I'm going to be giving up on covering him.
F*** this guy. He's a fraud.
"Pope says force is justified against Islamic militants in Iraq" by Nicole Winfield | Associated Press August 19, 2014
So he has BOUGHT IN to the WHOLE PROPAGANDA SHOW, huh?
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis on Monday endorsed the use of force to stop Islamic militants from attacking religious minorities in Iraq but said the international community — and not just one country — should decide how to intervene.
I really don't care for his reasons justifying aggression.
These guys. First the Crusades, now this.
Francis also said he and his advisers were considering whether he might go to northern Iraq himself to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. But he said he was holding off for now on a decision.
Crisis is over and abated, and never was what the propaganda pre$$ war megaphones were screaming. This is all crap, folks. All crap.
In other comments to journalists returning from South Korea, Francis confirmed he hoped to travel to the United States in September 2015 for a possible three-city tour: to attend a family rally in Philadelphia and to address Congress in Washington and the United Nations in New York. He said a Mexico stop on that trip was possible. He also said he might make a one-day visit to Spain next year.
On Iraq, Francis was asked whether he approved of the unilateral US airstrikes on militants of the Islamic State, who have captured swaths of northern and western Iraq and northeastern Syria and have forced minority Christians and others to either convert to Islam or flee their homes.
‘‘In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor,’’ Francis said. ‘‘I underscore the verb ‘stop.’ I’m not saying ‘bomb’ or ‘make war,’ just ‘stop.’ And the means that can be used to stop them must be evaluated.’’
But, he said, in history, such ‘‘excuses’’ to stop an unjust aggression have been used by world powers to justify a ‘‘war of conquest’’ in which an entire people have been taken over.
The U.S. has been doing it for, well, centuries now!
‘‘One nation alone cannot judge how you stop this, how you stop an unjust aggressor,’’ he said, apparently referring to the United States. ‘‘After World War II, the idea of the United Nations came about: It’s there that you must discuss ‘Is there an unjust aggression? It seems so. How should we stop it?’ Just this. Nothing more.’’
His comments were significant because the Vatican has vehemently opposed any military intervention in recent years, with St. John Paul II actively trying to head off the Iraq War and Francis himself staging a global prayer and fast for peace when the United States was threatening airstrikes on Syria last year.
We are back at that point right now!
But the Vatican has been increasingly showing support for military intervention in Iraq, given that Christians are being directly targeted because of their faith and that some Christian communities, which have existed for 2,000 years, have been emptied as a result of the extremists’ onslaught.
The United States began launching airstrikes against Islamic State fighters on Aug. 8, allowing Kurdish forces to fend off an advance on their regional capital of Irbil and to help tens of thousands of religious minorities escape.
I will be posting these issues above.
Church teaching allows for ‘‘just wars,’’ when military force can be justified under certain circumstances.
It is the way they justified those wars of conquest called the Crusades.
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Related: 3 relatives of Pope Francis die in crash
I can't help but draw a karmic connection from on high. I mean, if God is going to speak to someone down here the Pope would be it.
So what does all this mean?
"What South Korea illustrates, therefore, is that Francis’s Teflon coating isn’t just a Western or Latin American artifact, but part of his global brand."
He was supposed to be the Peace Pope.
Also see:
Pope decries attacks on religious minorities in Iraq
Parishioners pray for end to persecution of Iraq’s Christians
Iraqi officials say rebels massacre at least 80 Yazidis
Pope challenges South, North Korea to seek peace
"Pope makes biggest gesture yet to China, eyes ties
HAEMI, South Korea (AP) — Pope Francis made his strongest gesture yet to reach out to China on Sunday, saying he wants to improve relations and insisting that the Catholic Church isn't coming in as a "conqueror" but is rather a partner in dialogue.
Francis outlined his priorities for the Catholic Church in Asia during a meeting of about 80 of the region's bishops, urging them to engage with people of different cultures empathetically.
"In this spirit of openness to others, I earnestly hope that those countries of your continent with whom the Holy See does not yet enjoy a full relationship may not hesitate to further a dialogue for the benefit of all," he said.
Then deviating from his text, he added: "I'm not talking here only about a political dialogue, but about a fraternal dialogue. These Christians aren't coming as conquerors, they aren't trying to take away our identity." He said the important thing was to "walk together."
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope's remarks were "obviously a sign of goodwill for dialogue" with China as well as the other countries in Asia with which the Vatican doesn't have diplomatic relations: North Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Bhutan and Brunei. "This offer of the pope for dialogue is to all these lands and not just one, even if China is the biggest," he said.
He acknowledged that Francis has so far refrained from making any outwardly political statement about China, which counts some 12 million Catholics, but that the speech was a clear affirmation of a desire for dialogue. It was also a message to the region's bishops that they can sow the seeds for dialogue through charitable works and educational services even before official diplomatic relations with the Holy See are established.
China cut relations with the Vatican in 1951, after the Communist Party took power and set up its own church outside the pope's authority. China persecuted the church for years until restoring a degree of religious freedom and freeing imprisoned priests in the late 1970s. The Vatican under then-Pope Benedict XVI sought to improve ties by seeking to unify the state-sanctioned church with the underground church still loyal to Rome.
Vatican-China ties have already broken new ground on Francis' first Asian trip, with Beijing agreeing to let Francis' Alitalia charter fly through its airspace; when St. John Paul II last came to South Korea in 1989, Beijing refused to let him fly overhead. With the fly-by confirmed, Francis sent the traditional greetings he sends to the leadership of countries he flies over. That said, there have been reports that some Chinese Catholics who wanted to participate in the Asian Catholic youth festival here were prevented from coming.
For the Vatican, the main stumbling block in relations remains the insistence of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association on naming bishops without papal consent. For China, the naming of bishops is a matter of its national sovereignty, while it also objects that the Holy See has diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Lombardi sought to stress that the Vatican was always open to dialogue, and was not interested in questions of political sovereignty....
I'm getting mixed messages from this guy.
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"Tens of thousands stage Hong Kong pro government rally" | Associated Press August 18, 2014
HONG KONG — Tens of thousands of people, many wearing red as a sign of their patriotism to China, took part in a march in Hong Kong on Sunday to protest a planned civil disobedience campaign by prodemocracy activists.
Many carried banners or shouted slogans saying they wanted to ‘‘oppose’’ the Occupy Central with Love and Peace prodemocracy movement, while others waved Chinese flags. Some, however, seemed to be not quite certain what they were protesting.
You gotta love the propaganda pre$$!
First of all, an obvious intelligence agency action given the way Occupy was treated at home. The second giveaway is the description of the counter-protest; that is the same thing the whoreporate corporate pre$$ said about the Occupy kids here.
C'mon, guys, this is detestable crap and needs to stop.
Occupy Central’s organizers have sparked political turmoil in Hong Kong and unease in Beijing with their plan to rally at least 10,000 people to freeze the financial hub’s central business district if the Chinese government fails to come up with satisfactory democratic reforms.
After the former British colony came back under Chinese control in 1997, it was allowed to keep a high degree of autonomy over its own affairs and Western-style civil liberties unseen on the mainland, although an elite pro-Beijing committee picks the city’s leader.
Beijing has promised that starting in 2017, Hong Kong voters can choose the leader but insists that candidates be vetted by the committee, which democracy activists reject.
‘‘Occupy Central is an extreme way of protest,’’ said Terence Chung, a company manager who joined Sunday’s march. ‘‘Using legal ways to express opinions is all right. If it comes to an irrational protest, social order will be disrupted.’’
The Alliance for Peace and Democracy held the rally to cap its monthlong anti-Occupy petition campaign. But tactics used to mobilize supporters raised questions about whether demonstrators knew why exactly they were marching.
Yeah, whatever, pos!!!!!!
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The Pope endorsed this, huh?
"At Least 2 Tibetans Reported Dead in Custody in Western China" by Chris Buckley | New York Times August 21, 2014
HONG KONG — At least two Tibetans died in police custody in southwestern China after a protest last week in which residents were shot and wounded, according to the exiled Tibetan government and other groups abroad. The accounts described an eruption of tension in a mountainous area of Sichuan province that has been beset by strife over the Chinese government’s rule.
One Tibetan advocacy group and an overseas news service said separately the death toll for detainees had reached five.
The reports of deaths and bloodshed have not been confirmed by Chinese state news media, and public security and government officials in the region declined repeated requests for comment Wednesday.
But the Tibetan government in exile, in Dharamsala, India, said Tuesday that two men had died in police custody after being detained following a protest last week in which the police shot and used tear gas on an unarmed crowd in Ganzi Prefecture in Sichuan. The region, known to Tibetans as Kardze or Garze, has long been a center of protest and defiance against the Chinese government.
Residents had gathered to demand that the government release a respected village leader who had been detained after he complained “against the mistreatment and harassment of Tibetans by the Chinese authorities,” the Tibetan administration said on its website.
One of the detainees, Lo Palsang, killed himself in detention in Luoxu Township, where two dozen Tibetans were held, the report said. Additionally, “an unidentified 22-year-old Tibetan youth succumbed to injuries sustained during the police firing,” according to the report. Tsering Wangchuk, an officer in Dharamsala with the administration, said staff members there had spoken to people in the area who verified the accounts, following reports by overseas groups.
“The situation in the area remains tense as the injured Tibetans are still denied medical treatment,” the report said.
The two deaths have also been reported by the International Campaign for Tibet and Free Tibet, two groups that campaign for Tibetan self-determination. But information can be difficult to obtain from the tense area, and the reports did not describe how Lo Palsang had taken his life. Also, the reports gave different estimates of how many people had been detained and gave varied explanations of the complaints that led to the protest last week.
Contradicting the initial reports, the International Campaign for Tibet said Tuesday that the security forces did not appear to have fired on the protesters with live ammunition, saying that “some form of anti-riot projectiles were fired.”
The reports said that Chinese security forces had inundated the village of Shugpa, where the local leader was detained, and that many of the men there had either fled or been detained.
The reports by the International Campaign for Tibet also said that the authorities had denied medical treatment to detained men who were shot during the protest last week.
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Time to get the hell out of here:
China cites Mercedes for illegal pricing
Logan adding direct flight to Hong Kong
Waiting on the tarmac for what?
"China’s effort to produce natural gas falls short" by Keith Bradsher | New York Times August 22, 2014
SHOUYANG, China — Jin Peisheng, a drilling rig foreman, knows the challenges of trying to extract natural gas from a coal seam under the cornfields here in north-central China.
Cracks in the subterranean coal are flooded with water that needs to be pumped out before the gas will emerge. The coal seams are so cold that gels injected into the well, which are meant to help release the gas, sometimes become gummy and block the flow instead. And there is constant concern about hitting the active coal mines that honeycomb the area.
Fracking in China?
“The big uncertainty is what’s underground — if there’s a tunnel, that’s a big danger. It would be dangerous for the miners,” Jin said.
Faced with severe air pollution from coal and a rising dependence on energy imports, China has been eager to follow the United States by rapidly increasing natural gas output. Replacing coal with natural gas has also been central to Beijing’s hopes to limit emissions of global warming gases in China, the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide by a wide margin.
But China’s ability to extract sufficient natural gas is in serious doubt. Despite heavy investment and strong government support, China’s natural gas production is growing at a slower pace than its decelerating economy. China’s production of natural gas increased just 6 percent last year and 4.4 percent in 2012.
China’s main problem is that shale gas production has fallen far short of expectations. That has left China relying on alternative methods considered also-rans by US standards, like pumping natural gas from coal fields.
Now, the Chinese government appears to be acknowledging the shortfall. Wu Xinxiong, director of the National Energy Administration of China, unexpectedly said in a speech this summer that China’s target for domestic natural gas production in 2020 was only 30 billion cubic meters for shale gas and another 30 billion cubic meters for coal seam gas. Just two years ago, the National Energy Administration estimated that China would produce 60 billion cubic meters to 100 billion cubic meters of shale gas alone by 2020.
If Wu’s forecast comes true, shale gas and coal field gas would each supply only 1 percent of China’s electricity generation needs in 2020.
“If the population and economy keep growing, and extensive energy use continues, sustaining China’s energy supply will be hard,” Wu warned.
Gas production has been slow to rise despite energetic efforts by Beijing to make it financially attractive for energy companies, including direct subsidies for shale gas production.
Communi$t, capitali$t, the $ame people win.
The Chinese government also announced Aug. 13 that it would raise urban wholesale prices for natural gas at the end of the month by roughly 18 percent for industrial users.
Gas had looked like one of the few remaining ways for China to reduce its addiction to coal.
China’s nuclear power program slowed after Japan’s triple meltdown in Fukushima.
I can't believe I saw the word.
Related:
"Japan is setting up an amphibious unit similar to the US Marines to respond quickly to any invasion of the East China Sea, where Tokyo and Beijing are locked in a dispute over a chain of uninhabited islands. The military began large-scale annual ‘‘Fire Power’’ exercises at the foot of Mount Fuji aimed at repelling a hypothetical invasion."
Also see: Asia’s never-ending war
Also related(?):
Landslides kill 6 in Hiroshima area
36 dead, 7 missing in Hiroshima landslide
39 dead, dozens missing after Japan landslides
Time to give it up.
Also see: Flood cleanup begins in Phoenix after heavy storms
That's a long way from China.
Efforts to expand hydroelectric power have run into environmental concerns as well as the huge cost of resettling people from areas flooded when dams are built to make artificial lakes. Solar power and wind power are growing rapidly, but from small bases.
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