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Many evangelicals believe that the Antichrist, or Beast, is a political leader that will carry a message of hope for the people of the world. Many of those same evangelicals believe that there are, in fact, more than one Antichrist working in concert to usher in the end times. The first would be the political leader, followed by a religious leader who gives credibility to the first. The second beast of the book of Revelations would then encourage the masses to first accept, then trust, and finally worship the first beast...
confidence erodes in US food supply from star tribune: The conclusions of a pioneering survey from the University of Minnesota's Food Industry Center and Louisiana State University's AgCenter should come as a surprise to no one. The deadly salmonella outbreak tied to peanut butter made at a filthy Georgia processing plant has caused consumer confidence in the food supply to plummet. Just one in five Americans now believe the food supply is safer than it was a year ago, according to findings from the latest Continuous Consumer Food Safety/Defense Tracking Study... Consumer confidence dipped last year with the outbreak of salmonella first linked to tomatoes but later tied to peppers. Confidence rebounded, the CFST found, only to nosedive to a new low with the peanut butter salmonella outbreak that has sickened at least 500 and killed eight people, three of whom were Minnesotans. The findings should give the industry some food for thought. It's hard evidence that the peanut butter outbreak isn't simply the problem of one Georgia company. It has damaged the reputation of the entire food industry. Action is needed, lest the precipitous drop in peanut butter sales plague other products.
pope warns of proliferation of 'new eugenics' from lifesitenews: In an address last Saturday to participants in a conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life, Pope Benedict XVI warned of the rise of a "new eugenics" that judges the worth of an individual based on his or her genetic makeup, as expressed in factors such as health and beauty. Despite the fact that a condemnation of imposed eugenics was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "there are appearing in our days troubling manifestations of this hateful practice," observed the pope to participants in the conference, entitled 'New Frontiers of Genetics and the Danger of Eugenics.' "A new mentality is insinuating itself that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity based on individual desire and individual rights... There is thus a tendency to privilege the capacities for work, efficiency, perfection and physical beauty to the detriment of other dimensions of existence that are not held to be valuable."
gore pulls 'inconvenient' slide of disaster trends from nytimes: Former Vice President Al Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation. When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels. The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, floodingand other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said. (The preceding link is to a video clip of that portion of the talk; go to 7th minute.) Now Mr. Gore is dropping the graph, his office said today. Here’s why. Two days after the talk, Mr. Gore was sharply criticized for using the data to make a point about global warming by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist focused on disaster trends and climate policy at the University of Colorado. Mr. Pielke noted that the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters stressed in reports that a host of factors unrelated to climate caused the enormous rise in reported disasters... Dr. Pielke quoted the Belgian center: “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one - even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.”
obama's inauguration financed partially by bailed-out wall st execs from abc: The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, which isn't stopping rich donors and the government from spending $170 million, or more, on the inauguration of Barack Obama. The actual swearing-in ceremony will cost $1.24 million, according to Carole Florman, spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. It's the security, parties and countless Porta-a-Potty rentals that really run up the bill.
obama reaches out for mccain’s counsel from nytimes: Not long after Senator John McCain returned last month from an official trip to Iraq and Pakistan, he received a phone call from President-elect Barack Obama. As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn? It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.
big party, small change: baby, we were born to run...the empire from chris floyd: I understand there's a big party going on in Washington this week, where hundreds of thousands of people are gathering to celebrate Bob Gates'retention as Pentagon chief. I mean, that is what this shindig is all about, isn't it? Hope and.... continuity? [See Arthur Silber for more.] We've got Bush's manstill driving the war machine, we've got Bush's generals still waging the "War on Terror" all over the world. We've got a president who is eager to spend his "political capital" on slashing "entitlements," because everyone must sacrifice, everybody's "going to have to have some skin in this game" - everyone, that is, except for the president's Wall Street backers, who are about to receive yet another tranche of billions of taxpayer dollars in what they are now calling openly - and rightly - "opportunity funding." We've got a president honoring homophobic right-wing preachers who urge their followers to imitate the mindless zeal of Nazis and Bolsheviks in doing "whatever it takes" to establish Christianist dominion. We've got a president whose education chief believes in turning over the teaching of America's children to corporations -- and the military. We've even got a president who follows Dick Cheney's "good advice" on interrogating Terror War captives. It seems like the only place you can find "change" in Washington these days is in the cup of a street beggar, left homeless and jobless in the great bankrupting of the nation by Wall Street and the war machine.
obama’s web wasteland from sitepoint: Tomorrow, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American chief executive of the country. That is indeed a historic moment in American politics and race relations, and Obama’s campaign certainly had a good deal of significance, especially in terms of how it utilized the Internet. The Internet will play a huge part in tomorrow’s inaugural festivities, but what has happened to the vast social networks that Obama built during that campaign? What will happen to them?
ny councilman proposes mandatory public service for students from epoch times: Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Queens) and representatives from City Year, New York Cares, Common Cause NY, and Big Brothers Big Sisters gathered at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Sunday, Jan. 18. Gioia proposed that New York City create a requirement of 20 hours of community service for high school graduation, inspired by President-Elect Barack Obama’s calling the nation to service in his Inauguration and Mayor Michel Bloomberg’s pledging to encourage public service at the State of the City address delivered last week.
350,000 conservatives pledge to block obama's socialistic agenda from raw story: A conservative group, Grassfire.org, announced on Monday that its online petition pledging "patriotic" opposition to President-elect Barack Obama has gathered 350,000 signatures. (By presstime, the groups website was claiming a total of 371,453.) Grassfire's founder, Steve Elliot, stated, "This is not a personal attack on Barack Obama. On the contrary, this is a call to action for conservatives who profess love for our country and respect for our institutions. Our disagreements with the President are based in ideology and public policy only. From this firm foundation we are mounting a patriotic, resilient, conservative resistance to Obama's agenda."
masonic rituals live on in inauguration from washington times: President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in Tuesday will incorporate several elements out of America's Masonic past. One-third of the signers of the Constitution, many of the Bill of Rights signers and America's first few presidents (except for Thomas Jefferson) were Freemasons, a fraternal organization that became public in early 18th-century England. Although it became fabulously popular in America, at one time encompassing 10 percent of the population, Pope Clement XII condemned Freemasonry in 1738 as heretical. The latest pronouncement was issued in 1983 by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - who called Masonic practices "irreconcilable" with Catholic doctrine. Still, as the first president, George Washington had to come up with appropriate rituals for the new country. He borrowed many of them from Masonic rites he knew as "worshipful leader" of a lodge in Alexandria. His Masonic gavel is on display at the Capitol Visitor Center. Until this inauguration, Washington's Masonic Bible - on which he swore his obligations as a Freemason - was used for the presidential oath of office. President-elect Barack Obama will use Abraham Lincoln's Bible.
new 9/11 brochure for obama inauguration from 9/11 blogger: DC 911Truth has produced an attractive new brochure to be distributed at the Obama Inauguration and surrounding events. On the cover, President Obama is asked to "help America learn the truth about 9/11," (160kb PDF) but the interior is aimed at general audiences who may not be aware of problems with the official account, or who may be quick to dismiss any questions as conspiracy theories.
contaminated US site faces ‘catastrophic’ nuclear leak from new scientist: One of "the most contaminated places on Earth" will only get dirtier if the US government doesn't get its act together - clean-up plans are already 19 years behind schedule and not due for completion until 2050. More than 210 million litres of radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford in Washington State. Most are over 50 years old. Already 67 of the tanks have failed, leaking almost 4 million litres of waste into the ground. There are now "serious questions about the tanks' long-term viability," says a Government Accountability Office report, which strongly criticises the US Department of Energy for delaying an $8 billion programme to empty the tanks and treat the waste... The DoE's plan, however, is "faith-based", says Robert Alvarez, an authority on Hanford at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. "The risk of catastrophic tank failure will sharply increase as each year goes by... and one of the nation's largest rivers, the Columbia, will be in jeopardy."
the process of indoctrination: how the public is being conditioned to accept the existence of an elite ruling class from corbett report: It seems that a unique moment in human history is at last coming to an end. Just a few short years ago, anyone who dared talk about the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg group or the Bohemian Grove as organizations through which the financial oligarchs wielded power was dismissed with that ultimate debate-ending phrase: 'conspiracy theorist.' Now, however, these secretive organizations and the corporate moneymen who pull their strings are finally allowing the public a glimpse behind the façade of representative democracy at the way elite institutions are really shaping global geopolitics. People are at last free to talk about how world politics are shaped by a few thousand of the ultra-wealthy and well-connected… provided, of course, those people are closely tied to Henry Kissinger and tend to think that global government is the best way of organizing 21st century society.
wolfowitz: US future hinges on another ‘crisis’ from aaron dykes: In a response to PNAC associate Robert Kagan, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has suggested that a ‘compelling crisis’ such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 may help bolster America’s stature in the world, which, Wolfowitz clearly hints, has been damaged by the Bush administration:
"America’s future leadership role may depend even more on how threatening the world appears. Historically, that leadership role has often emerged out of a compelling crisis: Pearl Harbour, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or the attacks of 9/11.
the pope reunites with his old buddy the serpent from this is london: The image was practically Biblical: Pope Benedict XVI face to face with a serpent. But the hint of a good vs evil face-off dissipated when the pontiff next squared up against a koala - and, smiling, gave the fuzzy furball a little scratch behind the ears. The Pope was meeting native Australian animals during the World Youth Day celebration in Australia, where young Roman Catholic pilgrims attended religious classes then chowed down on sausages at barbecues.
7ys on, no answer on anthrax attacks from raw story: It's been almost seven years since - in the weeks immediately following 9/11 - anthrax powder sent through the mail killed five people, threatened the lives of two Democratic senators, terrorized the entire nation, and helped prod a panicky Congress into passing the so-called Patriot Act. In the intervening years, not only has the killer remained free, but missteps in the investigation have had major negative consequences.
from guardian: George Bush arrived in the UK today for his last presidential visit to the country before leaving the White House next January. Airforce One touched down at Heathrow just before 2pm. On the final leg of his European tour Bush will take tea with the Queen, dine with Gordon Brown and have breakfast with Tony Blair.
His arrival has prompted planned demonstrations and a heavy security operation. The Stop the War coalition are planning protests at Windsor and Parliament Square. They are also expected to defy a police ban and march past Downing Street. The Metropolitan Police said it has mounted a "significant" operation involving 1,000 officers.
bush dines with rupert murdoch as protests go on from thinkprogress: Yesterday, President Bush “arrived at Downing Street for a private dinner hosted by Gordon Brown and attended by Rupert Murdoch, a clutch of ministers and a mini-faculty of historians.” Thousands of Britons turned out to protest the President, chanting, “George Bush terrorist” and “Arrest George Bush.”
pope to meet bush in st john's tower from reuters: Pope Benedict will unusually host talks with U.S. President George W. Bush in a restored medieval tower on Friday, to repay him for a warm reception at the White House, the Vatican said. The pope usually receives heads of state in his private study in the Apostolic Palace, overlooking St Peter's Square. But Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the change was to repay Bush for "the cordiality of the meeting at the White House" when the pope visited the United States in April. St. John's Tower is a round structure on a hilltop inside the Vatican gardens that is sometimes used as a residence for important guests... The late Pope John XXIII, who reigned from 1958 to 1963, restored the tower as a place where he could work in peace.
bush protesters clash with police in uk from raw replay: Protests were staged as George Bush visited Downing Street and Windsor on day one of his trip to the UK. The US president is in London with his wife Laura as part of his ‘farewell’ tour of Europe. This video is from BBC, broadcast June 16, 2008.
The Respect Party MP details incitements that the officer made towards police and how the man encouraged other protesters to charge baton-wielding officers and hurl projectiles at them. Galloway cites an article from last Weekend’s Mail On Sunday in which author Yasmin Whittaker-Khan detailed how she bumped into a known senior police officer, dressed like a press photographer with a large expensive camera, who shouted “Pigs out!” and enticed others to the front of the police-protestor clashes.
from voa: Pope Benedict XVI began his last day in the United States at Ground Zero, the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York... Pope Benedict knelt in silent prayer on a pew placed in front of a large candle, which he then lit... The pope then met individually with two-dozen survivors and representatives of victims' families. According to officials, Benedict XVI insisted that a stop at Ground Zero be put on the schedule of his three-day visit to New York. For the low key, secular occasion, the Pope wore a long white overcoat in marked contrast to the more elaborate vestments he has worn throughout the rest of his six-day visit to the United States.
from time: After three days of rising protests from students and professors, Pope Benedict XVI has pulled out of a long scheduled visit Thursday to Rome's historic La Sapienza University... The Pope's opponents burst out in celebration at the east Rome campus when reached with the news of the cancellation... the 80-year-old Pope may yet have the last word... For the whiff of censorship... may offer ammunition for Benedict's belief that he is something of a "Pope under siege" in the face of the prevailing secular winds of his times.
update: pope publishes cancelled speech from bbc: The Vatican has released the text of a speech the Pope was due to have given during a visit to Rome University, that was cancelled due to protests.
from daily mail: The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism. Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult. They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of "Godlessness." Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.
The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican "exorcist-in-chief," to the online Catholic news service Petrus. "Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on," he said.
update: vatican denies exorcist expansion from upi: The Vatican is denying reports it plans to install more exorcists around the world so possessed people can get help quickly.
"Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of ordering local bishops to bring in garrisons of exorcists to fight demonic possession," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told reporters in Rome Friday...
Paolo Scarafoni, a priest at Vatican University who teaches how to recognize and expel Satan, said exorcists increasingly are in demand because devil worship has become so common, reported ANSA, the Italian news agency. "Priests are being bombarded," Scarafoni told ANSA.
from ap: Ignored for centuries, documents about the heresy trial of the ancient Christian order discovered in the Vatican's secret archives are being published in a limited edition — with an $8,377 price tag.
They include a 14th-century parchment showing that Pope Clement V initially absolved the Templar leaders of heresy, though he did find them guilty of immorality and planned to reform the order, according to the Vatican archives Web site.
But pressured by King Philip IV of France, Clement later reversed his decision and suppressed the order in 1312.
An 800th copy will go to Pope Benedict XVI, said Barbara Frale, the researcher who found the long-overlooked parchment tucked away in the archives in 2001.
The Knights Templar, which ultimately disappeared because of the heresy scandal, recently captivated the imagination of readers of the best-seller "The Da Vinci Code," which linked the order to the legend of the Holy Grail.
The new Vatican work reproduces the entire documentation of the papal hearings convened after Philip IV of France arrested and tortured Templar leaders in 1307 on charges of heresy and immorality.
from chicago sun-times: With Pope Benedict XVI's blessing, the Vatican released a document Tuesday that said the Catholic Church is the one true church and other Christian bodies shouldn't be called churches.
Predictably, the document drew praise from some, while critics called it insensitive and a harsh example of religious intolerance.
But in some Catholic circles, the document was viewed as sort of a Chicago Manual of Style.
"The Vatican is interested in theological precision in using the word 'church,'" said Lawrence Cunningham, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. The Rev. James Massa, who heads the U.S. bishops' office for ecumenical and interreligious affairs, insisted the Vatican wasn't building walls, but laying the groundwork for "fruitful" discussions between Catholics and other Christians.
"This clarifies the meaning of certain technical theological terms that had been confusing to scholars," he said. "There's no retreat from ecumenical dialogue nor our love and respect for other Christians."
After 2000 years, were theologians really unclear about the meaning of "church"?
Benedict believed so, scholars said. For him, the battleground was a phrase used in a document of the 1960s Second Vatican Council. It said the church instituted by Jesus and his apostles "subsists in the Catholic Church."
Pope Benedict said in his Christmas message on Monday (December 25) a self-confident humanity that has reached other planets, worships technology and conquers science cannot live without God or turn its back on the hungry masses. The Pope said that while 21st century man appeared to be a master of its own destiny, ''perhaps he needs a saviour all the more'' because much of humanity still suffered.
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Welcome to New World Next Week - the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Visit NewWorldNextWeek.com to get previous episodes in various formats to download, burn and share. And as always, stay up-to-date by subscribing to the feeds from Corbett Report here and Media Monarchy here. Thank you.
