Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
In this morning's general audience, the Pope continued with his series of catechesis on the great writers of the Eastern and Western Church in the Middle Ages, turning his attention today to St. Theodore the Studite.
On its first day online, the new website enabling young people from around the world to get to know Pope Benedict XVI, received almost half a million visits.
As Germany prepares for national elections in September, Chancellor Merkel has dropped the language of freedom entirely.
Instead, she talks about solidarity, justice and security.
It is as if freedom had become a pejorative term, especially in the context of the global financial crisis.
Merkel cannot afford politically to put individual aspirations before solidarity and social justice.
The German government is contributing to the escalation of war in Pakistan with weaponry, military training and finances.
In an online chat with Spiegel Online, Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament, expressed his opposition to full-fledged EU membership for Turkey.
He also lamented deficits in Europe's common foreign and security policy and warned of over-dependency on Russia for energy.
Martin Schulz, the chairman of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, talks to Spiegel about the forthcoming European elections, why the EU needs more democracy and his infamous spat with Silvio Berlusconi.
The failure last week of Russian talks with the European Union on energy supplies to Europe is one more occasion for Russian-Western tension.
Putin's words are seen as the latest in an ongoing volley of pointed warnings to the West not to meddle in Ukraine, which has such close historical and cultural ties to Russia that the Kremlin considers the country firmly within its sphere of interests.
After nearly 2 decades of false starts and failures, the Kremlin appears determined to begin the radical military reforms needed to fashion a modern army from the tangled wreckage of its Soviet-era armed forces.
Behind-the-scenes infighting has reportedly been furious, pitting Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev against most of the military's general staff, as well as some powerful nationalist and conservative political forces.
In the past month, several top generals and defense ministry officials have been sacked by the Kremlin.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanhayu went to Washington with one overriding mission: to win concessions from the Obama Administration for London's planned military strikes against Iran's purported nuclear weapons program.
After nearly 4 hours of talks at the White House, Netanyahu failed to extract any agreement from Obama, on either the Iran war plan, or on his efforts to sabotage any movement towards a 2-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Now, look for things to get really nasty.
London is furious that the US is insisting on diplomacy with Tehran, and will now move to blow things up in the Persian Gulf.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu put off a planned visit to Paris and Rome next week, a senior official said citing technical reasons.
The UN Security Council has unanimously called for the creation of a separate Palestinian state in a vote that comes one week before a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington to meet with Barack Obama.
The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said Obama is determination to vigorously pursue "a comprehensive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors" in the months ahead.
Barack Obama will meet Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in Riyadh next week to seek his support over the nuclear standoff with Iran and reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Obama will visit Riyadh on June 3 in a surprise addition to his scheduled 3-day trip to Egypt, Germany and France.
In just over 100 days, Barack Obama is on the verge of ensuring that militant Islam's war on America will be waged for decades to come and its forces will never suffer manpower or money shortages.
How did he accomplish so much in some little time?
He simply behaved as all US political leaders behave; that is, as an ignorant and arrogant interventionist.
Nicolas Sarkozy's Napoleonic ambitions for France scored 2 hits on Tuesday when he opened the country's first military outpost overseas in half a century and laid the first brick of the "Louvre of the Sands", a branch of the world's most visited art museum, in Abu Dhabi.
The opening of "Peace Camp", a naval and air force base located less than 150 miles from Iran's coastline, demonstrated France's resolve in protecting the United Arab Emirates, said an Elysée official.
"If Iran were to attack, we would effectively be attacked also," he said.
A huge suicide car bomb in one of the busiest districts of Lahore killed at least 23 people and injured almost 300 today, deepening official worries that frail security in this nuclear-armed country may allow militants to strike with impunity.
North Korea has declared it is abandoning the truce that ended the Korean war and warned that it could launch a military attack against the South.
Russia is taking security measures as a precaution against the possibility tension over North Korea could escalate into nuclear war, news agencies quoted officials as saying today.
Interfax quoted an unnamed security source as saying a stand-off triggered by Pyongyang's nuclear test on Monday could affect the security of Russia's far eastern regions, which border North Korea.
"The need has emerged for an appropriate package of precautionary measures. We are not talking about stepping up military efforts but rather about measures in case a military conflict, perhaps with the use of nuclear weapons, flares up on the Korean Peninsula."
In the final analysis, the international furore over Monday's nuclear test is not about North Korea but about the jostling of the major powers — the US, Japan and China — for advantage in North East Asia.
The rise of China and declining relative position of the US and Japan, now accelerated by the global economic crisis, are fuelling growing tensions.
For Washington and Tokyo, Pyongyang's actions are a convenient means for pressuring Beijing and advancing their own economic and strategic agenda in the region.
Amid all the Western panic at the prospect of North Korea's Kim Jong-il wielding a nuclear arsenal, we would be well-advised to take a chill pill.
Essential to understanding the comic-opera belligerence of the North Korean regime is the fact that the Korean War never ended: a truce was declared, but the formalities of ending the conflict have never been performed.
South Korea refused to sign the Korean War Armistice Agreement, and the 2 sides are technically still at war, after all these years.
Japan should consider developing the capability to conduct pre-emptive military strikes given North Korea's nuclear test yesterday, a ruling party lawmaker said.
"North Korea poses a serious and realistic threat to Japan," former defense chief Gen Nakatani said in Tokyo at a meeting of Liberal Democratic Party officials.
"We must look at active missile defense such as attacking an enemy's territory and bases."
Bolivia denied supplying uranium to Iran for its nuclear program, saying Tuesday that it has never produced the metallic element.
Venezuelan President Chavez joined top Bolivian officials in dismissing the allegations after a secret Israeli government report accused both nations of providing Iran with uranium.
Bolivian Presidential Minister Quintana called it nonsense and labeled Israel's intelligence agency a bunch of incompetent "clowns."
Buckingham Palace officials were said to be "fuming" after the Queen was snubbed as a guest at next week's D-Day 65th anniversary.
Royal aides were reportedly "outraged" after French officials admitted they never had any plans to invite the Queen. She was keen to attend.
(And: THIS INSULT TO THE QUEEN)
The man now occupying the White House is likely Constitutionally unqualified to hold the office.
There are reports that top management of Fox instructed its commentators to stay away from the subject – a strange position for a service that deservedly won a reputation for "fair and balanced" reporting.
The black love affair with Barack Obama is stronger than with any figure in the post-civil rights era.
According to a recent New York Times poll, Obama enjoys a 96% approval rating among African Americans.
When it comes to expressing plain truths, few are as gifted as American rednecks.
During recent travels in the Appalachian communities of West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky I've collected scores of their comments on our national condition and especially Barack Obama.
Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he will be combining the White House staffs dealing with international and homeland security, claiming that the move would "make Americans safer."
He will establish a "global engagement directorate" and a "National Security staff" that will deal with all policymaking related to "international, transnational, and homeland security matters."
National Security Adviser James Jones will head the staff.
The state has one powerful tool at its disposal to control the masses: fear.
A minority can control and enslave a majority only as long as the majority fears the minority.
There will be another event such as those mentioned above when the state feels it is beginning to loose control of Boobus, it needs the premise for a new war, or reason to expand the ones it now has.
There is no end in sight for the decline in US house prices.
Even the happy talk dispensers at CNBC admits "US Economy at Risk for Double-Dip Recession."
Skeptics have dismissed Beijing's talk of de-emphasizing the US dollar, but China is making moves that could soon lead to a convertible yuan.
Confusion reigns on all fronts about the business and financial worlds the business school graduate is about to enter.
Democratic capitalism is questioned, redrawn, drawn and quartered in everything from the Financial Times and The Economist to Chicken Little books about the sky falling.
Many analysts said that the Islamic financial system would suffer least from the financial crisis.
Islam bans the interest rate, which is the basis of wealth and the source of trouble for the traditional world of money.
The Islamic economy is not based on the principle of deriving as much profit as possible.
It also excludes all most popular forms of financial speculations.
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
Billionaire entrepreneur Kevin Trudeau told The Alex Jones Show that elitists and Bilderberg members who he had personally conversed with spoke of their desire to see "two-thirds of the dumb people" wiped off the planet.
Trudeau admitted that he was in Greece recently and implied that he attended the Bilderberg Group meeting, while also stating that he personally knew many Bilderberg members who he "conversed with on a regular basis."
Overpopulation is a primary concern of the elite.
Elitists veil their agenda with the humanitarian rhetoric of the need to naturally reduce world population by means of contraception and education, whereas in reality, as we have exhaustively documented, their program has its origins in the inhumane pseudo-science of eugenics which first flourished in Britain, and the ideology of racial and genetic superiority that was later adapted by the Nazis with the aid of Rockefeller funding.
Eight nations carried out 2,054 nuclear explosions from 1945 to 2009.
Today, facing the new threats and the old ones, Americans are on their own – or are they?
Into the fray steps a new company called Sovereign Deed.
It has been described as a "privatized FEMA" and "private civil defense."
But the people who started the company like to call it a service providing "life continuity."
* "So on the 2nd day they marched around the city once and returned to the camp." (Joshua 6:14)
* "In the 480th year after the Israelites had come out of Egypt, in the 4th year of Solomon's reign over Israel, (on the 2nd day of) the 2nd month, he began to build the temple of YAHWEH.(1Kings 6:1 / 2Chron 3:1,2)
? "In the 2nd month of the 2nd year after their arrival at the house of ELOHIM in Jerusalem, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, Jeshua son of Jozadak and the rest of their brothers (the priests and the Levites and all who had returned from the captivity to Jerusalem) began the work, appointing Levites 20 years of age and older to supervise the building of the house of YAHWEH." (Ezra 3:8)
[WAR: The exact day of the 2nd month is not mentioned, but I wouldn't doubt (but not 100% certain) that it would've been on the same day as when Solomon started the 1st temple.]
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