Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Paolo non celebrare la Quaresima, è situata a Whore-cane!...
Benedict XVI is encouraging Catholics to live this Lent practicing prayer, almsgiving and fasting following the example of St. Paul.
Referring to this year dedicated to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the Pope pointed out: "Paul experienced in an extraordinary way the power of the grace of God, the grace of the Paschal mystery which Lent itself lives."
Here is the adapted text of an article written by Bishop Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and president of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory for the Social Doctrine of the Church, on the Vatican instruction "Dignitas Personae."
The Vatican has rejected an apology by a British bishop who denied the full extent of the Holocaust. It said the bishop needed to "unequivocally and publicly" withdraw his comments.
Muslims and Catholics have much in common when it comes to beliefs about peace, decided participants at an interreligious meeting: Both faiths consider that peace should permeate all aspects of life.
This was a conclusion from the Joint Committee for Dialogue of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Cairo-based Permanent Committee of al-Azhar for Dialogue Among the Monotheistic Religions. The group had their annual meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.
(And: FULL TEXT OF FINAL STATEMENT)
Europe has more than its share of mass graves, a reflection of the extraordinary scale of violence of the previous century.
But throughout the Continent the public is far more used to Germans as perpetrators rather than victims, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Germany itself.
Yet there are signs in the former German territories such as Malbork that an understanding of the human suffering, in particular of civilians, is beginning to gain traction, balancing slightly the long-held grudge of collective guilt toward the German aggressors who began the war.
(Truth!: STALIN WAS TO BLAME)
Germany has provoked anger in Poland over plans to build a museum dedicated to German refugees who fled or were expelled from Poland after WW2.
Chancellor Merkel is being pressed by the German Federation of Expellees to decide on a controversial museum that will depict refugees' post-War experiences, despite a potential backlash from Warsaw.
The expulsion of German citizens from Eastern lands started when the Red Army entered Poland in 1944.
Historians estimate around 14 million Germans were expelled across Europe and between 600,000 and 2 million killed between 1944 and 1948.
The majority were fleeing areas of Poland, Russia and modern-day Czech Republic.
Bavaria's Christian Social Union party is hoping to tap into anti-European sentiment in the influential state of Bavaria to attract votes for the June European elections.
Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU, on Wednesday made a campaign speech that was notable for its break with the more pro-European stance of its sister party, the CDU.
In the speech, he said Europe must become much closer to its citizens and that citizens should have the right to decide on important questions, specifically naming Turkish EU membership as a referendum-worthy issue.
At the moment, the CSU has 9 euro-deputies in Brussels but it fears a haemorrhage of votes to the Liberals and independent parties.
Parties need to get over 5% of the total vote to enter the EU assembly, seen as a high hurdle for the CSU, which only runs in Bavaria.
A Berlin cashier who was sacked from a supermarket after 31 years of service because her employer accused her of stealing $1.65 has become a flash point of a debate about unchecked capitalism in Germany.
Leaders of Germany's major political parties criticized the supermarket's decision.
Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union, said the case raised questions about capitalism, which has come under attack in Germany in the wake of the global financial crisis.
"I don't understand how a cashier can be fired because of E1.30 while managers who lose billions of euros can keep their jobs."
Anger rises in Germany as the economy falls.
Trade unions and globalization-critical protesters are planning demonstrations in Berlin and Frankfurt under the banner: "We're not paying for your crisis."
Alexis Passadakis, an activist from the group Attac, tells Spiegel what's wrong with the system.
The global financial crisis threatens to strike Germany - and the rest of the EU - with hurricane-like force in the next 3 to 6 months.
And Germany's downward spiral could further fragment the 27-nation EU.
A tectonic political shift is likely to occur with the Sept. 27 German national elections.
The gravity of the economic crisis has accelerated a rise in national protectionist sentiment across Europe in ways that are likely to distract Germany from playing a more helpful and decisive role in abetting American interests.
Just like I've been saying...
Ex-Bundesbank chief Karl Otto Pohl has just said that Ireland and Greece are in danger of defaulting on their sovereign debts and/or may be forced out of the Euro.
Professor Pohl said Germany's political class is afraid their country will ultimately have to pay for the EMU mess.
This is more or less what ex-foreign minister Joschka Fischer has been saying in London over the last 2 days. Fischer now thinks monetary union is beyond saving.
A massive rescue will be needed. It will not be forthcoming.
German-French relations are the worst since the war, he said.
The European insitutions have lost virtually all authority in this crisis. The half-century Project is collapsing. .. or words to that effect, from what I hear.
EMU is inherently unworkable. The destructive effect has now brought the EU project to this unhappy pass, where even Fischer is giving up on it.
[WAR: A number of years ago, when I told Ambrose that Germany would eventually (either on purpose or by neglect) bring down the euro, he said that no, that couldn't be possible -- about his same reaction when I told him that Germany was responsible for the OKC Bombing (www.thebndinokc.blogspot.com).
But, as with his change of mind on OKC, it appears that he can now see that the euro is about to collapse...]
Far from being ready to take on banking regulation, the EU may yet struggle to keep its currency union together.
The member states are not coming together like circling wagons under attack in the Wild West; rather, the Union is fragmenting. The eurozone itself is under threat.
The evidence of the euro's unsustainability is growing daily and is causing serious alarm even among the most ardent supporters of the EU.
While no one in the eurozone wishes to contemplate it, the possibility is growing that one or more countries will leave, dealing a severe blow to the concept of "ever closer union".
Germany, as the eurozone's surplus economy, should be bailing out those in difficulty; but the Germans have made it clear they do not intend to do so.
One vote after another disturbs the European agenda.
The 2009 Euro-election will be haunted by another vote: the Irish rejection by referendum in June 2008 of the Lisbon treaty.
The Lisbon treaty is dead, at least in its current form, and in 2009 its fans will at last come to terms with that fact.
A nasty row will break out among the 27 EU leaders, and it can only be hoped that pragmatists gain the upper hand quickly.
It is not easy being small, especially in the world of global power politics. History has taught the Central Europeans this lesson all too well.
But the young democracies of the region exert surprising clout today in the geopolitical arena. For once, they are thinking like players rather than pawns.
Bosnian Serb leaders have threatened to pull out of state institutions and are pressing anew for independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina, threatening to throw the fragile, multiethnic country into political crisis once again.
Analysts and observers of the region said the situation could unravel the US-brokered Dayton accords of 1995.
The end of the cold war did not produce a thaw throughout the continent. A peculiarity of today's Europe is the variety of "frozen conflicts" it contains.
From Cyprus, through the Balkans and into the former Soviet Union, a string of nasty small wars have been settled not through peace deals but simply by freezing each side's positions.
The trouble with frozen conflicts is that they have a nasty habit of turning hot.
Ariel Sharon turned 81 in a Tel Aviv hospital where he has lain comatose since a stroke 3 years ago. Staff at Tel HaShomer hospital said his condition was stable.
Israel's next government will be "more Jewish and more Zionist", the confident faction leader of the right-wing National Union party declared Thursday, following coalition talks with members of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.
Despite the state's formal commitment not to expand West Bank settlements, a government agency has been promoting plans over the past 2 years to construct thousands of housing units east of the Green Line, Haaretz has learned.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the US Pacific Commands, said that the military is prepared to shoot down any North Korean ballistic missile -- if Obama should give the order.
(And: NK LASHES OUT OVER WARNINGS)
Former Iranian president Rafsanjani said today Tehran's atomic plans were not of military nature.
"In the Friday prayer sermon, we don't make false promises. Therefore I declare that Iran's nuclear plan is not to build weapons ... and we are ready to prove it in negotiations."
Iran's U.N. Ambassador didn't attend the latest UN Security Council meeting on Iraq.
But the moment the 3-hour session was over the Iranian delegation was circulating a strongly worded letter that had a very clear message for the administration of Barack Obama: Stop talking like Bush.
He was responding to less than 2 dozen words on Iran in US Ambassador Susan Rice's speech to the council during a routine review of UN activities in Iraq.
Rice said that US policy "will seek an end to Iran's ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capacity and its support for terrorism."
Those words clearly infuriated the Iranians, who have been toning down their anti-US rhetoric since Obama took over from Bush.
"It is unfortunate that, yet again, we are hearing the same tired, unwarranted and groundless allegations that used to be unjustifiably and futilely repeated by the previous administration."
"Real men go to Tehran!" brayed the neoconservatives, after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory.
Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on Iran.
It would be a mistake to believe they and their collaborators cannot succeed a second time.
Tuesday, Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a front spawned by the Israeli lobby AIPAC, was given the Iranian portfolio. AIPAC's top agenda item? A US collision with Iran.
Propagenda...
Former top US diplomat John Bolton says that Washington has lost the race with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear program. "We have lost the race with Iran on the nuclear front. They now have complete mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle."
On the heels of 2 active duty members of the US military serving in Iraq calling for Obama to prove his eligibility to be president, a retired major general has agreed to join the case, saying he just wants "the truth."
"I agree to be a plaintiff in the legal action to be filed by Orly Taitz, Esq. in a petition for a declaratory judgement (sic) that Barack Hussein Obama is not qualified to be president of the US, nor to be commander in chief of the US armed forces, in that I am or was a sworn member of the US military (subject to recall)."
If recalled, he would be "unable to follow any orders given by a constitutionally unqualified commander in chief, since by doing so I would be subject to charges of aiding and abetting fraud and committing acts of treason."
The budget that Barack Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them.
It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Clinton or George W. Bush.
And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas.
(And: OBAMA ISN'T DOING ENOUGH)
In his first speech to Congress, Barack Obama urged optimism despite America's dire economic straits.
His message drew hearty applause, even from Republican politicians -- but German editorialists warn that the president faces tough challenges.
Obama's war is going to be taking place on a much larger, more difficult canvas than that of his predecessor's, which was confined in large part to Iraq.
All of Afghanistan will soon be teeming with newly-arrived US soldiers.
Antiwar voters who cast their ballots for Obama have succeeded in rolling the stone all the way up a rather steep hill, only to see it fall down the other side – and we are right back where we started.
The next hill is called Afghanistan, and beyond that is yet another: Pakistan.
In a swift about face from her views as New York's senator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now hammering Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
Jewish leaders are furious. "I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state," said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News.
Colorado's oldest newspaper, which launched in Denver in 1859, printed its last edition today, leaving The Denver Post as the only daily newspaper in town.
"Today the Rocky Mountain News, long the leading voice in Denver, becomes a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges."
(And: FINAL FRONT PAGE)
The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2% pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, as consumers and businesses ratcheted back spending, plunging the country deeper into recession.
Claims for unemployment insurance and the number of people in the US on the dole is at its highest point since October 1982, the US government reported Thursday.
A bigger proportion of non-investment grade companies will go bust in the US and overseas in the coming years than during the Great Depression, according to Moody's, one of the world's foremost experts on credit.
In what will be seen by many as die-cast confirmation that the world economy is plummeting towards an economic and corporate implosion of unprecedented proportions, Moody's said it anticipated a tidal wave of defaults was approaching.
The life insurance companies that millions of Americans entrust to help protect their families or pay the bills in their golden years are caught in a downward spiral eerily similar to the one that has brought down banks and brokers.
They're reporting huge losses that -- if they continued -- could trigger a meltdown.
Treasuries fell for a 3rd day as the government sold $22 billion of 7-year notes in the last of 3 auctions this week as it issues an unprecedented amount of debt to spur the US economy.
It's not much fun to be a banker these days. One leading European banker says a poll showed that the only groups now held in lower regard are prostitutes and convicted felons.
Remarkably, the US institution that had the most direct responsibility for preventing the debacle - the Federal Reserve - has taken little heat for its own failures.
There has been no congressional hearing in which Fed officials have been treated to anything like the grilling the division chiefs of the Securities and Exchange Commission received 3 weeks ago.
Instead, Congress appears ready to increase the Fed's powers. Sometimes nothing succeeds like failure.
The capital markets have become increasingly uneasy over proposals to use the European Investment Bank as an all-purpose fireman to prop up weaker regions of the eurozone or come to the rescue of Eastern Europe.
The EIB, the world's biggest multilateral lender, was able to borrow for years at rates that were almost the same as the German government – or even lower – enabling the entire EU to take advantage of the Germany's credit-rating for project finance. The change has been abrupt.
Unemployment across the nations that share the euro has risen again to its highest level in more than 2 years, as more firms laid off staff.
The global economic crisis buffeting Russia is "far from over," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said today. "We are forced to conclude that the crisis is far from over - it has not yet even reached its peak."
The financial crisis is quickly turning into a political crisis.
Already governments in Iceland and Latvia have collapsed and the global slump is just beginning to accelerate.
Riots and street violence have broken out in Greece, Latvia and Lithuania and worker-led protests have become commonplace throughout the EU.
As unemployment skyrockets and economic activity stalls, countries are likely to experience greater social instability.
Pot calling the kettle black...
What does Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor who has dedicated his life to fighting hatred and intolerance, think about Bernard Madoff?
"'Psychopath' — it's too nice a word for him," he said in his first public comments on Madoff and the Ponzi scheme he is accused of perpetrating on thousands of individuals and charities, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
"'Sociopath,' 'psychopath,' it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal."
Wiesel's charity lost $15.2 million, and he and his wife, Marion, lost their life savings. "This was a personal tragedy where we discovered all of a sudden what we had done in 40 years — my books, my lectures, everything — was gone."
(Truth!: A PROMINENT FALSE WITNESS: ELIE WIESEL)
[WAR: Sorry, but no tears shed for Wiesel. He deserved to lose every penny he made on his career of lying and extortion -- to put it nicely.]
The entire cause of the financial mess America is now in can be summed up in 2 words: living wages.
There are not enough living-wage jobs in this country for each household to have at least 1 person in one – it's that simple.
Clara shares her stories and wisdom from the Depression as she shows you how to make simple, inexpensive and delicious meals.
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
Yes!...
This is not fanciful speculation. Some of you have evoked the possibility of a world conflict in the course of 2009. I shan't say that this prediction is far-fetched; or remote.
Hell no!...
This attitude of blind compliance and self-preservation at the expense of others is found at every level of society in America. It evokes for me a vision of soulless beings wandering aimlessly through life just doing what they are told until they can retire and then finally start living the good life.
A model of biblical proportions: A retired farmer has spent more than 33,000 hours in 30 years building an enormous scale model of Herod's temple - and it is still not finished.
Is B16 Catholic?!...
The AntiChrist, symbolized in the Book of Revelation as "the beast," will rule from the City of Seven Hills — Rome. His compatriot, the False Prophet, will rule from the same.
[WAR: An "AntiChrist" is anyone who doesn't believe that Yahshua had been God, then emptied Himself to become a human being (100% man, 0% God -- just like you and me).
So there really isn't a one-and-only "The" AntiChrist, because as John himself says: "many antichrists have come" (1John 2:18); and also that it is a "spirit of the antichrist" (4:3).
But I would say that there is an "AntiChrist-in-Chief" -- a person who actively promotes, and embodies, the spirit of AntiChrist, and who is the leader of the religion that is built on the foundation of the spirit of antichrist.
And yes, it is Pope Benedict XVI -- who is also the False Prophet. And yes, that means that all of Christianity (the Mother Whore and her Prostitute Daughters) is actually againt Christ, by promoting a false pagan-inspired messiah.]
The crop circle community has been left stunned after 2 of its leading lights died within hours of each other.
Astronomers have captured a breathtaking new image of the Helix planetary nebula, one of the most spectacular objects in the night sky.
It has been a superb winter for viewing the queen of the planets, Venus. February marks the pinnacle of its evening visibility as it stands like a sequined showgirl nearly halfway up in the western sky at sunset.
Sadly, this will be the last in the current series of evening get-togethers between the Moon and Venus, for during March Venus will slide rapidly down into the sunset glow and by month's end will disappear from our evening sky until the spring of 2010.
(And: PRETTY SKY ALERT)
(Image: TONIGHT'S SKY)
Try to see Lulin pointing at Regulus, the king star in Leo.
"In the 12th year, in the 12th month on the 1st day, the word of YAHWEH came to me..." (Ezekiel 32:1-16)
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