Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
In a May 29 talk to the Italian bishops' conference, Pope Benedict XVI argued that a democratic state should support Catholic schools. Since the government invests resources in many different projects, he reasoned, "there does not appear to be any justification for excluding adequate support for the work of Church institutions in the field of education."
Rich countries cannot appropriate the wealth of poor nations hidden in the soil or underground, Benedict XVI affirmed.
"The primordial gauge in political matters is the search for justice, so as to ensure that the dignity and rights of human beings are always respected and that all the inhabitants of a country may share in the wealth of their nation. The same holds true for the international sphere.
"The international community is also called to act -- over and above simple justice -- by showing its solidarity with the poorest and ensuring a better distribution of wealth, enabling especially those countries whose wealth resides in the soil or under the soil to be the primary beneficiaries thereof. Rich countries cannot appropriate what comes from other lands. Justice and solidarity must mean that the international community oversees the distribution of resources."
With a number of world leaders in Rome for the FAO meeting, Vatican-watchers have been speculating about the likelihood of a papal audience with certain heads of state.
A display presented yesterday in the Vatican Museums reveals the period of struggle between popes and emperors that led to the Western modern concept of the separation of powers.
The grand coalition has failed to live up to the expectations it awoke in 2005. Iternal conflicts have served to largely paralyse the government, and newspaper commentaries increasingly refer to a "deadlock," "crisis of confidence," "coalition of the disconcerted," etc., following differences between the coalition partners over a series of policy measures.
With oil prices breaking all records, the next shock for consumers is already at hand with electricity and natural gas prices set to skyrocket. While experts fear for the economy, the crisis is driving a wedge between the partners in Germany's coalition government.
An overwhelming majority of Germans chose Barack Obama as their favourite candidate for the US presidency, according to a poll published today. "Germans are very much taken with his multi-cultural background and particularly his air of aristocratic humility."
Just 25% of Germans polled said they view the US as a "force for good," and it seems their hopes are pinned on Obama to improve the transatlantic ties damaged during the Bush administration.
[Europress] [Russopress]
Politics can make strange bedfellows, but there can be few stranger partners for Britain's Conservatives than Ireland's Sinn Fein party, known for many years as the political wing of the IRA. But Sinn Fein is the only Irish party campaigning for a "No" vote in the June 12 referendum on the new European Treaty, in what looks to be a very close vote.
Ireland's referendum has Europe's other 26 member states deeply concerned at the prospect of an upset. If the Irish vote "No," as they did over the European Union's last Treaty of Nice, it would disrupt the EU's grand design to overhaul its governing system.
Fuel protests triggered by rising oil prices have spread to more countries across Europe, with thousands of fishermen on strike. Trade unions say the cost of diesel has become prohibitively high, after rising 300% over the past 5 years.
(Q&A: Europe fuel protests)
The European Union is being forced to delay its law-and-order mission to Kosovo due to footdragging by the UN. The squabble between the UN and the EU over who should have the final say in Kosovo has been provoked by Russia, which sees the proposed EU mission as illegal.
Russian PM Putin discussed EU-Russia relations during a 2-day visit to France, his first trip abroad since stepping down as head of state. His reception marked a break with the usual protocol for prime ministers.
"NATO has a serious military advantage over Russia's European combat capability."
Russia suspended the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) last December, saying that it would do so until its NATO partners resume the ratification of the updated version of the treaty, which reflects post Cold War realities -- the Warsaw Pact, once a CFE signatory, does not exist anymore; instead, there are NATO and non-NATO members, such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which have ratified the treaty; no NATO country has done so, while Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn have not even joined it.
Moscow believes that this situation gives the entire alliance unilateral military advantages, which it cannot accept.
Stressing Germany's commitment to Israel, Foreign Minister Steinmeier has pledged to do more to help secure a lasting peace in the Middle East, ahead of a visit to the region starting on Saturday. During his trip to the Middle East, he will visit Beirut, Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Marking the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, German parliamentarians said on Thursday, May 29, the Jewish state's right to exist had the same status as a German national interest.
Germany has played a key role in reviving efforts by the so-called Middle East quartet to help bring about a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. Berlin has invited foreign ministers from the Middle East, Europe, the US and several other countries to a conference on June 24 on efforts to assist the Palestinians in building up their police forces and justice system as steps toward creating a viable state.
"I believe that the way to protect the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley is to go to early elections," Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said. Speaking at a Likud party event held in the Golan, he said that "God willing, in the upcoming elections we will ensure (Israel's) sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Golan."
(And: Olmert's peace spin)
When the revered head of Iraq's largest Shiite opposition group was assassinated in 1999, the mantle of leadership passed to an unexpected heir: Muqtada al-Sadr, then a 25-year-old video-game aficionado who oversaw the movement's security forces.
Al-Sadr, now 34, has since emerged as an ardent nationalist who commands the support of hundreds of thousands of devotees and the scorn of those who see him as a thuggish militia leader. He has lately sought to reposition himself as a more mainstream figure amid increasing pressure from Iraq's Shiite-led government.
Forty nations are embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Anyone who travels through the country with Western troops soon realizes that NATO forces would have to be increased tenfold for peace to be even a remote possibility.
Pakistani President Musharraf is on the verge of quitting with a special aircraft being positioned to fly him out and Senate chair Muhammadmian Soomro being asked to cut short his foreign tour and return home, a newspaper report said today.
Quoting highly placed sources, The News said that a special wide-bodied Airbus A-310 aircraft has been parked at the Chaklala airbase in the garrison town of Rawalpindi adjacent to the national capital.
You've heard of rich India and poor India, a land of high-tech workers and slum dwellers alike. This is a story about a third India that exists at the nexus of the two, which feeds off the excesses of the country's new wealth and preys on its most vulnerable.
It is the story of the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency that has grown from the margins four decades ago to become, in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.
It is a tale of ideology and mafia-like thuggery, a conflict born in a vacuum of government inaction, and fueled by official mismanagement and corruption. And it is the story of the millions caught in between.
Russian Foreign Ministry reports are stating today the Prime Minister Putin's 'sudden' diplomatic trip to France was made at the behest of China's President Hu in order to 'warn' the EU not to become involved with the US following what is widely expected to be a 'retaliatory strike' against the US, and who the Chinese military has blamed for the catastrophic May 12th earthquake that has killed nearly 90,000 human beings.
Chinese and Russian Military scientists, these reports say, are concurring with Canadian researcher, and former Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of Forbes Magazine, Benjamin Fulford, who in a very disturbing video released from his Japanese offices to the American public, details how the US attacked China by the firing of a 90 Million Volt Shockwave from the Americans High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facilities in Alaska.
So powerful was this Shockwave, Britain
Russian Military Analysts note that though China 's Military has ordered its vast submarine fleet to 'disperse' throughout the Pacific Ocean, the Chinese 'attack' against the US
Iran on Thursday refuted all evidence of a possible military dimension of its nuclear programme as US fabrications. Tehran's representative at the IAEA said documents presented by the UN nuclear watchdog were fakes.
'Whatever is shown in the papers, films and drawings is fabrications ... It has many inconsistencies. In fact, the CIA has done a lousy job. They could at least have prepared something that could fly."
The most aggressive posturing and accusations against Iran, yet issued by Washington, signal the rapid closure of the window of opportunity for peace. It seems that the war camp led by Cheney have regained the lost ground and are furtively peddling for war before Bush leaves office.
According to Col. Sam Gardiner, a specialist on military strategies, the raising of "message volume" of anti-Iran rhetoric points to the administration's policy direction of ratcheting up towards war on Iran.
There was considerable speculation in press circles when he took over the Wall Street Journal that Rupert Murdoch would make the newspaper's editorial positions a little bit more mainstream and a little less neo-conservative than they had been, if for no other reason than to further expand its competitiveness with the New York Times.
I think I'm safe in saying that the speculation has so far proved unfounded. Take just the past couple of days' opinion pages as examples. On Tuesday, it published yet another Islamophobic rant by its "Global View" columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor, Bret Stephens. It also published a particularly unenlightening — and not very credible — excerpt from ultra-Likudist Doug Feith's recent book, War and Decision.
But both Stephens' column and Feith's op-ed were relatively tame compared to Wednesday's opinion pages. In the lead editorial, entitled "Punxsutawney Condi," the newspaper called for the US drop its diplomatic efforts to get Tehran to freeze its uranium enrichment program and instead mount a "month-long naval blockade of Iran's imports of refined gasoline" — a clear act of war — in order to, in its words, "clarify for the Iranians just how unacceptable their nuclear program is to the civilized world."
The 3rd George vs. George III...
The Bush administration has arrogated powers to itself that the British people even refused to grant King George III at the time of the Revolutionary War, an eminent political scientist says.
The authors of the US Constitution wrote that the president "shall take care to faithfully execute the laws of the land" because "the king of England possessed a suspending power" to set aside laws with which he disagreed, "the very same kind of power that the Bush Administration has claimed."
The synchronized savagery of the attacks on Scott McClellan as turncoat suggests he drew blood. For what he has done is offer confirmation to the president's war critics, from within the White House inner circle.
Neoconservative ideology, not US national interests, McClellan is saying, motivated Bush to launch one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history. The reason is that Bush embraced their utopian ideology of democratic empire and listened to their siren's call to be the Churchill of his age.
The lies about weapons of mass destruction were driven by the need of the American ruling establishment to hide from the American people the predatory class interests that underlay the war drive.
The war was waged not to "protect" the American people, but to secure by means of aggressive war a key strategic objective of US imperialism, hegemony over the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
McClellan, it should be noted, continues this practice of lying, claiming in his book that the real motive for the war was not WMD and terrorism, but the desire of Bush and Co. to spread democracy in the Middle East, perhaps the most ludicrous pretext of them all.
(Cartoon: We coordinate lies?)
(Cartoon: Bush on "What Happened")
If the American people should have learned one lesson from the past 7 years, it is that the careless mix of tough talk and wishful thinking gets good people killed – and pushes even powerful nations to the brink of bankruptcy.
Leo Strauss is the father of the NeoConservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration. Indeed, some of the main neocon players were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured.
The NWO 2.0?...
The UN is a hindrance in tackling rogue states. We should try America's latest big idea
Persistently advocated by McCain and more recently by Obama, this big idea is to muster a "concert" of democracies prepared to join forces at the UN and also, when vetoes or institutional incompetence paralyse the UN, outside it.
This is just the sort of liberal internationalism that turns Europeans pale. The irrepressible idealism of the US is, frankly, a confounded nuisance.
Speaking with evident condescension, Arizona Sen. John McCain needled Barack Obama on Wednesday by offering to travel to Iraq with the Illinois senator to help him gain a better understanding of the war and the consequences of withdrawing troops.
[WAR: It would also be the perfect opportunity to have Obama taken out by someone from Blackwater, and then blame it on Iran.]
Economic crises... unelected cabals kicking out the Prime Minister: the signs are all there
To be fair, this slightly Latinate quality to modern Britain is in part the inescapable - and certainly not exclusively British - consequence of an economic crisis that has produced calamity all over the world. But the data points seem somehow more alarming, more extreme in Britain than anywhere else.
The so-called science of economics is, to a large extent, a con-job created by the Rockefellers and their clan of robber barons. In reality it is a camouflaged system for extracting tribute payments from the masses.
Somehow, the masses know there is something wrong with the situation but they are not quite sure what it is because it has been so cleverly disguised.
US banks set aside a record $37.1bn to cover losses on real estate loans and other credits during the first quarter in a sign of the growing economic pain being caused by the global credit crisis, regulators said on Thursday.
Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said it was likely loan-loss provisions and bank failures would rise in coming quarters as the fallout from market turmoil hits the real economy.
Dow Chemical announced it would charge up to 20% more for its products, citing spiraling price increases for oil and other petrochemical inputs.
This decision by Dow—a behemoth with $54 billion in 2007 sales spread throughout numerous consumer industries—is expected to substantially increase inflation, which is already increasing rapidly in the US and throughout the world, cutting into workers' purchasing power.
Long-term private investors are pulling their money out of the eurozone at the fastest rate since the creation of the single currency, according to a report by the French bank BNP Paribas.
The annual exodus of private funds from eurozone equities and bonds has reached almost $280bn. Taken together, the total outflows have topped €400bn in 12 months and may spell trouble for Europe's industry as the economic downturn gathers pace.
The euro is being held aloft by central banks in Asia, Russia, and the Middle East seeking an alternative to the dollar as a place to park their mushrooming currency reserves.
"There are a lot of ugly surprises in store as deleveraging finally hits Europe. Investors are going to stop treating the eurozone as if it were Germany, and take very close look at the deficits of the southern countries. We can expect bond spreads to widen significantly. We will discover in this downturn whether the eurozone is really an 'optimal currency area'. This is the test."
Oil prices fell to near $126 a barrel today in Asia, extending a decline of more than $4 in the previous session despite a huge unexpected drop in US crude oil stocks.
Federal regulators are investigating whether large institutional funds that have been snapping up futures contracts for oil and other commodities may have skewed the market and contributed to rising pump prices.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Thursday that it had opened a probe of large investors, including pension funds and commodity index funds, in December and that it had reached agreements with an overseas commodity exchange to share information about buyers and sellers.
Part of the investigation is to simply figure out which investors are buying what kinds of financial instruments.
It has been described as a global crisis pushing 100 million people into hunger, threatening to stoke social and political turmoil and set the fight against world poverty back by 7 years.
Now, the food price crisis will be tackled by world leaders who meet in Rome next week to seek ways of reducing the suffering for the world's poorest people and ensure the Earth can produce more food to sustain an ever growing population.
In Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent, drought punctuates the climate record with disheartening regularity. There's not been a decade since official records began that hasn't seen severe rain shortage. Down here drought is just a part of life.
But the onset of 2 record-breaking droughts in the past 7 years — 1 of them widely considered "the worst drought in 1,000 years" — has had far-reaching and crippling effects. Major river systems are drying up and the dearth of water has ravaged Australian agriculture.
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Archaeologists exploring an old military road in the Sinai have unearthed 3,000-year-old remains from an ancient fortified city, the largest yet found in Egypt, antiquities authorities announced
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