Japan's government has moved to alter the country's pacifist stance, requiring schools to teach patriotism and upgrading the defence agency to a full ministry for the first time since World War II.
An interreligious initiative promoting peace has asked President George Bush and the newly elected Congress to make Arab-Israeli-Palestinian peace a top priority of U.S. foreign policy.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told a conference in Tehran questioning the Holocaust that Israel's days are numbered. "Just as the USSR disappeared, soon the Zionist regime will disappear," he said to the applause of the participants. The two-day conference provoked widespread international outrage. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the forum and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "shocking beyond belief".
In an interview with CNBC, a vice president for a prominent London investment firm yesterday urged a move away from the dollar to the "amero," a coming North American currency, he said, that "will have a big impact on everybody's life, in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico." Steve Previs, a vice president at Jefferies International Ltd., explained the Amero "is the proposed new currency for the North American Community which is being developed right now between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico."
The aim, he said, according to a transcript provided by CNBC to WND, is to make a "borderless community, much like the European Union, with the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso being replaced by the amero."
Why are Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests include deniers of the genocide? Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state. A handful of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran's controversial conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews - not because they deny the Holocaust but because they object to using it as justification for the existence of Israel.
The European Ombudsman has turned to MEPs in Brussels to seek support for a request that German be considered as a language choice on EU presidency websites, while accusing EU member states of "maladministration" for dismissing such a request.
Palestinians have been shocked by the drive-by shooting of the boys, aged between 6 and 9, outside their school on Monday. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, the first time children have been targeted in such a way. One senior official from Abbas's Fatah faction blamed people very close to Hamas, the governing Islamist movement. Hamas has angrily denied the accusations and denounced the shooting. The killings come as tensions between Fatah and Hamas reach breaking point over failed efforts to form a unity government.
From dust it came, and to dust it is returning. In what used to be a busy Israeli campsite, the road ends with a jagged scar of tarmac, disappearing into a 20ft crater. Cracks tear the earth and new holes appear underfoot without warning, dragging an abandoned hotel into the crumbling soil.
Like it or not, the United States got its Christmas present from Washington's political elites. What was it? Betrayal, packaged in the report by the Iraq Study Group. They should have wrapped it black paper and tied it with a noose. Instead it was presented to the president, Congress, the media, the public and indeed, the world, in written form that tried to put a good face on a betrayal of our military and the other nations who fought with us in Iraq. But it's also a betrayal of our country and what it stands for, to say nothing of being a blatant slap in the face and yes, betrayal of Israel.
The report is a gift to Islamic terrorists worldwide as well as the anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Christian Middle Eastern countries who see it as a road map to their fondest dreams: defeat of "The Great Satan" (read that the United States) and the annihilation of Israel.
If Israel does not vacate the Golan Heights within months, a guerilla organization allegedly formed in Syria will soon launch "resistance operations" against Israeli positions and Jewish communities in the Golan, an official from Syrian President Bashar Assad's Baath party told WND in an exclusive interview.
"If in the coming months an agreement is not forged between Israel and Syria [for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan], the Committees will begin attacks," said the official, who spoke on condition his name be withheld during an in-person interview with WND and with the G. Gordon Liddy national radio show.
It's the secret question in official Washington, D.C., in the Pentagon, and in the White House. It's the question that is so radioactive that most in government and the press dare not even pose it, let alone answer it:
Is Islam inherently violent and expansionist?
In the days following 9/11, President Bush assured America and the world that Islam was a "religion of peace" and that the violent followers of Osama Bin Laden had twisted the true Muslim faith. Acting on this belief, President Bush and other Western leaders sent troops to the Middle East in an effort to bring freedom and democracy to the Muslim world.
But what if this "understanding" of Islam is based not on fact, but instead on equal parts wishful thinking and Islamic deceit? It would mean that the entire War on Terror is based on a faulty and increasingly deadly premise.
It is becoming clear that the first 21st century clash of civilisations if there is to be one will not pit Christians against Muslims but one branch of Islam against another. In yet another escalation of the Middle East crisis sparked by the disastrous American-led occupation of Iraq, The Business has learnt that, in response to Shia Iran's ambitions to possess a nuclear arsenal, Sunni Saudi Arabia has plans to create a nuclear capability of its own.
In a development that risks turning the Middle East into a nuclear powder keg, Western and Middle Eastern sources have told this magazine that, if and when it is clear that Iran has the bomb (or is close to it), the Saudis will respond by buying one from Pakistan, a fellow Sunni state.
They would also likely purchase Pakistani ballistic missiles to replace the Chinese ones they bought in the 1980s.
Everything is already in place for this to happen.
With nearly three-quarters of a billion people traveling internationally every year and millions more relocating as immigrants and refugees, infectious disease is no longer a local issue, but a global concern. There is increasing evidence that at least some re-emerging infections are being driven by the AIDS pandemic.
Infectious diseases that are easily transmitted, such as tuberculosis, pose a particular threat to healthy populations.
"It's important to keep returning to the concept of the global village -- how interconnected we really are. We tend to be preoccupied with our own lives, our family, our work. That's natural. But we're all pretty intertwined, and that's what these emerging and re-emerging diseases are telling us."
Tony Blair has argued that Britain needs to buy a new generation of nuclear weapons because it might not be able to rely on the United States to protect it if it were attacked.
The value of the U.S. dollar on the international market is continuing to plummet, despite record growth in the US economy. Since October, the dollar has fallen 4 percent against both the euro and the Japanese yen. And this week, the dollar hit the lowest it has been against the euro since March 2005.
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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