• Home
• About
• Contact
• Prophecy News Search

Subscribe

Vatican Urges Israel To Drop Barriers To Papal Visit

The Vatican urged Israel Monday to send out the “positive signals” Pope Benedict XVI needs to pave the way for an historic visit to the Holy Land.

Israel and the Vatican have been in negotiations since 2004, following a 10-year hiatus, over a bilateral accord on the legal and financial status of the Roman Catholic Church in Israel.

In September, Israels President Shimon Peres indicated after a private audience that the pontiff could make the journey in 2008, but chief Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said obstacles remain.

“The conditions for a papal visit, specifically the pacification of the situation in the region and the sending of positive signals by Israel in these bilateral negotiations, are not yet in place,” said Lombardi.

“There are no concrete plans for a voyage to the Holy Land,” he added during a press conference on the situation for Christians in Isael.

Antonio Maria Veglio, secretary of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, regretted the lack of progress in negotiations, adding: “Dealing with Israel is not easy.”

Israels ambassador to the Vatican, Oded Ben Hur, had said the two states were “very close” to an “historic” agreement on December 3, with the next round of talks scheduled for December 13 in Israel.

Centered on the economic element of a heads of agreement signed between the two states in 1993, the negotiations are principally concerned with the legal and tax status of Church property and commercial activities of Christian communities in Israel.

In a related complaint, the Custos of the Holy Land, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has bemoaned the difficulties for priests and monks who come from Arab countries in obtaining visas to travel to Israel.

“A third of our people, a proportion which is falling fast, incidentally, come from Arab lands. However, getting an Arab priest into the Holy Land has become virtually impossible,” he said.

He also described “the great suffering” of Israels 170,000-strong Christian community, given political, economic and social problems in the region.

The Custos is in charge of Catholic friars across the Middle East and coordinates the reception of pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Source

If this is your first time visiting Bible Prophecy In The News, I'd like to invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Church Shootings On Rise In U.S.

Church shootings, in the headlines because of the attacks by Matthew Murray, 24, of Englewood, Colo., on two Christian groups last weekend, are on the rise across the United States, even though they’re not yet at epidemic proportions.

Murray killed two people at a Youth With A Mission missionary training center in Arvada, Colo., early last Sunday morning, then apparently posted some rantings on the Internet, and drove to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs where he killed two teen girls. He also wounded half a dozen others before he was confronted by a church member volunteering as a security guard, and was shot.

Read More

Strong Earthquake Sends Residents Fleeing In Eastern Indonesia

A deep 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Indonesia on Saturday, sending panicked residents running out of their homes, the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency and witnesses said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries and no tsunami alert was issued, said Suharjono, an agency spokesman.

The tremor struck at a depth of about 100 kilometers in Maluku province, about 2,700 kilometers east of the capital, Jakarta.

Pakistan Has Eight Cases of Human Bird Flu

Five members of a family in Pakistan are among eight people who may be the country’s first human cases of bird flu, the World Health Organization said. At least one brother died.

Pakistan’s national laboratory found the lethal H5N1 avian flu strain caused the infections in three brothers and two cousins from the same family, according to information from a Dec. 15 WHO statement and Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman in Geneva. Another brother from the U.S., who attended a funeral for one of the victims, and his son tested negative for the virus at a hospital in Nassau County, New York, Hartl said.

Medical teams have been sent to Pakistan to assist local authorities in investigating the cases, in which two people had only mild symptoms, Hartl said. Doctors are monitoring for signs avian flu may be adapting to humans by killing fewer people, fostering its spread.

Read More

Fasting Helps The Heart

Mormons have less heart disease, something doctors have chalked up to their religions ban on smoking. New research suggests another of their habits also may be helping: fasting for one day each month.

A study in Utah, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is based, found that people who skipped meals once a month were about 40 percent less likely to be diagnosed with clogged arteries than those who did not regularly fast.

Non-Mormons who regularly took breaks from food also were less likely to have clogged arteries, scientists found.

They concede that their study is far from proof that periodic fasting is good for anyone but said it poses a theory that deserves further testing.

“It might suggest these are people who just control eating habits better,” and that this discipline extends to other areas of their lives that improve their health, said Benjamin Horne, a heart disease researcher for the Intermountain Medical Center and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

He led the study and reported results at a recent American Heart Association conference. The research was partly funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
About 70 percent of Utah residents are Mormons, whose religion advises abstaining from food on the first Sunday of each month, Horne said.

Researchers got the idea to study fasting after analyzing medical records of patients who had X-ray exams to check for blocked heart arteries from 1994 to 2002 in the Intermountain Health Collaborative Study, a health registry. Of these patients, 4,629 could be diagnosed as clearly having or lacking heart disease.

Researchers saw a typical pattern: 61 percent of Mormons had heart disease, compared to 66 percent of non-Mormons. After taking smoking into account, they still saw a lower rate of heart disease among Mormons and designed a survey to explore why. It asked about Mormons religious practices: monthly fasting; avoiding tea, coffee and alcohol; taking a weekly day of rest; going to church; and donating time or money to charity.

Among the 515 people surveyed, only fasting made a significant difference in heart risks: 59 percent of periodic meal skippers were diagnosed with heart disease, vs. 67 percent of the others.
Horne speculated that when people take a break from food, it forces the body to dip into fat reserves to burn calories.

But he and other doctors cautioned that skipping meals is not advised for diabetics; it could cause dangerous swings in blood sugar.

Israel: US Report On Iran May Spark War

Israel’s public security minister warned Saturday that a U.S. intelligence report that said Iran is no longer developing nuclear arms could lead to a regional war that would threaten the Jewish state.

In his remarks  Israel’s harshest criticism yet of the U.S. report Avi Dichter said the assessment also cast doubt on American intelligence in general, including information about Palestinian security forces’ crackdown on militant groups. The Palestinian action is required as part of a U.S.-backed renewal of peace talks with Israel this month.

Dichter cautioned that a refusal to recognize Iran’s intentions to build weapons of mass destruction could lead to armed conflict in the Middle East.

He compared the possibility of such fighting to a surprise attack on Israel in 1973 by its Arab neighbors, which came to be known in Israel for the Yom Kippur Jewish holy day on which it began.

“The American misconception concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons is liable to lead to a regional Yom Kippur where Israel will be among the countries that are threatened,” Dichter said in a speech in a suburb south of Tel Aviv, according to his spokesman, Mati Gil. “Something went wrong in the American blueprint for analyzing the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Dichter didn’t elaborate on the potential scenario but seemed to imply that a world that let its guard down regarding Iran would be more vulnerable to attack by the Islamic regime.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had disputed the U.S. intelligence assessment this month, saying that Iran continues its efforts to obtain components necessary to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran still poses a major threat to the West and the world must stop it, Olmert said.

Israel has for years been warning that Iran is working on nuclear weapons and backed the United States in its international efforts to exert pressure on Iran to stop the program. Israel considers Iran a significant threat because of its nuclear ambitions, its long-range missile program and repeated calls by its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for the disappearance of Israel.

Iran says its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes.

Israel will work to change the American intelligence agencies’ view of Iran, said Dichter, a former chief of Israel’s Shin Bet secret service agency.

“A misconception by the world’s leading superpower is not just an internal American occurrence,” Dichter said.

Any future faulty U.S. intelligence on the actions of Palestinian security forces could damage peace efforts, Dichter said.

“Those same (intelligence) arms in the U.S. are apt to make a mistake and declare that the Palestinians have fulfilled their commitments, which would carry with it very serious consequences from Israel’s vantage point,” Dichter said.

Source

Revealed: Israel Agreed To Forfeit Temple Mount

In spite of longstanding denials by top officials here, the Israeli government in 2000 agreed to relinquish the Temple Mount Judaism’s holiest site to the Palestinians during U.S.-backed negotiations, according to declassified documents made public today.

The information comes as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert earlier this month denied talks started at November’s Annapolis summit would lead to Israel giving up its sovereignty over the Temple Mount, while chief Palestinian negotiators tell WND the Jewish state already agreed to forfeit Judaism’s holiest site to a coalition of Arab countries.

According to declassified Israeli government documents published today by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, during U.S.-led negotiations in 2000 at Camp David, Ehud Barak, then prime minister, agreed sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be either “ambiguous” or control would be determined based on the bond of each party to the site. The Palestinians would therefore control the upper sections of the Mount, which houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and also is the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples.

The 2000 negotiations fell through after Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected an offer of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern sections of Jerusalem.

Read More

Israeli Intel Warns Of Waning Support In The West

For the first time since the 1960s, Israel’s intelligence community has raised the prospect that the
West could abandon its support of a Jewish state.

Officials said the intelligence community has warned of a movement spreading in Europe and the United States to form one state that would include Israel, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps Jordan. The proposal was seen as a means to end Jewish sovereignty and replace it with an Arab-dominated confederation.

“The idea is based on the view in the West that a Jewish state is no longer desirable and Jews should become a minority in a much larger entity,” an official said. “It’s an idea that is spreading within the European elite and discussed in the United States as well.”

The assessment said EU and U.S. diplomats were increasingly seeing Iran as an emerging nuclear power that must be treated as the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The diplomats were also said to favor Western engagement with the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

The Cabinet was briefed on the Israeli intelligence assessment during a meeting on Nov. 21. ISA director Yuval Diskin said the proposal of “one state for two people” was sweeping Europe. He said stalemate with the Palestinian Authority could accelerate this concept, which he said was meant to de-legitimize Israel.

Source

Newer, Deadlier Cold Virus

Doctors are warning patients about a dangerous new form of an old cold virus that is causing severe respiratory illness and even death in what appear to be healthy Americans.

It’s called Adenovirus serotype 14, and it has infected Americans in four states - Oregon, Texas, Washington, and New York.

Ad14, as it is known, was first identified in 1955. It’s one of more than 50 serotypes.

And unlike other respiratory infection, doctors say Ad14 often affects those who appear healthy.

“It seems to be affecting individuals that had no other medical problems,” says Dr. Tiffini Lucas. “Viruses spread easily and their ability to mutate can occur quickly and we worry about that.”

Sheilah Heilah Lynch has had a cold for four days.

“I’ve been feeling congested, nasal congestion,” she said. “Runny nose and feeling tired.”

Her doctor says she just has the common cold and should be feeling better in a couple days. But for someone suffering from Adenovirus 14, symptoms would be more intense -  severe coughing, fever, trouble breathing - and they would progressively get worse .

At least 1,035 cases of Adenovirus have been reported this year, and at least ten people have died.

There is as of yet no specific antiviral medication to treat the illness. Instead, doctors are treating the symptoms. The medical community says despite the outbreak, patients should not panic if they find themselves feeling ill.

“I don’t think we’ve reached this epidemic level where we have to sound the alarm for patients,” said Dr. Lucas.

Doctors say the best way to prevent the spread of Adenovirus 14 is hand-washing, covering your mouth when you cough, and staying home from work when you feel sick. But doctors warn if your symptoms get worse, or you experience shortness of breath, to call your doctor.

Source

New Kidman Film Branded Atheism For Kids

Religious groups are calling for parents to think twice before letting their children see Nicole Kidman’s new film, The Golden Compass, with some labelling it sacrilegious.

The film, based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy books, opens in Australia on Boxing Day and its release in the US this month was criticised by the Catholic League for being anti-Christian and promoting “atheism for kids”.

The books follow a girl through an apocalyptic war between the forces of good and evil, including a thinly veiled version of the Catholic Church and a god who has gone senile.

A spokesman for Catholic Archbishop of Perth Barry Hickey said the Archbishop had not seen the film and was not aware of the books so could not comment.

A spokeswoman for the Australian Christian Lobby in WA urged parents to be aware of the intent of films before their children saw them.

Read More

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Prophecy In The News Ads

Did God Send A Prophet In The Last Days?

Latest Bible Prophecy In The News Headlines

• Russia Not About To Invade Mideast, Says New Prophecy Theory
• God Trumps Doctors For Many Americans
• Russia Considers Nuclear Missiles For Syria, Baltic
• Scientists Warn Bird Flu Strain Could Mutate To Spread Quickly
• Georgia, Russia and Ezekiel 38
• Russia: Poland Risks Attack Because of US Missiles
• Iran Tests Satellite Carrying Rocket - U.S. Concerned
• China Confiscates Bibles From American Christians
• Homeschoolers Threaten Our Cultural Comfort
• Russia Has Called The Bluff - Now The Question Becomes, What Will They Do Next?

Copyright © 2007 Bible Prophecy In The News · Bible Prophecy In The News Log in