He was born during an eclipse (May 18, 1920) and there will be an eclipse, a rare type of partial eclipse, Friday (April 8) on the day of his burial.

And so now eyes have turned more intently to an old prophecy attributed to the Irish monk St. Malachy O’Morgair — who supposedly foresaw the entire succession of popes by using riddle-like nicknames, with the one fitting the 110th — John Paul II — being De Labore Solis, which means “from the labor of the sun.”

Indeed, John Paul II was the Pope of Fatima — where there was the famous “miracle of the sun” — and reigned during an explosion of other supernatural claims involving solar miracles. Like the sun he came out of the East (Poland). Like the sun he visited countries all around the globe. There was a glow that emanated from him.

Of the sun, yes, and with a stature that means some kind of change of era is coming. This was a giant of a man. This was “Mary’s Pope.” It was the Pope of her secret. It was as if he was there to prevent or stave off a (long-overdue) chastisement and now he is gone.

The way he died could not have been more dramatic, the “culture of life” Pope dying two days after Terri Schiavo in a benchmark case on the value of life — she prematurely put to death, in commotion, in terror, he dying with all the dignity with which the old, infirm, and disabled should die.

There was the Pope who had fought for Terri nearing the same end of the road (with even a feeding tube) but in a way that was natural and calm, in a state of prayer, such that he was able to tell his aides he was “happy” and that they too should be happy and then ending his life with Mass, more prayer, and the word, “Amen.”

The very way he died was “prophetic.” You can’t get a much more pointed ending.
Full Article:spiritdaily.com

This is the sort of back-story and drivel with which the minds of ‘the faithful’ are being poisoned. And we ‘paranoids’ from way back can’t help noticing the masonic calling-cards that whoever these people are are so fond of leaving lying around…All that Sun business.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund called yesterday for a doubling of foreign aid to poor countries in five years, adding their weight to recent support from other development groups for such increases.

They laid out an agenda for combating global poverty, including calling for debt relief for poor countries and trade reform by rich ones, in a joint 256-page report. The document, which was reviewed by their governing boards, sets the stage for a high-level meeting of the two institutions this weekend in Washington.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Doubling the stranglehold on ‘poor lands.’

PARIS (AP) — People screamed to be rescued from flames — some even jumped from windows — as a fire roared through a Paris hotel early Friday used by the government to house needy African families. At least 20 people were killed, half of them children, officials said.

More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously. The fire was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel in the capital’s 9th district, a popular tourist area, fire officials said.
Full Article: nytimes.com

I guess Africans only rate one-star i.e. firetraps.

JERUSALEM, April 14 – A prominent Israeli rabbi has reversed an earlier ban and ruled that the anti-impotency drug Viagra can be made kosher for Passover, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday.

The rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, a former Sephardic chief rabbi, said Viagra could be taken if the pill was placed in special gelatin capsules before the weeklong observance begins April 23, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Either the administrators of New York City’s Public School 34 aren’t hip to semantics, or their most recent interpretation and application of the term “savage” is entirely incongruent to the discourse of White-patriarchal-privilege, and most specifically here, the hastening assault against the Haitian Global Community by a myriad selection of American society. For further elaboration, please see the following.

As a seasoned and rather proud cynic, there are few displays of barbarism that tweak the nerves, bring about a spat of fury, a vitriolic spasm, and what have you. Forget that last bit of deceit. In reality, all too often, I do succumb to the sexy red temptress of rage. The latest chapter of rancor and virulence proliferated by New York Public School 34’s Assistant Principle Nancy Miller and Principle Pauline Shakespeare has my bowels in fits.

“While all my city is heavy I drop elephant shit
Smeared the face of the fascist priest’s pulpit”
Zach De La Rocha

Yup.

New York’s cultural cabal stays heavy, dropping fecal matter from the fuselage of pig despotism, late-night blackface, mayoral-Mussolinism and the like; Stuka war eagles razing the Black, Brown and Migrant communities like the Ho Chi Minh trail. For the Haitian Community, Operation Phoenix leapt through McNamara’s porthole of kill-tha-gook and embedded itself within the psyche of city-commandants. Nou tout Viet Cong ­ We are all Viet Cong. Savages, in short.

Thirteen fourth grade students on public trial. The jury ­ PS34 populace. The courtroom ­ school cafeteria. The crime ­ being Haitian. In response to a classroom conflict involving two students, educational hack Nancy Miller, as white-cloaked-judge in de facto robe, sentenced the youths to public humiliation and ethnic degradation. As punishment for acting in the universal vein of childhood, she sat the children on the cafeteria floor before the student-jury, forced them to eat their lunch of rice and chicken with bare hands, subjecting them to a primary-educational-stoning, equipped with demeaning glances and ridicule per their peers. According to the “guilty” parties, Miller’s articulation was as such: “In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here.” Yes Ms. Miller, in Haiti, they, Blancs yo (Whites / foreigners / outsiders, aka UN, U$, France, Canada, USAID, OAS, CIA, 184, Haitian Elite) do treat us as inferior peoples, acting as only savages can. We expect no less from you, you studious apprentice. Only through the lens of a dysfunctional clique of negrophobes could such a valiant people be “considered inferior.” If time travel were possible, now would be an excellent time to send message to General Le Clerc and Napoleon Bonaparte. The query: How humiliating was the serving, guerilla style in 1804?

The plot thickens. Principle Pauline Shakespeare, a sister no less ­ pause for dramatic effect, a fucking sister ­ exemplified the role of house-hand, Sanbo, McWhorter, Watts, Powell, Condoskeeza, Cosby, Blackwell; attempted a cover up, in doing so, efforting to bribe the gesticulating “savages,” rather “animals,” with ice cream. Shit, you know tha ghetto’s got sweet teeth. Miller and Shakespeare promoted the stereotype to the wrong community. In Haiti, we sharpen sugar cane stalks to pierce United Nations APV’s.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

By Maria Carrion
With his controversial past statements on the United Nations now being used as munition against his candidacy to be the United States Ambassador at the UN, President George W. Bush’s nominee John Bolton has an uphill battle in proving himself as anything but an enemy of the global body.

But at his raucous confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Bolton pointed to his pro-bono work on a little-known area of the world as evidence that he respects the work of the UN: Africa’s last colony, the Western Sahara. Bolton assisted former Secretary of State James Baker when his then-boss was appointed UN Special Envoy to the Western Sahara and given the task of organizing a referendum for self-determination in the territory, which has been occupied by Morocco for the past 30 years. For just a minute, Bolton put this tiny territory on the Senate’s map.

Many of the Senators attending the hearings might have never heard of the Western Sahara, a stretch of land that lies between Morocco and Mauritania. In 1975, Morocco invaded the Western Sahara following the withdrawal of Spain, its former colonial ruler. The invasion had the support of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was facilitated by Spain with the signing of an agreement that allowed Morocco and Mauritania to take possession of the land. Mauritania later withdrew.

The brutal military invasion was followed by a repopulation campaign known as the Green March, with hundreds of thousands of Moroccan citizens moving to the area with the promise of financial aid and a better life. At the same time, almost 200,000 Sahrawis, as the natives of the land are known, were forced into exile, settling in camps in Algeria, whose government has supported them financially and militarily. Others too frail to make the long trip by foot through the Sahara Desert stayed behind in the occupied lands, creating traumatic family separations that have lasted to this day. Thousands of others were killed, disappeared or jailed, while many young men and some women joined the newly-formed Polisario Front in a war against Morocco that lasted until 1991, and that produced thousands of deaths on both sides. With US aid, Morocco built a wall ­ more like an interminable sand trench lined with over a million landmines ­ stretching for over one thousand kilometers between the occupied lands and a small part of the Western Sahara controlled by the Polisario Front, known as the “liberated zone.” Morocco refers to it as the “protective wall”; Sahrawis call it the “wall of shame.”
Full Article: counterpunch.org

Saddam Hussein’s effigy was pulled down again in Baghdad’s Firdos Square at the weekend. But unlike the made-for-TV event when US troops first entered the Iraqi capital, the toppling of Saddam on the occupation’s second anniversary was different.

Instead of being done by US marines with a few dozen Iraqi bystanders, 300,000 Iraqis were on hand. They threw down effigies of Bush and Blair as well as the old dictator, at a rally that did not celebrate liberation but called for the immediate departure of foreign troops.

For most Iraqis, with the exception of the Kurds, Washington’s “liberation” never was. Wounded national pride was greater than relief at Saddam’s departure. Iraqis were soon angered by the failure to get power and water supplies repaired, the brutality of US army tactics, and the disappearance of their country’s precious oil revenues into inadequately supervised accounts, or handed to foreigners under contracts that produced no benefits for Iraqis.

From last autumn’s disastrous attack on Falluja to the huge increase in detention without trial, the casualties go on rising. After an amnesty last summer, the numbers of “security detainees” have gone up again and reached a record 17,000.

The weekend’s vast protest shows that opposition is still growing, in spite of US and British government claims to have Iraqis’ best interests at heart. It was the biggest demonstration since foreign troops invaded.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

The man chosen by George Bush to be the new US director of national intelligence yesterday denied that he had covered up human rights abuses when he was Washington’s ambassador to Honduras.

John Negroponte came under fierce questioning from the Senate intelligence committee as his nomination for the role was considered.

The questioning coincided with the publication of diplomatic cables sent by Mr Negroponte in the 1980s which indicate that he secretly sought to undermine the peace process in central America and entertained the head of a group trying to violently overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The documents show that he sought to cover up clandestine US involvement in the war in Nicaragua.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

CHICAGO – The Secret Service sent agents to investigate a college art gallery exhibit of mock postage stamps, one depicting President Bush with a gun pointed at his head.

The exhibit, called “Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin,” opened last week at Columbia College in Chicago. It features stamps designed by 47 artists addressing issues such as the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal, racism and the war in Iraq.

None of the artists is tied to the college.

Secret Service spokesman Tom Mazur would not say Tuesday whether the inquiry had been completed or whom the Secret Service had interviewed, but he said no artwork had been confiscated.

The investigation began after authorities received a call from a Chicago resident.

“We need to ensure, as best we can, that this is nothing more than artwork with a political statement,” Mazur said.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

Well what else would it be?

MOUNT TALANG, Indonesia (AFP) – Massive quakes in Indonesia have stirred two huge volcanoes from their slumber and sent shockwaves reverberating along a vast and volatile region known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”

Both on land or underwater, the volatile edges of the north Pacific, bounded by the east Asian rim and the west coast of the Americas, are alive with near-constant seismic activity.

Some of the most dramatic natural disasters of recent history have happened within the Ring’s arc, which stretches from Chile, north to Alaska and then west to encompass Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.

From the nuclear-like explosion of Krakatoa volcano off Indonesia in 1883 to the eruption of Mount St Helens in the United States in 1980, the Ring’s awesome power is legendary.

But it gained new notoriety when on December 26 last year, a massive 9.3 magnitude earthquake occurred off Indonesia unleashing tsunamis that devastated shores around the Indian Ocean, killing more than 220,000 people.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com