Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano grounds US flights

Four U.S. airlines temporarily suspended flights to and from Mexico City on Thursday after a volcano 50 miles from the capital spewed ash, a spokesman for the city's international airport said.

Three to eight flights on American Airlines, U.S. Airways, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Air Group have been postponed so far, Richard Jimenez, a representative for Mexico City's international airport told Reuters.

"The decision not to fly from Mexico City has been made by these airlines, but the airport is in operable conditions," Andres Gomez, another airport representative, said on local television. No Mexican airlines have halted operations, Gomez said.

Mexico's leading airline AeroMexico suspended flights briefly Thursday morning, but resumed operations less than an hour later.

The volcano Popocatepetl in the central state of Puebla has been more active this year, prompting officials to raise warning levels but have so far ordered no evacuations.

Officials have kept the volcano's risk level on hold at "yellow," the second highest on the four-color spectrum, indicating that there is more activity than usual but no threat of eruption, national emergency services coordinator Luis Felipe said on Twitter.

On Thursday, ash fell on communities adjacent to the volcano, nicknamed Don Goyo, and reached southern neighborhoods of Mexico City.

There is no evidence of volcanic ash in the airport's immediate vicinity, it announced through its Twitter account. Volcanic ash can damage jet engines.

Mexico City's airport serves more than 29 million people a year and oversaw 174,511 takeoffs and landings between January and June.

World News

Nationwide anti-NSA spying protests hit US

France 'has vast data surveillance'

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.

The operation is "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision", Le Monde says.

Other French intelligence agencies allegedly access the data secretly.

It is not clear however whether the DGSE surveillance goes as far as Prism. So far French officials have not commented on Le Monde's allegations.

The DGSE allegedly analyses the "metadata" - not the contents of e-mails and other communications, but the data revealing who is speaking to whom, when and where.

Connections inside France and between France and other countries are all monitored, Le Monde reports.

The paper alleges the data is being stored on three basement floors of the DGSE building in Paris. The secret service is the French equivalent of Britain's MI6.

The operation is designed, say experts, to uncover terrorist cells. But the scale of it means that "anyone can be spied on, any time", Le Monde says.

There is a continuing international furore over revelations that the US has been systematically seizing vast amounts of phone and web data.

The French government has sharply criticised the US spying, which allegedly included eavesdropping on official EU communications.

The scale of surveillance by America's National Security Agency (NSA) emerged from classified intelligence documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The UK spy agency GCHQ is reported to run a similarly vast data collection operation, co-operating closely with the NSA.
BBC

Church of England to Build “Pagan Church”

What would it be like to worship the Goddess inside a Christian cathedral, or to hold a Christian sermon inside a prehistoric stone circle? The Church of England (CoE) has announced plans to make such a scenario into reality by forming a church which incorporates pagan styles of worship and ritual, but the efforts have drawn criticism from Christians and pagans alike. For Universal Life Church ministers the English church’s plans an important ethical question: are Anglicans trying to show greater acceptance for earth-based religions, or are they secretly trying to convert pagans?

News of the so-called “pagan church” came as druids, Wiccans, and other members of the pagan community gathered together to celebrate Litha, or Alban Heruin—the Summer Solstice—at Stonehenge in the countryside of Wiltshire, England. The Church’s Mission Society is currently training its ordained ministers to consort amicably with pagans in the hope of seeing more of them discover, or re-discover, Christianity. According to the Society’s Andrea Campenale, the goal is to provide spiritual meaning in a secularized Britain. “Nowadays people, they want to feel something; they want to have some sense of experience”, she said, adding that “[w]e live in reflective England where there’s much more of a focus on ourselves. I think that is something we can bring in dialogue with the Christian society”. The Society’s Web page says about its pioneer minister training scheme that “[w]herever in the world the mission of Jesus goes on, the church needs pioneer mission leaders to break new ground”.

At first glance this attempt to “break bread” suggests the Anglican Communion’s growing tolerance of paganism, and the fact that Anglicans have fielded criticism from their own seems to testify to this. In a 2010 American Anglican article entitled “Are Pagan Practices Meeting an Increasingly Receptive Audience in the Episcopal Church”, author Jeff Waltondescribes another article in the newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The article, called “Crone Power”, recounts a “croning” ritual, or celebration of female wisdom. “[T]he meditation embraced a history of mystical women and offered prayers to ‘Mothering God’ and ‘Eternal Wisdom’”, he writes, also noting the “outing” of an Episcopal priest who led a secret life as a druid named Oakwyse. Additionally, in 2009, the Institute of Religion and Democracy, which bills itself as “ecumenical”, condemned as “idolatrous” a Native American “Sacred Circles” ceremony held inside the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

   

But does this growing receptivity mean the Church of England wants to embrace pagans, or convert them? In a Telegraph article on the topic, one commenter wrote, “given that much of Christian culture is the result of putting a monotheistic gloss on pagan ritual, this seems like the only way that another wrote, “[t]hen again, maybe this is just what we need. Converting the pagans by co-opting some of their beliefs worked wonders the first time, and made Christianity a whole lot more fun in the bargain. Where would we be without Christmas trees?” Many, it would seem, think the CoE’s “pagan church” is really just a subtle form of missionary work.

Christianity will survive in England”, while       

The idea of a paganized Anglican worship service seems refreshingly open-minded on the surface, but talk of “mission” work and bringing pagans to Christ make it sound like a thinly-veiled attempt at proselytizing an increasingly secular British populace. Interfaith ministers ordained online should be aware of the difference between syncretism and religious co-optation. The former means to accept and integrate; the latter, to weigh up and assimilate.


The monastery.org

New device turns public transportation windows into ads by beaming sound into your head

Maybe that is why everybody it's going to love the antichrist....

They are going to beam ideas to the people mind

New technology developed by Britain's Sky Go and advertising agency BBDO Dusseldorf can turn vibrating bus and train windows into hi-tech advertisements by beaming sound into commuters' heads.

The nefariously clever device is installed on a window, where it releases high-frequency oscillations. The brain then converts those oscillations into sound.

Lean your head against the glass, and the window talks to you.

The process is called "bone conduction", which sounds rather ominous. Rightly so. This technology could stop thousands of drained and groggy commuters from dozing on their trips home.

Just watch the video above, which was put together by BBDO Dusseldorf to showcase the device. None of the featured commuters seem particularly impressed by the strange voice in their heads.

It's not all bad, mind you. In the right hands, this technology could probably give passengers access to live sports commentary, some easy listening music or even a soothing Stephen Fry audiobook.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/07/03/new-device-turns-public-transportation-windows-into-ads-by-beaming-sound-into/?intcmp=related#ixzz2Y6F3lxlf

Portugal, Greece risk reawakening euro zone beast

(Reuters) - A teetering Portuguese government has underlined the threat that the euro zone debt crisis, in hibernation for almost a year, may be about to reawaken.

From Greece to Cyprus, Slovenia to Spain and Italy, and now most pressingly Portugal, where the finance and foreign ministers resigned in the space of two days, a host of problems is stirring after 10 months of relative calm imposed by the European Central Bank.

Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho told the nation in an address late on Tuesday that he did not accept the foreign minister's resignation and would try to go on governing.

If his government does end up collapsing, as is now more likely, it will raise immediate questions about Lisbon's ability to meet the terms of the 78-billion-euro bailout it agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund in 2011.

Portugal had been held up as an example of a bailout country doing all the right things to get its economy back in shape. That reputation is now harder to sustain and even before this latest crisis, the International Monetary Fund reported last month that Lisbon's debt position was "very fragile".

Coming soon after the near-collapse of the Greek government, which has been given until Monday to show it can meet the demands of its own EU-IMF bailout, the euro zone may be on the brink of falling back into full-on crisis.

EU officials have been at pains to talk down any unrest, buoyed by the tranquility in financialmarkets since European Central Bank President Mario Draghi made good on his pledge last summer to do whatever it takes to protect the euro via a bond-buying program.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has spoken of the worst of the crisis being over, and the economic affairs commissioner, Olli Rehn, has often dismissed "doomsayers" who once predicted the euro would collapse.

But despite the desire to project calm, EU officials quietly acknowledge that all is not well and that any number of problems could throw the region back into turmoil.

"There are always issues simmering under the surface," said an EU diplomat who has been dealing first hand with the crisis since it erupted in Greece in early 2010.

"It's far from over. The immediacy may have ebbed away, but I think we're all aware that under the surface, there's still a lot of stuff than can come back to bite us."

During a meeting of finance officials from the 17 euro countries on Tuesday, there was agreement that the "optimism in the euro zone is not justified, that we are in worse shape than it seems," according to one source at the meeting.

The situation in Portugal was a particular concern, said JP Morgan economist Alex White.

"The announcement this afternoon that Paulo Portas, the foreign minister, has resigned significantly escalates our near-term concerns," he said in a note to clients. "At the moment risks appear elevated."

All that is coming against a backdrop of rising euro zone borrowing costs once again after the U.S. Federal Reserve's announcement of an exit strategy from its money-printing program put world markets back into a spin.

Portuguese 10-year bond yields spiked up to eight percent on Wednesday with reports of further ministerial resignations throwing the coalition government's future into peril.

Portas has to decide whether to stay in his post or pull his rightist CDS-PP party out of the coalition, robbing the government of its majority.

Greece, which has resumed talks with its EU and IMF lenders, is every bit as alarming.

A privatization process, which was supposed to help cut into Greece's debt mountain down, has stalled and progress on public sector reform is faltering.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has ruled out a fresh round of cuts, his government is seeking to lower its privatization revenue target after failing to sell its natural gas operation and there is a 1 billion euros black hole in the state-run health insurer, so its lenders may demand measures to fill that.

There are some suggestions that the EU and IMF may refuse to pay at least some of the 8.1 billion euros bailout tranche on offer and dribble it out instead in order to focus minds in Athens. Anything more dramatic would be risky since Greece faces big bond redemptions next month and nobody wants a default.

With German elections looming in September, Angela Merkel's government is determined not to rock the boat beforehand.

CRISIS AWAKENS FROM SLUMBER

Spain and Italy, two far larger economies, also major risks, as do banking sector problems in Slovenia, slow reforms in Cyprus and a scandal in Ireland that has shaken confidence.

In a note to clients late last month, Italy's Mediobanca warned that the country would "inevitably end up in an EU bailout request" in the next six months unless borrowing costs could be kept low and the economy found some traction.

Prime Minister Enrico Letta, in office only since April, faces instability in his coalition, with former prime minister Mario Monti threatening to withdraw support because of the slow pace of desperately needed economic reforms.

While Spain may have avoided a full bailout so far, its banks - which received 40 billion euros from the euro zone rescue fund in 2012 - face a long road to rehabilitation, as do those in Ireland. The IMF praised both countries for their efforts last month, but also warned of risks ahead.

"There are so many negatives outside of Greece as well. On the rest of them, we just want them postponed until after the summer," said one senior euro zone source.

In Ireland, which has performed best of the rescued countries and is expected to emerge from its assistance program later this year, the problems are more of reputation than implementation.

Transcripts of telephone conversations from 2008 have revealed how bankers at Anglo Irish Bank made light of the Irish government's decision to guarantee their liabilities, a move that ultimately saddled the nation with vast debts.

The bankers also ridiculed Germany - the chief underwriter of all the rescue loans in Europe - singing "Deutschland ueber alles" on the tapes, which has infuriated German officials, the very people the Irish government needs to keep happy.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble described the bankers as contemptuous.

While Ireland's problems are likely to blow over, those in Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, which also has tough bailout conditions to meet, are clear and present, and those in Italy and Spain show few signs of disappearing.

EU institutions effectively shut down in August. but that might not prevent a restless summer as the slumbering crisis reawakens agitated.

Reuters

Gerald Celente Unleashed - July 3, 2013