Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Following his own advice to make Lent a time of conversion, Pope Benedict and those who assist him in governing the Church (the Roman Curia) will go on retreat this coming Sunday, February 10. For the next 6 days, the group will follow a daily routine based off of the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, culminating in Vespers, adoration and a Eucharistic blessing at 5:45 p.m. every day.
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews' conversion.
However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.
Benedict XVI's meeting with President Fatmir Sejdiu does not reflect a change in the position of the Holy See regarding Kosovo's juridical status, the Vatican affirmed. "The meeting also served to enable the [Pope] to receive firsthand information on the current situation and future prospects. The audience ... does not represent any change in the position of the Holy See vis-à-vis the definitive juridical status of Kosovo. As for any possible declaration of independence by Kosovo, the Holy See will follow developments on the ground with particular attention and, in her appraisal thereof, will bear in mind the position of the international community."
Omar bin Laden, son of Osama bin Laden has said he wants to meet Pope Benedict XVI and visit the Vatican. " I would very much like to meet the Pope in St. Peter's, but I have been told that it is not easy," said bin Laden, who considers himself an ambassador for peace."
The former foreign minister and leading member of the Green Party, Joschka Fischer, has used his weekly column in the newspaper Die Zeit to vehemently argue for the deployment of German troops (Bundeswehr) in southern Afghanistan.
Fischer argues that what is at stake in Afghanistan is "victory or defeat on the ground," and therefore "the very future of NATO." "Germany risks the danger of being seen as primarily responsible for a possible failure in Afghanistan in a conflict which has been brewing under the surface for some time." Should the allied mission in Afghanistan fail, Fischer continues, the result for German foreign policy would be maximum damage.
This is nothing less than the unsullied voice of German militarism. It echoes the concerted campaign by leading military experts and former generals for the central political leadership to overcome public hostility to the role of the German army as a combat force. German troops must be bloodied in battle, and the German public must be prepared to accept the spectacle of body bags returning home.
Fischer's latest comments on the Afghan war reek of contempt for democratic process and the popular will. He now speaks on behalf of a layer of radicals who are prepared to support a "strong state" in order to ensure the pursuit of German imperialist interests.
[Europress] / [Russopress]
Italy's Parliament was dissolved today after inter-party talks failed to form an interim government. Italian media widely said the election would most likely fall on April 13-14, which would allow national.
Serbia's prime minister on Tuesday denounced an offer to sign an accord with the European Union as a trick to lure it into rubber-stamping an independent Kosovo, piling pressure on his tottering coalition. "The EU's proposal to sign a political agreement with Serbia while at the same time sending a mission to break apart our state is a deception aimed at getting Serbia effectively to sign its agreement to Kosovo independence."
One might think Washington would hesitate to trigger a blowup on a seemingly unimportant matter that could transform into a full-blown global crisis. Yet that is exactly what the administration intends to do with respect to the Serbian province of Kosovo.
The police have received a criminal complaint against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for discussing the future of Jerusalem with a foreign entity - in violation of the Jerusalem Law. However, the police have not reported any progress on investigating the matter.
Clause 6 of "Basic Law: Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel" states: "No authorities over the area of Jerusalem currently under the purview of the State of Israel or the Jerusalem Municipality shall be given over to any foreign political or governmental entity, or any other similar foreign entity, neither permanently or temporarily."
Clause 5 states that the Old City and other areas liberated by Israel during the Six Day War are an integral part of Jerusalem for the purposes of this law.
Russian Military Analysts are reporting today that the government of Afghanistan is 'enraged' over the discovery by Afghan Secret Police of a top secret British Military computer memory stick revealing the United Kingdom's plan to train over 2,000 Taliban rebel fighters and provide them with a base of operations.
Upon their learning of the treachery by their British NATO allies, Germany was quick to state that they would send no further troops to Afghanistan and the Canadian Prime Minister, Steven Harper, has, also, told his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, that Canadian Military forces could soon leave Afghanistan
So serious has the Western Allies mission NATO mission in Afghanistan been compromised by these new charges against Britain that European support for the US led war has erupted in fresh tensions among the West.
According to these reports, however, the most catastrophic revelation contained on the captured British Military computer memory stick were plans by the UK, and their American ally, to 'utilize' these 2,000 Afghan Taliban rebel fighters as terrorists against UK, European and US civilian 'targets' in a bid to further their effort towards igniting their populations passion for Total World War.
The West's greatest fears, these reports state, are being further fueled by Russia and Iran's growing blockade of Afghan opium supplies which have supplied the coffers of the British and Americans vast spy apparatus' with untold billions of dollars of hidden wealth since 2002.
To the Western people themselves, and who are intended by their rulers to be victims, there remains no appetite among them to know the truest state of a World which is rapidly plunging into the chaos of Total War, and all the misery it entails.
Several days ago a cargo ship with its 14-member crew left an Egyptian port and went in the Red Sea en route for Sudan. The vessel went missing. Egypt authorities launched a search for the ship Tuesday, a government spokesman said. But it was unclear when and where the vessel went missing along the 800-mile route.
Rescue ships are thoroughly combing the area along the stretches of the Sudanese and Egyptian shores backed up by a search plane. But so far, all efforts to locate the ship -- which did not send a distress signal at the time it went missing -- failed.
[WAR: Will it end up in the Persian Gulf with Iranian markings/flags on it to be used in an "attack" on US ships?]
A 5th cable cut?!...
Internet connectivity still remains slow in several Middle East countries due to the cable damage near Egypt, Iran and Dubai. An improvement is not expected soon as operators claim there are many complexities involved in fixing the problem. In addition, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.
The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding undersea cables, has declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches, adding investigations were underway. A total of 5 cables being operated by 2 submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.
Reelality?...
"Turner is able to discern that a rogue presence inside CIA ("a CIA within the CIA") is conducting top secret, illicit operations. His report indicated he had stumbled onto one of their contingency plans to invade the Middle East in the event of an oil crisis."
[WAR: I saw this for the first time last night. I recommend seeing this and Syriana back-to-back.]
Former colonial power France is continuing to evacuate its citizens and other foreigners out of strife-torn Chad. Paris has actively backed the regime in N'Djamena in the past and on Tuesday President Nicolas Sarkozy warned the rebels that France was prepared to "do its duty" and intervene to defend President Idriss Deby.
Oil again lubricates the wheels of conflict in Africa. Déby welched on a deal brokered by the World Bank to ensure that Chad's oil revenues get spent on health and education, as well as placed in trust for a future after the wells run dry—akin to schemes in place in other petro-states such as Norway and East Timor. Chad's generals thought otherwise, and the revenues have been redirected into military spending and the war in the east, with little opposition from the French or the main oil drillers.
And as the rebels encircled N'djamena, Chad told the UN Security Council that it reserves the right to act in self-defense, by which it means a military attack in Sudan. Now an international war looms in the Sahel, and will likely be fought in the already-scorched earth of Darfur and eastern Chad, where so much horror has been visited upon civilians over the past 5 years.
Five weeks after manipulated presidential elections, Kenya is on the brink of civil war. Tribal violence is raging -- without mercy, sense or discretion -- throughout the land. As negotiations stall, merciless tribal violence is raging, leaving the country littered with bodies.
President Ahmadinejad has stressed that Tehran and Caracas will fight side by side against global imperialism and ultimately defeat it. "Despite pressures from imperialism, both Iran and Venezuela have high economic growth and continue their development with great speed.
A prominent security think tank says there is now a low probability of a US military attack on Iran over the country's nuclear program. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies announced on Tuesday that there is no short-term prospect of a US strike on Iran.
The top US intelligence official is backing away from his agency's recent assessment that Iran halted its "'nuclear weapons program." "I would change the way we describe the Iranian nuclear program. I would have included that there are the component parts, that the portion of it, maybe the least significant, had halted."
President Bush still believes the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons – and so do the Israelis. So for journalists to assume that neither the US nor Israel will attack Iran before the November election could constitute another failure of imagination.
Iran's military self-sufficiency proves it is fully prepared to counter any attack on its territory, a top military commander says. "The threat of a US military attack may only be ruled out once the presidency of George W. Bush ends," said the Iranian military official who believes a US attack in 2008 is probable.
The latest addition to the Air Force's arsenal of bunker busters is a 5,000lb weapon with formidable penetrating power. If you're going to attack the hardest of targets, you've got two options: go for the weak spot, like the Air Force's Portal Defeat program does; or simply to use the biggest, hardest bomb possible striking at high speed for maximum force. And that means the BLU-122.
As of this posting, no estimate was possible of the total number of convention delegates won by each of the 5 major candidates, because many of them are apportioned on the basis of the vote in congressional districts, not statewide.
The final decision on the Democratic nomination may well be made by the 800 unelected "super delegates"—congressmen, governors, mayors and members of the Democratic National Committee—who will cast 20% of the votes at the convention.
A section of the political establishment is attempting to alter the world image of the US, after eight disastrous years of the Bush administration, and make certain limited shifts in policy. Obama is seen as a useful tool in altering the image of the US around the world. Hence the clear media bias in his favor in recent weeks.
The Republican contest, while evidently closer to resolution, could well plunge the party into deep political crisis. The Christian fundamentalist and extreme-right elements are deeply hostile to McCain, but split their votes between Huckabee and Romney, a multi-millionaire venture capitalist whose Mormon religion is anathema to many evangelical Christians.
(Analysis: Stupor Wednesday dawns)
(Video: European reaction)
John McCain's "Super Tuesday" victory on the biggest day of voting so far in the presidential campaign has left him on a clear path to capture the Republican nomination, and closer to taking the White House than many outside the US might think.
(And: "Pat Buchanan just said that McCain as president would make Cheney look like Gandhi." -- phoned-in from WAR correspondent.)
Regardless of the outcome of the "Super-Tuesday" primary vote, a hard core of London-linked fascists are intent on imposing a dictator in the White House in January 2009. At the moment, the leading candidate to fill that spot is New York City's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He is at the center of a nationwide "independent candidacy" drive, spearheaded by a strange-bedfellow coalition.
Whether Obama has figured it out yet or not, these people intend to use him to bring down Hillary Clinton, and then dispose of him, the same way they jettisoned former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, through a mountain of crime-infested scandals.
Therefore, the Anglo-Dutch gang have their scopes set on destroying the Presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton—through whatever means are necessary. They will stop at nothing to wreck both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The Duke of York has angered the Queen and senior politicians with his extraordinary attack on the White House on the eve of his trade mission to the United States. The duke's criticism, in a newspaper interview, of President Bush's post-war strategy for Iraq demolished the protocol that members of the Royal Family refrain from public comment on sensitive international and political issues.
In the interview, timed to mark the start of his 10-day mission to the US in his role as a British trade envoy, he said that there were "occasions when people in the UK would wish that those in responsible positions in the US might listen and learn from our experiences".
Stock markets around the world slipped again on Tuesday on concerns the 6-month-old credit and banking crisis was already hitting consumers and service sector firms in the US and Europe.
Banks and financial stocks were in the firing line once again with stretched balance sheets from the mortgage market hiatus and wholesale funding difficulties compounded by new jitters over US credit card businesses and a wider recession.
Asian markets tanked today, sending investors on a selling spree after unexpectedly weak service sector data in the US and Europe fueled fears of a recession. Japan plunged over 4% and Hong Kong closed more than 5% lower.
US and global financial markets are continuing to adjust to a period of prolonged turmoil and the Bush administration is closely monitoring developments, 2 top Treasury Department officials said Tuesday.
Panic can be a dangerous thing, especially when it is the response by a central bank to global economic disintegration. The combined 1.25% cut was precisely the wrong move, amounting to more of the poison which has already killed the patient.
The Fed is trying to save a system which cannot be saved, and in doing so, is leading the nation and the world into a Weimar Germany-style hyperinflationary blowout. We are headed into a "global breakdown crisis," a self-feeding downward spiral in which the financial system, the physical economy, and the political structures all collapse, leading to a chaos not seen since the Dark Age of 14th-Century Europe.
Open warfare has broken out among the power groups who see themselves running the world. This is an end-of-game fight for survival, to see who winds up on top of whatever pile of rubble remains, and this type of fight will destroy virtually everything in its path.
The US is worried that Russia, China and OPEC oil-producing countries could use their growing financial clout to advance political goals, the top US spy chief told Congress on Tuesday. Such economic matters joined terrorism, nuclear proliferation and computer-network vulnerabilities as top US security threats described by National Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in an annual assessment.
Dozens of US banks will fail in the next 2 years as losses from soured loans mount and regulators crack down on lenders that take too much risk, especially in real estate and construction, an analyst said. Between 50 and 150 US banks could fail by early 2010.
He who hesitates is lost in a seller's market. Reality is what happens whether you believe it or not. Reality is now intruding into the housing markets. People had better re-think their plans. Optimists think this housing market is going to reverse in 2009. I am not among them. This is an international phenomenon.
The decline in on-paper wealth is going to shake the confidence of hundreds of millions of home owners. I suggest that you prepare for an international economic slowdown. The people who thought they were real estate rich are going to face a new reality: rising property taxes, rising expenses, rising utility bills, and declining equity.
One of the most interesting aspects of the emerging debacle in the US housing markets is the fact that so many construction-related business owners and construction workers are still so naïvely unaware of the potential severity of the housing recession over the next few years. The Fed is all but impotent to avert a serious and long-lived recession in construction-related industries that will cause an immense amount of misery for an enormous number of people.
(Cartoon: The magic of gov't statistics)
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