Today, we are celebrating the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is an ancient feast deeply rooted in Sacred Scripture: indeed, it presents the Virgin Mary closely united to her divine Son and ever supportive of him.
(Zenit: B16's homily on the Assumption)
Benedict XVI will receive Israeli President Shimon Peres in a private audience at Castel Gandolfo next month, confirmed the Holy See. It was also confirmed today that the meeting of the Bilateral Permanent Working Commission between the Holy See and the state of Israel will take place Sept. 3. This commission is seeking agreements on juridical and fiscal issues linked to the Catholic Church in Israel.
Calls to ban the far-right NPD party have resurfaced in Germany following a mob attack which left 8 Indians injured. In a separate incident, that party's leader has been charged with incitement of racial hatred.
There was a growing sense of unease about the exposure of regional banks in Germany to the troubled US mortgage market after a Bavarian state-owned lender acknowledged that it, too, had invested in risky US home loans and amid reports that another troubled bank in Saxony could be forced into a sale to avoid failure.
Russia has made significant cuts to oil supplies sent to German refineries recently, rekindling concerns in Germany over the reliability of Russian energy supplies.
Fires pushed by gale-force winds tore through more parched forests, swallowed villages and scorched the edges of Athens on Saturday with ashes raining onto the Acropolis. The death toll rose to at least 49 and the government declared a nationwide state of emergency. Prime Minister Karamanlis said arson was suspected in some of the blazes. "So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence."
Chancellor Merkel has said she will discuss ways to improve the human rights situation in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan when she meets Chinese leaders on the first leg of a trip to Asia starting today.
Ten years after the US imposed an economic boycott against what is territorially Africa's largest country, it's hard to see much effect on the streets of Khartoum, the capital. Unlike Iraq, which was crippled by UN sanctions in the 1990s, Sudan has blossomed economically since the sanctions were put in place in 1997. Oil exports are generating more than $4 billion a year, and heavy investment by China and other Asian nations has allowed the country to escape crippling economic pain.
Indian politicians blamed the Pakistani secret service for last night's coordinated bomb attacks in the crowded entertainment district of Hyderabad that claimed the lives of at least 38 revellers and injured 70. Indian police and security analysts have blamed Islamist militant groups based in Pakistan for a wave of recent attacks, seen as an attempt to derail the peace process between India and Pakistan and trigger widespread communal violence.
Washington thinks about China's becoming a military as well as economic superpower. The Europeans think about trade and economic competition. Both underestimate what it takes to become a modern industrial superpower.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation held its "Peace Mission 2007" joint war games August 9-17, starting in the Chinese western province of Xinjiang and continuing in Russia's Ural region of Chelyabinsk. The military exercise, followed by the SCO's annual summit, is one more indication of rising great-power tensions over the energy-rich Central Asian region. Moscow and Beijing denied the war games were aimed at any "third party". But the real purpose was obvious: to send a warning that Russia and China would not tolerate the emergence of opposition movements in Central Asia, nor their exploitation by the US and other rivals. Far from creating stability and prosperity in Central Asia, the SCO summit simply underscores the substantial economic and strategic interests at stake for all the major powers.
Not content with plunging Afghanistan into what could be decades of conflict and triggering a bloodbath in Iraq, it looks as though the US government has Iran firmly in its sights.
Once looked down upon, American Evangelicals have now risen triumphantly to the heights.
"Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain," warns Psalm 127 - as does David Gelernter, the militantly neoconservative Yale computer scientist and patriotic rhapsodist who cites that verse often in "Americanism." Gelernter's claim that Americanism is itself a great religion will offend secularists and many religious people. He argues plausibly that the American creed of "liberty, equality, and democracy," seeded by Puritans and their oft-ambivalent legatees, can't be separated from biblical faith, historically or now: It "was a distillation of biblical (especially Old Testament) principles [that] created a new force in the world's spiritual history." But Gelernter's own distillery doesn't work. His "new force" is driven by "American Zionism," our sense of ourselves as "a new chosen people in a new promised land" - a jarring reminder to liberal Protestants that their forebears called themselves "God's New Israel."
They describe themselves as "a Christian fellowship based on the Holy Scriptures", but others call them a sect, and they have meddled in elections in New Zealand and Australia. So when the Australian Prime Minister admitted that he had recently met leaders of the ultra-conservative Exclusive Brethren, his critics smelt something unsavoury. The group, an offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren, with followers in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the US, enforces a policy of separation, including from other Christians.
Russian FSB sources are reporting in the Kremlin that Australian Prime Minister Howard has agreed to a controversial proposal by American War Leaders to "relocate" all Muslims in Australia into detention facilities upon the soon expected expansion of the West's war upon the Muslim nations of the Middle East .
Iran's caretaker oil minister has said it seems OPEC's current crude oil production is enough and there would be no change at the next meeting. He also said that there was, however, the possibility of an increase in oil prices.
The Fed has a new problem: convincing investors it does not need to cut interest rates yet.
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The eurozone's economic recovery shows signs of losing momentum, while global financial turmoil is already taking its toll on the services sector, a closely watched survey has suggested. The ECB would also face political attacks if it went ahead with a rise. President Sarkozy of France says the central bank must take account of global financial market conditions.
After appearing immune to the turmoil unleashed on world markets from high-risk home lending in the US, China suffered its first serious setback from the meltdown in subprime loans. Investors punished China's flagship lender, Bank of China, after it disclosed the biggest exposure revealed so far of any bank in Asia to this segment of the US mortgage market.
Are we about to see a great wall of Chinese money slam into the world's equity markets? The Chinese authorities have announced that for the first time, citizens will be permitted to own foreign shares.
Since 2001, Democrats embraced tax cutting and overspending policies as enthusiastically as Republicans with both parties directing the benefits hugely to the right pockets. They're on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms where recipients know "free markets" work great with a little creative resource directing from Washington.
The nation state will indeed be challenged, but that is not an argument for actively trying to get rid of it. It may be able, with some adjustments, to withstand the pressures from migration and globalization, but it will definitely not be able to withstand both this and the additional ideological onslaught we are witnessing now. Scruton believes that we in the West must "do what we can to reinforce the nation-state, which has brought the great benefits that distinguish the West from the rest, including the benefits of personal government, citizenship under a territorial jurisdiction, and government answerable to the people." This means that we must "constrain the process of globalization." For Europeans, that would mean scrapping the European Union, which has transferred dangerous amounts of power to institutions and individuals not accountable to the people.
Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex: There are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no surprise that, despite the glow from recent advances in the science of the brain and mind, we still find ourselves squinting in the dark somewhat. Even partial answers to these 10 questions could restructure our understanding of the roughly three-pound mass of gray and white matter that defines who we are.
Muslims claim that in pre-Islamic times, "Allah" was the biblical God of the Patriarchs, prophets and apostles. Indeed, the credibility of Islam as a religion stands or falls on its core claim of historical continuity with Judaism and Christianity. No wonder, then, that many Muslims get uppity when the claims of Islam are subjected to the hard science of archaeology. Because archaeology provides irrefutable evidence that Allah, far from being the biblical God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was actually the pre-Islamic pagan moon-god.
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