Greece hit by general strike against austerity

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Tens of thousands of anti-austerity demonstrators took to the streets of Athens on Wednesday as unions staged a general strike to protest government spending cuts and tax hikes, which some predict will push unemployment to an alarming 30 percent.

Police said up to 40,000 people were participating in two separate marches in central Athens that were so far peaceful.

"We are protesting about (reduced) pensions, emergency taxes, the high cost of life," said retired factory worker Kyriakos Anastassiadis.

Unions are pressing for the renewal of binding collective labor contracts, instead of individual deals that allow employers greater leverage in defining salary levels. They are also asking the government to support the crumbling labor market, where roughly 1,000 jobs have been lost daily since 2010.

"The government wants to further lower our salaries and destroy unions," said unionist Vassilis Epicarithis, an aircraft engineer.

The 24-hour nationwide walkout disrupted domestic flights, kept ferries and long-distance trains idle and crippled public services. It was the first general strike of the year, renewing confrontation between labor groups and the conservative-led government that has pursued punishing austerity policies to cut debt - a key condition imposed by international bailout creditors.

State schools and tax offices closed down, public hospitals functioned on emergency staff, court cases were stalled as lawyers walked off the job, and even neighborhood street fruit and vegetable markets were cancelled. Private doctors and dentists also joined the strike.

In Athens, police said about 25,000 people were marching toward Parliament with banners such as "We won't become slaves in the 21st century," in a demonstration organized by the main public and private sector unions. Earlier, some 15,000 members of a Communist Party-affiliated labor union protested peacefully along the same route.

Previous protests have been marred by clashes between riot police and masked youths armed with fire bombs and stones. Up to 3,000 police officers were on duty for the Athens street rallies.

In the northern city of Thessaloniki, some 17,000 protested peacefully.

Conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has won praise from bailout lenders for pushing through major cost-cutting measures after forming a three party coalition last June.

But a new round of tax increases this year and a surge in unemployment to 27 percent have angered unions, as Greeks battle a rapid increase in poverty during a sixth year of recession.

In recent weeks, the Samaras government has twice used rare emergency powers to force an end to strikes by workers on ferry services and the Athens subway.

"The Greek people have no tolerance left," Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the civil servants union ADEDY, told the AP in an interview ahead of the strike. "For us, the time has come for a major confrontation with the government ... and policies that are taking our country from bad to worse and leading people to poverty and desperation."

Unions are also angry at a government decision to scrap collective wage agreements across the public sector as part of an overhaul of state pay scales that will usher in further salary cuts.

Unemployment is expected to reach 30 percent this year, while national output will contract a further 4.1 percent, according to a study by a government funded research agency published last week. By the end of the year, the Greek economy is forecast to have shrunk 25 percent since 2008, a year before the crisis started.

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A Key Principle

Assad’s troops retreat from Golan, leaving Islamist rebels to confront Israel

President Bashar Assad has evacuated most of the troops of his 5th Army Division from their permanent bases on the Golan opposite Israeli forces and transferred the unit along with its artillery to Damascus,DEBKAfile’s military sources report.
The Syrian ruler’s step had three purposes:

1. To reinforce his Damascus defenses;

2. To carve out a buffer zone along the Israeli border and leave it under rebel control.

3. To provide the jihadists fighting in rebel ranks with access to the Israeli border fence. Senior officers in the IDF’s northern command believe it is just a matter of time before these al Qaeda-associated fighters hurl themselves at the border fence to break through, or target Israeli military targets from across the Syrian border.

Assad first practiced this stratagem on Syria’s northern frontier with Turkey.

Six months ago, he opened the door of his border region to let armed bands of the separatist PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) through from Iraq and set up new strike bases opposite Turkey’s back door, to which they could flee after attacks.
The PKK took full advantage of this opportunity. Indeed, to curb the Kurdish offensive, Ankara was forced to enter into negotiations with PKK leaders for a settlement of their claims, although they are still poised in Syria to resume their attacks.
Israel does not have that option because most of the Islamists fighting with the Syrian rebels are associated with al Qaeda and committed to jihad against the Jewish state.
DEBKAfile reports that Saturday, Feb. 16, Israeli government and military leaders were at odds over whether to extend medical treatment to seven Syrians injured in battle on the Golan. In the event, they were allowed to cross the border and transferred to hospital in Safed.

But because of the argument, the official communiqué said only that the decision was taken on humanitarian grounds but omitted to specify whether the injured Syrians were soldiers or rebels.
However, there was never any doubt that they were in fact Syrian conscripts wounded in the course of their unit’s withdrawal from the Golan. The argument against giving the soldiers medical treatment was that they were Bashar Assad’s troops and looking after them was tantamount to endorsing Assad’s hostile schemes and therefore unacceptable. It was settled by avoiding identifying the wounded men.

DEBKAfile

How neuroscientists are hacking into brain waves to open new frontiers

BOSTON — Neuroscientists are following through on the promise of artificially enhanced bodies by creating the ability to "feel" flashes of light in invisible wavelengths, or building an entire virtual body that can be controlled via brain waves.

"Things that we used to think were hoaxes or science fiction are fast becoming reality," said Todd Coleman, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at San Diego. Coleman and other researchers surveyed the rapidly developing field of neuroprosthetics in Boston this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One advance came to light just in the past week, when researchers reported that they successfully wired up rats to sense infrared light and move toward the signals to get a reward. "This was the first attempt … not to restore a function but to augment the range of sensory experience," said Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis, the research team's leader.

The project, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, involved training rats to recognize a visible light source and poke at the source with its nose to get a sip of water. Then electrodes were implanted in a region of the rats' brains that is associated with whisker-touching. The electrodes were connected to an infrared sensor on the rats' heads, which stimulated the target neurons when the rat was facing the source of an infrared beam. Then the visible lights in the test cage were replaced by infrared lights.

It typically took about four weeks of practice for the rats to figure out how to use their new infrared sensory system, but eventually the rats could respond to the invisible light as well as they responded to the visible light. Presumably, they could "feel" where the infrared flash was coming from, as part of their whisker-touching sense.

Nicolelis said the experiment showed that the brain is "much more plastic than we thought" when it comes to adapting to new stimuli.

That plasticity is the key to another set of experiments he and his colleagues have been conducting with rhesus monkeys, in which the monkeys learn to use their brain waves to control robotic arms or manipulate virtual objects on a computer screen. Over the years, Nicolelis' research team has developed a brain-cap system for monkeys that can pick up neural signals in almost 2,000 channels simultaneously, and send them wirelessly to a computer for processing. Nicolelis indicated that he was closing in on the goal of creating a system that could control a full-body exoskeleton.

"We can get animals to control the whole body now, when you get to the 1,000-neuron margin," he said.

Such work feeds into the Walk Again Project, a multinational effort to develop next-generation, full-body prosthetics for people with disabilities. Nicolelis wants to have an experimental brain-controlled exoskeleton ready in time to make its debut at next year's World Cup soccer finals, which are to be hosted by Brazil, Nicolelis' native country.

"We hope we will open the World Cup with a paraplegic young adult walking onto the field," he said.

Coleman, meanwhile, is working on ways to make brain-control devices less obtrusive. He is among several researchers who have been developing stamp-sized wireless sensors that can be worn like temporary tattoos. Such sensors can be used to monitor a person's medical signs — but if they're worn on the head, it's possible to pick up brain waves. In fact, Coleman found that the wireless tattoo sensors worked as well as the conventional, wired stick-on electrodes.

Todd Coleman, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at San Diego, demonstrates how his "wireless tattoos" make monitoring bodily functions much easier.

The results suggest that someday, it might be possible to develop a computer program to read the brain-wave patterns sent in by a tattoo on your forehead, and then fine-tune a virtual character to respond as if it was reading your thoughts.

The tattoos could have more down-to-earth applications in the medical field: In the future, such sensors could be used to monitor a newborn's brain for any signs of abnormality, or an older person's brain for signs of cognitive impairment.

"As we age, our ability to respond, or to modulate our attention to different new types of inputs, will start to slow down," Coleman said in a video interview distributed by AAAS. "Imagine if we could ... mount a sticker to the forehead that can provide quantitative outputs — measurements of that."

Does all this sound like a dream come true for the disabled, or a nightmare for folks worried about mind-reading robots?

Are We Days Away From A Financial Collapse?

PETRUS ROMANUS (Pt 8) The False Prophet And The Antichrist Are Here

From Christians to New Agers, skeptics to historians, the world is presently enthralled with what will happen during and following the year 2012. In general, the excitement (or dread, as the case may be) surrounds a variety of predictions made by ancient and modern sources concerning a portentous moment in time. 

Mankind has entered a period of unprecedented global upheaval, according to these experts, when the earth and all life on it will undergo apocalyptica marked by the end of the “thirteenth baktun” of the Mesoamerican Mayan Long Count. The exact end date of this calendar is December 21, 2012, when during the winter solstice at 11:11, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), the New Age crowd says the sun will align with the galactic center of the Milky Way galaxy, an event that occurs only every thirteen thousand years. 

The precession of the equinoxes will conclude a twenty-six-thousand-year cycle, bringing the astrological Age of Pisces to an end and introducing the beginning of Aquarius, when the next cycle begins and the sun rises out of the mouth of the Ouroboros (great serpent of the Milky Way). This is the sun rising in Sagittarius, the centaur with a bow—the symbol for Nimrod coming out from the mouth of Leviathan and the sun “god” rising again—Apollo/Osiris. The Mayans predicted this conjunction, interpreting it as a harbinger of the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of a new “enlightened” pagan age. People from the world’s greatest religions including Christianity and Islam also see current global developments as potential omens of an end-times scenario leading to the Apocalypse. This includes catholic mystics who believe in the Prophecy of the Popes.

On this order and as discussed in an earlier entry, the Catholic seer who in 2002 correctly predicted that the pope succeeding John Paul II would be named Benedict XVI, Ronald L. Conte Jr., believes the next pope will be Cardinal Francis Arinze and that he will take the namePius XIII. This name (Pius) is associated historically with popes who emphasized authoritative doctrine during their pontificates. Cardinal Arinze fits this description, and Conte interprets this qualification as best fulfilling “Peter the Roman” as a pope who “will reaffirm the authority of the Roman Pontiff over the Church; this authority is based on his place as a Successor of Peter” and “will emphasize the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Faith and the Roman Catholic Church above all other religions and denominations, and its authority over all Christians and all peoples of the world.” To this, Conte adds, “During the reign of Pope Peter the Roman, the great apostasy begins” and this pope will mark “the first part of the tribulation, during our generation.”[i] Conte envisions this apocalypse beginning in 2012 when, as he sees it, Benedict is assassinated and is replaced by Petrus Romanus. This is followed by a series of cascading events resulting in World War III, which is triggered when Iranian-backed terrorists explode a nuclear bomb in New York City. The Great Tribulation begins, and by July 2013, Rome is destroyed when it is struck by a nuclear missile.

Elsewhere in our upcoming book we have meticulously investigated a French codex entitled, La Mystérieuse Prophétie des Papes (“The Mysterious Prophecy of the Popes”), issued in 1951 by a Jesuit priest and mathematician named René Thibaut (1883–1952). Among his astonishing findings—hidden to the modern world until the publishing of our work—Thibaut found concealed in the Prophecy of the Popes a clever number of word plays that form many acrostics and anagrams.^[ii]An example of one of the linguistic codes may hold cryptic agreement with Ronald L. Conte’s conclusion that Petrus Romanus will take the name Pius. The code is discovered in the Latin text “Peregrinusapostolicus”^[iii] which was the prophecy for the ninety-sixth pope on the list, Pius VI. The anagram not only reveals the papal name, it does so twice: PeregIinUS aPostolIcUS. This appearance of the name “Pius” is rather astounding considering we have a published copy dated almost two hundred years before Pius VI was elected. But Thibaut suggests the repetition serves as an even farther-reaching poetic refrain. In other words, “Pius! Pius!” is similar to the excited binary “Mayday, Mayday!” that sailors cry out in dire circumstances^[iv] and which may have prophetic implications concerning the name of the final pope on the list[Editors note: Thibaut's book in French and an English translation will be provided free with numerous other research works exclusively from Raiders News Update with the release of Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here].

In addition to being associated with Roman authoritarianism and cryptogramed in the Prophecy of the Popes, Conte bolsters his prognostication concerning the name “Pius” by pointing to the electrifying visions of another pope named Pius—Pope Pius X who served as pope from 1903 to 1914 and who saw a papal successor carrying the same name Pius fleeing Rome over the bodies of dead priests at the onset of the end times. Pius X is widely reported to have said:

What I have seen is terrifying! Will I be the one, or will it be a successor? What is certain is that the Pope will leave Rome and, in leaving the Vatican, he will have to pass over the dead bodies of his priests! Do not tell anyone this while I am alive.[v]

In a second vision during an audience with the Franciscan order in 1909, Pope Pius X appeared to fall into a trance. After a few moments, he opened his eyes and rose to his feet, announcing:

I have seen one of my successors, of the same name [a future pope named Pius], who was fleeing over the dead bodies of his brethren. He will take refuge in some hiding place; but after a brief respite, he will die a cruel death. Respect for God has disappeared from human hearts. They wish to efface even God’s memory. This perversity is nothing less than the beginning of the last days of the world.[vi]

The third part of the Secret of Fatima, which was supposedly released in total by the Vatican June 26, 2000, seems to echo the visions of Pius X. A section of the material reads:

…before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions.[vii]

The conceptual framework of these visions and their validity is volatile among many Catholics who believe Rome is complicit in an intentional cover-up involving the true Third Secret of Fatima as well as other suppressed Catholic foresights that are rife with wildly different predictions concerning the future prophetic role of the Roman Catholic Church. Marian apparitions, visions by popes, interpretations by cardinals of the apocalypse, and approved mystical prophecies often stand at odds with recent Vatican publications. Even the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” approved by the Church and promulgated by Pope John Paul II (released in English in 1994, the first catechism in more than four hundred years), which draws on the Bible, the Mass, the sacraments, traditions, teachings, and the lives of the saints, states under the section The Church’s Ultimate Trial:

675  Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the mystery of iniquity in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the Truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in the place of God and his Messiah who has come in the flesh.[viii]

Possibly at the center of this prophecy and a “Vatican cover-up” of the complete vision of Fatima (and related prophecies) is a second and potentially more powerful papal contender for the role of Petrus Romanus or “Peter the Roman”—Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro (Peter) Bertone, who was born in Romano (the Roman) Canavese (“Peter the Roman”). Among other things, Cardinal Bertone is, at the time our new investigative book on this subject Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here heads to the printer, second in command at the Vatican. As the Secretary of State and the Pope’s Camerlengo (Italian for “Chamberlain”), he is responsible during a papal vacancy to serve as acting Head of State of the Vatican City until “the time of agreement” and the election of a new pope. Our interest for the moment is with his 2007 work, The Last Seer of Fatima that appears to have accomplished exactly the opposite of its primary objective, mainly, to refute another work by famous Italian media personality, journalist, and author Antonio Socci, whose manuscript The Fourth Secret of Fatima claims the Holy See has repressed information concerning the true secrets delivered in Marian apparitions to three shepherd children in the rural Portuguese village of Fatima in 1917. The three young people were Lúcia (Lucy) dos Santos and her cousins Francisco Marto and his sister Jacinta Marto, whose visions—containing elements of prophecy and eschatology—are officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

We continue the investigation into Cardinal Bertone and the hidden secret of Fatima in the next entry. What does this have to do with the election of Petrus Romanus? A lot, according to those now assembling at the Vatican in preparation of Conclave...

Tom Horn

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