Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Italy's presidential palace and the Vatican are 2 symbols of mutual respect for the sovereignty of the state and the Church, says Benedict XVI.
Scripture and Tradition are inseparably united since they both come from the same source, says the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
"As the dogmatic constitution 'Dei Verbum' reminds us, there exists an indissoluble unity between sacred Scripture and Tradition since both flow from the same source. Only the living ecclesial tradition allows sacred Scripture to be understood as the authentic word of God that acts as guide, rule and law for the life of the Church and the spiritual growth of believers."
Here is an unofficial Vatican translation of the address Cardinal Albert Vanhoye, former rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and former secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, gave Monday at the world Synod of Bishops on "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church."
Here is the original English-language text delivered Monday by Shear Yashuv Cohen, chief rabbi of Haifa, to the world Synod of Bishops on "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church."
German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer is poised to become prime minister of the southern state of Bavaria after his 2 rivals for the post pulled out Tuesday.
Government is panicking (scroll down)
Wolfgang Munchau, in his column in the FT Deutschland, has only one explanation for the extraordinary convulsions in the German government, that complancency has given way to panic.
Merkel the summit smoothie has transformed into a champion of national defiance. Germany, more than any other country, has reason to fear the financial unknown.
The precedent of the 1929 Crash haunts many. But for Germany, lost savings do not simply mean financial fallout, they carry associations of political Armageddon.
Newspaper parallels with 1929 are bad enough, but God forbid the comparisons start to be political as well economic.
With the stakes so high it should come as no surprise the woman hailed as Europe's most formidable multi-lateralist has turned her coat so swiftly.
History and hyperinflation have taught Merkel that German stability is more important than European unity, because without Germany stability, Europe has no guarantee of peace, let alone unity.
Adolf Hitler's rise to power on the back of the 1930s Great Depression is a warning to Germans against dangerous political repercussions spinning out from today's financial crisis, Germany's interior minister has said.
With the global financial crisis taking hold and governments on both sides of the Atlantic rushing to the aid of banks, analysts have forecast a potential long-term downsizing of military budgets in Europe and the US.
The new mantra of the ruling American elites, of the heads of the 2 branches of the One Party Police State is to embargo Russia as punishment for Georgia's war of aggression and extermination upon the Ossetian people.
An intelligent person would consider that maybe there is some deeper plan, some darker conspiracy going on, but no, there is none of either. What Russia is facing is pure American stupidity and vindictiveness, driven to such a degree, that it no longer recognizes when the real damage will be to its own people and its own interest, or for that matter really cares.
The Russians are coming to downtown Jerusalem, reclaiming ownership of a landmark with the approval of the Israeli government. After years of contacts, Olmert's Cabinet agreed Sunday to hand over the small tract known as Sergei's Courtyard.
The property includes a lush garden and the massive buildings around it — a turret-like structure at the intersection of two downtown streets and the sand-colored fortress-like wings leading from it.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak claimed that Russia's "controversial" arms sales to some states are destabilizing the Mideast.
After Syria moved tank units up to the Lebanese Beqaa Valley border Tuesday, Israel raised the alert level for Yom Kippur on its borders with Syria and Lebanon and placed its Air Force and emergency first aid teams on standby.
Israeli embassies and Jewish institutions worldwide were also placed on high terror alert.
In a further sign of just how low Syrian-Saudi Arabian relations have sunk, Syrian authorities have banned the distribution of al-Hayat, the Saudi-owned mass circulation Arab daily.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apparently failed on Tuesday to win a firm pledge that Moscow would halt advanced weapons sales to Israel's enemies,
A Falcon jet that violated Iranian airspace and was forced to land in the Islamic Republic belongs to the NATO forces, a report says.
An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the US.
As the campaign progressed, it soon became all too obvious that a candidate raised up by the "antiwar" wing of the Democratic Party was and is a committed interventionist – and, not only that, but one who is still maintaining some of the hoariest old clichés of interventionist dogma
Sarah Palin is distantly related to the late Princess Diana and late President Franklin Roosevelt, genealogy experts said today. The governor of Alaska and the princess are 10th cousins, while Palin and Roosevelt are 9th cousins once removed.
(And: Palin: A different image)
The airwaves are clogged with the clamorous voices of talk radio, or "squawk radio," as I like to call it — people claiming to be conservative, though they don't sound much like the great conservatives I grew up admiring.
In fact many of today's so-called conservatives seem to me to be liberals without knowing it, no matter how much they say they detest liberalism.
Prayin' pagans...
Christians are gathering on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to fast and pray all week. Leaders say they are humbly calling upon God in a time when our country needs it the most. The non-partisan prayer group also placed a 16-foot cross on the west lawn of the Capitol building.
Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn't pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time.
George Bush has struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the US. He has also legally established that in the "War on Terror," the US is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the US is also a battlefield.
He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify.
Another wave of relentless selling washed over global markets Wednesday, with stocks plunging in Asia and Europe. The Tokyo market had its worst decline since the 1987 crash.
(And: Asian markets in free fall)
(And: Ukraine market suspended)
US stocks fell, sending the Standard & Poor's 500 Index below 1,000 for the first time since 2003, on speculation banks and real-estate companies are running short of money as the credit crisis worsens.
The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England have all cut interest rates in an emergency move to restore confidence in the global financial system.
Americans will soon learn to change their mindset from focusing on their return on capital, to worrying about conserving the capital they have left. We have seen the beginning of this paradigm shift in the run on banks, and the flight to Treasury instruments.
Investors need to insure their portfolio is full of precious metals and other commodity-related assets. While hard assets have suffered lately, that will inevitably change as mistrust spreads throughout the financial system.
Today, the Federal Reserve is engaged in an eerily similar operation, counterfeiting trillions of dollars in US bank notes and flooding the US money supply with money created from nothing.
The result, of course, is the same as was intended by Operation Bernhardt in 1942: The economic destruction of the target nation. Only this time, the target is the United States of America.
If the actions pursued by the Federal Reserve were being masterminded by Al-Qaeda, they would be denounced as acts of war. In WW2, such actions were deliberate acts of war. Targeting the economy for destruction by flooding the money supply with counterfeit currency is, by any measure, a threat to any nation.
So why is the Federal Reserve engaged in actions that, if committed by other nations, would warrant a military response?
George Bush is expected to summon Gordon Brown and other European leaders to an emergency summit to discuss the economic crisis. The prospect of a high-level global meeting came as the US central bank launched a new bid to unfreeze credit markets by effectively lending billions of dollars to US companies.
The global economy is regulated by rules agreed at Bretton Woods in 1944. Now we must tear them up and start again.
So, as the world's central bankers gather this week in Washington DC for an IMF-World Bank conference to discuss the crisis, the big question they face is whether it is time to establish a global economic "policeman" to ensure the crash of 2008 can never be repeated.
The culprits who caused the problem offer their solution - more power for themselves
The world's central bankers are gathering this week at the IMF-World Bank conference in Washington DC and are expected to grease the skids for the creation of a machinery of world economic governance under the pretext of preventing a repeat of the financial crisis, a global economic policeman to patrol a de-facto financial dictatorship.
The final agreement reached on the ECOFIN meeting yesterday fell substantially short of the EU's aim of setting common standards for deposit protection schemes writes the Financial Times. Finance ministers agreed to raise the deposit guarantee protection for individuals for an amount of at least €50,000.
For Europe, this is more than just a banking crisis. Unlike in the US, it could develop into a monetary regime crisis. A systemic banking crisis is one of those few conceivable shocks with the potential to destroy Europe's monetary union.
European governments are struggling to prevent the financial crisis from exploding into a political crisis that could shake the foundations of the European Union.
Relations between European leaders are severely strained, not least between Paris and Berlin, long the political spine of the EU.
Some financial experts suggested yesterday that the very existence of the euro might come under severe strain in coming days and weeks.
The Paris summit had already agreed to temporarily relax euro zone rules against state subsidies and limits on national budgets — bringing an effective end to a coordinated monetary policy. There is even some speculation that the euro zone could fracture under the weight of increasingly divergent national interests.
Spain became the latest European country last night to announce a unilateral rescue package.
With European countries in a rush to take banking sector liabilities onto the public balance sheet, they might want to take a look at where that route goes, in extremis: Iceland, as a banking crisis becomes a full blown macroeconomic crisis.
The entire architecture of the European Union bureaucracy, from the Maastricht Treaty to the European Monetary Union and the European Central Bank, has a serious design flaw which, under conditions of great stress, could render the entire supranational edifice impotent, and could, once again, put national interests at the top of the agenda.
When we talk of "another 1929", we don't mean so much the market crash of that year, but the Great Depression that it preceded. So, will the Crash of 2008 be followed by a comparable period of hardship? Certainly, there's potential.
We have experienced crashes before and survived them to ratchet up ever greater gains in the following upswing, but there are some disturbing elements now which suggest perhaps this time things are different .
What seemed to be the end was only the beginning
Replace 1929 with 2008 and the story, I'm afraid, is eerily familiar: a speculative orgy, crescendo, climax and crash. As this plays out, important people – business and political leaders – rely on "the power of incantation" to keep the rest of us calm. Their efforts are doomed to fail.
(Op-ed: The unintended consequences)
Every few years, the world seems to face a new testing time. Today, leaders around the world have to figure out how to stabilize economies amid volatile global capital flows. This test is rooted in a global shift in economic power.
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