security are investigating whether Shirwa Ahmed had developed a terrorist recruiting network in the area.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS learned that Ahmed came to the Twin Cities in 1996 and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

More than a dozen young men of Somali descent, mostly in their 20s, from the Minneapolis area have recently disappeared, U.S. law enforcement officials tell 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. All are thought to be associates of Ahmed. U.S. officials suspect most of the young men have departed for Somalia to fight in ongoing violence there or to train in terrorist camps. Family members of the young men are said to be distraught, trying to figure to out what happened to them, sources say.

So far, the investigation has not uncovered credible evidence of a plot targeting the U.S. but American officials want to track down all these young men before they can say for certain what this is or is not, according to ABC News.

We have a new feature on the LGF front page: if you’re registered and logged in, the last comment information that shows at the bottom right of each article is now live.

Every 15 seconds an Ajax routine checks the last comment for each article on the front page, and if there’s a new comment the information is updated with the new total number of comments, and the username of the last commenter. With a fade-in effect, of course. And as always, hovering over the username shows a small excerpt of the comment.

A Thanksgiving morning open thread…

The latest word on the news networks is that eight hostages at that Chabad center in Mumbai have been released. Three terrorists were killed at the Taj Mahal Hotel, but one is still holed up inside. There may still be hostages inside the Oberoi Hotel. The death toll is now over 100.

The “Deccan Mujahideen” group claimed responsibility, but no one has ever heard of them before. This is probably a throwaway name for one of the Pakistani Islamist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba.

We wish all LGF readers a happy and safe Thanksgiving Day.

“The First Thanksgiving,” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris