Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Secret plans were drawn up by the Vatican to elect a new Pope and flee to a friendly country should Hitler have carried out his threat to kidnap the wartime Pontiff.
That Hitler considered kidnapping the Pope has been documented before, but this is the first time that details have emerged of the Vatican's strategy should the Nazis carry out the plan.
"Pius said 'if they want to arrest me they will have to drag me from the Vatican'," said Peter Gumpel, the German Jesuit priest who is in charge of researching whether Pius should be made a saint, and therefore has access to secret Vatican archives.
The Vatican's spokesman reacted to the remarks made by the President of Iran at the conference on the Durban Declaration on racism, by deploring the fact that the president used the forum to adopt "political positions, of an extremist and offensive nature."
Yes, and no...
According to the chairman of the Catholic bishops' conference of Germany, the death of Jesus Christ was not a redemptive act of God to liberate human beings from the bondage of sin and open the gates of heaven.
The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ's death in a recent interview with a German television station.
Zollitsch said that Christ "did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat." Instead, Jesus had offered only "solidarity" with the poor and suffering. Zollitsch said "that is this great perspective, this tremendous solidarity."
[WAR: True, Yahshua's Passover sacrifice had nothing to do with forgiveness of sin. It was the sprinkling of his blood on the Ark of the Covenant (6 months later on the Day of Atonement) that covered our sins.]
Chancellor Merkel met with industry, banking, government and union leaders in Berlin today to discuss how to best cope with the fallout from the current economic crisis.
All's well again in the world of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union party, an outspoken opponent of genetic engineering and genetically modified plants.
German Agriculture Minister (and CSU member) Ilse Aigner has slapped a ban on MON 810, a type of GM corn seed produced and marketed by the American agricultural corporation Monsanto, and opponents of the technology are celebrating the victory.
German authorities are bracing for unusually strong violence accompanying May Day demonstrations in Berlin.
The German capital's far-left scene has over the past few weeks staged numerous attacks. It torched cars, damaged company buildings and expensive apartments.
Authorities have been surprised by most attacks, as the individuals staging them seemed to be striking randomly.
Neo-Nazi crimes in Germany soared last year by 16%, according to new government figures. The interior minister, said the rise in politically motivated crime was disturbing.
The far right is on the rise throughout Europe, riding a perfect storm of unemployment, declining wage levels, poor housing and immigration.
As the economic recession bites deeper, and as labour mobility in Europe all too frequently becomes a race to the bottom, with workers forced to undercut each other, so an increasing tide of racism and xenophobia threatens the established political parties.
The EU is itself under attack as Europeans go to the polls on June 7 to elect a new parliament, and all the evidence points to sweeping gains for far-right parties.
What unites the movement is a belief that there are too many foreigners in Europe, that they should be induced to return from whence they came, and that the established political order needs to be overturned - not least the EU itself.
A number of eurocrats will soon form part of an EU diplomatic corps, if European Commission President Barroso has anything to say about it.
He's looking forward to the day when the Lisbon Treaty comes into effect -- and the EU has to build embassies.
At a military checkpoint between Georgia and its breakaway region of South Ossetia, the word "Russia" is hand-painted in pink on a concrete security barrier.
"It will be Russia," said a Russian army lieutenant as the Ossetian soldiers under his command nodded. "And Georgia used to be Russian, too."
Russia has troops just 25 miles from the Georgian capital, in violation of the EU-brokered cease-fire that ended last year's brief war.
And in recent weeks, it has put even more soldiers and armored vehicles within striking distance of the city ahead of street protests against Georgia's president.
More than 75% of Israeli Jews would like Israel to join the European Union, a recent survey found. Among the country's Arab population, 40% support the idea.
In general, 6 out of 10 Israelis see the EU favorably.
The same percentage of Israeli Jews would want Israel to join NATO, while among Israeli Arabs the idea was supported by only 19%.
Foreign Minister Lieberman said today his opposition to an Arab peace initiative stemmed from its demand for a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to Israel proper.
"The clause on the right of return cannot be agreed to. This is a subject upon which there is wide agreement in the government and in the public as well."
The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.
"Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets.
Lieberman granted his first major interview to the Israel correspondent of one of the oldest Russian dailies, not to an Israeli newspaper.
The role of Israel is to "bring the US and Russia closer," he declared. "Russia has a special influence in the Muslim world, and I consider it a strategic partner that should play a key role in the Middle East."
While President Bush was "blindly" and "mindlessly" supportive of Israel, Obama may be less willing to give the Jewish state "blank checks," says Rosa Brooks, the Obama administration's new adviser to one of the most influential Pentagon officials.
Obama is seeking to restart the flagging Middle East peace process by inviting Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian leaders for a series of bilateral meetings in Washington.
President Ahmadinejad accused Israel today of "brutal acts" and "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians.
He told a conference in Tehran on Israel's "genocide and war crimes" in Gaza that Israeli "criminals" should be brought to justice for the war in the Palestinian coastal strip in January.
He said Iran had submitted requests for the arrests of 25 "Zionist war criminals" to Interpol.
There will no denying the fact that Pakistan has been facing serious threats from terrorists as they have been making advancement towards Islamabad. The situation is very, very serious.
Over last 2 weeks, the New York Times has published a series of articles on conditions facing US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
The articles reveal considerably more than what one suspects their authors set out to explain.
For anyone reading them with a degree of historical consciousness, they depict a colonial war waged against an entire population, by US troops who see little purpose behind the violence they are unleashing on the Afghan population.
US Central Command head General David Petraeus said that he believes that the situation in Afghanistan is "going to get worse before it gets better."
Ethiopia greeted Sudanese President Bashir with a full state reception on Tuesday at the start of his latest trip abroad in defiance of an international arrest warrant.
Polling booths have opened in South Africa's 4th democratic general election, which is widely expected to propel controversial ANC leader Jacob Zuma to the presidency.
(Op-ed: CURB THE ANC)
Israel has warned Tehran that it is ready to be "the shield" defending Jewish people from a "new Holocaust" threat posed by Iran's nuclear programme.
Iran's parliament speaker warned Israel on Tuesday against a possible attack on the country's nuclear facilities. "Iran will respond in a way that they will not be able to sleep easy anymore."
(And: ISRAEL REJECTS WARNING)
The Justice Department is considering dropping its case against 2 former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of illegally disclosing national defense secrets, government officials said Tuesday.
The story of how Jane Harman -- this leading "national security Democrat" -- sold out her nation's security on behalf of a foreign power underscores the all-pervasive and corrupting influence of Israel's lobby in the US.
The moment of reckoning in US-Israeli relations is approaching much more quickly than could have been anticipated months ago, due to 2 related developments.
It is too early to tell whether we are witnessing the early stages of the US slowly taking back control of its wider Middle East policies from Israel and pro-Israel extremists in the US Congress, lobbies and think tanks who hijacked it in recent decades.
Barack Obama is putting a world government team in place under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
America's powerful agribusiness lobby has hit back at Michelle Obama's decision to make her new White House kitchen garden entirely organic, urging her to consider the use of appropriate "crop protection products."
To the anger of Big Ag, however, she has aligned herself with the growing movement of "locavores", people who grow their own fruit and vegetables at home or try to buy only locally-grown food.
FEMA is preparing to take its martial law exercises to the next level this July.
Such a large and coordinated exercise seems inappropriate, considering the fact there has not been a terrorist attack on the US since September 11, 2001.
Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.
"We may wake up one day and there's a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed … martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won't end until the crisis ends. The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention."
Planning for Round 2 of the nation's tea parties is under way – with more than 350 cities planning protests for Independence Day.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry rattled cages when he suggested that Texans might at some point become so disgusted with Washington's gross violation of the US Constitution that they would want to secede from the union.
Political hustlers, their media allies and others, who have little understanding, are calling his remarks treasonous. Let's look at it.
IT AIN'T OVER UNTIL THE FAT LADY SINGS (Cartoon)
The acting chief financial officer of struggling mortgage giant Freddie Mac has been found dead, police say. Fairfax County Police said there was no foul play suspected.
As The New York Times Co. tries to bask in the glory of having bagged 5 Pulitzers, the company is facing a cash crunch that could put it on the path toward insolvency.
Due to the lifting of the foreclosure moratorium at the end of March, the downward slide in housing is gaining speed.
In March, housing prices accelerated on the downside indicating bigger adjustments dead-ahead.
Housing prices are not falling, they're crashing and crashing hard.
Yesterday, AIG agreed to sell the US government 300,000 preferred shares in exchange for a little vitamin shot by way of $29.835 billion.
In its Global Financial Stability Report published on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund predicts European writedowns will total over €900 billion as deteriorating economic activity leaves individuals and companies increasingly unable to pay back borrowings.
No news organisation has done justice to the IMF's excellent global financial stability report.
The IMF criticises governments for not doing enough to sort out the problem of bad assets, and to recapitalise the banking sector.
Most troubling of all, the IMF forecasts that the credit crisis will be deep and long lasting, even if government were to take all the right decisions, which they are not.
China has become the world's largest car manufacturer, surpassing EU champion Germany and the US, whose ailing industries are struggling for survival amid the economic crisis.
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves. It's time to dump Earth Day.
(Cartoons: EARTH DAY)
Twenty years after the death of his friend, director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood recalls how they changed Westerns forever.
Alien life does exist but the truth is being covered up by the US government, former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has claimed.
A spokesman for NASA told CNN: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else – period."
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