ISRAEL - Rabbi Dr Benny Lau, a high-profile religious-Zionist figure, has added his voice to growing calls to allow Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. Rabbi Lau, who had previously opposed Jewish prayer there due to concerns over ritual purity, said that the events of the past few months had forced him to reconsider his stance. "Enough is enough," he said in an interview with Galei Yisrael radio, going on to level criticism against those who brandish rabbinic opinions which prohibit ascent to the Mount to further their political agendas. "It can't be that you (Muslims) stand on the Mount, pray as you wish, administer it as you wish via the Waqf administration, and the Israeli people should be humiliated to the lowest depths. This is not possible," he said of the current situation on the Temple Mount.
SWITZERLAND - Switzerland has disarmed the last bridge over the Rhine river on its border with Germany, removing the last defensive traps built to stop an invasion by Communist armies during the Cold War, German media reported on Sunday.
UK - A High Street bank may stop asking customers for their mother’s maiden name to avoid confusing account-holders with two dads, it was reported last night. A review of RBS’ ‘inclusion’ policies aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender customers could also include introducing the gender-neutral ‘Mx’ instead of the traditional Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms, it emerged last night. The bank’s global head of inclusion Marjorie Strachan said questions about maiden names would be tough for those with two mothers or fathers. She told the Times: ‘We are looking at unconscious bias. If we think about something as simple as using neutral language, that can be a good starting point.’ And of the ‘Mx’ title, she said: ‘We have considered it. It’s something we’re looking at as one of the options, although we’ve usually followed the same nomenclature that the census would use.’
USA - Nearly half of Florida households do not earn enough to pay for basic necessities, according to a report released Tuesday by the United Way that seeks to cast a light on the large group of state residents who struggle financially but do not meet the official criteria for being in poverty. The report zeroes in on the plight of low-income workers, people who have steady jobs but grapple with low wages and the increasing costs of many necessities. Florida's large number of financially fragile households is rooted in a number of economic trends, including housing affordability and other cost-of-living concerns. But the main driver is the dearth of middle-class jobs.
EUROPE - Forget the arrest warrant row, free movement of labour, budget surcharges and all the other invasions that come with membership of the European Union. There is a much bigger menace hovering above what my colleague Peter Osborne has called the “dreary parochialism” of the British debate on Europe than erosion of national sovereignty.
EUROPE - As large parts of Europe's economy grind almost to a halt, attention will focus this week on the latest assessments of business confidence in the euro zone and Germany, which has just narrowly avoided a recession. While the United States economy has accelerated and China holds a slower but steady course, euro zone countries have remained sluggish, with overall growth in output slowing to a trickle. "The euro zone is the best part of 20 percent of the global economy," James Knightley, an economist with ING, said. "The longer the stagnation goes on the more Japan-like it becomes." The euro zone's problems have raised expectations that the European Central Bank is preparing to loosen its purse strings further to try to rekindle growth.
MIDDLE EAST - "I don't know if we will ever be able to go back to Syria. My mother wants to see her home again, but she may never be able to return." Maria fights back the tears as she contemplates her country of birth, now wracked by fighting. Her mother - now in her 80s - was able to flee the fighting in Syria and stay with her son in Canada.
USA - The city of Berkeley, Missouri has issued an emergency preparedness alert to its citizens, urging them to stockpile food, water, gasoline, prescription medications and fully-charged cell phones in anticipation of widespread rioting. [It] also urges citizens to have a "contingency plan for picking up your children from school," warning that roads may be blocked, preventing vehicular traffic from moving. The local airport, says the letter, will be "protected by the National Guard" and curbside drop-offs of luggage will not be allowed.
USA - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is ordering top-to-bottom changes in how the nation's nuclear arsenal is managed, vowing to invest billions of dollars more to fix what ails a force beset by leadership lapses, security flaws and sagging morale. Hagel is scheduled to announce Friday the results of two reviews — one by Pentagon officials and a second by outside experts — and to spell out actions he has ordered to improve nuclear force management. Two senior defense officials discussed the Hagel plan Thursday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be cited by name. Hagel's moves, while not dramatic, are designed to get at the core of the problem, the officials said. Hagel ordered the reviews as a result of a series of stories by The Associated Press that revealed morale, leadership, security and safety problems across the nuclear force.
GERMANY - The second “International Urban Operations Conference” took place in central Berlin between 20 and 22 October. Four hundred delegates from 40 countries, many with dubious democratic traditions, met for three days to discuss the suppression of uprisings and other forms of civil unrest in urban areas.
USA - The State Department acknowledged that the crew of the destroyer USS Donald Cook has been gravely demoralized ever since their vessel was flown over in the Black Sea by a Russian Sukhoi-24 (Su-24) fighter jet which carried neither bombs nor missiles but only an electronic warfare device.
USA - A funny thing happened on the way to the ‘end’ of the multi-trillion dollar bond buying program known as QE - the Fed chronicles. Aside from the shift to a globalization of QE via the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan (BOJ) as I wrote about earlier, what lingers in the air of “post-taper” time is an absence of absence. For QE is not over. Instead, in the United States, the process has simply morphed from being predominantly executed by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to being executed by its major private bank members. Fed Chair, Janet Yellen, has failed to point this out in any of her speeches about the labor force, inflation, or inequality.
MIDDLE EAST - US secretary of state meets with [Palestinian Authority President] Abbas and then holds trilateral meeting with [Israeli Prime Minster] Netanyahu and [Jordanian King] Abdullah. Calm must be restored in Jerusalem before direct or regional Israeli-Palestinian peace talks can commence, said US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday, following a meeting in Amman with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Jordan.
ISRAEL - As the bloodthirsty demon of Arab terror once again raises its ugly head this week and claims innocent Jewish lives, the public debate over infraction of the 'status quo' on the Temple Mount reaches a deafening, uncivil, and disproportionate level. It’s the old game of blaming the victim, with some going so far as to say that the Jews who want to pray peacefully on the Temple Mount, are causing all the problems.
MIDDLE EAST - Militant leaders from the Islamic State group and al-Qaida gathered at a farm house in northern Syria last week and agreed on a plan to stop fighting each other and work together against their opponents, a high-level Syrian opposition official and a rebel commander have told The Associated Press.
“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!
Read online or contact email to request a copy
