Did the Pope visit the United States in part to influence the U.S. Presidential race in favor of John McCain?

That seems to be the conclusion of a large number of mainland Europeans.

This article from France’s Journal du Dimanche au Quotidien, quoting French journalist V. Jauvert, points out, “Since April 16 - his birthday - Pope Benedict XVI has been in the United States for a rather long trip (for an old person): a week. And he didn’t go there just to blow out the candles on the cake offered by Dubya … The Pope is (subliminally) campaigning for J. McCain … the official visit of a Pope during a very tight election campaign is contrary to tradition. … this trip, beyond the spiritual and political, is a pretext to support the pro life candidate.’

Jauvert goes on to say that in 2004 before his elevation to the papacy, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to American Bishops saying, “it’s not possible to defend the right to abortion and receive communion, and that therefore, those who vote for Kerry, who take communion each Sunday, “would be guilty of formal cooperation with the devil!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Wonder how the NATO Summit in Bucharest is being covered in the Russian press? Russian concerns about the meeting, infighting over why President Putin isn’t being given a platform to speak at the summit, and the details of Thursday’s events are all covered in somewhat excruciating detail in this analysis from Russia’s Kommersant. Apparently, the Kremlin is upset that President Putin won’t be able to address the public at the conference, suspicious that the Alliance is trying to prevent a repeat of his Munich Speech of last year, in which Putin criticized the United States.

According to Dmitry Rogozin, Russian Ambassador to NATO, “The leadership of the Alliance is committed to curtailing most of the debate. The Russian President will be unable speak publicly on the most important questions of world politics. This is an ugly spectacle, and attempts to blame it on the rules are inappropriate.

By Mikhail Zygar and Vladimir Solovyev

Translated By Igor Medvidev

April 2, 2009

Kommersant - Russia - Original Article (Russian)

The NATO summit opens today in Bucharest, and it may be the most scandalous summit in the history of the organization. Ukraine and Georgia will attempt to obtain entry into the Alliance’s Membership Action Plan, while Russia and its key economic partners try to prevent this. The format of the Russia-NATO meetings won’t give Putin a chance to make another Munich speech. But the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine and former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov will be given a chance to speak.

[Editor’s Note: In his speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy last year, President Putin said, among other things, “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this? And of course this is extremely dangerous. The result of this is that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this no one feels safe! Because no one feels that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them!”
Read the rest of this entry »

With Russia angry about America’s proposed missile shield and NATO in need of the Kremlin’s help in Afghanistan, will the NATO Alliance agree to admit the Ukraine and Georgia at the annual NATO Summit this week? According to Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, NATO membership for these former Russian satellites depends on how hard President Bush wants to push the reluctant nations of old Europe, who question the wisdom of angering President Putin at this moment of global high-tension.

Jacek Pawlicki writes for Gazeta, “Diplomatic sources told Gazeta yesterday that U.S. pressure had been so strong that Germany had begun to hesitate. It’s possible Berlin will make its final position conditional on France’s stance. If Paris doesn’t say no, neither will Berlin.”

By Jacek Pawlicki

Translated By Marcin Wawrzy?czak

April 1, 2008

Poland - Gazeta Wyborcza - Original Article (Polish)

The chance that NATO will open its door to Ukraine and Georgia remains, although the door is unlikely to be opened as wide as Poland would like. At least not just yet.

What NATO offers Ukraine and Georgia at its Bucharest summit, which begins tomorrow, will be decided by the Alliance’s leaders at the last moment. As Gazeta has learned, in the communiqué now being prepared, the section concerning NATO’s future relationship with Kiev and Tbilisi has been left blank. Read the rest of this entry »

I am again reminded of one of my favourite singer Harry Belafonte’s number “Women smarter…” after I read this court judgement pronounced in Italy. Their lordships observed women were justified in bending the truth in order to conceal extra-marital relationships. (For my “Women smarter-Part I… click here.)

Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that married Italian women who commit adultery are entitled to lie about it to protect their honour, reports the BBC. “In a predominantly Catholic country you might expect the courts to take a dim view of lying and adultery. But not in this case.”

Just think for a moment of that mighty nation that convulsed when their president had an affair with a young woman!!! And yes let’s not forget about that nation with a president named Sarkozy…Compared to Europe what would you say about the US of A? People in those nations that are very very serious and believe in work…work…and more work…sooner than later lose their natural appetite (as this news story indicates).

Here are a few interesting stories from around the world:

1) Chad: “At least 100 civilians were killed in last weekend’s fighting between rebels and government forces in Chad, according to aid agencies.”

[The rebels seem to have agreed to a cease-fire, but there could now be a major refugee crisis.]

2) Tajikistan: “Tajikistan is in the grip of emergency food shortages, the UN’s World Food Programme is warning… Some humanitarian agencies claim Central Asia’s poorest nation is heading towards catastrophe.”

[Note: Tajikistan is ruled by a “democratic” despot, Emomalii Rahmon. He “won” re-election in 2006, but that election is widely held to have been corrupt — at the very least, Rahmon had no serious opposition. A 2003 referendum, also corrupt, could enable him to remain in power until at least 2020. He has nine children. No word on whether they are suffering food shortages, but I’m sure they’re doing just fine.]

3) Pakistan: “Taliban militants declared a ceasefire today in fighting with Pakistani forces. The Pakistani government, meanwhile, says its is preparing for peace talks with the Al Qaeda-linked extremists in the lawless tribal area near the border with Afghanistan.”

[Shouldn’t this story be getting a lot more attention?]

4) Italy: “President Giorgio Napolitano dissolved Italy’s Parliament on Wednesday, and the cabinet scheduled national elections for April 13. Mr. Napolitano’s move followed the failure of Italy’s political factions to agree on a plan to revise the country’s flawed electoral law before a new vote.”

[Yet more electoral instability in the country that has perfected it.]
Read the rest of this entry »

What would someone from Italy think of the Hillary-Obama clash in the heart of the deep south? According to this account from La Stampa’s man in the United States, Mauritzio Maulinari, in addition to taking note of the continuing controversy over the Confederate flag, ‘When Hillary rises to speak, it’s impossible not to notice the difference; applause arrives, but it’s cold and short. … Hillary remains the best candidate, but the collective emotions are with Obama.’

Translated By Adrian Trevisan

January 22, 2008

Italy - La Stampa - Original Article (Italian)

At celebrations for Martin Luther King, there were boos for Hillary Clinton and standing ovations for Barack Obama. The crowd of thousands of Afro-Americans who filled the square in front of the South Carolina Assembly greeted the two challengers for the Democratic Presidential nomination. The crowd was transformed into a barometer of the electorate that will head to the polls on Saturday for the last primary before Super Tuesday. When “Martin Luther King Day” arrives, in every city in America, everyone - African-American and not - takes to the streets for a march in honor of the Reverend King, a symbol of the battle against segregation. And this year all eyes are on Columbia, stronghold of Southern nostalgia and theater for this bitter presidential duel. Obama raised the stakes against Bill Clinton on the TV screens of ABC by calling him “a partisan husband” and no longer “everyone’s leader” because of his “troubling” positions taken in favor of Hillary and his “unfounded attacks against me.”

The march began in front of the Zion Baptist Church, where hundreds of worshippers left a mass in memory of Reverend King, who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. They then donned “Obama for President” T-shirts and pins with the images of Obama and King, and carried signs with “Barack’n’Roll” and “No Clinton Dynasty” written on them.
Read the rest of this entry »

Stories of failure don’t usually excite me, as I’m not a schadenfreude kind of guy…

But this interesting commentary from Italy’s La Repubblica, translated on Watching America.com tells of two mutually supporting failures that offer exciting prospects.

The failures? Bush’s failure to deliver on a religious agenda, and the religious right’s failure to choose someone who could.

According to the article, the base that would die for its cause - at least that part of the base that learns its doctrine at Bob Jones University - has decided that politics is a lost cause, and are thinking they might try their hand again at communicating their beliefs to individuals, rather than attempting to rewrite the rules of a nation.

“Not Fox, CNN, nor even the candidates are coming here [Bob Jones University] anymore; no one here believes any longer in a redemption that must pass through Washington.”

Even the candidate who has been billed as the man most evangelical is voicing the exasperation,

“It is useless to deceive yourselves. A President is not equipped to transform the U.S. into a Christian nation.”

Accordingly, the people of Bob Jones are going to sit on the bench for this election: Read the rest of this entry »

Has the end of the American century - and perhaps even the American United States - begun?

The rise of Asia, and in particular China, has to many been “inevitable” for a long time. According to this Italian commentary, from La Stampa, translated at Watching America.com the inevitable has now begun, as the Chinese and others have begun buying up U.S. assets with state funds, in what he calls The Great Migration.

It has been written with concern that the massive intervention of sovereign funds is a kind of trans-national state-takeover

And the writer raises…

…a disturbing parallel between the United States today and the decline of the Ottoman Empire when it ceded ownership of banks to pay its debts.

.

Although the U.S. maintains global and economic superiority for now, the fundamental shift, the writer suggests, is in the role of “global economic engine” - from the U.S. to developing countries that have been benefiting greatly from increases in the prices of their natural resources - from oil to grain.

Read “The Great Migration” translated on Watching America.com, and for related specifics, check out this recent article from Britain’s Financial Times, discussing the possibility of a decline in the U.S.’ triple-A credit rating from Moody’s.

Have you ever noticed that some brilliant souls seem to come to earth close together in time, eddy near one another in genius, and then also leave the earth within a few short months of one another? … as though they arrive in pods, like creatures of the sea and together swim away at a signal only they know. The most recent: Antonioni, and Bergman. Now Sills, now Pavarotti.

Luciano Pavarotti, who passed away yesterday at age 71, made Puccini’s aria, Nessun dorma more famous yet: In the opera Turandot, the Unknown Prince sings to Princess Turandot who’s rejected all suitors thus far. He sings that though she’s proclaimed that no one shall sleep, no one! until they can discover this hidden prince’s name… that they will never discover his name… that he will keep his name secret until ‘the right moment.’

Then, in one of the most erotic passages of opera, the Prince sings as thought he is Night itself… and that his bold heart is almost breaking with longing and passion for the difficult Turandot. He sings that he will keep his name well hidden… but only until morning comes. And then… he will place his name into her mouth with his kiss. And thus he prays for daylight to break through night.

Whether Pavarotti, looking like a huge enchanted black bear-turned-man…sang Nessun dorma or Ave Maria or Pagliacci “Vesti la guibba,” or most anything else, including “It’s A Man’s World,” with James Brown (Yes, truly) (and he also sang with Sting )

… there are now hundreds of thousands of people across the world who can pause in the midst of work or shaving or walking across the room, and suddenly hear him again: they are imprinted by his singing.

Shamans of eld in mythic works were said to be able to sing health into the souls of humans. Pavarotti’s shapely voice that radiated through the mask of his face became for many, a sonic evocation of something greater than human, in us….

There is lyric music; and then there is deep music… that has a mysterious presence far greater than its notes, far greater than its tempo, its words. Many listeners love, adore, genuflect before whatever they consider to be the deeper music, because it cracks off all the armor that’s fastened itself to their hearts and souls by their hours of mundane work, their frustrations, their fast ways with what ought be slow days…

This primal kind of music makes them remember an essential core self. But deep music needs a giant of some sort to sing it. A shaman. Pavarotti with all his genius wrapped in foibles and trickster qualities, was indeed that.

It is an amazing thing to see a singer sing into the dead bones of listeners’ bodies and watch the listeners come alive again, soften, glow even… I’ve seen it up close.

I’ve a crusty neighbor who is short on temper and long on judgmentalness. Yet, often when I pass his open door at night in the summer, I know the beast is being returned to human somewhere there in the dark, for some operatic tenor on CD is wafting out his door. And sure enough, in the morning, my friend is human again. Strong still, but far more mellow. And that lasts at least until noon. And then must be repeated that night.

This shamanic quality to a voice seems true: Some singing voices vibrate the sternum and the long bones of the listeners. The musicians in our family, call this ‘ruffling the marrow.’ Once done, ever after, the listener carries a bone-deep ’sense memory’… something akin to feeling they now know the poignancy of and preciousness of life. Again. Once more. Pavarotti did that; ruffled the marrow; sang into people’s very bones, restored their memories of poignant, precious life. Reset the humanity switch.

Yet, you’d hardly have placed bets on that happening from where he began in life.

As a child, Pavarotti slept in the tiny kitchen on a little fold-up bed made of iron. His father rose ungodly early for he was a baker. His mother labored in a cigar factory. It almost makes me cry to remember Pavarotti saying he’d had a happy childhood…

for he was just a 6 year old child in Italy during World War II. He lived through the bombings and strafings carried out by the Allies in the dark of night. He’d said that the families of the town who had loved and nourished one another for eons were divided by coldness, as one neighbor was pro-Fascist but the next one was anti-Fascist.

Yet… maybe that’s one reason why he could sing with such warmth about the cold and dark, about the mysteries of love, about the happiness to sometimes to be found inside sorrow. He’d been immersed in the study of such difficult matters by living through them when young.

These are the words to the aria Nessun dorma

No one shall sleep!…
No one shall sleep!…
Nor shall you, O Princess
in your cold room…
Look, the stars that tremble
with love and hope!

But my mystery
it is locked in me,
my name no one shall know it!
No, no!
Only into your mouth shall I reveal it,
when dawn’s light will shine!
My kiss will break the silence
and then you shall be my own.

Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set!
Bring the daylight
and I shall conquer!

And conquer you did Pavarotti. Even Caruso was not granted your reach, nor Callas. Nor any others now gone.

What is a fitting epitaph for such as you? Maybe this: For the child who survived the World War in Italy, and yet still poured a memory of the ecstatic into this too often warring maelstrom we call planet earth… there’s a song you sang many times, one I think so richly describes how and what you did on earth. The song is Panis angelicus. And the first line, says it all Lucianito:

Panis angelicus fit panis hominum
“The bread of the angels
becomes the bread of humanity.”

“I will immediately give orders to my forces so that they can carry out an ethnic cleansing of faggots,” says the deputy mayor of the town of Treviso.

Former Mafia boss Carmelo Musumeci has written a letter, published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in which he asks Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to convert his life-in-prison sentence into the death penalty. Musumeci wrote: “I die a little bit each day. Honestly, I’d rather die immediately.”

After a long career in the mafia, he has been in prison for 17 years now. In prison, he finished (his) high school, and got a law degree. However, he writes, “light has become shadow.”

310 other prisoners co-signed the letter.

There is one problem: Italy abolished the death penalty after World War II. The prisoners would like the President to reinstate it (for them).

President Napolitano did not want to take this decision and has forwarded the request to the government and Parliament. Chances that Musumeci’s request will be honored are slim.

It goes to show how horrible, how hopeless life in prison can be. Of course, life in prison is not meant to be entertaining and uplifting, I am not saying anything to support these people, but too often people make it look like life in prison is fun.

It’s not.

Life in prison is horrendous. It’s boring. It’s alienating. It’s mind-numbing.

In a time of war, of such loss of life of the young, or no end in sight, to see dignitaries bowing and laughing and joking, surely a long, serious table grace is called for.

SEED CORN SHALL NOT BE GROUND
Seed corn: The best qualities of each green living thing, kept for seed so the next generation on earth will flower.

I first worked at the VA as an aide
and I saw them come back from hell…
Hell! Hell was still smoking inside them:
Front line men, artillery, tank and tail,
helicopter, hand to hand,
med evac, nurses, chaplains, photographers.

But too often, civvies, media, politicians wanted ”war stories,“ from them,
to somehow share a suck at what they thought of as the heroic tit.
They wanted battle-frayed soldiers to say they were okay,
that the war enchantment cast over them by others
had magically worn off just because someone said ‘war’s over, go home,’
that the soldiers had magically returned to their pre-war selves:
just a boy, just a girl, magically looking forward
to settling down with a nice girl or boy somewhere near trees and water.
But the soldiers’ eyes said,
Still at Inchon,
Still at the Ardennes
Still at the Tet
Still in Cambodia.
Forever.

Governments tried to erase all images and words about the wars,
but, the real eye-witness reports ran every night on the dream newsreels.
There, in their own beds, the men and women dreamt Honor and Horror
were dressed as innocent children,
who played time and again with the unspent money
of shells and mines so deadly pretty.
And outside the VA, the sexual lustre of war
continued to swell the hearts
of so many who never saw war up close.

At the VA, the soldiers walked the halls
wearing crowns of thorns made of missiles
and unspeakable memories on fire.
And anyone who saw them, helped them,
soothed them,
anyone who had a heart
left hanging by even one hinge
wondered,
Isn’t there such a thing as patriotic anger?
Is it not true that there is such a thing as patriotic sadness and sorrow?
What about patriotic resistance? Can there be patriotic regret?
And, oh by the way, when did patriotic reluctance to kill
change from a holy thing to a hated one?
And what does war shatter besides bone?
And how can secret regret deserve so much public praise?

How can the maiming of human life, life that all say is so precious,
be given so much remembrance, as though to be harmed and die
is hard sought treasure
instead of so unbearably tragic?
How can anything be more valued, more memorialized, than those who still stand
with earned valour shining,
with eyes that say:
Still walking from Bataan
Still in Saigon
Still in Seoul
Still deployed into cold waters
under hundred pound packs
and struggling toward shore.
Forever.

Seed Corn shall not be ground,
else the next generation of miracles, dies.
The visionary demands:
Seed corn shall not be ground!

Amen
————————————-

excerpt from ”Seed Corn Shall Not Be Ground,“ ©1968, 1978, 1989, 2003, 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved. The entirety of this poem is printed here at TMV under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder.

Why did someone give Pope Benedict 30,002 shoes?

“Pope Benedict last year made headlines in the fashion media after reports that some of his shoes were designed and donated by top Italian fashion houses such as Prada but the Vatican has never confirmed this.

“The Pope’s footwear, usually red or burgundy, is called the ’shoes of the fisherman’ since popes are the successors of St Peter the Apostle, who was a fisherman…”

Find out more here…

(Photo courtesy the Outlook magazine)

The detractors of Sonia Gandhi, said to be ‘the real power behind India’s political throne’, have reasons to smile.

The country’s Supreme Court has reopened the old debate by asking the government for its opinion on whether a ‘registered’ citizen of foreign origin could hold constitutional posts like those of the President and the Prime Minister, says a news report.

In November last year, the Delhi High Court had said the Indian constitution does not differentiate between ‘natural’ and ‘registered’ citizens. Thereby implying that Indian citizens of foreign-origin too are legally eligible to hold constitutional posts.

It was in 1983 that Ms Sonia Gandhi acquired Indian citizenship.

Ms Gandhi’s detractors were lying low so long she kept away from politics following the violent assassination of, first, her famous mother-in-law (former Prime Minister Ms Indira Gandhi) and later her husband, Rajiv Gandhi. Her husband’s grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first Prime Minister of free India.

In view of the dwindling fortunes of the 113-year-old Indian National Congress party, Sonia Gandhi was persuaded by the party men to jump into the political fray, and in 1996 she became a primary member of the party.

In May 2005 Ms Sonia Gandhi was elected President of the Congress Party, thus becoming the fifth member of the famous Nehru-Gandhi family and the eighth foreign-born person to become Congress President, and the third foreign-born woman, following Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta.

Ms Sonia Gandhi, named the third most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine in 2004, was elected to the Lok Sabha (Indian Parliament’s lower house) with an impressive margin of over 400,000 votes.

Today Ms Gandhi is the Chairperson of the ruling coalition United Progressive Alliance in the Lok Sabha, and the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party. She has survived the rough and tumble of the Indian politics and is a popular political figure now.

Born Sonia Antonia Maino, in Lusiana, a little village 50 km from Vicenza, Italy, Ms Gandhi spent her adolescence in Orbassano, a town near Turin, and was raised in a Roman Catholic family and attending a Catholic school.

She has a son, Rahul, and daughter, Priyanka, who have also begun to dabble in politics in a big way. They face no problems with regard to the citizenship issue as they were born in India.

Bodies of dead Iraqi civilians stored in a refrigerated truck.

It seems the world has gone off to sleep so far as killings, murder and mayhem in Iraq is concerned. Years are flying by and ordinary men, women and children continue to be slaughtered.

Why? Is there anyone left to attempt an honest answer?

America is allowing its valiant soldiers to be sacrificed at the altar of personal whims and expediency of the present US administration/business.

The UN and member states have even forgotten to mumble routine cliches about human rights, violence, forcible occupation of a country by foreign troops, crime against women and children…The list is too long.

And the United Nations’ members, and its bloated bureaucracy, refuse to wake up from its slumber.

Do you know (or does it matter to you at all) that the U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army? The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81. While the Iraqi military toll was 44.

More here…

There have been 3,504 coalition deaths — 3,246 Americans, two Australians, 134 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, six Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 32 Italians, one Kazakh, three Latvian, 19 Poles, two Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians — in the war in Iraq as of March 30, 2007, according to a CNN count.

At least 24,314 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon.

Now we come to the hapless civilians. At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion. For details please click here…

And here…

The following statement typically reflects the dehumanized world: “Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casualties, and a spokesman said yesterday there is no way to validate estimates by others.”

Did I hear someone say that the hanged dictator’s rule was much better than the one imposed by a foreign power as far as ordinary Iraqis are concerned?

Go ask an Iraqi women or child…

Two quotations come to mind…

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” - George Orwell
————–
“Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time - AND YOUR GOVERNMENT, WHEN IT DESERVES IT” - Mark Twain

Last April, I covered the Italian elections here, here, and here.

I was happy that challenger Romano Prodi of the center-left beat incumbent Silvio Berlusconi of the center-right. Berlusconi is, after all, a crook.

But the election was close, and, as the BBC is reporting, Prodi has resigned after “after losing a crucial foreign policy vote in the Senate”. The issue? America’s war on terror: “In the vote, several of Mr Prodi’s coalition partners opposed troop deployments in Afghanistan and plans to expand a US airbase in northern Italy.”

It is not clear what will happen now. “President Giorgio Napolitano is now expected to hold talks with political leaders before reaching a decision. He could accept the resignation or ask Mr Prodi to stay in power.”

High drama. Politics as usual in Italy.