October Foreclosure Filings Surge – 50,000 Lost Homes In October
Foreclosure filings have nearly doubled from a year ago and more people could lose their homes in 2008, according to a report released Thursday.
In October, 224,451 foreclosure filings were reported nationwide, up 94 percent from October 2006 and up 2 percent from September, according to RealtyTrac.
In the month, 53,609 U.S. homeowners were forced out of homes repossessed by banks, up from 20,768 a year ago, the firm said. Through October, a total of 309,557 homes have been repossessed by banks leading to forced evictions.
“Some people are in over their heads, owing more than what they can sell their house for,” said RealtyTrac spokesman Daren Blomquist.
For the full year, RealtyTrac expects 2 million homes to have entered the foreclosure process – including bank repossessions, default notices and auction sale notices.
U.S. Envoy To Press Israel To Take Risks
Predicting potentially grave security consequences for Israel, defense officials responded pessimistically Thursday to news that former NATO commander and retired US general James Jones had been tapped by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the new special envoy to coordinate security between Israel and the Palestinians.
A senior defense official involved in talks with the Palestinians said that Jones was likely to invest most of his efforts in pressuring Israel to concede to the Palestinians and taking risks on issues of security.
“Another envoy is not what is needed now,” the official said. “Both sides know what needs to be done, the problem is that due to everything else that is going on – including Hamas’s control over Gaza and the current coalition in Israel – things are stuck.”
Pope Invites Senior Muslims To Vatican Meeting
Pope Benedict XVI has invited senior Muslim figures, who signed an appeal for greater dialogue between religions, to a meeting at the Vatican, in a letter released Thursday.
The pope praised the “positive spirit” behind the October 11 message signed by 138 top Muslims from around the world and sent to Christian leaders, said Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone in the letter sent in Pope Benedict’s name.
The pope wanted to meet a representative group of the signatories at the Vatican, he added in the letter sent to Jordan’s Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, head of the Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman.
“The Pope has asked me to convey his gratitude to Your Royal Highness and to all who signed the letter,” Bertone wrote.
“He also wishes to express his deep appreciation for this gesture, for the positive spirit which inspired the text and for the call for a common commitment to promoting peace in the world.
“Without ignoring or downplaying our differences as Christians and Muslims, we can and therefore should look to what unites us, namely, belief in the one God, the provident Creator and universal Judge who at the end of time will deal with each person according to his or her actions. We are all called to commit ourselves totally to him and to obey his sacred will.”
Powerful Earthquake Hits Caribbean
A powerful earthquake rocked the eastern Caribbean on Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey said. No damage was immediately reported.
The earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.3, was centered 23 miles southeast of Roseau, the capital of Dominica, where the shaking lasted for about 20 seconds. The quake was felt as far away as Puerto Rico.
The quake struck at 2 p.m. EST at a depth of 90 miles beneath the surface of the Earth, according to the geological survey’s Web site.
Catholic and LDS Groups Call For Boycott Of Movie The Golden Compass
The ominous e-mail from his wife’s LDS Relief Society in Provo bothered Brandon Sanderson.
“Here’s a movie you will want to skip,” it said, urging Mormons to stay away from “The Golden Compass,” a fantasy film based on the novels by Philip Pullman, due to open Dec. 7. The e-mail claimed that because Pullman is an avowed atheist, he was using his fiction to subtly promote anti-God beliefs.
That same e-mail warning circulated among LDS groups from Delta to Bountiful. The e-mails claim the anti-religious themes have been toned down for the film, but the goal is to get children to read Pullman’s trilogy, “His Dark Materials,” which attack organized religion and belief in God.
“I feel this information about this movie is too important for you not to know about it,” Kevin Prusse, principal of Bountiful’s Muir Park Elementary School, wrote in an e-mail.
The same urgent warning raced through the Catholic community.
Putins Party – Russian Election Marred By Allegations of Fraud and Coercion
Though more than a dozen parties are on the ballot for Russia’s parliamentary election Sunday, one would hardly know it. The pro-Kremlin United Russia (UR) party, whose standing has jumped more than 25 percent since President Vladimir Putin announced he would head its candidate list last month, could fairly win up to two-thirds of votes for the 450-seat State Duma, according to most polls.
But in what some experts say may be the least democratic election since the USSR collapsed, boycotted by Europe’s election-monitoring body, the campaign has been marred by complaints from opposition parties of official interference, seizure of campaign literature, the exclusion of some candidates from the ballot, and the sidelining of independent Russian poll observers.
Over the past week, allegations have also surfaced, notably in an investigative report by the English-language Moscow Times, that voter coercion and outright fraud are being deployed to loft UR’s vote to even greater-than-expected heights.
“On a scale of 1 to 100, the level of democracy in this campaign is zero,” says Lilia Shibanova, head of Golos, Russia’s only nationwide network of independent election monitors. “The laws are being systematically violated. Officials at all levels are involved in agitation on behalf of a single party. There is direct pressure on citizens [to vote a particular way], especially at the municipal level.”
Long Sought After Wall In Israel Is Located
November 30, 2007 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
A wall mentioned in the Bibles Book of Nehemiah and long sought by archaeologists apparently has been found, an Israeli archaeologist says.
A team of archaeologists discovered the wall in Jerusalems ancient City of David during a rescue attempt on a tower that was in danger of collapse, said Eilat Mazar, head of the Institute of Archaeology at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research and educational institute, and leader of the dig.
Artifacts including pottery shards and arrowheads found under the tower suggested that both the tower and the nearby wall are from the 5th century B.C., the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said this week. Scholars previously thought the wall dated to the Hasmonean period from about 142 B.C. to 37 B.C.
The findings suggest that the structure was actually part of the same city wall the Bible says Nehemiah rebuilt, Mazar said. The Book of Nehemiah gives a detailed description of construction of the walls, destroyed earlier by the Babylonians.
“We were amazed,” she said, noting that the discovery was made at a time when many scholars argued that the wall did not exist.
“This was a great surprise. It was something we didnt plan,” Mazar said.
Annapolis – Israeli Officials Fear Bush and U.S. Reversal On Security and Territory
The concern was expressed on the eve of the Annapolis, Md. conference. Officials said that over the last two weeks, the administration, particularly Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, appeared to have abandoned U.S. commitments to Israel, including one in 2004 that recognized Israeli blocs in the West Bank.
A key concern has been President George Bush’s deadline for an independent Palestinian entity throughout the West Bank. Israel Security Agency director Yuval Diskin said the goal of establishing such a state within 14 months was dangerous, and that no viable Palestinian partner would be found.
[On Monday, Bush was scheduled to meet Israeli and Palestinian delegations to Annapolis. The U.S. president was expected to call for an acceleration of efforts for a Palestinian state.]
Officials said the most important U.S. commitment was a letter by Bush in 2004 meant to encourage the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The letter was said to have cited American recognition that in any final agreement with the Palestinians, Israel would not return to the 1967 borders.
“There is a serious question about the exact standing of the Bush letter on the eve of Annapolis,” former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, said.
Gold, a consultant to the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, cited Ms. Rice’s statement of Nov. 13 that “most Israelis are ready to leave nearly all of the West Bank, just as they were ready to leave Gaza for the sake of peace.” Gold said the secretary ignored public opinion polls that showed Israeli support for the retention of the Jordan Valley.
“Having decided to convene the Annapolis meeting, the Bush administration is under enormous pressure to make sure it succeeds,” Gold said. “The situation that has been created provides the Arab states with enormous leverage over Washington to revise its positions on the core issues in order to obtain their attendance at a high enough level.”
“Even if the U.S. does not issue its own statement in lieu of the joint statement, a revised U.S. position could come in the form of a presidential address or even private communications from Washington to Arab capitals that erode the Bush letter and empty it of much of its original content,” Gold said.
On the eve of the Middle East peace conference scheduled for Nov. 27 in Annapolis, Md., Israeli officials braced for a sea change in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“As bad as it might look from the outside, the truth is 10 times worse,” a senior Israeli military officer told the Jerusalem Post. “This is a nightmare. The Americans have never been so hostile.”
Forecast: U.S. Dollar Could Plunge 90 pct
A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.
“We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen,” Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a “Panic of 2008.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they’ll fall,” he said in an interview with New York’s Hudson Valley Business Journal.
Celente — who forecast the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the dollar’s decline a year ago and gold’s current rise in May — told the newspaper the subprime mortgage meltdown was just the first “small, high-risk segment of the market” to collapse.
Derivative dealers, hedge funds, buyout firms and other market players will also unravel, he said.
Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. and General Motors Corp., will also be fairly common “for some time to come,” he said.
He said he would not “be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths,” Celente said.
The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living, he said.
A result will be a drop in holiday spending a year from now, followed by a permanent end of the “retail holiday frenzy” that has driven the U.S. economy since the 1940s, he said.
Study Calls HIV in D.C. A Modern Epidemic
The first statistics ever amassed on HIV in the District, released today in a sweeping report, reveal “a modern epidemic” remarkable for its size, complexity and reach into all parts of the city.
The numbers most starkly illustrate HIV’s impact on the African American community. More than 80 percent of the 3,269 HIV cases identified between 2001 and 2006 were among black men, women and adolescents. Among women who tested positive, a rising percentage of local cases, nine of 10 were African American.
The 120-page report, which includes the city’s first AIDS update since 2000, shows how a condition once considered a gay disease has moved into the general population. HIV was spread through heterosexual contact in more than 37 percent of the District’s cases detected in that time period, in contrast to the 25 percent of cases attributable to men having sex with men.
“It blows the stereotype out of the water,” said Shannon Hader, who became head of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration in October. Increases by sex, age and ward over the past six years underscore her blunt conclusion that “HIV is everybody’s disease here.”
The new numbers are a statistical snapshot, not an estimate of the prevalence of infection in the District, which is nearly 60 percent black. Hader, an epidemiologist and public health physician who has worked on the disease in this country and internationally, said previous projections remain valid: One in 20 city residents is thought to have HIV and 1 in 50 residents to have AIDS, the advanced manifestation of the virus.
Pat Buchanans New Book – Day of Reckoning Declares America May Be At Its End
November 26, 2007 by admin
Filed under Moral Decay
According to the new release..
“America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive.”
The U.S. Army is breaking and is too small to meet America’s global commitments.
The dollar has sunk to historic lows and is being abandoned by foreign governments.
U.S. manufacturing is being hollowed out.
The greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the country, leading to Balkanization and the loss of the Southwest to Mexico.
The culture is collapsing and the nation is being deconstructed along the lines of race and class.
A fiscal crisis looms as the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare remain unaddressed.
All these crises are hitting America at once — a perfect storm of crises.
Specifically, Buchanan contends:
• Pax Americana, the era of U.S. global dominance, is over. A struggle for global hegemony has begun among the United States, China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam
• Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a product of hubris and of ideology, a secular religion of “democratism,” to which Bush was converted in the days following 9/11
• Torn asunder by a culture war, America has now begun to break down along class, ethnic and racial lines.
• The greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty and independence is the scheme of a global elite to erase America’s borders and merge the USA, Mexico and Canada into a North American Union.
• Free trade is shipping jobs, factories and technology to China and plunging America into permanent dependency and unpayable debt. One of every six U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished under Bush
• “Sovereign Wealth Funds,” controlled by foreign regimes and stuffed with trillions of dollars from U.S. trade deficits, are buying up strategic corporate assets vital to America’s security
• As U.S. wages are stagnant, corporate CEOs are raking in rising pay and benefits 400 to 500 times that of their workers
• The Third World invasion through Mexico is a graver threat to our survival as one nation than anything happening in Afghanistan or Iraq
* European-Americans, 89% of the nation when JFK took the oath, are now 66% and sinking. Before 2050, America is a Third World nation
• By 2060, America will add 167 million people and 105 million immigrants will be here, triple the 37 million today.
Study: Natural Disasters Quadruple Over Last Two Decades
The number of weather-related disasters have quadrupled over the last 20 years, British charity Oxfam said in a report published on Sunday.
There are now as many as 500 weather-related disasters a year from an average of 120 disasters a year in the early 1980s, the organization said.
Meanwhile, the number of people affected by extreme natural disasters has soared by 68 percent, from 174 million a year between 1985 to 1994 to 254 million people a year between 1995 to 2004, Oxfam said.
“This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people,” said Oxfam director Barbara Stocking.
“This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people.”
Oxfam said rising greenhouse gas emissions are the major cause for the increase and must be tackled. It urged the UN conference on Climate Change in Bali in December to agree on a mandate to negotiate a global deal to provide assistance to developing countries to cope with the impacts of climate change and reduce green house gas emissions.
“Action is needed now to prepare for more disasters otherwise humanitarian assistance will be overwhelmed and recent advances in human development will go into reverse,” Stocking said.
Oxfam said rich countries must move first and fastest since they are most responsible for climate change.
Annapolis Peace Summit -Will Bush Ask Israel To Return To 1967 Borders
If true, time is surely short.
———————–
According to the leading correspondent covering the Israeli Prime Ministers Office, Shimon Shiffer of Yediot Ahronot Israels largest newspaper, President Bushs address at Annapolis “will not be easy for Israeli ears.” In Fridays magazine, he argues, in an article co-authored by his colleague Nahum Barnea, that Bush will call for “the estabishment of a Palestinian state, the end of occupation, and a return of Israel to the 1967 borders, leaving an opening for land swaps.”
The authors explain that Olmert knows that “this text cannot be changed.”
If the report is true, and both of these reporters have direct access to Olmert, then Bush is close to abandoning the April 2004 gurantees on settlement blocs and “defensible borders” that he gave in writing to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. That letter was all Israel received for pulling 9,000 Israelis out of their homes in the Gaza Strip.
[..]
In Sundays Maariv newspaper, Ben Caspit, its chief foreign affairs correspondent, is reporting that there is a struggle in Washington today over the contents of the Bush Annapolis address, with the Saudis, Rice, and Israel all pulling in different directions.
[..]
But it is also difficult to explain the sudden decision of the Saudis to attend Annapolis at the level of foreign minister, unless someone in the administration gave them some guarantees.
Catholic Cardinals Discuss Threat From Christian Church Groups
November 24, 2007 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
The Roman Catholic Church must figure out what it is doing wrong in the battle for souls since so many Catholics are leaving the Church to join Pentecostal and other evangelical movements, a top Vatican cardinal said Friday.Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Vatican’s office for relations with other Christians, told a meeting of the world’s cardinals that the Church must undergo a “self-critical pastoral examination of conscience” to confront the “exponential” rise of Pentecostal movements.
“We shouldn’t begin by asking ourselves what is wrong with the Pentecostals, but what our own pastoral shortcomings are,” Kasper told the gathering, noting that such evangelical and charismatic groups count 400 million faithful around the world.
The Vatican has been increasingly lamenting the rise of Protestant evangelical communities, which it describes as “sects,” in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere and the resulting flight of Catholics. In Brazil alone, Roman Catholics used to account for about 90 percent of the population in the 1960s; by 2005 it was down to 67 percent.
Kasper’s comments came on the eve of Saturday’s ceremony to elevate 23 new cardinals. As he did during his first consistory in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI asked the world’s cardinals to come to Rome early for a meeting to discuss church concerns.
This year, Kasper briefed the cardinals on relations with other Christians, focusing on the church’s relations with the Orthodox, Protestants and Pentecostal movements.
Kasper said the rise of independent, often “aggressive” evangelical movements in Africa and elsewhere had complicated the church’s ecumenical task. Nevertheless, Kasper told reporters that “ecumenism is not an option but an obligation.”
Kasper opened his remarks by updating the cardinals and cardinal-designates on an important new document approved by a Vatican-Orthodox theological commission that has been working to heal the 1,000-year schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
In the document, Catholic and Orthodox representatives both agreed that the pope has primacy over all bishops — although they disagreed over just what authority that primacy gives him.
The development is significant since the Great Schism of 1054 — which split the Catholic and Orthodox churches — was precipitated largely by disagreements over the primacy of the pope.
Kasper told the cardinals that the document was an “important turning point,” since it marked the first time that Orthodox churches had agreed that there is a universal level of the church, that it has a primate, and that according to ancient church practice, that primate is the bishop of Rome the pope.
Kasper said that the Vatican’s relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, had become “significantly smoother” in recent years.
“We can say there’s no longer a freeze but a thaw,” Kasper said.
Tensions between the two churches have been strained over Orthodox accusations that the Vatican is seeking converts on traditionally Orthodox territories, particularly in eastern Europe charges that Rome denies.
The rift has precluded a meeting between a pope and Patriarch Alexy II, long sought by Pope John Paul II and pursued by Benedict.
Kasper noted that Moscow had “never categorically excluded” such an encounter.
