Muslim scholars have written to Benedict XVI and the heads of Christian churches to propose that the two faiths cooperate in creating peace and understanding in the world. The 138 signatories of this year's letter offer an open invitation to Christians to unite with Muslims over what is most essential to their respective faiths -- the commandment of love. With over a half of the world's population consisting of Muslims and Christians, the letter's authors believe that easing world tensions can only come from peace and justice between these two faiths. The document calls for tolerance, understanding and moderation.
While this discussion is of utmost importance, it is equally important to reiterate that economic policies cannot be separated from social policies; otherwise, neither one nor the other will reach its respective goal. So far, only a few states [Bavaria!] have achieved a right balance between success in a global market-driven economy and the preservation, even a fine tuning, of social protection, thus ensuring a person-cantered development.
The eradication of poverty and the full enjoyment of the basic social rights by all individuals and of their families is fundamentally a moral commitment. Indeed, the indications and suggestions contained in the Copenhagen Declaration are no more than a translation into the language of international relations of those ethical values that exist in the heart of every man and woman and are enunciated in moral and religious precepts. The eradication of poverty and the full enjoyment of the basic social rights by all must therefore be goals enshrined in all economic and development policies.
It's not the Holy Grail, but for fans of "The Da Vinci Code" and its tantalizing story line about the Knights Templar, it could be the next best thing. Ignored for centuries, documents about the heresy trial of the ancient Christian order discovered in the Vatican's secret archives are being published in a limited edition — with an $8,377 price tag. The new Vatican work reproduces the entire documentation of the papal hearings convened after Philip IV of France arrested and tortured Templar leaders in 1307 on charges of heresy and immorality.
They include a 14th-century parchment showing that Pope Clement V initially absolved the Templar leaders of heresy, though he did find them guilty of immorality and planned to reform the order. But pressured by King Philip IV of France, Clement later reversed his decision and suppressed the order in 1312. One parchment reveals the cardinals reached the conclusion the Templars were guilty of abuses but not "a real and true heresy." "There were a lot of faults in the order — abuses, violence ... a lot of sins, but not heresy."
Most of the policies being pondered in Berlin by Chancellor Merkel's coalition government add up to a general dismantling of Schröder's entire Agenda 2010, the most far-reaching package of structural reforms imposed on the country since its postwar reconstruction. "There is a shift under way. Reformists are still high in the hierarchy of the main government parties but they are losing the fight. They are on the defensive. Right now, the dominant feeling is that Agenda 2010 should be reversed." The rediscovery of a social conscience is all the more remarkable in that it runs through both the SPD and the CDU. "The speed at which the intellectual climate has changed is staggering."
EU leaders gathering at the end of this week in Portugal are looking to agree the so-called Reform Treaty. But ahead of the summit in Lisbon on Thursday and Friday, some member states have signalled agreement may not be so.
Poland's ultra-Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja is a crucial mouthpiece and vote-draw for the ruling conservative Kaczynski twins, who return the favour by shielding it from critics. The station wields a powerful influence in a country where more than 90% of the population of 37.8 million say they are Catholic.
As Chancellor Merkel and President Putin hold official talks today, analysts say that Berlin's attempts to forge a new policy toward Russia to bind it to Europe is close to tatters. Merkel, unwilling to pursue the same pro-Russian policies as her predecessor, has adopted a more confrontational stance toward the Russian leadership. "Germany used to be an active mediator between Russia and the West. Merkel is now just a passive player, and this means there is no European strategy toward Russia."
MI6 is stirring up dissent in Russia to influence upcoming elections and stop President Putin holding on to power, the Kremlin's security chief claimed yesterday. The head of Russia's Federal Security Service - the successor of the KGB - said British spies were intent on weakening Russia and breaking up the country. British secret agents had been doing the same since the reign of Elizabeth I, claimed Nikolai Patrushev, a close ally of Mr Putin. "Regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union as their achievement, they are now nurturing plans to carve up Russia."
Turkey is in short, almost everything the US could have asked for in the Middle East. But the Bush administration has, during the past 5 years, increasingly thrown away this asset, and now is in danger of losing a close and valued ally altogether. It is unclear what US interests are served by this repeated and profound damage inflicted by Washington on Turkey, or what Ankara ever did to us that we are treating them so horribly.
Israel will resume archaeological excavations near a Jerusalem holy site that has often been a flashpoint for violence, Israeli officials said Sunday. The decision drew Palestinian charges that Israel is trying to scuttle next month's US-sponsored peace conference.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the region to prepare for an Israeli-Palestinian summit next month, told Palestinian officials yesterday she would pressure Israel against initiating any Jewish construction in eastern sections of Jerusalem, a senior Palestinian negotiator involved in talks with Rice told WND. The Palestinian negotiator stated Rice singled out Jerusalem areas as becoming part of a future Palestinian state and told his negotiating team she would publicly blame Israel for the failure of next month's US-sponsored summit slated to be held in Maryland if the Jewish state didn't agree to evacuate eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods.
The great "mystery" arising out of the recent Israeli strike at Syria – purportedly targeting a nuclear-related site near the town of Dair El Zor in the northern part of the country – has been the subject of much speculation, but its real purposes have been hidden behind the veil of obfuscation deliberately thrown over the affair by the Israelis and their media amen corner. The gale winds of another Israeli propaganda campaign are blowing at full force across the American media landscape, perpetrating a hoax of outrageous proportions: namely, that the Israelis knocked out a nascent nuclear facility.
The moment this story hit the headlines, the alarm on my bullsh*t meter started clanging pretty loudly. But what, one wondered, was the purpose of this elaborate deception? First, it was meant as a warning to Iran, a clear demonstration that the Israelis can and will act if Tehran fails to curb its ambition to join Israel as a full-fledged member of the nuclear club. Furthermore, it was meant to show Washington's solidarity with Tel Aviv in this matter: in spite of doubts arising from the Rice-Gates faction within the administration, the Americans gave the Israelis the green light. It also, I believe, prefigures, on a much smaller scale, the sequence of events likely to trigger war with Iran: an Israeli strike, Iranian retaliation via Hezbollah, followed by American intervention, which would be practically inevitable.
History is in the making. The Second Summit of Caspian Sea States in Tehran will change the global geo-political environment. This article also gives a strong contextual background to what will be in the backdrop at Tehran. The strategic course of Eurasia and global energy reserves hangs in the balance. Two blocs are starting to manifest themselves in similarity to the geographic boundaries of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Mackinder's Islander versus Continental scheme; a Eurasian-based bloc and a naval-based, oceanic bloc based on the fringes of Eurasia as well as North America and Australasia. The latter bloc is NATO and its network of regional military alliances, while the former is the reactionary counter-alliance formed by the Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition as its nucleus.
Persian plot on Putin?
[WAR: Puh-leaze!! I'm not even going to waste space with any articles on this propaganda.]
Iran's "final response"?...
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei urged Arab nations to boycott a Middle East peace meeting in the US, while also accusing Washington of responsibility for all of Iraq's woes. "The United States took the initiative for this meeting to save the Zionist regime, which received a beating at the hands of Hezbollah. Every conference that has been organised in the name of peace has harmed the Palestinians."
B-52 nuke update (sent to WAR via e-mail)
Since the Minot story broke about the missing nuke clandestine operation from Minot, we have the following:
* All 6 people listed below are from Minot Air Force base.
* All were directly involved as loaders or as pilots.
* All are now dead as a result of "accidents".
* All 6 people listed below are from Minot Air Force base.
* All were directly involved as loaders or as pilots.
* All are now dead as a result of "accidents".
Citizen Investigation Team picks up where the media has failed and presents to you more previously unknown eyewitnesses to the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon. The people in the neighborhoods of Arlington saw a white jet fly tree top level over their homes seconds before the explosion presenting further evidence that fatally contradicts the official story. This testimony sheds light on why there was at least one other mysterious white jet that was called in to circle no fly zones minutes before and after the time of the attack.
"Bush lies" doesn't cut it anymore. It's time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves. We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq - and should. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name. Both Congress and the press - the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration's case - failed to do their job. Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.
Paul Krugman interview...
MK: Obviously the "L word" has been cast as a stereotype by the right-wing movement for many years. It was stated in terms of right-wing stereotypes. You redefine liberals here -- and the whole book is about liberalism. That was your goal. In essence, the implication here is that liberalism can best be defined by equating it to the promotion of democracy.
PK: That's actually where the term came from originally. We talked about the Manchester liberals, who were pro-business, pro-bourgeois, pro-democracy, back at a time when the relevant enemy was the hereditary aristocracy. At this point, what it means is having a society in which everybody shares, and partly that's about economics, because you can't have gross economic inequality and still have a functional democracy. You can't really have a society with broad equality without having a political democracy. So it is all about having basically a shared society.
PK: That's actually where the term came from originally. We talked about the Manchester liberals, who were pro-business, pro-bourgeois, pro-democracy, back at a time when the relevant enemy was the hereditary aristocracy. At this point, what it means is having a society in which everybody shares, and partly that's about economics, because you can't have gross economic inequality and still have a functional democracy. You can't really have a society with broad equality without having a political democracy. So it is all about having basically a shared society.
Oil prices were steady today after closing at a new record in the previous session on worries that supplies are insufficient for coming winter demand amid reports of declining crude inventories. Prices were also supported by worries that Turkey could take unilateral military action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.
Major banks including Citigroup are looking at setting up a roughly $80 billion fund to buy ailing mortgage securities and other assets, in a bid to prevent the credit crunch from further hurting the global economy, sources familiar with the matter said. Representatives from the US Treasury have organized conversations among top global banks, sources said, as financial institutions grow increasingly concerned that a certain type of investment fund linked to banks may have to dump billions of dollars of repackaged loans onto financial markets.
A fire-sale of assets could lift borrowing costs globally, trigger big losses from investors and force banks to further write down some holdings on their balance sheets. Such sales could trigger huge losses for banks. Banks including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch & Co, and UBS have in recent weeks announced billions of dollars in asset write-offs and are still struggling to sell off billions of dollars in loans that financed acquisitions globally.
The Bush recovery has been good for Wall Street, but not Main Street. The economic recovery that began in 2001 has brought slow job growth, limited wage gains, and continued rising inequality. While families at the top of the income ladder have seen their incomes rise faster than inflation, those in the middle and bottom have seen theirs fall.
Millions now work in what we call "bad jobs." Just over 1-in-5 workers (22.1%) are in a bad job - a job that pays low wages and provides no benefits. Nearly 41 million people live in families that don't earn enough to make ends meet, and government benefits do not fill in the gap. These families work, but their earnings aren't enough. As members of the middle class have been squeezed, more and more of us are struggling to maintain our standard of living.
It's a list of "the world's most powerful people," 100 of the bankers and media moguls, publishers and image makers who shape the lives of billions. It's an exclusive, insular club, one whose influence stretches around the globe but is concentrated strategically in the highest corridors of power. More than half its members, at least by one count, are Jewish. It's a list, in other words, that would have made earlier generations of Jews jump out of their skins, calling attention, as it does, to their disproportionate influence in finance and the media.
There is such an abundance of contradictory studies about food and cancer that it's nearly impossible to consider any one definitive, let alone keep them all straight. So how do you sort through myriad studies, complete with caveats and exceptions? Well, you don't, because we did it for you.
New Scientist magazine has now debunked some myths surrounding the worst ways to die by studying post-mortem examinations and reports of near-death experiences. The magazine examined some of the most unpleasant causes of death - from bleeding to decapitation and, in the most extreme cases, explosive decompression - and found that, while the physical injuries from each were gruesome, a lack of oxygen to the brain usually delivered the coup de grâce.
A legion of amateur stargazers has posed a profound challenge to cosmological theories: our universe appears to be lopsided. The survey has revealed that the collections of millions of stars, dust, gas and planets in galaxies prefer to rotate anticlockwise from the viewpoint of an observer on Earth. If this new finding turns out to hold true, "you will have to throw away the standard model of cosmology."
Traditionally astronomers have believed that galaxies would spin either clockwise or anti-clockwise in equal proportion. But these observations would seem to suggest that either a mysterious force is acting on them or that the universe is in some way lopsided. "We've proved that random people are as good as professional astronomers."
Today in Scripture
* "Say to the Israelites: 'On the 1st day of the 7th month you are to have a day of rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts." (Lev 23:24 / Num 29:1)
* "On the 1st day of the 7th month they began to offer burnt offerings to YAHWEH, though the foundation of His temple had not yet been laid." (Ezra 3:6)
* "So on the 1st day of the 7th month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand." (Neh 8:2)
* "A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth." (Rev 12:1,2)
[WAR teaser: Wow!! I've also gone through the verses for the remainder of this month to note them on the calendar form I made -- to "number my days correctly" (Psa 90:12) -- and have found a most amazing and unexpected thing about Noah's flood, the calendar, and the assumptions that have been made - even by little ol' me. It's so unbelievable that I'm going to have to double and triple check this to make sure I haven't made a mistake somewhere. If true, it will put an end to all arguments about this particular part of the calendar issue and provide solid and undeniable proof for the calendar I've been advocating. But I won't reveal this until that particular day comes up later in the month ... ;-)]
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