Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Novak on B16's US visit (part 2)
With the election of Benedict XVI on the heels of Pope John Paul II's papacy, we have the best of both worlds, says Michael Novak. In this interview, he discusses the Pope's address at the UN and his relationship with youth.
(And: How B16 won over the US)
(Cartoon: B16 meets B2)
(Cartoon: The real B16)
The election of a suspended Catholic bishop as president of Paraguay presents the Vatican with an important policy decision: Should further disciplinary action be taken against Fernando Lugo Mendez?
He is not likely to be deterred by any Vatican action. Before beginning his political campaign he announced his intention to resign from the priesthood entirely. The Vatican responded by pointing out that priestly ordination cannot be undone, nor can a priest "resign" from the clerical state.
On Wednesday, Germans marked their own contribution to the history of beer, the Reinheitsgebot, or purity law, which strictly regulated the price and ingredients of beer at the start of the 16th century.
It's an excuse for parties and brewery tours across Germany. The state of Bavaria has declared a whole "Beer Week," to let tourists and residents sample beer from some of the state's 40 breweries and 4,000 brands. Bavarians tend to be the most proud of the Reinheitsgebot. Most of their breweries adhere to it -- and they came up with it the law the first place.
The Bavarian law became the basis for legislation that spread throughout Germany for the production of beer for 471 years, making it the oldest food-quality regulation in history. Bavaria insisted on national acceptance of the Reinheitsgebot as a precondition for German unification under Otto von Bismarck in 1871.
Blah, blah, blah...
An angry vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany has sharply criticized the robust trade relationship between Germany and Iran. "Business with Iran is booming, while morality is wasting away. German companies, of all things, are doing business with a country that advocates a new Holocaust. This miserable profiteering is a scandal."
"The current economic relationship - that is, business as usual between German firms and the Islamic dictatorship in Iran - should be focused against the background of the Holocaust - that is, German responsibility for the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust," said a spokesman from the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin - a nonprofit that aims to raise public awareness of the Iranian threat to the international community and Israel.
In 2007, the trade amounted to more than €4 billion. Economic relations between Iran and Germany represent a politically sensitive test for the "special relationship" between Israel and Germany.
German business confidence posted a steeper-than-expected decline today, just as the government forecast a slowdown in Europe's biggest economy next year.
The German economy had long seemed surprisingly resilient despite the slowdown in the US, the international credit squeeze and a strong euro. But recent sentiment indicators and data suggest such factors are beginning to take a toll.
German lawmakers today overwhelmingly approved the new EU treaty, a document Chancellor Merkel described as providing a "new foundation" for the bloc. The lower house of parliament voted 515-58, with 1 abstention, to approve the so-called "Lisbon Treaty" — easily clearing the necessary two-thirds majority.
That reflected wide political support for the treaty in Germany, the EU's most populous country. It faces one more hurdle when the upper house of parliament, which represents the country's 16 state governments, votes May 23, where it was expected to pass easily.
Left Party leader Lothar Bisky called the treaty a document created in "the spirit of neoliberalism" and urged the EU to scrap the current document in favor of one which was "more transparent, simple and understandable for the people of Europe."
Kurt Beck, the leader of the Social Democrats, said the Lisbon Treaty was a good basis for Europe but should not be held up as the definitive plan for the future of the EU. He also said the ultimate goal remained an inclusive constitution and a Charter of Fundamental Rights signed by all EU nations.
Beck, echoing the opinion of a number of large trade unions in Germany, also called for the creation of a common social policy, saying social rights should be at the heart of European politics.
[Europress] [Russopress]
Chancellor Merkel called on Irish voters to approve the new EU treaties, which she said would bring benefits "even to sceptics." The founding of the EU is the best thing that has happened to the continent of Europe in its long history, said Merkel. And the EU Reform Treaty is the best way to prepare Europe to face the future. The treaty also addresses fears [and "prophecies"] that Europe could become a superstate.
Chancellor Merkel Wednesday told visiting Egyptian President Mubarak that there is no more money for promoting the Mediterranean Union. Merkel told Mubarak that she was interested in promoting a Mediterranean Union, but insisted that all European countries should be involved.
A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Sharon 4 years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president's efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.
Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush's letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush's peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank.
US officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has told Turkey that Israel is willing to cede the Golan Heights in return for peace with Damascus, a Syrian cabinet minister confirmed Wednesday. "Olmert is ready for peace with Syria on the grounds of international conditions; on the grounds of the return of the Golan Heights in full to Syria."
President Ahmadinejad issued a warning to Syria on Thursday not to side with the Americans. "We must always be prepared to thwart the plans of the US in the region. The Americans are on the verge of destruction (and) anyone who sides with them will also go the same way."
He called on Middle Eastern countries to "raise their alert in the face of the enemies' plots and make plans to foil them."
General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, was tapped Wednesday to lead US forces in the Middle East in a major shift in the military command at a time of growing tensions with Iran.
(And: "King David" at the helm)
In the years since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, India's presence in Afghanistan has grown dramatically. India does not have a military presence in Afghanistan, but it does play a significant role in the country's reconstruction and has won support across Afghanistan's ethnic groups.
Pakistan's new government has drafted a peace agreement with Taliban militants in tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.
Iran has already answered all the UN atomic agency's questions over its nuclear programme, the foreign minister said on Wednesday, after the watchdog announced Tehran had agreed to respond to claims it was studying how to develop a nuclear weapon.
The nomination of General Petraeus to be the new head of the Central Command not only ensures that he will be available to defend the Bush administration's policies toward Iran and Iraq at least through the end of Bush's term and possibly even beyond.
It also gives Vice President Cheney greater freedom of action to exploit the option of an air attack against Iran during the administration's final months. Cheney aggressively solicited political support from Turkish leaders for a US strike against Iranian nuclear facilities during his visit to Turkey last month.
Yeah, right!...
Israel on Wednesday assured the US that it had not spied on its key ally since 1985, after the arrest in New York of an US Army veteran charged with passing defence secrets to the Jewish state nearly 30 years ago. "The events go back to the early 1980s. Since 1985 there have been clear orders from (Israel's) prime ministers not to conduct these kind of activities."
Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Olmert. The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau's opening of a full investigation.
Before the anonymous leak of information, the FBI had no idea that Kadish had been a spy for Israel. Now it is investigating a number of US citizens, including an individual who held very senior security positions in the Clinton and Bush White Houses.
It is believed that the "doves" in the Olmert administration who leaked the information are seeking to make a military confrontation more difficult and are hoping that negotiations, particularly with Syria, will instead take place.
Democratic voters just can't make up their minds between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In Pennsylvania, they denied him victory but spared her defeat. It will be the job of the superdelegates to commit political murder -- but will it mean suicide for the party?
(Cartoon: 2-headed donkey)
The 2008 US election has all the makings of a Greek tragedy, in which noble heroes and heroines are forced to follow a course to catastrophe, divinely preordained as punishment for sins and blunders committed by their forefathers in the dim and distant past.
In acting out their ineluctable doom, the eloquent protagonists do not just destroy themselves but also their cities, their nations and even their entire civilisations.
If this description sounds too grandiose, consider the results from the Pennsylvania primary. The outcome seemed to be precisely calibrated by the gods to maximise the agony of the Democrats.
Worse still, this result underlined the fear that senior Democrats have long been aware of, but have never dared to express in public: America may not yet be ready to elect a black President.
Olbermann discusses Hillary's zeal to mandate US intervention in any Middle East skirmish even if it does not involve Israel, and her desire to create a so-called League of Democracies like John McCain.
(Cartoon: Baby Maverick, who's your daddy?)
A Phoenix man says he caused the red light display that mystified thousands of people as it floated across the north Phoenix sky Monday night.
The man, who did not want to be identified, said he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the flares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard. He said he believed turbulence created by a passing jet caused the balloons to move around.
If another quake of the magnitude of the New Madrid Quake of 1811 should hit the Midwest, it would be the worst natural disaster in American history. Overall the loss of life could run into the hundreds of thousands.
The 5.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the Midwest last Friday was felt from Kansas to Georgia, and aftershocks have continued over the weekend,
President Ahmadinejad says no one in the White House nor any of the presidential candidates can save America from its economic 'downfall'. Addressing a large crowd in Hamadan on Wednesday, he said the US is doomed to undergo an economic breakdown.
US manufacturing orders fell again in March, the 3rd consecutive monthly decline, as industry continues to feel the economic slowdown, according to a report released today.
A vast communication offensive has started. It uses the same logic as was used for the Iraqi situation before the 2004 presidential election: preventing voters from becoming aware of the extent of the disaster in progress by flooding them with fictitious news, by drowning "bad" objective news in a multitude of "good subjective news" (this is what an American economist called "the transformation of indicators into vindicators."
In fact, what we have seen for 2 months, and will see for another month, is a remarkable exercise of psychological war probably coordinated by the very secret "Working Group on Financial Markets".
US bank failures could rise above "historical norms" as a weakening economy puts pressure on badly underwritten loans, particularly in commercial real estate, according to a bank regulator wo oversees about 1,700 national banks as comptroller of the currency. He said the growing problems for lenders follow a period of almost 4 years in which no institution regulated by his agency had failed.
Despite the cheery tone in the press of late and the claims by quite a few senior banking executives that the credit crisis is on the mend, the money markets remain unconvinced. "Interest-rate derivatives are signaling that the rate banks charge for loans in dollars in London may rise further as financial institutions remain reluctant to lend."
This week's Contrarian Chronicles focuses on the multitrillion-dollar question on Wall Street: Has the worst been seen, or is the worst yet to be seen?
Among the nightmares lurking around the corner for the already battered housing and credit markets would be a meltdown at mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
An influential economist who long predicted the bursting of the housing market bubble cautioned Tuesday that the slump in the US housing market could cause prices to fall more than they did during the Great Depression and that bailouts will be needed so millions don't lose their homes.
(Cartoon: Real Estate bear market)
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Fed will announce another rate cut next week, but will then pause to assess whether the current rate cuts have any effect on growth, and to reduce the risk of what the article calls an "inflationary psychology".
AEP blog
No bear wants to be a perma-pessimist, ever waiting for the sky to fall. So, sunk in a deep armchair with an optimistic bottle of Rioja (Baron De Ley Reserva), I have tried to tot up reasons why the great credit smash-up of 2007-2008 may now be safely over, heralding sunlit uplands once again.
As Europe's drama slowly unfolds, the ECB is sticking defiantly to its orthodox line. The IMF suggests looking beyond the current food and oil spike, and preparing "some easing of the policy stance". Axel Weber, the German Bundesbank chief and leader of the Uber-hawks, will have none of it. "I do not share the vision of the IMF," he said, tartly.
One notes that the Bundesbank was quieter when Germany was in the dumps and needed lower interest rates. It acquiesced in roaring money supply growth as inflation fuelled bubbles in the Latin Bloc – the cause of their current distress. Such is the hypocrisy of EMU. Beware the pious incantations by Weber, a German nationalist in Euro-clothing.
Once you add Europe to the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese sick list, you reach 60% of world GDP, and 66% of world demand. This leaves the global boom on tenuously narrow ground. Who is going to buy all those exports from China? Who is going to keep pushing commodity prices into the stratosphere? This bear growls on...
.Credit Suisse Group today reported a 1st-quarter loss nearly 3 times worse than analysts had expected as it wrote down $5.3 billion in soured investments.
China's stock market has lost half its value since October in one of the most spectacular bear markets of the last half century, eliminating $2.5 trillion of paper wealth.
The near panic sales over recent weeks have caused heavy losses for millions of Chinese savers who jumped into the market at the top of the boom, but this has not had any appreciable effect on the broader economy so far.
The economic dragon of the Seventies had finally, it seemed, been slain. Abruptly, however, inflation is back with a vengeance. The inflationary dragon was far from dead, merely dormant.
As in the Seventies, a driving force behind the inflation threat is soaring oil prices. But just as 4 decades ago, a drastic surge in energy costs is coupled with huge increases in prices for an even more basic necessity: food.
The intensity of the danger from inflation is hampering the efforts to fend off the threat that a global credit crunch, as well as housing market downturn in the US and Britain, will trigger economic setbacks, if not recessions. Trying to keep a lid on inflation, central banks have been forced to limit interest rate cuts they might have made to bolster growth.
At the heart of the problem lies the reemergence of China as an economic power, along with the rise of other mainly Asian emerging market nations. These trends have unleashed massive extra demand for commodities and energy.
Many years ago in San Francisco, I looked down at the street one day and saw a spray-paint stencil graffiti work saying: "Be silent, consume, die." Immediately after seeing it, I thought to myself, "This perfectly sums up Western consumer capitalism."
Nicolas Sarkozy, the America-loving conservative, may be the new president, but he has some work to do changing the culture of a country largely in love with socialism. The front door of the European news bureau of the state-owned Radio France displays a bumper sticker reading "Capitalism … the social disease."
Deadly greed
Vast amounts of money are flooding the world's commodities markets, driving up prices of staple foods like wheat and rice. Biofuels and droughts can't fully explain the recent food crisis -- hedge funds and small investors bear some responsibility for global hunger.
No good deed ever goes unpunished. Asians are quickly discovering the wisdom of this idiom, as they suddenly confront staggering shortages in basic food items.
The upshot for Asian governments is increased social tensions in many countries where food shortages were unheard of until very recently, as well as a number of others where economic fragility has increased on the back of rising food prices.
The world appears inexorably headed for a period of increased trade confrontations that would make trade terms much more onerous for most countries. The primary target is Asian exports.
The upshot of all this is that trading in agricultural products is by far the most complex issue in international trade with lack of uniform standards, multiple layers of bureaucracy, zero price transparency and most importantly, a complete absence of free markets.
All too often, these arrangements fail - imagine the spider's web above and think that a ball bearing were to fall through multiple layers - and you get the idea that what starts as a minor problem, such as a weather disturbance, in one country can quickly degenerate into global panic on the price of the produce affected.
As governments in countries scurry for cover, very little is being said about the main culprits, namely European farm subsidies and the overvalued US dollar.
China is exchanging its depreciating reserves of the greenback for things of value, notably rice, with deadly consequences for US foreign policy.
The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar.
Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.
Rising worldwide food prices are resulting in shortages, riots and protests, promises by governments to expand food aid, expressions of concern by international bodies like the World Bank, and stress on household budgets even in developed countries like the US. Did this just "happen" or is there a plan?
First of all, let's get rid of the idea that we are seeing "impersonal market forces" at work. "Supply and demand" is not a "law"—it's a policy. Second, let's ask the question which any competent investigator should pose when starting out on the trail of a possible crime: "Who benefits?"
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
The battle lines of future conflict between nations are emerging along the fault lines of the polar ice caps of our planet. An international race for oil, fish, diamonds and shipping routes, is being accelerated by the impact of global warming on Earth's frozen north.
Yes!!...
Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunisation against the virus may never be possible, according to an unprecedented poll conducted by The Independent.
A mood of deep pessimism has spread among the international community of AIDS scientists after the failure of a trial of a promising vaccine at the end of last year. It just was the latest in a series of setbacks in the 25-year struggle to develop an HIV vaccine.
Angels or Demons?
In Dan Brown's blockbuster thriller, Angels & Demons, to be a 2008 movie starring Tom Hanks, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tries to stop what seems to be the Illuminati, a legendary secret society, from destroying the Vatican City with the newly-discovered power of antimatter discovered by CERN physicist, Leonardo Vetra, who was found murdered in his own secured, private quarters at the facility.
The events taking place today at CERN's Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland are in many ways far more exciting than Brown's novel, as one of the world's largest assembled teams of scientists attempt to discover what is considered the "Holy Grail" of particle physics, the Higgs Boson, and rec-create the conditions that existed a few seconds after the Big Bang and the creation of our universe. This video is a brilliant tour de force of one of mankind's most exciting voyages of discovery -a journey to the beginnings of time.
* Early the next morning King Hezekiah gathered the city officials together and went up to the temple of YAHWEH." (2Chr 29:20-
* [WAR: Although there's no specific Scripture indicating it, at the end of this day (17th) was when Yahshua was resurrected back to life. And this event happened at the end of the Sabbath day -- just before the 1st night of the week. And this directly corresponds to when "Let there be light" was commanded -- before the 1st day of the week (Sun's day) even commenced at the next morning!
So the Sun was not re-created/unveiled on the 1st day of the week as currently believed, but its light started shining on what would've been the end of the 7th day -- if there had been previous days to count up to it. Therefore, you have an interesting parallel of the Sun and the Son being resurrected at the end of the 7th day of the week -- NOT on the 1st day!!]
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