In a meeting with Italian priests, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about confusion over Church teachings following Vatican II, the relationship between faith and reason, and the duty of all Catholics to spread the Gospel.
People know that marriage is for life, and the key to reversing the divorce trend is to recuperate the ability to listen to nature, says Benedict XVI. "Canon law assumes that man as man, even without great learning, intends to carry out matrimony according to human nature, as it is written in the first chapters of Genesis."
WAR: Slow day on the Assyrian front...
Two years after the EU constitution was rejected by French and Dutch voters, a replacement treaty is now being negotiated. The first draft of the Reform Treaty, as it will be known, was unveiled on Monday, and EU leaders hope to have a final text by mid-October. The director of the Global Vision think tank, and the director of the Centre for European Reform go head to head.
After the leadership shake up at EADS, Germany's Thomas Enders is to head up the company's Airbus subsidiary. But despite Berlin's celebrations, it is the French who are still really pulling the strings.
Less than a week after rebuffing French calls for a greater role for governments in setting European monetary policy, Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, met with the French prime minister Wednesday for a "broad discussion" of economic issues.
The Contact Group met in Vienna Wednesday to discuss a negotiation framework for the future status of Kosovo as apprehensions at the UN and tensions in the Balkans threatened to turn the current stalemate into a crisis.
In the first time that a delegation from the Arab League has been sent to Israel, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan visited here Wednesday to promote the league's peace initiative. "We are extending a hand of peace on behalf of the whole region to you, and we hope that we will be able to create the momentum needed to resume fruitful and productive negotiations" among Israel, Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world.
(UPI analysis: Arab ministers on peace mission)
France and Libya have signed agreements on issues including security, health care and immigration during talks between the countries' leaders. Their meeting is being seen as a sign of the normalisation of ties between Libya and the EU following the medics' release.
Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto called upon the British parliamentarians to help restore democracy in Pakistan which was fast slipping into the hands of militants threatening world peace. Benazir warned the world community that a "parallel state structure" had evolved in Pakistan, which was a threat not only to Pakistan, but to London and Madrid also.
Top Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday that US Special Forces would enter Pakistan if they had specific intelligence about an impending terrorist strike against the US, despite warnings from the Pakistani government that it would not accept US troops operating independently inside its borders.
As the troubled Muslim nation of Pakistan falls into further chaos, its embattled President, General Musharraf, has ordered his country's nuclear forces to their 'highest alert', according to Russian Military Analysts in their reports to the Kremlin today.
President Ahmadinejad said the Iranian nation would never yield to international pressure to stop its peaceful nuclear activities and give up its rights. "World public opinion even in European states are in Iran's favor. We have never made bullying against any country and currently act legally."
War by another means...
As American and European governments debate how to deal with Iran's nuclear program, some of the largest public pension funds in the US are leaning on European and Asian oil companies to reconsider their investments in Iran. The current move by the institutional shareholders is another headache for European companies with shares traded in American markets in terms of their Gulf strategies.
The new narrative threatens to obscure the bigger picture of Iranian policy toward Iraq, widely recognized by regional specialists. Iran's strategic interests in Iraq are far more compatible with those of the US than those of the Sunni regimes in the region with which the US has aligned itself. Contrary to the official narrative, Iranian support for Shi'ites is not aimed at destabilizing the country but does serve a rational Iranian desire to maximize its alliances with Iraqi Shi'ite factions.
(Reuters: US rejects higher-level Iran talks for now)
Britain's ambassador to the US has sought to reassure the Bush administration that Gordon Brown values the alliance with America, ahead of a Camp David summit that is set to mark a shift in the "special relationship". Mr Brown is due to be received by President Bush on Sunday night before flying to New York on Monday, where he is expected to visit the UN and meet the new secretary general.
The Internal Revenue Service has lost a lawyer's challenge in front of a jury to prove a constitutional foundation for the nation's income tax, and the victorious attorney now is setting his sights higher. "I think now people are beginning to realize that this has got to be the largest fraud, backed up by intimidation and extortion and by the sheer force of taking peoples property and hard-earned money without any lawful authorization whatsoever," lawyer Tom Cryer told WND just days after a jury in Louisiana acquitted him of 2 criminal tax counts. Quite simply, he proved that the definition of Income as defined by the Supreme Court is NOT income from our labor, but rather things like interest and profit. You CANNOT tax a person's labor because it is a God-given right that we may work to support ourselves.
The global credit crunch has left a handful of banks holding almost $22bn of private equity financing as investor appetite dries up amid increasingly jittery credit markets. Two major and closely followed debt sales on both sides of the Atlantic were postponed Wennesday - a further blow to investor confidence that threatens to put the brakes on the long-running mergers and acquisition boom.
=========================
