Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Plans are being finalised for Pope Benedict XVI to visit Israel in May next year, the Vatican has confirmed.
The Vatican has thanked Muslims for bringing God back into the public sphere in Europe.
Cardinal Tauran, head of the Catholic Church's department for interfaith contacts, said religion was now talked and written about more than ever before in today's Europe.
The coincidence of 2 news items in 2 weeks highlights the question of anti-Catholicism in our country.
More and more, Evangelical Christians are coming to realize that the "old old story" of God's love for a dying world and the saving work of Christ on the cross is now most fully and vigorously told by the modern Catholic Church, as so many of their own churches are buying into the secular, morally indifferent agenda of the world around them.
Does this mean that anti-Catholicism is dead? I fear not. While the old-fashioned Protestant variety is dying out, a new and equally virulent form is rising up, evident in 3 different manifestations.
The worldwide financial crisis will become a catastrophe if the dignity of the human person is not protected, the Holy See is cautioning.
This is the warning sounded by Archbishop Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN, a day before the Doha conference on progress in international cooperation in development.
"For some time now, we've found ourselves in the middle of a financial crisis that could become a catastrophe if it is allowed to affect other crises: economy, food, energy.
It seems that a decided return of the public sector to financial markets is necessary. It is necessary to increase coordination and unity in the search for solutions.
It is necessary to recover some basic dimensions of finances, that is, the primacy of labor over capital, of human relationships over mere financial transactions, of ethics over the sole criterion of efficacy."
Here is the address given by Monsignor Volante, permanent observer of the Holy See at the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization, at the group's 35th special session, held last week.
Germany's troubled BayernLB bank will be granted a bailout package worth 30 billion euros to help it survive the financial chill.
Bavarian Governor Seehofer warned the bank's predicament was "very, very serious."
The gravity of BayernLB's situation was surmised by the new Bavarian Finance Minister: "It is facing the biggest challenge of its almost 40-year history."
Germany's Finance Minister has defended Berlin's refusal to back a proposed multi-billion-euro economic stimulus plan, dismissing it as "ineffective populist measures".
Germany does not have to go along with the idea of spending more to ease the economic crisis just because other countries are doing so, Steinbrueck told the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
Chancellor Merkel's Christian Democrats begin a party conference amid deep divisions over how Germany should come to grips with the worst financial upheaval in decades.
Merkel has called for a measured response to the crisis, saying the economic stimulus package enacted by her government should be given time to kick in before further action is taken.
This is not enough for many in the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, who want tax cuts to be introduced before the nation goes to the polls in a general election that's likely to take place on Sept. 27, 2009.
In an exclusive interview with DW-TV, Peter Mueller, the conservative premier of the state of Saarland, talks about why his party is best prepared to handle the current economic crisis.
Kosovo authorities released 3 German intelligence agents, 10 days after they were arrested and accused of throwing a bomb at a EU office, a UN official and the men's lawyer said.
At least 2 people have been killed and 3 others injured in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, after a suicide bomber struck a German embassy vehicle. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the suicide blast.
Europe is struggling to put in place even a conventional fiscal stimulus.
This week, EU economy and finance ministers will discuss a €200 billion stimulus package proposed last week by the European Commission, with Germany and Ireland already reacting with scepticism to the measures.
For the first time ever, Georgian President Saakashvili has admitted that his country started the military conflict in South Ossetia in August.
Georgia may have staged the shooting of a convoy carrying the Polish and Georgian presidents, say leaked Polish security service reports.
The incident highlighted the continuing presence of Russian-backed forces deep inside Georgia in violation of earlier peace treaties, but its impact has been dulled by suspicions that Tbilisi set up the events.
Russia is not the Soviet Union, but what is it? A recovering world power — or a corrupt oligopoly with a market economy of sorts?
President Bush believes that Israel is offering Syria the Golan Heights without getting anything in exchange, according to sources briefed on his White House meeting with Prime Minister Olmert last week.
After Olmert updated Bush on Israel's indirect talks with Syrian President Assad, Bush demanded, "Why do you want to give Assad the Golan for nothing?"
"It's not for nothing," Olmert insisted. "It's in exchange for a change in the region's strategic alignment."
A group of American Jews urged Barack Obama to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
"Obama likes using the word change. It is time for change. Now is the time to show support for Israel by moving the embassy here."
President Bush's "coalition of the willing" is set to all but disappear from Iraq by the end of the year, with 13 countries preparing to withdraw their few remaining troops.
Britain, Australia, Romania, Estonia and El Salvador are the only nations, apart from the US, that plan to remain after a UN mandate authorising their presence expires on December 31.
Dawood Ibrahim's gold smuggling operations in Dubai are part of Britain's offshore money laundering apparatus, which has existed since the time of the British East India Company's original opium war against India and China, during the 19th Century.
US intelligence sources have recently emphasized that the British offshore operations in the Caribbean and in the British Isle of Man, have been extended to Dubai, to facilitate the destabilization of Southwest and South Asia.
The siege at the Taj Mahal Hotel in the centre of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, has ended, bringing a halt to more than 3 days of terror in the city.
(And: 300 FEARED DEAD)
(And: TMH: WE HAD WARNING)
"It's war," declares the editorial in the Times of India. "The scale, intensity and level of orchestration of terror attacks in Mumbai put one thing beyond doubt: India is effectively at war and it has deadly enemies in its midst."
(Cartoon: "AN EYE FOR AN EYE...")
India will increase security in the country and on its borders to a "war level," a government minister said.
Relations between India and Pakistan were on a knife edge today.
A senior Pakistani security official has warned that Pakistan would pull back troops fighting Islamist militants on the Afghan frontier if India builds up its forces on Pakistan's border.
He said the next 48 hours would be crucial for the nuclear-armed neighbours.
"If something happens on that front, the war on terror won't be our priority. We'll take out everything from the western border. We won't leave anything there."
The Islamist terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai may be the beginning of a counter-attack to ongoing US and UK military action against Islamist targets in Pakistan, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
Pakistan continued to insist on Friday that the country had played "no role" in the murders. India's foreign minister, meanwhile, pointed the finger at "some elements in Pakistan".
Could Pakistani intelligence have been unaware of a paramilitary operation of this scale?
Former Inter Services Intelligence Chief General Hameed Gul has said that Mumbai incident is an international based conspiracy to deprive Pakistan of its atomic power.
He said that to involve Pakistan in the incident reflected that some forces wanted to declare Pakistan a failure state as somehow it had become necessary to make Pakistan knee down in order to snatch its atomic power away.
He said that the US wanted to see the Indian army in Afghanistan to disintegrate the country -- as new maps in the US show a divided Pakistan in 4 parts.
British police have flown to India to establish whether any of the terrorists who killed 150 people in the Bombay massacre had links to the UK.
Mumbai's chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said 2 "British-born Pakistanis" were among 8 gunmen captured alive during bloody shoot-outs with soldiers.
The Daily Telegraph has also learnt that the terrorists monitored international reaction to the attacks on British newspaper websites and on Arabic websites popular in the north of England.
(But: INDIA DENIES BRITISH LINK)
The Mumbai attacks have already created an extremely tense situation, which largely serves US geopolitical interests in the region.
Agents for Britain's MI5 intelligence service have concluded tactics used by the Mumbai terrorists have raised the chilling prospect that they were trained by someone who had acquired his skills in Western special forces – or had obtained its secret manuals on how to launch a full-scale surprise attack against one of the world's largest cities, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
This message, steeped in irony, read like a roll call of the issues and violence that have divided Hindu and Muslim India over the past year.
Almost a call to arms, it contained the great, twofold rage that has grown in Hindu India: the feeling that Islamic terrorism seeks to destroy the vigorous "new India" and the suspicion that the state is either unable or unwilling to defend itself — for cynical reasons, such as shoring up the Muslim vote for the government.
Indian media have reacted angrily to criticism from Israeli defense officials of the Indian commando operation against the terrorists who took control of Chabad house in Mumbai.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Pakistan-based movement which wants the removal of Indian forces from the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region.
Set up in about 1990 with aid, it is claimed, from the Pakistan authorities, its overall objective is the establishment of an Islamic caliphate throughout India, China and much of southeast Asia.
Iran's official news agency says Tehran has proposed building joint light-water nuclear power plants with neighboring Arab countries.
A computer expert has been executed in Iran after he confessed to working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
Behind their backs he allowed the software he bought to be subtly doctored by Israeli computer engineers before it was imported to Iran.
President Ahmadinejad yesterday called for developing an alternative economy in the face of the "total failure" of socialism and capitalism.
Addressing the plenary session of the International Conference on Financing for Development here, he hit out against the "capitalist bloc."
The main cause of the crisis is the nature of the economic system, he said, adding that its foundation is built on the theory of maximum profit.
Human values have no place in this system. The capitalists regard themselves as the superior class and seeks to impose their terms and conditions unilaterally on others, he said.
The whole system destroys the culture, national values and self-reliance of developing nations, he said.
A series of small earthquakes that rattled central Arkansas in recent weeks could be a sign of something much bigger to come. "It is abnormal. It is significant. We need to carefully watch this activity."
The chasm between those who want Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate to verify his eligibility to hold the nation's highest office and those who simply support the Democrat is widening.
Did God play a role in the election of Barack Obama, and could the Democrat even be God's sovereign choice for our next president?
The answers to those questions vary widely, depending on who is doing the answering.
The strain of the long campaign and a frenetic transition period is beginning to wear on the face of Barack Obama, who has developed a facial tic under his right eye.
Campaign insiders say it first emerged during the primary season and has now become chronic.
Barack Obama will unveil his national security team at a news conference in Chicago on Monday.
(Op-ed: SO FAR, SO VERY GOOD)
(Cartoon: THE CLINTON AGENDA)
The selection of the 81-year-old Paul Volcker puts an inveterate enemy of the working class at the side of the new president, and demonstrates the class character of the right-wing government that Obama is assembling.
No other individual in modern US history is so closely identified with the deliberate creation of mass unemployment to drive down wages and smash the organized resistance of the working class to the demands of corporate America.
He put into motion policies that led to the destruction of large sections of industry and the explosive growth of financial speculation in the US economy.
If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned.
The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.
(And: WILL OBAMA BAIL OUT US?)
As their economy slides, America's policymakers are turning to unconventional devices. Our first article looks at the bold new steps taken this week by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.
With its decision last week to pump an additional $1 trillion into the financial crisis, the government eliminated any doubt that the nation is on a wartime footing in the battle to shore up the economy.
The strategy now -- and in the coming Obama administration -- is essentially the win-at-any-cost approach previously adopted only to wage a major war.
And that means no hesitation in pledging to spend previously almost unimaginable sums of money and running up federal budget deficits on a scale not seen since WW2.
An internal memo from a top Citibank analyst reveals what the banks really think about the global financial situation, and the outlook is grim.
"The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done. When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed through into an inflation shock," wrote Citibank's chief technical strategist.
He goes on to explain that the massive money creation efforts by the Federal Reserve and other central banks will end with 1 of 2 things: A resurgence of inflation, or a fall into "depression, civil disorder and possibly wars."
Last year, about $20 billion was spent in American stores on Black Friday. This time, only the discount stores appear to have flourished.
(And: DREAMING OF A BLACK XMAS)
(Cartoons: HOLIDAY SHOPPING)
Texas Congressman Ron Paul has warned that international forces are planning the creation of a global central bank that will see a new fiat monetary system come to dominate the world economy.
He also warned that Obama's administration will only represent a change in faces and not in policies.
The Free Lakota Bank is the world's first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that issues, accepts for deposit, and circulates REAL money...silver and gold.
All of our deposits are liquid, meaning they can be withdrawn at any time in minted rounds.
Bold, unorthodox remedies are needed to jolt the world economy back to life.
French President Sarkozy says the global economic crisis is an opportunity to "change the world" and raise developing nations out of poverty.
He said the world cannot continue with "business as usual" and cautioned the rich against "sacrificing" the poor while looking for solutions to an "unprecedented financial crisis."
The chief executives of the Big Three automakers are preparing to return to Washington this week with business plans that they hope will lead to a US government bailout.
But any such help will probably come too late for thousands of car dealers who sell American brands.
The National Automobile Dealers Association predicts that about 900 of the 20,770 US dealers in new cars will go out of business this year, and automobile analysts say the number of failed dealerships could rise into the thousands next year.
The economic toll of a mass failure of dealerships around the country has already begun to harm the broader economy.
Members of OPEC left an informal meeting in Cairo this weekend without an agreement to reduce production, but with rising doubts about fraying discipline and tensions within the group that accounts for 40% of the world's oil exports.
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Shamanism, via Babylon, found its entrance into Christianity
When the Sumerians invaded southern Iraq the religion they brought with them was shamanism, and shamanism is a key to understanding how the original, more-primitive Babylonian religious tradition evolved into the more-sophisticated forms of religion in today's world.
I don't believe God's people are one bit healthier than the general population.
Don't we know that we're setting ourselves up for debilitating disease and/or early death by making poor choices in what we eat and how we live?
Information is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is acquired only when one is able to understand, interpret, and synthesize information productively, toward some valued purpose.
This distinction between information and knowledge is crucial.
THIS MONTH IN SCRIPTURE
"In the 9th month of the 5th year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, a time of fasting before YAHWEH was proclaimed for all the people in Jerusalem and those who had come from the towns of Judah. ... It was the 9th month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him." (Jer 36:9,22)
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