Benedict XVI participated in the extraordinary synod of the Syro-Catholic bishops, asking them to be an example of unity in the situations of violence and division in which they live. The Syro-Catholic Church, united with Rome since 1662, is principally present in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, though members are found all over the world, particularly in the US.
The vice president of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference said that during an audience which he and a group of Venezuelan bishops had with Pope Benedict XVI, the Pontiff said he was concerned about the abuse of power in that country.
A Vatican official warned against idolizing the environment and losing sight of the dignity of the human person, in the wake of a conference on climate change and development. "Nature is for the human person and the human person is for God. In considering the problems associated with climate change, one must look to the social doctrine of the Church," which "neither supports the absolutization of nature, nor the reduction of nature to a mere instrument. Nature is not an absolute, but a wealth that is placed in the person's responsible and prudent hands."
Henry Kissinger was at the Vatican this past weekend to participate in a conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Church officials criticized a European Parliament resolution that condemns "discriminatory comments" made by political and religious leaders against homosexuals. The resolution, which passed 325-124, with 150 abstentions, condemns the "discriminatory comments formulated by politicians and religious leaders about homosexuals, as fermenting hatred and violence - even if they were later withdrawn - and it asks that the hierarchies of the respective organizations condemn them as well."
[WAR: This is not how a "Holy" so-called empire acts. So it doesn't look like the Whore is riding this so-called Beast!]
Was the San Francisco Board of Supervisors constitutionally justified in passing an explicitly anti-Catholic resolution, adopted March 21, 2006, which labeled the Vatican a "foreign country" whose moral teachings are "hateful," "insulting and callous," and "insulting to all San Franciscans"?
The months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of this brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering. The best estimate is that some 3 million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. The 2 million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.
A terror scare is gripping Germany after a TV show exposed concrete attack plans. According to German news show "RTL aktuell," German security officials have "concrete evidence" of a terror attack in Germany, and some terrorists may already have arrived in the country.
May Day dilemma...
May 1st has a rich and tumultuous history in Germany as a day dedicated to workers around the world. But falling union membership and a rapidly changing labor market may mean it is losing some of its significance.
Assyria flirting with Israel again...
Chancellor Merkel has reoriented Germany away from Russia and toward the US. Expanded economic ties are just one area of renewed cooperation. But could Germany get burned like the British did?
The Russian list of grievances with the West is growing: the planned US missile shield in Eastern Europe, plans for an independent Kosovo, NATO overtures to former Soviet Republics, and now Estonia moving a Soviet war memorial. As president of the EU, Germany is desperately trying to keep the peace between East and West.
The EU law book can be so complicated that the EU wants to spend millions of euros explaining it. This is too much for some Germans, who have crossed swords with Brussels over its ever-expanding bureaucracy.
The EU and US have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership at a summit in Washington. The pact is designed to boost trade and investment by harmonising regulatory standards, laying the basis for an EU-US single market.
As US and EU officials showcase closer ties at a summit Monday, they may have found common ground over Iran's nuclear program and Russia's objections to a missile defense plan.
Belgrade-based historian and researcher, Milivoje Ivanisevic, who has been documenting Yugoslavian civil war casualties for more than a decade, has recently challenged the claims in a new booklet, "The Srebrenica Identity Card," which documents hundreds of bodies buried at the Srebrenica Memorial that were not killed in July 1995, when the alleged genocide took place, including cases of people who died natural deaths a full 13 years before the event took place. It remains to be seen whether the Western corporate mass media will continue ignoring this and other evidence debunking the claim that an anti-Muslim "genocide" took place in Srebrenica in July 1995.
The Turkish army's veiled threat of a coup is partly aimed at retaining political power in the face of curbs being placed on it by a government enacting liberal reforms to get Turkey into the EU, say German commentators. The crisis has raised new doubts about whether Turkey can qualify to join the EU, they add.
One day after a report blasting Prime Minister Olmert's handling of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, pressure is growing on the premiere to resign. One member of his cabinet has already headed for the door.
The fellow in the next building from me does the casualty reports for transmitting back to the States and he says they publish the names of 1 in 10. This has been a very bad month with over 300 known dead! That doesn't cover those with faces missing or legs up on a local roof, feeding the birds. This place has become a living hell.
The master of ceremonies at the mosque was one of Sudan's foremost religious leaders turned political celebrity - Hassan al-Turabi. A close associate of Osama Bin Laden during his time in Sudan and through most of the 1990s, he was the ideological driving force of Khartoum's Islamist government. He spent most of the last 5 years in jail - but now free he revels in his status as troublemaker-in-chief to his former friends in government.
The US remains Japan's single most important ally politically and militarily as well as economically, but that is not stopping Tokyo from making greater overtures to the Middle East. For an island nation that imports effectively all of its petroleum supply, of which 90% comes from the Middle East, securing sound relations with the region has been critical for its survival as the world's 2nd-largest economy.
Senior officials of 6 world powers will meet in London on Wednesday to review Iran's nuclear plans following renewed talks between the EU and Tehran.
The Arabic translation of a book titled 'Iran' Oil & its Role in Challenging US' written by Middle East, strategic, and energy affairs analyst, Roger Howard, was presented to book stores in Beirut Monday. Howard says the open challenge against US hegemony over oil resources was initially clicked by Russia and Venezuela, but today the most severe oil challenge against the US is posed by Iran.
The First International Congress on the Culture of Resistance inaugurated here Tuesday morning. The 2-day congress is participated by representatives from 46 world countries. Intellectuals as well as political and cultural figures from the Islamic states and several other world countries, and major media representatives are attending the congress.
A hurricane roars ashore in Rhode Island. A nuclear device goes off in the Midwest. And terrorists begin wreaking havoc in Alaska. What do you do? The Pentagon and other US and Canadian agencies plan to answer that question in a major exercise called Ardent Sentry-Northern Edge 07 that began Monday and will play out over the next 18 days, involving thousands of US troops and state and local officials.
In his book and on TV, former CIA Director George Tenet remembers all the things he should've said before we invaded Iraq but didn't.
Can dish it out, but can't take it...
Paul D. Wolfowitz declared vigorously today that it would be "unjustly and frankly hypocritical" for the World Bank's board of directors to find him guilty of ethical lapses. He also charged today that he had been the victim of "orchestrated leaks of false, misleading, incomplete and personal information" that were "part of a conscious campaign to undermine my effectiveness as president."
[WAR: What goes around, comes around - to one of the chief architects of the Iraq war and the "smear campaign" against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Remember: do to others as you would want them to do to you!]
Attempts to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld in Germany for war crimes have failed - again. Now lawyers are planning to go after him in Spanish courts.
Ségolène Royal intensified a desperate final effort yesterday to tar Nicolas Sarkozy, her presidential opponent, as a dangerous tyrant whose election would threaten the peace of France. In the latest torrent of anti-Sarko vitriol, 100 stars of the arts and sciences declared that "Sarkozy embodies a hard radicalised Right . . . with all its fears and hates. Entrusting the presidency to a demagogue like this means real danger."
Differences between presidential candidates Sarkozy and Royal are strategic rather than substantive in foreign affairs. Neither is beholden to the anti-American Gaullist or Socialist legacies.
The foreign policy challenge for the US is figuring out how to operate in a world less and less interested in US leadership.
The dollar rose Monday as the 13-nation euro backed down from its all-time high against the US currency on mixed economic news from the US and Europe.
The euro has reached its highest rate against the yen since the European currency was launched in 1999. The euro rose on expectations that the European Central Bank would raise its interest rates in the coming months.
German stock exchange operator Deutsche Boerse AG said Monday that it has reached an agreement to take over US-based options exchange International Securities Exchange Holdings. The acquisition would make Deutsche Boerse a major player in the US options trading business, since ISE is the largest options market in the US for individual stocks, including stock-index options. ISE is the second-largest options market behind the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Saudi Arabia's recent foiling of a large-scale terrorist plot, involving attacks on energy facilities, demonstrates the ongoing threat to global energy markets. If the authorities had failed to disrupt the plot, and the militants had carried out at least some portion of their plan, it would have had a shocking effect on energy markets.
Today's conversation concerns the manipulation of the stock market by the Plunge Protection Team, escalating monetary depreciation, the role of hedge funds in the buying up of European assets with dollars that soon won't be worth very much, the price of oil as it relates to a coming war with Iran, the housing market, the unstable dollar situation, the risk that pension funds take by investing in dollars, and the lack of investments in gold.
The Spring months are likely to see extremely large securities losses breaking out in "mortgage-backed securities" (MBS) which have been the international banks' essential tool in creating the now-exploding U.S. and other housing bubbles. These losses, which various investment bank reports are now estimating at up to $100 billion, may, in fact, become much larger than that, as the fall in home prices accelerates. They will hit those banks, and commercial banks as well, exposing how worthless are the large part of their assets which are based on the mortgage bubbles.
Venezuela is to take control of the massive Orinoco Belt oil projects as part of President Chavez's nationalisation drive. Many of the world's biggest oil companies have agreed to transfer operational control to the government.
President Chavez announced Monday he would formally pull Venezuela out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a largely symbolic move because the nation has already paid off its debts to the lending institutions. "We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone." He said he wanted to formalize Venezuela's exit from the two bodies "tonight and ask them to return what they owe us."
A Scottish church featured in The Da Vinci Code is embroiled in a fresh mystery of secret codes and heretical knowledge - but this one could be more than mere fiction. An ex-RAF codebreaker and his composer son say they have deciphered a musical score hidden for nearly 600 years in the elaborate carvings on the walls of Rosslyn Chapel. The pair believe the tune was encrypted because knowledge of music could have been considered heretical.
ToDAY-toNIGHT in Scripture
* By the way, I realize that the 10 plagues were poured out during this period before Passover. But I just haven't had the time to workout the timeline for it - been focusing on Yahshua's last week, instead. And there are some definite discrepancies between the accounts as to the timing of events.
* "It was just before the Passover ... (John 13:1-18:27 / Mark 14:12-72 / Luke 22:7-65 / Matt 26:17-75)
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