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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Iran, Russia to cooperate in Space



Iran and Russia have agreed to enhance cooperation in the field of space science and development of satellite technologies.

During the 10th annual meeting of the Russian-Iranian Business Council (RIBC) on Tuesday, Russian Space Agency Official Dennis Lessikov said Moscow is ready to cooperate with Iran in building satellite signal transmission stations and training Iranian experts.

The official added that the two sides have held a meeting on space cooperation, which was attended by Iranian Space Agency (ISA) official, Hassan Karimi.
Karimi, for his part, said Tehran and Moscow have set up a space working group to review possible fields of cooperation.

Also attending the Moscow meeting, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Iran seeks enhanced space collaboration with Russia, expressing hope that “cooperation with Russia will help to further our achievements in this [space] area.”

In January, Iran launched a bio-capsule with a live monkey onboard into space, which reached an altitude of more than 120 km and returned to earth safely.

Iran also launched Navid-e Elm-o Sanat (Harbinger of Science and Industry), another indigenous satellite, into the orbit on February 3, 2012.

Iran is one of the 24 founding members of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which was set up in 1959.


PRESSTV

Scientists Create Automated 'Time Machine' to Reconstruct Ancient Languages



Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how "big data" and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct "proto-languages" -- the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.

"What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online Feb. 11 in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team's computational model uses probabilistic reasoning -- which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome -- to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.

Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world's proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.

"Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future," said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.

The discovery advances UC Berkeley's mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans' earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the "comparative method" to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language.

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree -- much like a genealogical tree -- reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages.

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

"Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other," Klein said. "It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time."

Science Daily

Iran installing new centrifuges at Natanz facility

File photo shows an Iranian technician checking the grounds at Natanz enrichment facility.

The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says new centrifuges have been installed at Natanz enrichment facility since one month ago.

Fereydoun Abbasi made the remark on Wednesday as inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived in Tehran for a new round of talks over Iran’s nuclear energy program.

“In order to reach industrial-scale [nuclear fuel] production, we have to install a large number of these devices (centrifuges). The installation of new centrifuges at Natanz site started nearly one month ago. We plan to double their number in order to complete a lab related to the new generation [of centrifuges],” Abbasi said.
“These centrifuges have been developed for enrichment below five percent and they cannot be used in 20-percent enrichment,” he added.

Abbasi also criticized IAEA inspectors for letting confidential information out after visiting Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Three to four days after IAEA experts reported the installation of these [new] centrifuges to the Agency, their information was given to Western media which cited their source as an IAEA expert. This shows that information is easily leaked from the Agency.”

Abbasi stressed that some IAEA employees are on the payroll of their countries of origin and provide secret information at their disposal to their countries' intelligence services, and media. “We have warned Mr. [Yukiya] Amano [director general of IAEA] that this problem should be solved.”
He went on to say that Iran has already produced 12 nuclear fuel assemblies.

“We are doing this because of our need for 20-percent fuel and we will gradually transform our 20-percent enriched uranium to powder and then shape them into fuel assemblies for nuclear reactors,” he said.

The US, Israel, and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran rejects the allegations, arguing that as a committed signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the IAEA it is entitled to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that the Iranian nuclear program has been diverted toward military objectives.


PRESSTV

State of Delusion #n3

IS THE FINAL POPE ALREADY RUNNING VATICAN?

cardinal-bertone-petrus-romanus

Did Pope Benedict XVI line up his successor and then resign to fulfill a 900-year-old prophecy that the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church would be history’s “final pope.”

As WND reported, Horn and his co-author, Cris Putnam, accurately predicted Benedict would become the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.

Horn believes the last pope, called “Petrus Romanus” in the prophecy by Irish Archbishop St. Malachy, could be the man who is set to take over interim leadership the moment Benedict resigns Feb. 28 at 8 p.m. local time, becoming the acting Vatican head of state.

The claim centers on Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro (Peter in English) Evasio Bertone, the current secretary of state for the Vatican, who Pope Benedict XVI appointed Camerlengo, or Chamberlain, of the Holy Roman Church April 4, 2007.

In the period known as “sede vacante,” when there is no sitting pope, Bertone will be called upon as Camerlengo to serve as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

He will be in charge until the College of Cardinals attending the upcoming Papal Conclave in the Sistine Chapel select a new pope.

Did Benedict choose his successor?

Benedict XVI has made decisions that indicate Bertone could be, or at least once was, his choice for successor, Horn told WND.

Working alongside Bertone, Benedict appeared to be “stacking the deck” in Bertone’s favor Jan. 6, 2012, when he named 22 new cardinals. Most are Europeans, primarily Italians, already holding key Vatican positions.

As a result, Europeans currently number over half of all cardinal-electors, 67 out of 125. Nearly a quarter of all voters in the conclave will be Italian.

“When he appointed these new cardinals,” Horn said, “Benedict seemed to put his definitive stamp on an Italian successor, stacking the College of Cardinals, those who could be called upon to give Bertone the so-called apostolic chair of St. Peter.”

Horn said the idea was not Benedict’s alone.

Most Vatican experts attribute the large number of Italian appointments to the influence of Bertone, he said.

WND sources in Rome close to the Vatican previously suggested Benedict may have resigned in part because he wanted to have a hand, even if indirect, in influencing the selection of his successor.

The sources further argue that by selecting “Benedict” as his papal name, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, though not a priest of the Benedictine Order, sought to identify his papacy with Malachy’s prohecy that the next-to-last pope would be identified by the epithet Gloria olivae, translated as “Glory of the Olive,” knowing the Benedictine Order is associated by tradition with olives.

As WND reported, Horn and his co-author, Cris Putnam, accurately predicted Benedict would become the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.

Horn believes the last pope, called “Petrus Romanus” in the prophecy by Irish Archbishop St. Malachy, could be the man who is set to take over interim leadership the moment Benedict resigns Feb. 28 at 8 p.m. local time, becoming the acting Vatican head of state.

The claim centers on Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro (Peter in English) Evasio Bertone, the current secretary of state for the Vatican, who Pope Benedict XVI appointed Camerlengo, or Chamberlain, of the Holy Roman Church April 4, 2007.

In the period known as “sede vacante,” when there is no sitting pope, Bertone will be called upon as Camerlengo to serve as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Get “Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here” at the WND Superstore

He will be in charge until the College of Cardinals attending the upcoming Papal Conclave in the Sistine Chapel select a new pope.

Did Benedict choose his successor?

Benedict XVI has made decisions that indicate Bertone could be, or at least once was, his choice for successor, Horn told WND.

Working alongside Bertone, Benedict appeared to be “stacking the deck” in Bertone’s favor Jan. 6, 2012, when he named 22 new cardinals. Most are Europeans, primarily Italians, already holding key Vatican positions.

As a result, Europeans currently number over half of all cardinal-electors, 67 out of 125. Nearly a quarter of all voters in the conclave will be Italian.

“When he appointed these new cardinals,” Horn said, “Benedict seemed to put his definitive stamp on an Italian successor, stacking the College of Cardinals, those who could be called upon to give Bertone the so-called apostolic chair of St. Peter.”

Horn said the idea was not Benedict’s alone.

Most Vatican experts attribute the large number of Italian appointments to the influence of Bertone, he said.

WND sources in Rome close to the Vatican previously suggested Benedict may have resigned in part because he wanted to have a hand, even if indirect, in influencing the selection of his successor.

The sources further argue that by selecting “Benedict” as his papal name, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, though not a priest of the Benedictine Order, sought to identify his papacy with Malachy’s prohecy that the next-to-last pope would be identified by the epithet Gloria olivae, translated as “Glory of the Olive,” knowing the Benedictine Order is associated by tradition with olives.


By setting up the College of Cardinals to elevate an Italian cardinal to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI could help fulfill the Malachy prophecy, making Cardinal Bertone – “Peter of Romano” by virtue of one of his given names and his place of birth – the “final pope.”

On Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters at a Vatican briefing that Pope Benedict XVI would have no say in the selection of his successor, telling reporters the pope “will surely say absolutely nothing about the process of the election” for his successor.

Benedict “will not interfere in any way,” Lombardi insisted.

The Third Secret of Fatima

Horn suspects Cardinal Bertone is at the center of a Vatican cover-up to prevent the release of the complete version of what is known as the highly controversial “Third Secret of Fatima,” allegedly given by the Virgin Mary in an appearance to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, July 13, 1917.

Bertone, who turned 78 in December, had a long history with Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

From 1995 to 2002, Ratzinger worked with Bertone as his No. 2 at the influential Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican.

A few months after he was elected pope, Benedict asked Bertone to take up the position of Vatican secretary of state, the position Bertone holds to this day.

In January 2010, when Bertone reached 75, the age of retirement for Curia cardinals, he presented a letter of resignation to the pope. Benedict was adamant he needed Bertone to stay on as Vatican head of state, because he wanted to maintain “their precious collaboration,” as reported by Andrea Tornielli in the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Benedict has steadfastly supported Bertone through a series of crises that have called into question Bertone’s integrity and honesty, including a money-laundering scandal involving the Vatican Bank, formerly known as the Institute for Works of Religion, or IOR. The scandal resulted in the sacking of the bank’s head, Gotti Tedeschi, a highly respected Italian economist and banker, as well as Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, who was criminally prosecuted for confiscating and photocopying more than 1,000 pages of sensitive Vatican documents over six years that he released to an Italian journalist for publication.

In their role of directing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinals Ratzinger and Bertone released for the fist time to the public “The Third Secret of Fatima” at a press conference June 26, 2000.

In 2007, Bertone published a book, “The Last Secret of Fatima,” with a foreword authored by Benedict XVI, defending the publicly released text of “Third Secret” as the entire secret, arguing that in publishing the text, the Catholic Church had withheld nothing.

“The Third Secret of Fatima” involves a highly controversial End Times vision of an assassination attempt on a future pope that is occasioned by moral corruption and lack of faith among the clergy.

Pope John Paul II believed Our Lady of Fatima intervened to save his life in the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square at Vatican City on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the three children of Fatima.

The current controversy began when Italian journalist and television personality Antonio Socci and American attorney Christopher Ferrara began publishing the claim the Vatican had refused to publish a second part of “Third Secret” that contained the words of the Virgin as revealed to the children of Fatima.

Socci and Ferrara contend the hidden text predicts catastrophes for the Catholic Church and the world that involve End Days punishment by God, leading to Jesus Christ returning to earth for Judgment Day.

Did Benedict XVI plan to resign in 2009?

Celestine V was the last pope to resign, in 1294, after only five months in office. He was a hermit who was greatly revered for his sanctity and his miracles.

On April 28, 2009, in a visit to view Celestine’s remains in the badly damaged Santa Maria di Collemaggio after the disastrous 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, Pope Benedict XVI left the woolen pallium he wore during his papal inauguration in April 2005 on Clement’s glass casket as a gift.

To mark the 800th anniversary of Celestine’s birth, Benedict proclaimed the Celestine Year from Aug. 28, 2009, to Aug. 29, 2010.

Benedict was the only pope to visit Pope Celestine V’s tomb, a sign many have taken that he had contemplated resignation for some time before he made the announcement earlier this week.

On Dec. 13, 1294, on the Feast of Saint Lucy, Celestine V read the following statement to the cardinals who assembled to hear his news: “I, Celestine V, moved by valid reasons, that is, by humility, by desire for a better life, by a troubled conscience, troubles of body, a lack of knowledge, personal shortcomings, and so that I may then proceed to a life of greater humility, voluntarily and without compunction give up the papacy and renounce its position and dignity, burdens, and honors, with full freedom. I now instruct the Sacred College of cardinals to elect and provide, according to the cannons, a shepherd for the universal church.”

As recounted by John Sweeney in a 2012 book, “The Pope Who Quit,” Celestine V declared himself “useless,” stepped down from the papal throne and removed his ring, tiara and mantle, handing them to the cardinals who had elected him; he then sat down on the floor.

He put on the dress of the simplest of friars – the gray habit of a Celestine hermit – and secreted away from the crowd outside to return to the mountains.

What will be next for Pope Benedict XVI? Is there a spiritual connection between the hermit pope and the scholar?

Malachy’s predictions

St. Malachy, an Irish saint and the archbishop of Armagh, who lived from 1094 to 1l48, is attributed with a vision of the last 112 popes from which he created a prophetic list. He named with a descriptive epithet each pope in succession from Celestine II, who was pope from 1143-1144, to the present day.

Malachy described the last pope as “Petrus Romanus,” or “Peter the Roman,” writing: “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock among many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.”

In 1880, M. J. O’Brien, a Catholic priest, published in Dublin a book providing a “historical and critical account” of the prophecy of St. Malachy regarding the succession of the popes.

O’Brien understood that Malachy’s prophecy was declaring that in the reign of the pope identified as Petrus Romanus the end of the world would come, culminating in Jesus Christ descending to earth for Judgment Day.

O’Brien said Malachy’s vision occurred while he was in Rome for a month, visiting and praying at the Eternal City’s many historical and holy sites.

“The sight of the ruins of Pagan Rome, the tombs of the Apostles, the thought of so many thousands of martyrs, the presence of [Pope] Innocent II, who had been obligated to wander so many years in France and elsewhere on account of the anti-pope Anaclete – all this, I say, filled the mind of St. Malachy with deep and sad reflections and he was forced to cry out in the words of the old prophets: ‘Usquequo, Domine non misereberis Sion?’ – ‘How long, O Lord! wilt Thou not have mercy on Sion?’”

O’Brien continued:

And God Answered: “Until the end of the world the Church will be both militant and triumphant. Until the end of time the sufferings of my passion and the mysteries of my cross must be continued on earth, and I shall be with you until the end of the world.” And then was unfolded before the gaze of the holy bishop of Armagh the long line of illustrious pilots who were to guide the storm-tossed bark of Peter until the end.

Malachy gave his manuscript to Innocent II, born Gregorio Papareschi, who was pope from 1130 to 1143. Innocent placed the manuscript in the Vatican archives, where the document remained unknown until its discovery in 1590.

Through the past 900 years, various critics have questioned the authenticity and the accuracy of St. Malachy’s prophecy, often arguing the methods employed by some of Malachy’s interpreters in applying his epithets to certain popes have been tortuous.

In a modern 1969 version of Malachy’s prophecies, Archbishop H. E. Cardinale, the apostolic nuncio to Belgium and Luxembourg, wrote “it is fair to say the vast majority of Malachy’s predictions about successive Popes is amazingly accurate – always remembering that he gives only a minimum of information.”




By setting up the College of Cardinals to elevate an Italian cardinal to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI could help fulfill the Malachy prophecy, making Cardinal Bertone – “Peter of Romano” by virtue of one of his given names and his place of birth – the “final pope.”


On Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters at a Vatican briefing that Pope Benedict XVI would have no say in the selection of his successor, telling reporters the pope “will surely say absolutely nothing about the process of the election” for his successor.

Benedict “will not interfere in any way,” Lombardi insisted.

The Third Secret of Fatima

Horn suspects Cardinal Bertone is at the center of a Vatican cover-up to prevent the release of the complete version of what is known as the highly controversial “Third Secret of Fatima,” allegedly given by the Virgin Mary in an appearance to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, July 13, 1917.

Bertone, who turned 78 in December, had a long history with Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

From 1995 to 2002, Ratzinger worked with Bertone as his No. 2 at the influential Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican.

A few months after he was elected pope, Benedict asked Bertone to take up the position of Vatican secretary of state, the position Bertone holds to this day.

In January 2010, when Bertone reached 75, the age of retirement for Curia cardinals, he presented a letter of resignation to the pope. Benedict was adamant he needed Bertone to stay on as Vatican head of state, because he wanted to maintain “their precious collaboration,” as reported by Andrea Tornielli in the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Benedict has steadfastly supported Bertone through a series of crises that have called into question Bertone’s integrity and honesty, including a money-laundering scandal involving the Vatican Bank, formerly known as the Institute for Works of Religion, or IOR. The scandal resulted in the sacking of the bank’s head, Gotti Tedeschi, a highly respected Italian economist and banker, as well as Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, who was criminally prosecuted for confiscating and photocopying more than 1,000 pages of sensitive Vatican documents over six years that he released to an Italian journalist for publication.

In their role of directing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinals Ratzinger and Bertone released for the fist time to the public “The Third Secret of Fatima” at a press conference June 26, 2000.

In 2007, Bertone published a book, “The Last Secret of Fatima,” with a foreword authored by Benedict XVI, defending the publicly released text of “Third Secret” as the entire secret, arguing that in publishing the text, the Catholic Church had withheld nothing.

“The Third Secret of Fatima” involves a highly controversial End Times vision of an assassination attempt on a future pope that is occasioned by moral corruption and lack of faith among the clergy.

Pope John Paul II believed Our Lady of Fatima intervened to save his life in the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square at Vatican City on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the three children of Fatima.

The current controversy began when Italian journalist and television personality Antonio Socci and American attorney Christopher Ferrara began publishing the claim the Vatican had refused to publish a second part of “Third Secret” that contained the words of the Virgin as revealed to the children of Fatima.

Socci and Ferrara contend the hidden text predicts catastrophes for the Catholic Church and the world that involve End Days punishment by God, leading to Jesus Christ returning to earth for Judgment Day.

Did Benedict XVI plan to resign in 2009?

Celestine V was the last pope to resign, in 1294, after only five months in office. He was a hermit who was greatly revered for his sanctity and his miracles.

On April 28, 2009, in a visit to view Celestine’s remains in the badly damaged Santa Maria di Collemaggio after the disastrous 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, Pope Benedict XVI left the woolen pallium he wore during his papal inauguration in April 2005 on Clement’s glass casket as a gift.

To mark the 800th anniversary of Celestine’s birth, Benedict proclaimed the Celestine Year from Aug. 28, 2009, to Aug. 29, 2010.

Benedict was the only pope to visit Pope Celestine V’s tomb, a sign many have taken that he had contemplated resignation for some time before he made the announcement earlier this week.

On Dec. 13, 1294, on the Feast of Saint Lucy, Celestine V read the following statement to the cardinals who assembled to hear his news: “I, Celestine V, moved by valid reasons, that is, by humility, by desire for a better life, by a troubled conscience, troubles of body, a lack of knowledge, personal shortcomings, and so that I may then proceed to a life of greater humility, voluntarily and without compunction give up the papacy and renounce its position and dignity, burdens, and honors, with full freedom. I now instruct the Sacred College of cardinals to elect and provide, according to the cannons, a shepherd for the universal church.”

As recounted by John Sweeney in a 2012 book, “The Pope Who Quit,” Celestine V declared himself “useless,” stepped down from the papal throne and removed his ring, tiara and mantle, handing them to the cardinals who had elected him; he then sat down on the floor.

He put on the dress of the simplest of friars – the gray habit of a Celestine hermit – and secreted away from the crowd outside to return to the mountains.

What will be next for Pope Benedict XVI? Is there a spiritual connection between the hermit pope and the scholar?

Malachy’s predictions

St. Malachy, an Irish saint and the archbishop of Armagh, who lived from 1094 to 1l48, is attributed with a vision of the last 112 popes from which he created a prophetic list. He named with a descriptive epithet each pope in succession from Celestine II, who was pope from 1143-1144, to the present day.

Malachy described the last pope as “Petrus Romanus,” or “Peter the Roman,” writing: “In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock among many tribulations; after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed and the dreadful Judge will judge the people.”

In 1880, M. J. O’Brien, a Catholic priest, published in Dublin a book providing a “historical and critical account” of the prophecy of St. Malachy regarding the succession of the popes.

O’Brien understood that Malachy’s prophecy was declaring that in the reign of the pope identified as Petrus Romanus the end of the world would come, culminating in Jesus Christ descending to earth for Judgment Day.

O’Brien said Malachy’s vision occurred while he was in Rome for a month, visiting and praying at the Eternal City’s many historical and holy sites.

“The sight of the ruins of Pagan Rome, the tombs of the Apostles, the thought of so many thousands of martyrs, the presence of [Pope] Innocent II, who had been obligated to wander so many years in France and elsewhere on account of the anti-pope Anaclete – all this, I say, filled the mind of St. Malachy with deep and sad reflections and he was forced to cry out in the words of the old prophets: ‘Usquequo, Domine non misereberis Sion?’ – ‘How long, O Lord! wilt Thou not have mercy on Sion?’”

O’Brien continued:

And God Answered: “Until the end of the world the Church will be both militant and triumphant. Until the end of time the sufferings of my passion and the mysteries of my cross must be continued on earth, and I shall be with you until the end of the world.” And then was unfolded before the gaze of the holy bishop of Armagh the long line of illustrious pilots who were to guide the storm-tossed bark of Peter until the end.

Malachy gave his manuscript to Innocent II, born Gregorio Papareschi, who was pope from 1130 to 1143. Innocent placed the manuscript in the Vatican archives, where the document remained unknown until its discovery in 1590.

Through the past 900 years, various critics have questioned the authenticity and the accuracy of St. Malachy’s prophecy, often arguing the methods employed by some of Malachy’s interpreters in applying his epithets to certain popes have been tortuous.

In a modern 1969 version of Malachy’s prophecies, Archbishop H. E. Cardinale, the apostolic nuncio to Belgium and Luxembourg, wrote “it is fair to say the vast majority of Malachy’s predictions about successive Popes is amazingly accurate – always remembering that he gives only a minimum of information.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/final-pope-already-running-vatican/#OC7r4yrvRJXC7CZC.99 


WND

Is America The Next War Zone?

Syrian jets bomb northern air base seized by Islamist-led rebels



Tuesday night, Feb. 12, he Syrian Air Force began bombing the large al-Jarra air base which rebels led by Islamist battalions conquered near the northern city of Aleppo. Bashar Assad has ordered the destruction of the dozens of fighter-bombers on the ground in the captured base. Most are Czech-made L-29 trainer planes which his air force has been using to pound rebel positions in built-up areas of the cities. But still in hangars are also Sukhoi Su-22M bombers and Mig-23 interceptors which too have been pressed into service for striking rebel-held territory.
The loss of the al-Jarra air base is a major blow for Assad’s forces, depriving them of the ability to hunt down and wipe out rebel forces from the air. Now the remnants of his air force are entrusted with somehow destroying their own planes, which are housed in bomb-proof hangars of the captured air facility.

As for the rebels celebrating their feat in those hangars, they might have used the air fleet they seized to bomb the presidential palace in Damascus, except that none of them are trained fliers. What they have done is to launch a recruitment campaign in Muslim countries for air crews with experience in flying Russian-made warplanes and helicopters.

Their headhunters are scouring the former Soviet republics and East Europe with large Muslim communities for Muslim pilots who served in the air forces of their own countries. Even those trained fighters, however, never served on advanced Sukhois or Migs, only on light trainers.
In Damascus, DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the 4th Division (which acts as the Republican Guard) managed Tuesday to shore up the defensive lines that the rebels had breached in the eastern sector in the last day or two and throw back their advance into the heart of the capital. The rebels can only shell the Jobar district of central Damascus from outside, but are prevented from breaking through to their ultimate target.

DEBKAfile’s sources and most Western observers sources fear that as his setbacks in battle pile up, the Syrian ruler is likely to decide that the only way to save his regime is to turn his chemical weapons against the rebel forces.





DEBKAfile

North Korea's nuke test encourages Iran



The nuclear test North Korea conducted early Tuesday has harsh ramifications for Israel, as Pyongyang is showing Iran that it is possible to defy the international community, disregard the restrictions and prohibitions and even benefit from this sort of conduct.

North Korea's "extortion system" was introduced in 1993. It is based on the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. After every nuclear test or long-range ballistic missile test-launch, the international community imposes additional sanctions on North Korea, yet at the same time it offers to conduct negotiations with it. These negotiations are usually headed by a group of countries that includes Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the US. As the negotiations draw to a close, North Korea promises to disarm itself of nuclear weapons or stop conducting missile tests – or even both. Then it receives aid in the form of petrol and food it needs in order to feed the hungry masses. But Pyongyang always reverts to its old habits.

North Korea held its first nuclear test in 2006. The second one was held underground in 2009, and the third one was held today. In the interim it conducted ballistic missile tests. What is Iran supposed to learn from this? The conclusion is pretty clear: In order to lift the sanctions imposed by the Western nations Iran does not have to surrender to them. On the contrary, it should complete its nuclear program and then enter into real negotiations with the West from a position of power.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said over a year ago that North Korea is like an ice breaker ship that clears the way for the Iranian military nuclear ship. This is precisely what is happening, and this is why the nuclear explosion this morning does not bode well for Israel. In roughly two weeks the permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with Germany, plan to begin negotiations with Iran in Kazakhstan. If the talks with North Korea are any indication, the next round of talks with Tehran will also fail to yield any results. Iranian scientists, by the way, were present during North Korea's previous nuclear test in 2009.

The two previous nuclear tests were held during the days of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current North Korean ruler, Kim Jong-Un, who apparently learned from his father that while nuclear weapons and missiles can be used to extort food and petrol from the West, the main reason behind the nuclear tests, which were condemned worldwide, is the desire to deter the West from trying to topple the regime in Pyongyang by force. Extortion alongside military deterrence is the name of the game.



Ynet

Are Russia And China Hoarding Gold Because They Plan To Kill The Petrodollar?


Will oil soon be traded in a currency that is thousands of years old?  What would a "gold for oil" system mean for the petrodollar and the U.S. economy?  Are Russia and China hoarding massive amounts of gold because they plan to kill the petrodollar?  Since the 1970s, the U.S. dollar has been the currency that the international community has used to trade oil around the globe.  This has created an overwhelming demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt.  But what happens when the rest of the globe starts rejecting the increasingly unstable U.S. dollar and figures out that gold can be used as a currency in international trade?  The truth is that it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure that out.  Demand for the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt would fall off the map and there would be a rush into gold unlike anything we have ever seen before.  So are Russia and China accumulating unprecedented amounts of gold right now because they eventually plan to cut the legs out from under the petrodollar and they want to gobble up huge stockpiles of gold before the cat is out of the bag?  Of course they will never admit this publicly, but there are rumblings out there that this is exactly what is happening.
Not that you can really blame any nation that wants to get into gold right now.  News outlets all over the globe are telling us that we are in the midst of a "currency war" as central banks all over the planet race to devalue their currencies.
So why would anyone want to be in paper in such an environment?
And of course the Federal Reserve is one of the biggest offenders.  The Fed has been printing money like it is going out of style, and nobody at the Fed or in the U.S. government really seems too concerned that all of this money printing could be endangering the petrodollar.
But the truth is that the Fed is endangering the petrodollar.  Just read some foreign news stories about the U.S. dollar.  They mock us for our reckless money printing.
In the end, our recklessness will make it very easy for the rest of the world to ditch the U.S. dollar.
At some point, it will happen.  In fact, there are persistent rumors that Russia and China actually intend to make it happen.
Many believe that this is the reason both nations have been hoarding so much gold recently.
Just check out how much gold Russia has been accumulating.  The following is from a recent Bloomberg article...
When Vladimir Putin says the U.S. is endangering the global economy by abusing its dollar monopoly, he’s not just talking. He’s betting on it.
Not only has Putin made Russia the world’s largest oil producer, he’s also made it the biggest gold buyer. His central bank has added 570 metric tons of the metal in the past decade, a quarter more than runner-up China, according to IMF data compiled by Bloomberg. The added gold is also almost triple the weight of the Statue of Liberty.
“The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow.
And Russia's gold hoarding appears to have accelerated last year.  According to one recent report, Russia added 3.2 million ounces of gold to their reserves in 2012 alone.
But of even greater concern is China.  Nobody really knows how much gold China has, because they do not tell us, but all indications point to the fact that Chinese gold hoarding has gone into overdrive.  The following is from a Zero Hedge article from a few months ago...
Because while earlier today we were wondering (rhetorically, of course) what China is doing with all that excess trade surplus if it is not recycling it back into Treasurys, now we once again find out that instead of purchasing US paper, Beijing continues to buy non-US gold, in the form of 68 tons in imports from Hong Kong in the month of June. The year to date total (6 months)? 383 tons. In other words, in half a year China, whose official total tally is still a massively underrepresented 1054 tons, has imported more gold than the official gold reserves of Portugal, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and so on, and whose YTD imports alone make it the 14th largest holder of gold in the world. Realistically, by now China, which hasn't provided an honest gold reserve holdings update to the IMF in years, most certainly has more gold than the IMF, and its 2814 tons, itself. Of course, the moment the PBOC does announce its official updated gold stash, a gold price in the mid-$1000 range will be a long gone memory.
As I wrote about the other day, nobody produces more gold than China does, and nobody imports more gold than China does.
Everyone agrees that China seems to have an insatiable appetite for gold, but nobody can agree on exactly how much gold they actually have.  One recent estimate put China's gold reserves at more than 7,000 tons of gold, but it could even be much higher than that.  Nobody really knows.
So what are Russia and China up to?
Well, for a long time both nations have expressed displeasure with the fact that the U.S. dollar is the de facto currency of the world.  Leaders from both nations have suggested the possibility of adopting a new global reserve currency, but up to this point no real contenders have emerged to dethrone the U.S. dollar.
So for now, the U.S. dollar reigns supreme in international trade.  Sadly, even though most Americans greatly benefit from the petrodollar, most of them do not even know what it is.  For those that do not fully understand the petrodollar, the following is a good explanation of the petrodollar from a recent article by Christopher Doran...
In a nutshell, any country that wants to purchase oil from an oil producing country has to do so in U.S. dollars. This is a long standing agreement within all oil exporting nations, aka OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The UK for example, cannot simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia by exchanging British pounds. Instead, the UK must exchange its pounds for U.S. dollars. The major exception at present is, of course, Iran.
This means that every country in the world that imports oil—which is the vast majority of the world's nations—has to have immense quantities of dollars in reserve. These dollars of course are not hidden under the proverbial national mattress. They are invested. And because they are U.S. dollars, they are invested in U.S. Treasury bills and other interest bearing securities that can be easily converted to purchase dollar-priced commodities like oil. This is what has allowed the U.S. to run up trillions of dollars of debt: the rest of the world simply buys up that debt in the form of U.S. interest bearing securities.
And all of this has worked out very nicely for the United States.  It has created a massive demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt.
But what would happen if the rest of the world rejected the petrodollar system and adopted a "petrogold" system instead?
A recent article by Jim Willie discussed how a petrogold system might work...
The crux of the non-US$ trade vehicle devised as a USDollar alternative will be the Gold Trade Note. It will enable peer-to-peer payments to be completed from direct account transfers independent of currency, and most importantly, not done through the narrow pipes and channels controlled by the bankers with their omnipresent SWIFT code system among the world of banks. The Gold Trade Note will act much like a Letter of Credit, serve as a short-term bill, and maybe even push aside the near 0% short-term USTreasury Bills that litter the banking landscape. Any bond or bill earning almost no interest is veritable clutter. The zero bound USTreasurys open the door in a big way for replacement by a better vehicle. The new trade notes will involve posted gold as collateral, whose entire system for trade usage will bear a massive gold core that also will include silver and platinum, maybe other precious metals. The idea is to avoid the FOREX systems, to avoid the USDollar, and to avoid the banks as much as possible in a peer-to-peer system that can be executed between parties holding Blackberry devices or simple PC to complete the payments on transactions. If Gold is ignored by the corrupt bankers, then Gold will be the center of the new trade system and the solution in providing a globally accepted USDollar alternative.
And Russia and China would greatly benefit from a petrogold system.
Today, Russia is the number one oil exporter on the planet.
China is the number two consumer of oil in the world, and at this point they are actually importing more oil from Saudi Arabia than the United States is.
Does it make sense that they should remain locked into a system that forces them to use U.S. dollars for all of their oil transactions?
And now Russia even has the number one oil company in the world.  The following is from a recent article by Marin Katusa...
Exxon Mobil is no longer the world's number-one oil producer. As of yesterday, that title belongs to Putin Oil Corp – oh, whoops. I mean the title belongs to Rosneft, Russia's state-controlled oil company.
Rosneft is buying TNK-BP, which is a vertically integrated oil company co-owned by British oil firm BP and a group of Russian billionaires known as AAR. One of the top-ten privately owned oil producers in the world, in 2010 TNK-BP churned out 1.74 million barrels of oil equivalent per day from its assets in Russia and Ukraine and processed almost half that amount through its refineries.
With TNK-BP in its hands, Rosneft will be in charge of more than 4 million barrels of oil production a day. And who is in charge of Rosneft? None other than Vladimir Putin, Russia's resource-full president.
And Russian gas giant Gazprom supplies a huge percentage of the natural gas that Europe uses...
Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, already has Europe wrapped around its little finger. Russia supplies 34% of Europe's gas needs, and when the under-construction South Stream pipeline starts operating, that percentage will increase. As if those developments weren't enough, yesterday Gazprom offered the highest bid to obtain a stake in the massive Leviathan gas field off Israel's coast.
Gazprom in control of Europe's gas, Rosneft in control of its oil. A red hand stretching out from Russia to strangle the supremacy of the West and pave the way for a new world order– one with Russia at the helm.
Russia and China have a tremendous amount of leverage when it comes to energy.  What if they got together with a bunch of oil producing nations in the Middle East and decided to set up a system where oil is traded for gold?  Would not much of the rest of the world go along with such a system?
Of course if that happened the U.S. financial system would crash.  We would no longer be able to export our inflation to the rest of the globe and prices would rise dramatically.  Demand for U.S. government debt would go through the floor and interest rates on that debt and on everything else in our economy would skyrocket.  Economic activity would grind to a standstill and the financial markets would collapse.
And that would just be for starters.
Most Americans simply don't understand that Russia and China have the power to collapse the U.S. economy by going to a gold for oil system.  All they have to do is pull the trigger.
The other day I wrote an article entitled "Show This To Anyone That Believes That 'Things Are Getting Better' In America" which discussed all of the reasons why the U.S. economy is already collapsing.  But as bad as things are now, this is nothing compared to what things will be like when the petrodollar dies.
So pay keen attention to anything in the news about Russia or China suggesting that oil should be traded for gold.  When Russia and China pull the trigger, things will get messy very quickly.
Gold

Economic Collapse

Gerald Celente on China surpassing US global economic dominance


A year ago they used to say it will take china 10 years to surpass US.
We said It would take 2 years....Now its deal done.