Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Seek the truth and the good, Benedict XVI urged some 200,000 people who flooded the Vatican to support the Pope, days after protests led him to cancel a visit to a Roman university. At the behest of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Pope's vicar for Rome, throngs of professors, students, families and politicians gathered in St. Peter's Square today for the weekly Angelus to show their affection for the Holy Father, in what the Italian media tagged "Pope Day."
Those gathered in St. Peter's Square held up banners with slogans such as "Holy Father We Love You" and "The Truth Sets Us Free," while tens of thousands more supporters watched video links of the event outside the Milan cathedral and in Verona.
(Also: Full text of address)
(Also: Silencing B16)
The Jesuits were once such a powerful force in the Roman Catholic Church that their elected leader was unofficially called the "black pope" a nod both to his influence and to the order's predeliction for simple black cassocks. Indeed, it is said that the rest of the Church never allowed a Jesuit to be elected to the real papacy for fear of concentrating too much power in the hands of the order.
On Saturday, the Society of Jesus — the order's formal name — elected a new "black pope." Will he be able to help them regain the influence they've lost over the last few decades as their increasingly progressive reputation has clashed with recent traditionalist popes?
After months of tension between Beijing and Berlin sparked by Chancellor Merkel's meeting with the Dalai Lama, the foreign ministers of both nations have been busy mending ties behind the scenes. The Chinese foreign ministry has confirmed reports that Germany's Foreign Minister has covertly been in touch with his Chinese counterpart in past months to heal a rift caused by Merkel's decision to receive the Dalai Lama in Berlin last year.
A statement published on the ministry website said that difficulties in relations between the countries had to be surmounted. It said Germany had come out in support of the "One China" policy, which regard Tibet and Taiwan as Chinese territory.
The process of ratification of the Lisbon treaty will start this week in the House of Commons. I'm against the treaty because it involves an important constitutional transfer of powers from the European nations to the European institutions, from national democracy to supra-national bureaucracy.
The reform or Lisbon treaty gives Europe a much bigger voice in Britain. It follows the original constitutional treaty in giving the European institutions that are not democratically accountable important additional powers, while failing to repatriate any powers to the individual European nations.
(Also: This week in the EU)
A pro-Russian former ally of Slobodan Milosevic won the 1st round of the Serbian presidential election last night, setting up a 2nd-round head-to-head clash with the pro-Western incumbent.
(DW TV: Serb nationalist wins 1st round)
The Lebanese army opened fire on Israeli warplanes as they flew over the south of the country today in violation of Lebanon's airspace, police said.
The lights went out on the Gaza Strip last night when the only electricity plant in the seaside territory closed down after Israel severed fuel supplies.
(Op-ed: The Gaza time bomb)
Yes, and no...
Israeli college professors who label their country a Nazi apartheid regime, teach that the Bible is full of myths, urge the downfall of the Jewish state, and speak at conventions calling for the boycott of Israel? Universities in Jerusalem that give awards to academic papers complaining Jewish soldiers don't rape enough Arab women and encourage students to protest the antiterror policies of the Israeli military?
These trends are rampant across college campuses here, according to one website which has been documenting what it calls the anti-Israel, at times anti-Semitic behavior of the senior staff at major Israeli universities. Some 20-25% of the humanities and social sciences staff in Israel's universities and colleges have "expressed extreme anti-Zionist positions," according to Israel Academia Monitor.
North Korea on Sunday criticised a US deployment of military jets to South Korea, saying the move jeopardised nuclear disarmament moves and risked "tension and war." "Such reckless moves for military confrontation clearly show who is scuttling the peaceful solution to the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula and sparking off tension and war."
Israel has successfully launched a spy satellite which will be used to gather intelligence on Iran's activities, a new report says. The TECSAR satellite operates with an enhanced footage technology, allowing it to transmit images regardless of daytime and weather conditions.
John Bolton, former US envoy to the UN, says the report by US intelligence agencies on Iran's nuclear case has been illegitimately politicized. "I know the people who wrote this intelligence estimate. They are not from our intelligence community. They're from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective."
For some reason, Fox News continues to disregard the fact that Ron Paul is one of the GOP presidential candidates and he didn't ignore Nevada like most of the presidential candidates. For some reason, they failed to mention the #2 candidate, although they covered #1, #3 and #4.
For the 2nd time in 2 weeks, the entire US press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch's London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt US officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the U.S. Congress and the courts.
For the last 2 weeks -- one could say, for years -- the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds, quoted in the London Times in a front-page story that was front-page news in much of the rest of the world but was not reported in a single American newspaper or network.
[WAR: Why the silence? Because it involves Jews and Israel. There is no other explanation.]
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston has been closely tracking the nation's income gap in the pages of the New York Times. David Cay has just published a new book. It's called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill). Explain the wealth transfer...
We have created in the US, largely in the last 30 years, a whole series of programs -- a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden -- that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
Oil prices fell Monday in Asia as concern over the US economy drove down regional stock markets and outweighed concern that OPEC will resist pressure to raise crude production levels.
Markets in Asia have had a gloomy start to the trading week, with shares in Japan , Hong Kong and Shanghai dipping sharply as investors gave a thumbs down to a US government plan to revive the troubled US
Stocks in Europe sold off massively today, with banks and insurance firms pacing a hasty retreat as fears of more write-downs intensified on continuing gloom over economic prospects.
* "There's something approaching panic in the market," Holger Schmieding, the chief European economist at Bank of America in London said by telephone. (IHT)
If the storm is peaking in the US, it has hardly begun in Europe. A global strategist at Banque AIG says euro-losses may surpass the US debacle. "The next really big shock to financial markets is likely to be the risk of collapse in the EMU credit bubble: the private sector credit consequences are likely to be catastrophic."
Monetary bail-outs are not allowed either, at least not until the German bloc gives a green light to the European Central Bank. We are a decade into EMU. The outcome is what Bundesbank sceptics feared. Hedge funds are already circling. One has set up a Euro Divergence Fund.
We are nearing the moment when the ECB must decide whether it is a bank or the political guardian of the EU Project. It cannot be both. Trumped by politics, the Germanic hawks have climbed down. The euro fell hard last week. The euro must be weak, or it will break. Whatever happens, it is already too late to avoid the Latin Crisis of 2008.
Given the pain experienced to date by the some of the world's largest financial institutions, investors are understandably concerned about what might happen if an economic downturn really does take hold. So, in spite of the financial hit taken by the major banks to date, could it be possible that the worst is yet to come? There is still too little visibility to be confident that the nightmare on Wall Street is coming to an end.
The 5 largest Wall Street banks doled out a record $39 billion in bonuses last year. After driving hundreds of thousands of families into foreclosure, causing a financial crisis affecting hundreds of millions, and pushing the US and world economies closer to recession, it appears Wall Street is rewarding itself for a job well done.
The absurdity of this standard is self-evident. But, for all that, no major public figures have called for the leaders of these banks to be held liable for the destruction they caused, much less even called for hearings into their massive pay. Executive compensation, we are told, is a private affair between shareholders and executives, whatever its effect may be on the rest of the population.
The financial crisis we are currently in will probably enter the US record book as the 2nd worst in the last 100 years. The worst was in the early 1930s when thousands of banks failed and the mortgage market shut down entirely. Four of the 5 federal agencies now supporting the market were created during the financial crisis of the 1930s. The only exception is Freddie Mac, which was formed in 1970. If not for these institutions, the current crisis would be much worse.
Australian share prices have plummeted since the start of 2008, driven by the exposure of local banks and financial institutions to the US credit crisis. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Australian economy as a whole is far from immune to the impact of a US recession.
Many have now heard rumblings of the "amero", a proposed North American currency to replace the Canadian loonie, dollar and peso. However, most of the mentions of this concept, when discussed in the mainstream media tend to focus on suggesting that talk of an "amero", and in effect, the accompanying North American Union, is nothing but a conspiracy theory created by deluded xenophobes afraid of immigration and globalization.
The push for this agenda is being driven by the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and the Mexican Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales. The concept of a North American currency has not only been the object of discussion within powerful big-business think tanks, but has, in fact, been discussed in government positions.
So clearly, there is a move on toward a regional currency for North America, in conjunction with the formation of a North American Union. Monetary sovereignty, and especially the power to create and issue money, is perhaps more central to the idea of a free, democratic and sovereign nation than the right to vote. If we do not have the power over the issuance of money, it does not matter whom we vote for. It's the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.
The icy Swiss mountains are to host the world's business and political elite this week for their annual gathering in Davos, where the cooling temperature of the world economy is set to focus minds. The Davos event, a unique spectacle of wealth, power and debate, begins Wednesday when chief executives and heads of state gather in the chic Alpine ski resort for 5 days of public discussions and private deal-making.
Gordon Brown has begun secret talks with other world leaders on far-reaching reform of the United Nations Security Council as part of a drive to create a "new world order" and "global society". The Prime Minister is drawing up plans to expand the number of permanent members in a move that will provoke fears that the veto enjoyed by Britain could be diluted eventually. The United States, France, Russia and China also have a veto but the number of members could be doubled to include India, Germany, Japan, Brazil and 1 or 2 African nations.
Wikipedia: Algol, known colloquially as the Demon Star, is a bright star in the constellation Perseus. It is one of the best known eclipsing binaries, the first such star to be discovered, and also one of the first (non-nova) variable stars to be discovered. Algol is actually a 3-star system.
The name Algol derives from Arabic ra's al-ghūl : head (ra's) of the ogre (al-ghūl) (see "the ghoul") which was probably given due to its peculiar behavior. The English names of Demon Star and Blinking Demon are direct translations. In Hebrew folklore it was known as Rōsh ha Sāṭān 'Satan's Head'.
[WAR: The goulish "Demon Star" / "Satan's Head" is a TRINITY-star system? How ironic! So are the stars trying to tell us something? After all, "Night after night they display knowledge." (Psalm 19:2)]
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"The Great Altar of Pergamon is in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. It was this altar, believed dedicated to Zeus, that John of Patmos referred to as 'Satan's Throne' in Rev 2:12-13. ... It can be seen alongside other monumental structures such as ... the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. ... [which] was the 8th gate to the inner city of Babylon. It was constructed in about 575 BC by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II on the north side of the city."
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