Sunday

The Daily WAR (12-03)

Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
 
 
 
 
    The Vatican said on Friday that the apology issued by an ultraconservative bishop who denied the Holocaust was not good enough to admit him into the Catholic Church as a clergyman.
    Also on Friday, Germany's justice minister said Germany could issue a European-wide arrest warrant on hate crimes charges for Williamson, because the Swedish TV interview was conducted in Germany.
(Truth: HOLOINFO)
 
    During a meeting with pastors and clergy of the diocese of Rome, Benedict XVI answered 8 questions put to him concerning such matters as the world economic crisis, the formation of priests, evangelisation, the educational emergency and the value of the liturgy.
    He explained that the Church has the duty to present a reasonable and well-argued criticism of the errors that have led to the current economic crisis.
    This duty, he said, forms part of the Church's mission and must be exercised firmly and courageously, avoiding moralism but explaining matters using concrete reasons that may be understood by everyone.
    Referring to his forthcoming social Encyclical, the Pope then presented a synthetic overview of the crisis.
    First he considered the macroeconomic aspects, highlighting the shortcomings of a system founded on selfishness and the idolatry of money, which cast a shadow over man's reason and will and lead him into the ways of error.
    Here the Church is called to make her voice heard - nationally and internationally - in order to help bring about a change of direction and show the path of true reason illuminated by faith, which is the path of self-sacrifice and concern for the needy.
 
Algunos putilla vino mexicano...
    Even if the financial crisis is spread throughout the world, this is no time for discouragement, says the leader of Caritas Internationalis at a conference in Mexico, sponsored by the Instituto Mexicana de Doctrina Social Cristiana (Mexican Institute of Christian Social Doctrine).
 
    Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor may become the first Roman Catholic bishop to sit in the House of Lords since the 16th century, The Times of London has learned.
    The newspaper reported Friday that offering a life peerage to the retiring Archbishop of Westminster was discussed during a meeting last week between Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Pope Benedict XVI.
    The move would require a special dispensation from the Vatican because the Catholic Church bans its clergy from any office that might involve the exercise of political power.
    When he steps down, Murphy-O'Connor, 76, will be the first archbishop of Westminster since the Reformation not to die in office.
 
 
 
    The Christian Social Union is in all sorts of trouble right now. They currently have 9 sitting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), including some big hitters in the Parliament.
    But due to a change in the way that the European Parliament election's are being held in Germany, they stand to lose all 9.
    Add to that the spectre of Libertas Germany standing possibly with Count von Stauffenberg at top of the list and their is massive pressure on the old party of Bavaria.
    So what do they do? First, Edmund Stoiber suggests that he will ride to the flailing party's rescue by sitting at the top of their Euro list.
    Now, we hear that current party leader, Horst Seehofer, has been talking referenda over Turkish entry into the EU. But the word referendum is a dangerous one in German politics.
 
    Its place on the map once worried its generals. Now Germany feels encircled by economic menace.
    Some now talk of a possible break-up of the euro area. At times like these people turn to Germany, the biggest and most creditworthy economy in Europe.
    For Germany, this poses a dilemma. At German insistence, countries in the euro must tame their public finances and cannot be bailed out.
    Otmar Issing, a former chief economist of the ECB, spoke for many when he said that making euro members pick up others' debts "would take an axe to the stability of the currency union."
 
    Chancellor Merkel has backed euro zone solidarity, giving her clearest hint yet that Europe's biggest economy may dip into its pockets to help struggling neighbors.
    Ahead of today's emergency EU summit, Merkel called for a "frank" debate.
 
 
 
    If eastern Europe goes down, it may take the European Union with it.
    The strain of default, combined with atavistic protectionist instincts coming to the fore all over Europe, could easily unravel the EU's proudest achievement, its single market.
    Indeed, collapse in the east would quickly raise questions about the future of the EU itself.
    Moreover, if the people of eastern Europe felt they had been cut adrift by western Europe, they could fall for populists or nationalists of a kind who have come to power far too often in Europe's history.
    German taxpayers are already worried that others are after their hard-earned cash.
    The bill will indeed be huge, but in truth western Europe cannot afford not to pay it.
    The meltdown of any EU country in the region, let alone the break-up of the euro or the single market, would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
 
    Right now the air is filled with talk of divisions between long-standing EU members and more recent arrivals from the ex-communist block.
    The most serious division now may be between countries inside the EU and countries outside.
    Europe can expect much unhappiness this year. Interdependence will cause some, as economies pull each other down.
    But the same ties may persuade Europeans to avert a graver peril: the notion that they can safely refuse to help one another out.
 
    The European Union is being tested, and it is being found wanting. The 3 great European projects of the past 30 years are all in danger at the same time.
    The economic crisis threatens the scheme that has consumed the most political energy of all: the single currency area.
    For it is not only over the new members that disaster looms. It is also possible that more established countries could default on their debts, which could give rise to movements in those countries that endanger social peace and demand - however unrealistically - an independent currency.
 
    EU member states will in Brussels today to gather for a high stakes summit that will test the bloc's ability to pull together in the face of the economic crisis.
    Pre-summit signs have not been encouraging. With unemployment rising, production going down and the financial turmoil intensifying, governments have reached for national solutions.
    The results have threatened the functioning of the internal market, the cornerstone on which the European Union is built.
    EU competition law and the treaty underpinning the euro, the Stability and Growth Pact, are also under threat.
    The crisis has posed the question of what it means to be an EU member state and to what extent this implies extending solidarity to other members.
 
    The Wall that represented the geographical and political division of Europe was taken down 20 years ago, bringing euphoric hopes of unity.
    Yet today there is a new division in Europe - a solidarity gap.
    How the EU will succeed to bridge this solidarity gap perception will be crucial to its own survival.
 
    Environment, competition and the overarching economic crisis dominate the European agenda this week.
 
    Its economy harbored far more risk than most people realized, and businesses are more in hock than their US counterparts. Now Europe's fate may depend on events outside its borders.
 
 
 
    Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel's centrist Kadima party, has formally rejected an offer by her hawkish rival Benjamin Netanyahu to join his government.
 
    Netanyahu said that he had failed to enlist the main centrist party into his new Government, leaving him at the head of a far-Right coalition of nationalist, settler and ultra-Orthodox parties.
 
    Whatever the truth of WW2 and the history of the Jewish people, nothing can justify the shocking and obscene crimes against the Palestinian and the Arab peoples for the past 6 decades.
    What is the destiny of the Jewish people? What is the future of the crime which is called Israel?
    All that can be said with any degree of certainty is that the arrogance and cruelty of the Jewish people is both astonishing and frightening.
 
    Israel's prime minister has promised an "uncompromising response" if rockets continue to be fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Olmert said Israel's retaliation would be painful, harsh and strong.
 
    Russian warships have returned to the naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus, used by the Soviet Union since the late '60s, after more than a decade of absence.
 
    Shia unhappiness is rattling regimes in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf.
    Despite suspicions of their loyalty, Shia Arabs tend to look not to Iran but to their own spiritual leaders for guidance.
    Considering local, regional and international variables, a clash between the Saudi regime and its Shia citizens is a matter of time, reads an ominous analysis on a popular Saudi website.
 
    The Taliban's terror network is spreading across Pakistan so rapidly, it may be on course to strike the financial and shipping hub of Karachi, according to a report prepared by the city's CID Special Branch.
 
    Almost no one wants to say it out loud. But between the threats from extremists, an unraveling economy, battling civilian leaders and tensions with its nuclear rival India, Pakistan is edging ever closer to the abyss.
 
    India Saturday formally pushed the button for assembling its first home-made aircraft carrier by holding a keel laying ceremony, reflecting what its military leaders call the country's "a quest for sea supremacy."
 
    North Korea accused the US military of making provocative moves along the tense border on the divided Korean peninsula, warning Saturday of "unpredictable military conflicts."
 
    A financial meltdown in China promises to test the Communist Party's power in ways not seen since Tiananmen.
    But theirs is a house divided, as princelings take on populists and Pekinologists try to make sense of it all.
    Will this team built for economic success implode once the money dries up? An insider's guide to the leaders at China's controls.
 
 
 
    Iran's authorities are determined to launch more nuclear power plants across the country, a prominent Iranian parliamentarian has stated.
 
    Immediately after Iran and Russia carried out a test run of the Bushehr nuclear reactor on Wednesday, Israel's outgoing prime minister made a ridiculous outburst.
    In a veiled threat to Iran, Ehud Olmert told the Zionist regime's public radio: "We are a strong country, a very strong country, and we have at our disposal (military) capacities, the intensity of which are difficult to imagine."
    "We have deployed enormous efforts to reinforce our deterrence capacity. Israel will be able to defend itself in all situations, against all threats, against all enemies. I cannot say more, but believe me, I know what I'm talking about."
 
 
 
    Winston Churchill knew all about special relationships between Britain and America – he wouldn't have been born without one. It is appropriate, then, that it was he who coined the phrase.
 
    A California lawsuit seeking documentation from Occidental College that could verify the nationality under which Barack Obama entered the school points out that the state formerly reviewed presidential candidates and disqualified those who were ineligible.
 
    Obama's new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past 8 years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years.
    If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.
 
    Conservatives might be seeking a spiritual leader, organizing principle and fresh identity, but they at least seem to have settled on a favorite rhetorical ogre: socialism.
 
    Amid growing deficits and a slowing economy, Gov. Jan Brewer said that state government is "teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe."
 
 
 
    A late burst of selling sealed a dismal finish for the stock market, which hit a fresh 12-year low on Friday.
    The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 119.15 points, or 1.7%, to end at 7062.93.
    The blue-chip benchmark ended down 937.93 points, or 11.72% on the month -- the worst percentage drop for February since 1933, when it fell 15.62%.
    The Dow industrials have fallen 6 months in a row and are now more than 50% off their record highs hit in October of 2007.
 
    Billionaire Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, has recorded his worst financial performance since taking over famed US investment group Berkshire Hathaway in 1965.
    The group's net worth dropped by $10.9bn in the final quarter of 2008 to end the year at $109.2bn.
 
    The Bank of England is set to bring interest rates down to an effective zero-level within days and to sound the starting pistol on quantitative easing, pumping extra cash into the economy.
 
    The Prime Minister said the 2 countries' historic "partnership of purpose" should be directed at fighting the downturn as well as terrorism, poverty and disease.
    "Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York - and giving security to the hard-working families in every country."
    It would require all continents to make cash injections to boost economies, all countries to adopt green policies, universal banking reforms and changes to international bodies, he suggested.
 
    The whole global economy has tipped into a downward spiral. Trade and output are contracting at rates that outstrip the leisurely depression of the 1930s.
    This terrifying fall has been concentrated in the last 5 months. The job slaughter has barely begun. Social mayhem comes with a 12-month lag.
    Stephen Lewis, from Monument Securities, says we have been lulled into a false sense of security by the lack of "soup kitchens". The visual cues from Steinbeck's America are missing.
    "The temptation for investors is to see this as just another recession, over by the end of the year. But this is not a normal cycle. It is a cataclysmic structural breakdown."
    We are at the moment of extreme danger in Irving Fisher's "Debt Deflation Theory" (1933) where the ship fails to right itself by natural buoyancy, and capsizes instead.
    And for the first time since the launch of monetary union, Europe's leaders are speaking openly about the risk of EMU break-up.
    A run on the US dollar looks a remote threat as the euro drama unfolds.
 
    Hayman Advisors LP, the firm that earned $500 million betting on the US subprime mortgage-market collapse, says Europe's monetary union is about to fall apart.
    Richard Howard, a managing director for global markets at Dallas-based Hayman, said Germany may opt to shore up its own economy rather than bail out fellow euro nations as their banks sag under the weight of bad debts. That might lead to defaults and compel Germany to renounce the euro, he said.
 
    Ireland's 'miracle' economy has turned terrifyingly sour - and as it strains against the inflexibility of the euro, its next crisis may shake the entire EU.
    They can barely let the words pass their lips, but some of the EU's most important policymakers were forced this week to discuss what was once unthinkable: that at least one of the 16 eurozone countries might be on the brink of ditching the single currency.
    The prospect of the eurozone breaking up would bring the future of the EU into question.
    If the Irish economy, and that of other struggling EU states, continues to nosedive, the cohesion of the eurozone is likely to be tested to breaking point.
 
    EU leaders gathered in Brussels today for a summit designed to shore up the bloc's beleaguered unity in the midst of a damaging row over protectionism and fears that the EU may risk breaking into splinter groups.
 
    With the former communist nations of Eastern and Central Europe reeling from the global economic crisis, 3 major lenders said Friday that they would inject $31 billion over 2 years into the region's banks.
    "The amount of cash is small in the whole scheme of things," said an emerging-markets specialist at the Royal Bank of Canada. $31 billion "sounds like a lot of money, but when the banks have lent Eastern Europe about $1.7 trillion, $31 billion is peanuts."
 
    The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet.
    But another perilous consequence of the crash has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.
    Survey the present world, and it's all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for multiple eruptions -- or far worse.
    Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous.
    At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage.
 
    The number 7 is certainly an interesting number. World Affairs Monthly has identified 7 very compelling sources of global conflict, 7 very powerful and no doubt inescapable sources of world war, or rather, WW3.
 
 
 
    The global food crisis was called a "ticking time bomb" at a forum during the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington.
 
    Author Michael Books has investigated some of the most puzzling anomalies of modern science, those intractrable problems that refuse to conform to the theories.
 
    For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey.
    Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.
    The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion - and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.
    And what has been uncovered since is astonishing. Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance.
 
Paranoid Protestants Perverting Prophecy...
    Last Saturday marked the last of the 3-day Southern California Prophecy Conference, where thousands of evangelicals have gathered to get the Biblical scoop on breaking news from around the world.
    America's place in prophecy is a curious concept for evangelicals who would plant the flag at the foot of the cross. "This is the #1 asked question in prophecy," said Mark Hitchcock of Faith Bible Church in Edmond, OK.
    [WAR: The key to prophecy is understanding that America is mentioned all throughout the prophecy.
    But "these lying prophets, who prophesy the delusions of their own minds" (Jer 23:26) are the deceived ministers of Satan's church (Christianity) that do not understand this key.
    "Israel's watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge" (Isa 56:10).
    However, Edmond, OK does have one of the sources about "America's place in prophecy": The US & Britain in Prophecy.
 
 
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