A very special interview with Pope Benedict XVI's personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein. It contains important reflections on the Pope's 2006 Regensburg talk, on the new motu proprio, and on the Pope's day-to-day private life from the person who is closest to him.
Germany is debating whether to send more soldiers to Afghanistan. Currently, the ISAF mission there enjoys broad support, but 2 other engagements seem likely to face resistance.
The US is using rough-handed methods to force Germany to impose tougher sanctions against Iran. The government in Berlin is resisting, but German banks are already caving in.
Not even 3 months in office and President Sarkozy is already proving to be highly unpredictable. He claimed the credit for the release of the Bulgarian hostages and promptly offered Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi a nuclear power plant in return - much to the irritation of his European partners.
The European Central Bank is facing a tough fight with French politicians who want to chip away at its independence. Or is it? If you are an inflation-fighting German watching French politicians unload on the ECB, the war of words surely confirms the worst fears about European monetary union. The Maastricht Treaty, largely a Teutonic script designed to preserve the bank's integrity, matters little in Paris, it seems.
The West says that it is perplexed by Russia's "aggressive" behavior of late, and suggests that Moscow is desirous to regain its past superpower status, and even a little empire. But if cashing in on oil is imperialism, how do we explain the following US moves?
A former aide to Vice President Cheney is briefing lawmakers on Pentagon plans for secret military intervention in Turkey. The Bush administration is considering covert military activity by US Special Forces to help Turkish troops quash Kurdish guerilla fighters, who are believed to be using northern Iraq as safe-haven.
For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been and remains effective control of its energy resources, according to Noam Chomsky. He writes in his new book Interventions that control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in what the US calls the Shia "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East.
Iran allowed UN inspectors into an atomic reactor site yesterday in an attempt to fend off international sanctions over its nuclear programme.
Condoleezza Rice has warned that Iran poses the biggest threat to US Middle East interests, as she begins a major regional tour.
The US is retrofitting its B-2 Stealth bombers with massive bunker-buster bombs - a move that could be a prelude to an attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities. Apparently the US has big plans for Iran.
Diplomatic arm-wrestling between Iran and the West over the future of the Islamic republic's nuclear program has not prevented talk of the military option as a solution to the crisis, despite the tsunami-like reaction such a military adventure would generate in the Arab and Islamic world. Of late, there has been much speculation regarding the probability of US and/or Israeli military strikes intended to destroy the Islamic republic's nuclear power sites before they become fully operational. But a well-informed source tells UPI that according to senior US intelligence officials, President Bush has definitely decided not to strike any of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons production facilities this year.
At the same time, sources familiar with the intelligence community report that there have been "a lot of stories about bunker buster bombs being moved to the region." The source says, however, that there is no basis for these reports, which, according to them, are being floated by Israeli intelligence. "This is 'PSYOP' rubbish," a well-informed source told UPI. PSYOP stands for psychological operations; or in other words, playing mind games with the enemy. Part of the task performed by PSYOPs includes developing and employing propaganda in a convincing manner.
President Bush and the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, pledged Monday to continue the close trans-Atlantic relationship that has been a hallmark of Bush's tenure. "We have common interests throughout the world, but it's an important relationship primarily because we think the same."
(LT op-ed: Shoulder to shoulder)
You can always tell when America is having doubts about itself: it starts producing westerns. Gordon Brown may or may not have ridden into town this week to disarm the sheriff, but Hollywood has already been on the case, with a brace of films set for release that are fuelled by anxiety about the country's legacy of outlaw behaviour and its fear of the outsider. That these new films are cowboy pictures will not surprise anybody who has long admired westerns as America's great national art form, for they have always tended to show a greatly imaginative nation contemplating its own moral character.
Tillman wasn't a gung-ho warmonger. "A side of Pat Tillman not widely known – a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought, and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books … to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author." Apparently a meeting between Tillman and Chomsky was planned for after Pat's return to the US, but he never returned. Mary Tillman has long suggested that her son was deliberately murdered by his fellow soldiers. After initially dismissing her allegations as a case of grief-gone-over-the-edge, I've come to believe that there is something awfully fishy about this whole incident.
Problems in the US mortgage market are spreading deeper and farther afield. Trading in the shares of a large US mortgage company was suspended Monday, and the largest insurer of home loans in the US said its stake in a business that underwrites and invests in mortgage securities may be worthless.
The panic selling that hit Wall Street and most global exchanges last week exposed a deep-going structural and systemic crisis of US and world capital markets that cannot be dispelled by a short-term rebound in share prices. Even the near-term prospects for stocks remain in doubt under conditions of a credit crisis that threatens to seriously impact major commercial and investment banks in the US and internationally.
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