PORTUGAL - Portugal was teetering on the brink of a new political crisis after its high court blocked austerity plans presented in the 2013 budget, a move that threatened to derail its bailout commitments with European partners.
UK - Fears over a bird flu epidemic in China and the health of the US economy saw almost £24 billion wiped off the value of Britain’s top companies yesterday. The FTSE 100 was down 1.49 per cent after figures showed America created far fewer jobs in March than expected. The London market was 94 points lower at 6249, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones also weakened. Economic fears were compounded by nervousness about an outbreak of bird flu in China which has so far claimed six lives. A third day of falls has seen the FTSE shed £40 billion in value since Tuesday.
USA - On March 23, my colleague Mark Finkelstein noted how MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry considers the unborn child a "thing" which takes a "lot of money" to "turn into a human," costing thousands of dollars to care for each year of his/her life. Now it appears that Harris-Perry thinks that, after they're born, children fundamentally belong to the state.
UK - Vegetarian or vegan employees with deeply held beliefs should be allowed to exert their rights in the workplace by refusing to sit on leather chairs or clean out office fridges containing meat or dairy products, according to new guidance.
IRAN - Talks between world powers and Iran on its nuclear programme have ended without agreement, with the EU saying their positions "remain far apart". Over two days of talks in Almaty, Iran was asked to give up work on its most sensitive nuclear activities in return for an easing of sanctions. Iran said it was up to the world powers to demonstrate willingness to take confidence-building steps. World powers suspect Iran of a covert nuclear weapons programme.
JAPAN - The Bank of Japan unleashed the world's most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.
AUSTRALIA - The cascade of WikiLeaks-style revelations shedding light on the often murky world of offshore tax havens began when Gerard Ryle received a mysterious letter in the post.
EUROPE - Everyone learned a lesson from the “bail-in” of the Cypriot banks: Russian account holders who’d laundered and stored their money on the sunny island; bank bondholders who’d thought they’d always get bailed out; Cypriot politicians whose names showed up on lists of loans that had been extended by the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank but were then forgiven and written off.
HOLLAND - An interesting development in the precious metals market is that the largest Dutch bank, ABN Amro, has said that they will no longer be providing physical delivery of precious metals including gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bullion coins and bars.
AUSTRALIA - A currency deal enabling the Australian dollar to be converted directly into Chinese yuan, slashing costs for thousands of businesses, is set to be the centrepiece of Julia Gillard's mission to China next weekend. Australia would become the third country, after the US and Japan, to secure such an arrangement from China, which is Australia's top trading partner, with exports and imports totalling $120 billion last financial year.
ISRAEL - Hackers around the globe are making final preparations for a cyberattack against Israel — purported to be the biggest attack to date • They will try to hack into banks, infiltrate government sites and infect users • Israel is also preparing itself.
CHINA - A new and deadly strain of bird flu is threatening two eastern Chinese provinces, with health authorities and virologists suspecting that a virus mutation is the link between the dead pigs that floated past Shanghai, dead migratory birds in north China, and the deaths of three people. Two new cases of H7N9 bird flu, one of them fatal, have been reported in east China’s Zhejiang Province, bringing the total number of infections in the country to nine, according to a report by Chinese regime’s state media Xinhua.
VATICAN - Pope Francis has called for "decisive action" in the fight against sex abuse of minors by priests. He told Bishop Gerhard Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith - the Vatican watchdog that deals with sex abuse cases - to ensure that perpetrators were punished. It was the Argentine Pope's first public statement on clerical sex abuse.
USA - Amber Bartlett was waiting last Friday for her kids to come home from school. One of them called from the entrance to the upscale subdivision near Little Rock, Arkansas, to tell her the community was being evacuated because of an oil spill. Bartlett was amazed by what she saw out her front door."I mean, just rolling oil. I mean, it was like a river," she says. "It had little waves in it."
USA - Thousands of gallons of oil have spilled from a pipeline in Texas, the third accident of its kind in only a week. Shell Pipeline, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, shut down their West Columbia, Texas, pipeline last Friday after electronic calculations conducted by the US National Response Center showed that upwards of 700 barrels had been lost, amounting to almost 30,000 gallons of crude oil.
“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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