**CORRECTED**Conflicting Reports on Beheading of Franciscan Father. The Gray Lady Mum.

Catholic Online has a piece about the Al Nusra Front beheading Franciscan Father Francois Murad. This is being denied. No word as of yet in the prestige press.

No Syria news appeared in this morning's New York Times. Reuters is reporting that Chinese Communist leadership blames unrest in the western region of Xinjiang on the Syrian opposition. This wasn't mentioned in the story by Christopher Buckley that appeared in the New York Times.

Yesterday Mark Mazzetti, C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt reported on Qatari shipments of shoulder-fired Chinese FN-6 missiles to the rebels in Syria. Add this to reports of the Saudis supplying antitank guns to the rebels in Aleppo, and already it's plain to see that the heart of the Middle East is going the way of Afghanistan in the 1980s. This means constant warfare and the suffering that results -- death, dislocation, poverty.

It was a big disappointment to read Steve Coll's take on Syria in The New Yorker. It's pure sophistry. He basically comes out and calls for a no-fly zone. Coll makes his pitch based on appeals to our humanitarian better angels. Al-Assad is targeting civilians lining up to buy bread. Proof? No proof needed. And he's using poison gas on his own people. Proof? Well, our spot-on intelligence apparatus, of course. After reading Coll's "spooky" piece, from now on I'll be skeptical about anything he writes.

The best reporting -- the most consistent and trustworthy -- comes from The Independent's Patrick Cockburn. He had an excellent piece on Homs that appeared on Counterpunch's web site over the weekend; in it he directly addresses humanitarian warriors like Coll and the canard that the body count -- 90,000 to 100,000 -- constantly headlined in the Western press is entirely attributable to al-Assad:

The Syrian conflict is a civil war with all the horrors traditionally inflicted in such struggles wherever they are fought, be it Syria today or Russia, Spain, Greece, Lebanon or Iraq in the past. For the newly appointed American National Security Adviser Susan Rice, David Cameron or William Hague to pretend that this is a simple battle between a dictatorial government and an oppressed people is to misrepresent or misunderstand what is happening on the ground.

Evidence that both sides have committed supporters prepared to fight to the death is borne out by the estimate of some 100,000 dead published this week by the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It concludes that fatal casualties come almost equally from the two sides in the civil war: broadly 25,000 of them government soldiers, 17,000 pro-government militia, 36,000 civilians and 14,000 rebel fighters, though the last two figures in particular are probably understated.

The massive anti-Morsi protests yesterday in Egypt are heartening. The Saudis and Qataris actively seeking to Talibanize the entire Middle East no doubt took note. There is a huge majority that wants peace, employment and tolerance. Not sharia. Not perpetual war.