USA - Americans are voting in mid-term elections which will decide who controls the Senate and pave the way for the 2016 race for the White House. Polling booths opened in the eastern states at 06:00 local time (11:00 GMT). The Republicans, who already control the House of Representatives, need to gain just six seats to take the Senate. Meanwhile the Democrats are battling to stay ahead as President Barack Obama's approval ratings fall to the lowest they have been since he was elected. Many analysts predict a Republican victory as Mr Obama's popularity rate has failed to climb much above 40%, despite recent improvements in the economy. "This is a referendum on the president," Republican senator and potential 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul told NBC's Meet the Press at the weekend.
USA - War was the leading cause of death in the military nearly every year between 2004 and 2011 until suicides became the top means of dying for troops in 2012 and 2013, according to a bar chart published this week in a monthly Pentagon medical statistical analysis journal. For those last two years, suicide outranked war, cancer, heart disease, homicide, transportation accidents and other causes as the leading killer, accounting for about three in 10 military deaths each of those two years. More than 6,800 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 and more than 3,000 additional service members have taken their lives in that same time, according to Pentagon data.
RUSSIA - Putin has called for a “new world order,” with the aim of stabilizing the globe. He believes the US is abusing its role as global leader. What’s not being widely reported is the fact that the pillars of the old order have been crumbing for years. It used to be all so simple. The world was split into two camps – the West and the rest. And the West was truly the best. Twenty years ago, six of the world’s biggest economies were part of the pro-Washington world.
EUROPE - Ahead of her visit Friday, Federica Mogherini says actors in the region ‘need the European Union to be present to make steps forward’. The European Union’s new foreign policy chief called for the creation of a Palestinian state within the five years of her term, and announced that the EU intends to play a more influential role in the Middle East than it has in the past. “What’s important for me is not whether other countries, be they European or not, recognize Palestine,” Federica Mogherini told the European press in comments published Tuesday, referring to Sweden’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state. “I’d be happy if, during my mandate, the Palestinian state existed.”
GERMANY - David Cameron is furious about the EU Commission's demand that the UK make a back payment of €2.1 billion. But it is the British prime minister's stance on immigration that has German Chancellor Merkel more worried. She fears he may be crossing a red line.
VATICAN - Conservative Catholics, angry at Pope Francis’s more moderate tone, are bucking the Church’s hierarchy. Almost from the beginning, there have been rumblings of discontent about Pope Francis. While the world’s media fell in love with him, there were more conservative bishops who felt that Francis’s popular appeal came at the expense of carefully worked-out Church rituals and teachings. They saw Francis as chipping away at established Church teachings on sexuality, kowtowing to the liberal media, and acting aggressively towards conservative church leaders.
USA/UK - QE has boosted equity prices, while hammering ordinary savers and pensioners while handing a massive wealth transfer to bailed-out banks. In sum, the world’s most important central bank has fired $3,700 billion from its monetary bazooka. America’s QE has been six times bigger than envisaged. The Fed’s balance sheet has grown more than three-fold in just over half a decade – an unprecedented monetary expansion. And it’s not just America, of course. Launched in March 2009, British QE was presented as a £50 billion program. It has since ballooned to £375 billion, some 7.5 times the official prediction. The Bank of England’s balance sheet has quadrupled, with our QE focusing on gilt purchases. The Bank now holds over a third of all outstanding sovereign bonds.
JAPAN - The Bank of Japan is mopping up the country's vast debt and driving down the yen in a radical experiment in modern global finance. The Bank of Japan has stunned the world with fresh blitz of stimulus, pushing quantitative easing to unprecedented levels in a bid to drive down the yen and avert a relapse into deflation. The move set off a euphoric rally on global equity markets but the economic consequences may be less benign. Critics say it threatens a trade shock across Asia in what amounts to currency warfare, risking serious tensions with China and Korea, and tightening the deflationary noose on Europe. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) voted by 5:4 in a hotly-contested decision to boost its asset purchases by a quarter to roughly $700 billion a year, covering the fiscal deficit and the lion’s share of Japan’s annual budget. “They are monetizing the national debt even if they don’t want to admit it,” said Marc Ostwald, from Monument Securities.
SOUTH AFRICA - Gauteng’s water was recently switched off because it was “so close to the edge” – and that’s just the beginning. The rest of the country is running on empty unless government spends 100 times more to secure our water supply. In more than half of the country, South Africans are using more water than what’s available. We are already using 98% of our available water supply, and 40% of our waste water treatment is in a “critical state”. A staggering 37% of our clean, drinkable water is being lost through inefficient ways of using water such as leaking pipes, dripping taps – and that is what’s being reported, the figure could be much higher.
BANGLADESH - Imagine what happens when electricity is cut off nationwide in a country of 160 million people. In Bangladesh, everyday life was brought to a standstill on Saturday as factories, hospitals, and homes plunged into darkness or had to rely on generators. Even the prime minister’s official residence was left with no electricity, as the small but extremely densely populated South Asian country experienced one of the worst blackouts in world’s recent history. “The national grid collapsed so the whole country lost power,” Reuters quoted Mohammad Saiful Islam, a director of the state-run Bangladesh Power Development Board, as saying. “Our repeated efforts to restore electricity across Bangladesh failed repeatedly.”
UK - New British government threats that a Christian school, which previously was rated “good” and “excellent,” may be closed if it doesn’t promote “other faiths” are based on new regulations that need to be reviewed, according to school officials.
GERMANY - The German government is accelerating the creation of an EU army by means of bilateral military cooperation. The German-Polish "declaration of intent" on military cooperation of the two countries' armed forces, signed in the middle of the week, is the most recent example.
GERMANY - Assistant Spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry Susan Shibley said on Friday that her country would not follow in the footsteps of Sweden and recognise a Palestinian State, Anadolu news agency said. She was speaking at a press conference held in Berlin. She said that her country has been supporting a solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on the two-state plan via a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
GERMANY/UK - Chancellor Angela Merkel would rather see the UK exit from the European Union than compromise over the principle of free movement of workers, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.
ISRAEL - Housing and Construction Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home) responded to the Jordanian government's threat to revoke the 1994 peace agreement with Israel, due to controversy over the Temple Mount. Israel temporarily closed the Mount to both Jewish and Muslim worshippers on Thursday, in an attempt to calm tensions.
“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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