Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
In September 1943, Adolf Hitler, furious at the ouster of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, suspected Pope Pius XII of encouraging his ally's removal. The Führer sent German troops into Rome and ordered Heinrich Himmler's chief aide to occupy the Vatican, assassinate the curia, and kidnap -- and perhaps kill -- Pope Pius XII.
This intriguing story is told in A Special Mission: Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII, written by former Washington Post foreign correspondent Dan Kurzman. In providing the first detailed account of Hitler's mad plan to sack the Vatican and kidnap the Pope, Kurzman underscores the hostility that existed between the Fuhrer and Pius XII.
President Köhler said on Thursday he would seek a 2nd term. The position is largely a symbolic one, but with the Social Democrats poised to name an opponent, the campaign could become bitterly political.
The upper house of the German parliament approved the European Union's Treaty of Lisbon today in a vote that exposed fault lines within Berlin's local government. Berlin's Mayor, a Social Democrat, was forced to abstain from the treaty vote because of dissent from his junior partners in the local parliament, the hard-line socialist Left party, Die Linke.
With just 3 weeks to go before Ireland's highly anticipated referendum on the Lisbon treaty, the country's European commissioner has admitted that the document is hard to sell because it does not bring tangible benefits to the population.
The oil problem is even more important for Turkey the US Turkey
Tony Blair came within moments of being killed when 2 Israeli fighter aircraft threatened to shoot down a private jet taking him to a Middle East conference in the belief that it might have been staging a terrorist attack.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday urged Europe to play an important political role in the Middle East peace process. "We discussed the peace process, and we say frankly that we want Europe to have a role -- we insist on it."
Syria's Foreign Minister said that Syria cannot progress even one step forward in negotiations before it receives assurances that Israel will fully withdraw from the Golan Heights. "This is not a precondition, it's Syria's right."
(Analysts: Israel-Syria peace could defuse major conflicts)
(Petraeus: Syria nuclear program troubling)
(Timeline: Israel, Syria and the Golan Heights)
(Factbox: 5 facts about the Golan Heights)
Paranoia or possibility?...
Hopes that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could today broker a deal to get aid flowing into cyclone-hit Burma looked grim last night, after the junta cited fears of an American invasion when it yesterday blocked US naval ships and helicopters from delivering supplies.
The New Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece for the ruling junta, said US naval ships and helicopters poised offshore would not be allowed to deliver aid to cyclone victims - citing fears of a US invasion aimed at grabbing the country's oil reserves.
Iran has proposed that an international consortium enrich uranium within its own borders as a way of breaking the deadlock with the Western powers over its nuclear programme.
The Israeli ambassador to the US alleges that Iran is winning the race "to acquire nuclear weapons." "If we want to avoid the juncture of Iran with a bomb or bombing Iran than the world must act decisively in a much more serious way."
Paranoid Protestant's Premier Prophet...
According to a number of sources, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to bring his first reactor on line sometime in September 2008, which is just about in line with what the Israeli Mossad had estimated back in 2003 when the full extent of Iran's secret nuclear program became known.
Everything is in place for war except the pretext to start things off. Starting up a nuclear reactor will do nicely.
The US should increase diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to counter its rising influence, while retaining possible military action as a "last resort," a top US military officer said Thursday.
Any moment now, the Iranian challenge will be added to the list of things too serious to be left to politicians. A fateful strategic issue - certainly for the State of Israel - became a plaything this week for the American election circus. The Iranian threat is now the Iranian debate: to threaten or talk, to attack or wait.
(Analysts: Bush plan to isolate Iran didn't work)
Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, former Clinton White House aide and senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, said that the US faces a "cataclysmic" final few months of the Bush term, and that Bush is determined to leave a lasting mark on the world regardless of who is elected the next president. "Bush feels unconstrained right now, and a sense of urgency."
Stanley Hilton was a senior advisor to Sen Bob Dole and has personally known Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for decades.
"Our case is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen.
"Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East."
President Bush's usurpation of power since 9/11 was termed "rapacious," "predatory," and "extra-Constitutional," by presidential scholar Michael Genovese, director of the Institute for Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He said the "Unitary Theory" of the executive espoused by the Bush White House "is a very strange and ahistorical notion that says, 'In a crisis all power gravitates to the president. No one, not the courts, not the Congress can interfere with the president and in effect, the president is the state. That ahistorical view runs contrary to everything that we find in the Framers."
The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General's report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a "War Crimes" file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.
A hole must have been ripped in the space-time continuum lately, because the world in which I live doesn't seem to make sense. Something seems amiss, as if the events of the last 30 years never happened, or didn't happen the way I remember them. Or something.
John McCain rejected the months-old endorsement of an influential Texas televangelist after an audio recording surfaced in which the preacher said God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.
Although John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, as the various state conventions roll forward in obscurity, conflict and chaos continue to be spread by Ron Paul's enthusiastic followers who continue to try to storm the ramparts of the GOP establishment.
It has been announced that Bilderberg luminary and top corporate elitist (Fannie Mae CEO) James A. Johnson will select Democratic candidate Barack Obama's running mate for the 2008 election.
(On your knees!: Obama promises "unshakable commitment" to Israel)
A Texas appeals court said Thursday that the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist sect's ranch, a ruling that could unravel one of the biggest child-custody cases in US history.
The credit crunch is far from over and is likely to hit sectors other than housing, Marc Faber, Editor and Publisher of "The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report", told "Squawk Box Europe."
"I personally think we are just starting the credit crunch and it is going to be worse. I think the economy really stinks and the next sector to be hit, in America and elsewhere, is retail. ... we should worry about civil unrest."
(And: The return of stagflation)
A home-price index considered to be the most comprehensive reading of the US market posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history, and analysts say housing has yet to bottom out.
The Nigerian government announced it intends to employ the very same militants often blamed for attacks on oil installations in the Niger Delta to guard the region's oil pipelines. In a surprising and certainly controversial move, defense officials said they would negotiate a possible protection agreement with militants.
The global financial market has become "a monster," responsible for "massive destruction of assets," according to the president of Germany and former head of the IMF, Horst Kohler.
These [oil] trades, unregulated, have virtually no useful economic role. They have become a form of parasitical professional gambling that distorts the transactions between producers and buyers.
Kohler compared the speculative bankers with alchemists, who purported to make gold from dross. It is not a bad comparison, and our contemporaries have, thus far, done better than their medieval counterparts, who often ended burned at the stake.
Sky-high oil prices are causing pain at the pump, but bills for air conditioning this summer and heating next winter -- combined with rising food costs -- promise to squeeze US consumers even more.
And there are no signs things will get better. "This is going to eat into the disposable income of American consumers -- supposing they have any left."
A leading global energy monitor fears there may not be enough oil out there to slake the world's thirst -- and is preparing a landmark forecast (to be released in November) that could reverberate through the global economy even as major companies announce fuel-related cutbacks.
Less oil would mean even higher prices for everything from gasoline to food. Already, airlines squeezed by jet fuel costs are bleeding profits and predicting cutbacks and industry upheaval.
Unless the US energy structure changes radically and rapidly, soaring oil prices will leave the country at the mercy of hostile states and terrorists, witnesses testified Thursday in Congress.
Relying on these countries for the nation's lifeblood puts the US at serious risk because it gives power to those who oppose US policy, said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Washington.
Global farm representative Jack Wilkinson says that recent rises in food prices were a necessary adjustment. Spiegel Online spoke with him about the good side of farm subsidies and why higher food prices aren't necessarily so bad.
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Leaders of 12 South American nations will set aside growing mistrust and ideological divisions today in Brasilia to sign a treaty to create a continental bloc modeled on the European Union.
Today in Scripture
* "In the 600th year of Noah's life, on the 17th day of the 2nd month -- on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." (Gen 7:11)
* "Each morning everyone gathered as much manna as he needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away." (Exo 16:21)
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