Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
The Pope has taken the unusual step of ordering an investigation into an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic order after it revealed that its late founder had a mistress and fathered a child.
The Legionaries of Christ revealed in February that its Mexican founder, Marcial Maciel, who died last year at the age of 87, had a daughter who is now in her 20s.
Pope Benedict XVI will now send senior clerics to all the institutions run by the influential order, one of the fastest-growing in the Church.
(And: TEXT OF CARDINAL'S LETTER)
Benedict XVI has expressed his appreciation to heads of State and government who are due to participate in the G20 Summit for the "noble objectives" they have set themselves.
These objectives, he writes, arise from the conviction "that the way out of the current global crisis can only be reached together, avoiding solutions marked by any nationalistic selfishness or protectionism."
(And: TEXT OF BROWN'S REPLY)
The Group of Eight labor ministers meeting in Rome to discuss ways to help those affected by the global downturn are addressing the heart of the Church's social teaching, says a Vatican aide.
"These topics are important for the Church and are at the heart of her social teaching." The Church's social and economic thought, he continued, "is based on the principle of the dignity of the person" as the "basic pillar of society itself" and as the "goal of all social institutions."
Qui, un sorso di vino...
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has announced it's drafting a new document on the Church's social teaching in response to concern over the global financial crisis.
The bishops plan to explain how the Church's social teaching springs from the message of the Gospel.
The document will not only help "to set out in a creative and constructive way the Church's contribution to the debate about the sort of society we want to make, but also to give our own people confidence in their generous work for the common good which is part of the Kingdom of Christ."
Security personnel hold drill in north ahead of Benedict XVI's visit in May, focus on possibility of glider, car bomb attack during mass events.
Noooo!...
Tens of thousands of new Catholics are expected to join the Catholic Church in the US in 2009, with many doing so at the Easter Vigil liturgies on April 11.
As Merkel heads to London today for a summit of leaders from the Group of 20 nations, stalwarts back home are abandoning her party.
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union depended on its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, to win the Chancellery in 2005. The state sent 46 Merkel-backing lawmakers to parliament, helping her secure a four-seat edge over the Social Democrats.
"Do the math: Without Bavaria, the chancellor and the CDU are nowhere," a political scientist at the University of Passau said. "Only Bavarian votes allow the CDU to compete" with the Social Democrats.
Many of the state's 7 million Catholics from a population of 12.5 million were offended by her criticism last month of Pope Benedict XVI, a Bavarian by birth.
"Merkel is no longer electable for German Catholics," a theologian at the University of Freiburg wrote in an editorial.
(Again: MERKEL'S BAVARIAN PROBLEM)
A mysterious illness is causing calves to bleed to death on German farms.
Veterinarians are stumped over what is causing the deaths: vaccines, genetically modified feed or perhaps even the first mother's milk?
Russia does not rule out NATO membership at some point in the future, but for the moment it prefers to keep co-operation on a practical, limited level, Moscow's envoy to NATO told EUobserver.
"We need Russia for the resolution of European and global problems. That is why I think it would be good for Russia to join NATO."
Americans for Peace Now are skeptical of incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's promise to pursue peace with the Muslim and Arab world.
"The long-held positions of Netanyahu and his coalition partners do not bode well for peace efforts."
(And: 5 FACTS ABOUT LIEBERMAN)
(And: WHO'S WHO IN THE NEW CABINET)
Israel's 32nd government, which was sworn in last night, is destined to fail.
Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa says Israel has forcefully 'wrecked' what was left of an Arab-Israeli peace process.
So says a confidential EU report revealed on March 7 by The London Guardian.
It accuses Israel "of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank (Separation) barrier as a way of 'actively pursuing the illegal annexation' of East Jerusalem."
A delegation from the State Department promised the Palestinians the Obama administration will strongly oppose any new Jewish construction in the strategic, biblical West Bank, a top Palestinian Authority official told WND.
The PA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the US delegation last week told the PA in a meeting it views Israel's presence in the West Bank as an obstacle to peace and that Obama was ready for a possible confrontation with incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu on the issue of any new construction in the territory.
Malaysia explains why the international community needs to take Israeli leaders to court as a first step toward peace and prosperity.
Syrian President Assad urged the Arab nations to show unity at the Arab League summit, which they did not have in the solution of international problems.
He also said that the Arab countries should take efforts to create a new world order which would guarantee justice to everyone.
In other words, the Syrian president stood up against the supremacy of the West.
Catch me if you can...
The Sudanese president has arrived in Saudi Arabia, the 5th state he has visited since an international warrant was issued for his arrest.
It's time, as a start, to stop calling our expanding war in Central and South Asia "the Afghan War" or "the Afghanistan War."
If Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke doesn't want to, why should we?
While the US places great hope and expectation in Saudi Arabia to help with the Middle East, the oil-rich kingdom may be working at odds with the US in backing and financing the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
North Korea accused the US of spying on the site of an impending rocket launch and threatened to shoot down any US planes that intrude into its airspace.
It has recently transpired that Pyongyang has several nuclear warheads ready.
A senior analyst at the International Crisis Group said that North Korea had built compact nuclear warheads, the technical details of which were not known yet.
(And: NK CAN NUKE SEOUL AND TOKYO)
With tensions already rising due to the Chinese navy becoming more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the US Navy seems to have yet another reason to be deeply concerned.
After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a "kill weapon" developed by the Chinese to target and destroy US aircraft carriers.
Benjamin Netanyahu declared that a "radical regime" with nuclear weapons was the "biggest danger to humanity" on Tuesday as he took office as Israel's prime minister.
Iran has denied that a meeting took place between their main representative at an international conference on Afghanistan and a senior US official.
(And: MYSTERY OF US-IRAN TALK)
The leader of the Pakistani Taleban threatened Tuesday to launch an attack on Washington that would "amaze everyone in the world."
"Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world ... The maximum they can do is martyr me. But we will exact our revenge on them from inside America."
Obama has been named in dozens of civil lawsuits alleging he is not eligible to be president, with one man even filing a criminal complaint alleging the commander-in-chief is a fraud, and now a citizen grand jury in Georgia has indicted Obama.
The indictment delivered to state and federal prosecutors yesterday is one of the developments in the dispute over Obama's eligibility to be president.
Over the weekend the jurors took sworn testimony from several sources, including Taitz, and then generated an indictment that later was forwarded to the US attorney, the state attorney general and others in law enforcement across the state.
A new incarnation, a new name – and the same old warmongering.
As David Weigel put it, the FPI conference turned into a "Neocons for Obama" festival, as super-hawkish foreign policy maven Fred Kagan hailed Obama's Af-Pak offensive as the best thing since the Iraqi "surge."
As the neocons hail Obama, their new conquering hero, the irony of all this underscores the difficulties of instituting real change in our foreign policy.
The same old faces turn up no matter which party is in power, and the same old ideas – shopworn "internationalist" bromides – dominate a consensus that never questions whether an empire is good for the American people.
(And: NEOCONS AND MORAL DEGENERACY)
The military-industrial complex is now vast, rich, and so embedded in Washington that it is succeeding in converting the American republic into a military empire.
There is a secession movement afoot and its proponents are determined to put a halt to the federal government's ambitions to destroy and reconstruct an entire economy and dissolve the last remnants of individual liberty.
Twenty-eight states are invoking the law of the land, the US Constitution, by rolling out legislation to assert their sovereignty as free states in order to keep from being undermined by the never-ending swarm of unrestrained federal decrees.
There is a chill wind blowing across this land of ours. People are losing faith in their ability to realize the American dream.
For the first time in 13 years, Executive Intelligence Review magazine has released a new indepth study of the status of the deadly global enemy of mankind called Dope, Inc., the international drug cartel headquartered in London.
Conceptually, EIR's approach continues the method outlined in its breakthrough 1978 book, "Dope, Inc.," which elaborated in historical depth, how the British Empire — now transformed into the globalized Anglo-Dutch financial system — imposed the drug trade, from the top down, in the interest of maintaining its political control over the world's population.
The furor over the AIG rescue and the possibility that American banks might be nationalized have turned March into a financial horror film: Zombies on the street, empty vaults, tentacled monsters, and cryptic pronouncements from a parallel universe.
Oh, by the way, some people will get very rich off the Geithner plan.
Some hedge and equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off the Geithner plan.
And, under current law, they will pay a lower tax rate on this money than a schoolteacher or firefighter. Are you sold yet?
The so-called Public Private Partnership Investment Program introduced by Treasury Secretary Geithner not only stands to bankrupt America but the global financial system as well.
The financial bailout scheme released by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner this week is an unmitigated disaster -- one which will bring down the Obama Administration, if not reversed.
"First of all, it is incompetent, it is un-Constitutional, and it will destroy the United States."
We have said it before, and we will say it again: The bailout scheme is the greatest financial swindle in history, a policy which is monstrously corrupt.
In the name of saving a bankrupt international financial bubble, it is bankrupting the US, economically, politically, and morally.
(And: OBAMA MUST DUMP SUMMERS)
It is a "group of islands close to continental Europe" which is "slightly smaller than Oregon". Or at least, that's the White House view of Britain.
(And: BO MEETS QE2)
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses.
It is a "partnership" in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
President and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff has earned a well-deserved reputation for predicting the path of currencies worldwide, as well as forecasting the current meltdown in the global economy.
Schiff spoke recently to the Exchange-Traded Funds Report about the outlook for the dollar, other foreign currencies, and gold prices.
On the eve of the G20 summit in London, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has issued a grim forecast for the global economy, undercutting the more optimistic predictions being made by governments around the world.
All the major economies are being drawn into the abyss.
France and Germany are not satisfied with proposals for the G20 summit, President Sarkozy said on Wednesday, as leaders arrived in London for Thursday's G20 summit.
"I will not associate myself with a summit that would end with a communique made of false compromises that would not tackle the issues that concern us. As of today, there is no firm agreement in place. The conversation is going forward, there are projects on the table. As things stand at the moment, these projects do not suit France or Germany."
Chancellor Merkel said Wednesday she was going into the G-20 summit with a mixture of confidence and concern, renewing a call for world leaders to produce firm agreements on market reform.
"We will look very carefully at every period, every comma -- we will see that very concrete agreements are made from which people cannot pull back. I am traveling to London with a mixture of confidence and concern."
(And: JAPAN PM ATTACKS MERKEL)
Three major meetings will take place in Europe over the next 9 days: a meeting of the G-20, a NATO summit and a meeting of the EU with Obama
The week will define the relationship between the US and Europe and reveal some intra-European relationships.
If not a defining moment, the week will certainly be a critical moment in dealing with economic, political and military questions.
To be more precise, the meeting will be about US-German relations.
The fact remains that German and US national interest are not at all the same.
As Merkel put it: "International policy is, for all the friendship and commonality, always also about representing the interests of one's own country."
Reality has shifted, and so have national interests. The international economic crisis has heightened — not reduced — nationalism as each nation looks out for itself.
[WAR: I highly recommend reading the whole article.]
There are no longer any easy answers.
There are only difficult questions brought on by a crisis that ballooned to such massive proportions that it changed the world, within an extraordinarily short amount of time, in ways that no one would have thought possible.
Never before has the world changed as quickly as it has in the 12 months since March 2008.
The governments of the industrialized countries, faced with a crisis of such proportions, have returned to pursuing their national interests.
But the most dangerous fact of all is that they have yet to come up with an approach to combat the causes of this unprecedented economic decline.
Prominent figures within the European Union have upped the ante with increasingly tough rhetoric as they prepare to negotiate solutions to the economic crisis.
"We are there for results. It is a question of now or never."
The only voices expressing the will of Europeans and showing a way out of the current crises are in the madding crowds outside the G20.
The EU is a hodge-podge of very different states with radically different governments and economies.
The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels in an emergency summit meeting that seemed to highlight the very worries it was designed to calm: that the world economic crisis has unleashed forces threatening to split Europe into rival camps.
The traditional concept of "solidarity" is being undermined by protectionist pressures in some member countries and the rigors of maintaining a common currency, the euro, for a region that has diverse economic needs.
Whether Europe can reach across constituencies to create consensus, however, has been an open, and suddenly pressing, question.
The G20 must create an emergency $50bn fund to reignite the flow of goods around the world, as international trade suffers the biggest collapse in the modern era, it has been warned.
World trade is in "free fall" and will slump this year at the fastest rate since records began.
The G20 summit is an opportunity to restate the case for economic openness. But there are limits to how far it can correct the imbalances in the global economy.
(And: RHETORIC MEETS REALITY)
(And: CRISIS KEEPS G-20 DIVIDED)
Thousands of people from a large range of groups including anti-capitalists, environmental activists and those angry at the global economic downturn are protesting in London in advance of Thursday's G20 summit.
The institutional framework of world governance erected since WW2 has proved a failure.
What the international community can and must demonstrate now is a willingness to undertake a full reconstruction.
The G-20 summit would be a great success if it could achieve just that, in addition to agreeing on credible immediate economic and financial measures.
Any attempt to rebuild governance must recognize that the new international system must be multipolar, heterogeneous and global.
If we fail to move in this direction, we risk reproducing a kind of post-WW1 scenario: The combination of nationalist forces and beggar-thy-neighbor protectionist policies could lead to a planetary disaster.
The Council on Foreign Relations, often described as the "real state department", has launched an initiative to promote and implement a system of effective world governance.
[WAR: Sure, they may have agendas/plans ... but: "YAHWEH foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples ... Swords will flash in their cities, will destroy the bars of their gates and put an end to their plans." (Psalms 33:10 / Hosea 11:6)]
Venezuelan President Chavez sought Arab support Tuesday for a proposed oil-backed currency to challenge the US dollar in his latest swipe at Washington's dominance in global financial affairs.
"A new world is being born. Empires fall. There is a world crisis of capitalism, it's shaking the planet."
It's highly unlikely he will gain any serious momentum for his "petro-currency" proposal at a summit of South American and Arab League leaders, but it represented another attempt to undercut the dollar's standing as the world's leading commercial currency.
China has struck deals — most recently this week with Argentina — to conduct trade in currencies other than the dollar.
And Iran has proposed replacing the dollar with the euro or other currencies to set worldwide oil prices.
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
"Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars." Jesus' famous words in the Olivet prophecy have been true for pretty much every generation of history for the past 2,000 years.
So why should things be any different now?
The pattern of these already serious wars and conflicts around the world teaches us a great deal about the patterns of 21st century war.
Reports from across the country confirm that gun owners seeking to stock up on ammunition are facing the same list of problems: shortages, back orders, elevated prices and a long line of people staring at empty shelves where boxes of bullets used to be.
Tunnels, bright lights, visions of the deceased. Do near-death experiences really offer a glimpse of the afterlife – or is there a more rational explanation?
Well, duh...
The prolific pollster George Barna just released another startling survey: among America's professing "born-again" Christians, only 19% possess a Biblical worldview.
That's right. Some 80% of professing Christians do not possess a Biblical worldview.
DNA: THE GOD PARTICLE (Part 2)
What if the similarities between species are due to a common designer who designed similar functions for similar purposes?
Life and genetic information are far too complex to have happened by chance.
Therefore, it is much more logical to believe that the genetic and biological similarities between species are due to a common Designer rather than common ancestry through evolution.
A computer virus that has wormed its way into millions of PCs was activated today ... but with little effect.
The 'worm' started looking for new instructions on what it should do next by scanning 50,000 different websites at midnight.
Experts feared the virus was about to be used by its creators to control an army' of 15 million 'zombie PCs' to steal bank details, send spam emails or even crash a major website.
But so far, nothing untoward has taken place...
(And: NOW WHAT?)
The origin of April Fools' Day is obscure. One likely theory is that the modern holiday was first celebrated soon after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; the term referred to someone still adhering to the Julian Calendar, which it replaced.
Speaking of the Gregorian Calendar...
WAR NOTE
[WAR: Well ... at "high noon" today, I'm going to meet with a detective in the MVD Office of Special Investigation (Arizona Dep't of Transportation) in Tucson, so that he can determine the status of my drivers license.
The reason there's a question, is because I obtained it with an intentionally altered Birth Certificate -- changing the pagan Gregorian Calendar date of birth, to the correct Biblical date.
I'm not sure what he will do upon me presenting my altered BC to him -- whether he'll issue a ticket or arrest me for a crime.
So, at this point, I don't know if there will be a Daily WAR tomorrow -- or even for a while...
UPDATE: Because of the G-20 summit (and filtering thru the flood of news) and a couple of factors here on the homefront, I've decided to reschedule the meeting until next week...]
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