Jewish groups are furious about Benedict XVI's decision to meet controversial Polish priest Tadeusz Rydzyk who was recently accused of anti-Semitism after defamatory remarks were allegedly caught on tape. Polish prosecutors are considering opening a criminal investigation against the priest, who heads a powerful media empire.
The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, gave a press conference yesterday afternoon in Nashville, speaking on a wide range of topics. The Cardinal began by mentioning the success of his first visit to the US, and then moved on to talk about the Church in China, and the intersection of faith and politics.
Shock, horror. Dairy prices are going up in Germany. As hoarders fill their BMWs with butter and long-life milk, support for Merkel's conservatives is slipping. Analysts say she is ignoring growing public frustration with cost-of-living increases, fat-cat executives and foreign "locusts."
German press...
Locomotive engineers in Germany want a huge pay raise, but judges kept Deutsche Bahn workers from walking off the job Thursday morning. Still, commuter trains in Hamburg and Berlin stood still for 2 hours. Is the right to strike sacred or not?
The re-engineered ally (part 2)...
Many corners of the German foreign intelligence apparatus are, by design and tradition, bespoke to US and Israeli intelligence, and its political control mechanisms are slick even by Western standards. It is the osmosis of bad habits via the demands of Western solidarity.
After a bright start, some bumpiness emerges in a close bilateral relationship: France and Germany are starting to chafe against each other again.
A new effort is due to begin to find a solution to the long-term political status of Kosovo. Envoys from the US, the EU and Russia will arrive in Belgrade for talks with Serbian political leaders. They will then travel to Kosovo for talks with ethnic Albanian leaders.
(Reuters: Kosovo independence plan still alive)
A group of hundreds of prominent Israeli rabbis today issued a statement calling Prime Minister Olmert's recent actions "anti-Jewish" and "hostile to Judaism." Olmert's actions are "anti-Jewish and hostile to Judaism in spite of the fact that he speaks Hebrew and dwells in the Land of the Patriarchs," read a statement by the Rabbinical Congress for Peace.
What this agreement suggests is that US oil interests are sharing the spoils of war with Europe's largest oil giant, the Franco-Belgian oil conglomerate Total. This rapprochement between Chevron and Total is consistent with the shift in French politics. President Sarkozy is broadly representative of the interests of the Franco-Belgian conglomerate. The building of a US-French consensus on Iraq (e.g. between Sarkozy and Bush) is largely the result of the willingness of US oil interests to share the spoils with their European counterparts in exchange for their political and military backing of Washington's foreign policy in the Middle East.
Iraq hopes to call an open race as early as September for its prized oilfields, the country's oil minister said after talks in Moscow dashed Russian hopes to get a slice of oil reserves on preferential terms.
Russia's recent effort to claim unilaterally its northern seabed to the North Pole has highlighted the race to divide the globe's remaining waters for nation's benefits. Besides the Arctic, these include Antarctica and the Caspian. Of the 3, the Caspian is the most hotly contested, as extraction efforts are already under way, and the battle involves not only the riverain powers Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, but behind them, massive Western investment thirsty for access to the region's hydrocarbons. For Iran, its advantage is that it controls the shortest route to the Persian Gulf and eastward to the lucrative Asian markets. All Iranian efforts to promote oil swaps and pipelines have been thwarted by US pressure, however.
President Bush sternly warned Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki against cozying up to Iran, amid what Washington sees as unsettling signs of warming Baghdad-Tehran relations. "If the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart to heart with my friend, the prime minister, because I don't believe they are constructive. My message to him is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay." The US National Security Council spokesman later said the "price to pay" remark by Bush was directed at Iran.
The conservative movement that for a generation has been the source of the Republican Party's strength is in the dumps.
Probably—but not in the way many foreigners (and some Americans) hope.
Markets have faltered in today's trading a day after markets in the US and Europe suffered heavy losses amid fears of a global credit crunch. Japan's central bank followed the European Central Bank in pumping money into the market to boost liquidity. Analysts said that the markets would remain volatile in the near future.
The European Central Bank scrambled to head off a potential financial crisis on Thursday by pumping an emergency €94.8bn ($131bn) into the region's banking system after liquidity in the interbank market started to dry up, threatening banks' access to short-term funds. The cash injection was the biggest in the ECB's history, exceeding the €69bn provided the day after the attacks of September 11 2001. The ECB also made an unprecedented one-day pledge to meet 100% of all funding requests from financial institutions.
Losses and money supply are different things, of course, but the moral is clear: nobody in the markets, including central banks, can say with confidence that they know where this crisis will end. In the thriller called Sub-prime Slime, the numbers seem to get bigger with each new chapter.
To counter the subprime woes, the world's biggest monetary authorities are infusing billions of dollars to meet the sudden demand for cash from banks hit by the subprime impact. Is the crisis bigger than what we think it is?
A few generations ago, savers responded to financial panics with runs on banks, and even healthy institutions could fail if they could not raise enough cash quickly enough. But in the past decade a new financial architecture emerged - one that relied less on banks as intermediaries and more on securities. Mortgages were financed by investments in securities that were supposed to be safe - and were so certified by the bond rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's. Now that safety is being questioned, and the modern equivalent of a massive bank run is on. And it appears to be up to the central banks to put in cash to tide the system over until the worries recede.
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