The Catholic Church has declared Sunday "Save Creation Day" as Pope Benedict joined about 300,000 young Roman Catholics for an eco-friendly festival. In his main homily the Pope urged young Catholics to take better care of the planet and called for "courageous decisions" to safeguard creation.
The Church is treated just like any other noncommercial organization, said the Italian bishops in the face of a possible European Commission tax probe into alleged property tax advantages.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, we learnt last week, suffered a deep crisis of faith for the last four decades of her life. "I am told God loves me," she wrote, "and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." It is worth noting that these words came in a prayer that she wrote directed to Jesus, in whom she continued to have faith - faith without any discernible response.
[WAR: In a number of conversations I've had with people, I've used MT as an example to prove a point. Now once again she is a great example: Of the limits of the dead human faith in the dead false Christ hanging on the pagan cross - as opposed to the living spritual faith of the Messiah living in/through a person via the power of the spirit. But a person cannot even have this faith unless they have "discerned his body" and believe that Yahweh "came in the flesh" as Yahshua - and is not some kind of bi-polar God-man that was "God in the flesh" or "God with us".]
Bavaria has won a legal battle to get the publication and sale of Adolf Hitler's infamous book "Mein Kampf" banned in Turkey after the book became a best-seller there. In letters to publishers, Bavarian officials argued that the book's copyright belonged to Bavaria everywhere except in the US and Britain.
The pharaohs may have set the standard, but German entrepreneurs are hoping to challenge Egypt's pre-eminence in monumental self-indulgence by building the world's largest pyramid.
French officials of the EADS arms company, are warning against Berlin's factual take-over of the company. Germany is in the process "of usurping none other than the aerospace as well as the European defense industry" according to the vice shop chairman at the EADS Corporation. The power struggle within the company's new management and leadership structure as well as the dispute concerning the introduction of "Golden Shares" has provoked this alarm.
Germany's defense minister has called for cutting back on troops in anti-terror operations, a paper reported. Another top politician said Chancellor Merkel should tell Germany why its soldiers should be in Afghanistan.
This week the EU's treaty will take centre stage as foreign ministers discuss the document at the end of the week, the first political discussion since the outline was agreed at a contentious summit in June. In the run up to the informal foreign ministers' meeting, legal expects will continue going through the draft agreement and are expected to complete the first legal examination of the whole document on Thursday.
The EU's Kosovo envoy has urged the bloc to work towards finding a common response to a possible failure of the final round of diplomacy on the fate of the province, including the scenario of unilaterally declared independence. "There is a great risk that the [international] troika will fail to reach an agreement [between Belgrade and Pristina] and therefore, the EU has to start preparing to speak with one voice after 10 December." He also warned against "chaos" if the EU splits over how to deal with the consequences.
Serbia warned Friday that it would retaliate if Kosovo declares independence and if other nations recognize the breakaway province as a separate state. "Serbia will have no choice but to respond to acts that would jeopardize its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The unilateral declaration of independence would bring protracted instability to the region."
Israeli officials cast doubt Friday over claims that remains of the 2nd Jewish temple might have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem. "If that was the case, the antiquities authority, which has an observer on site, as well as police, also monitoring the work, would have stepped in."
General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army during the invasion of Iraq, has launched a scathing attack on the US for the way it handled the post-war administration of the country. The former chief of the general staff said the approach taken by Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, was "intellectually bankrupt", describing his claim that US forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical".
A 2nd retired British general slammed the US over its Iraq policy, saying in a newspaper interview published Sunday that it had been "fatally flawed." Maj. Gen. Tim Cross, the most senior British officer involved in the postwar planning, said he had raised serious concerns about the possibility of Iraq falling into chaos but said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the warnings.
It's bigger than Saddam's palace and, with a cinema, gym and pool, is the safest and smartest place to live in Iraq.
American officials knew that Musharraf had known about the nuclear trade all along. And Washington had itself not only turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear bomb project for decades but had covered it up for imperative geopolitical reasons, even when Islamabad began trading its secret technology.
Hardline Islamic law could be introduced across Malaysia under reforms proposed by the country's chief justice. As the nation in south-east Asia celebrated 50 years of independence from Britain yesterday, its government was preparing to discuss a plan that would revolutionise the legal system put in place by its former colonial administrators.
Cheney Cabal media sycophants at the New York Times and elsewhere are indignantly reporting that Iran continues to ignore certain sections of resolutions passed by Board of Directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, requiring actions deemed "necessary" to satisfy their "concerns" about Iran's nuclear programs – concerns subsequently "reaffirmed" by the UN Security Council, ever "mindful of its primary responsibility" under the UN Charter "for the maintenance of international peace and security." But the reality is the IAEA has once again verified to all IAEA members and NPT-signatories "the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials" by Iran. Furthermore, Iran and the IAEA Secretariat have just announced an important agreed "time table" for "resolution" by year's end of "all outstanding questions" relevant to the implementation of Iran's Safeguards Agreement. And even some "questions" that aren't relevant.
Iran's leader says his country now has more than 3,000 centrifuges enriching uranium - a target it set itself in its nuclear programme, state media says. President Ahmadinejad said Iran would continue its nuclear drive, in spite of UN resolutions against it. UN officials say the target, if confirmed, would be the point of no return in an industrial programme.
Italian premier Romano Prodi has warned against any military solution to Iran's nuclear issue in a meeting with his Jordanian counterpart. In a joint press conference with Jordan's Prime Minister, Prodi denounced any military option against Iran to resolve Tehran's nuclear standoff.
Those who hoped that America was headed out of Iraq got a rude awakening. They are about to get another. Today, the US has 30,000 more troops in Iraq than on the day America repudiated the Bush war policy and voted the GOP out of power. And President Bush, self-confidence surging, is now employing against Iran a bellicosity redolent of the days just prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. What is to prevent Bush from attacking Iran and widening the war, at a time and place of his choosing, and sooner than we think? Nothing and no one.
Yes!...
In a nondescript room, 2 blocks from the American Capitol building, a group of Bush administration staffers is gathered to consider the gravest threat their government has faced this century: the testing of a nuclear weapon by Iran. The job of the officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy is to prevent a spike in oil prices that will pitch the world's economy into a catastrophic spin.
The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in 3 days, according to a national security expert.The director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for "pinprick strikes" against Iran's nuclear facilities. "They're about taking out the entire Iranian military."
Increasingly, people in the know are revealing what some of us have realized for months, even years: the US, under the pernicious control of Muslim-hating neocons, will attack Iran, and sooner before later.
(UPI analysis: Would Iran retaliate to bombing?)
German press on...
Chancellor Merkel on Thursday proposed the idea of basing a nation's carbon emissions allowance on population size. German commentators on Friday say it's another step on the path towards isolating the USA.
On Monday, Americans will celebrate Labor Day. This annual national holiday was created more than 100 years ago as a tribute to the American worker. To most Americans these days, however, Labor Day seems to be more about end-of-summer picnics, beach excursions, and an extra day off from work. The average American isn't the only one who has lost sight of the contributions and sacrifices of the workers of this nation. Over the past couple of decades, American corporations have been ignoring the needs of the workers in order to focus instead on stuffing the bottomless pockets of the CEOs. And the U.S. government has been giving them all the help and support they need. It wasn't always this way.
The US Army is authorized to create civilian prison labor camps on military installations, according to a little-noticed regulation. The camps are allowed if the request comes from the Federal Bureau of Prisons or state corrections facilities under leasing requirements defined by federal law. The regulation specifies "the Army's primary purpose for allowing establishment of prison camps on Army installations is to use the resident nonviolent civilian inmate labor pool to work on the leased portions of the installation."
A century hence, what will historians consider the most significant social change to Britain during the Blair years? Quite possibly they will conclude it was how immigration transformed the country. One in 4 children born in Britain last year had a foreign parent. This changing ethnicity has been further accentuated by a growing flight of British citizens, almost 200,000 of whom emigrated last year. Today's rate of immigration is producing the most significant change in the national make-up in 900 years.
This national ignorance of our own history, of our heroes, is perhaps the single most important element in the current crisis over "Britishness". Nations and states seem to be formidable and permanent structures, but they are rooted ultimately in such sentiments as pride, loyalty, fellowship and a sense of common destiny. It is hard to feel these things towards something you know nothing about.
Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, signalled Friday that the US central bank was ready to cut interest rates if necessary to counter the risk of an economic slump stemming from this summer's turmoil in global financial markets. He is treading an even more perilous tightrope than usual for a central banker.
The US housing bubble burst is now at the core of a socio-economic tragedy directly affecting dozens of millions of Americans with consequences expanding more and more deeply into the country's financial system. This phenomenon is obviously taking on historical dimensions.
(WSWS: The social toll of the US home mortgage crisis [part 2])
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, is favourite to be named as the new head of the International Monetary Fund.
Capitalism, as Malcolm X suggested, is in its twilight. Under this egregiously malevolent and brutal system of economic organization, we have "evolved" to a point where corruption is so pervasive, the divide between the "haves" and the "have nots" is so vast, and the imperial wars for resources are so frequent and destructive that as it is imploding, capitalism may take most of us with it. Despite the fact that he mixed his metaphors a bit, Malcolm drew an astute conclusion. With the US as its nexus, the complex array of components and dynamics known as capitalism sustains itself in much the same way as did Bram Stoker's Dracula and the vampires of Slavic folklore.
Create a handheld laser burner that can light matches and burst balloons.
=========================
