EU: Bonino urges ‘United States of Europe

(ANSAmed) – Rome, May 15 – Italy’s foreign minister Emma Bonino has called for a ‘United States of Europe’.

“I am a confirmed federalist and so is this government,” Bonino said on Wednesday.

“Our objective remains the United States of Europe” and “a system that guarantees major results and also savings in the area of defence, research, major infrastructure and obviously foreign policy”.

Europe’s Unemployed: An Army Waiting for a Leader

As Europe edges toward mass anarchy and chaos, the Catholic Church is emerging as the key mediator between Europeans and their leaders.

Europe’s unemployment crisis is one everyone knows about, but no one is thinking seriously about.

Rome—Where Religion and Politics Meet

Throughout its history, the church has always competed with the state for power.

Having grabbed the attention of the whole world by his shock resignation from papal office, the subsequent actions of Joseph Ratzinger give an inkling as to his future influence within the Vatican and in global politics.

On Saturday, Ratzinger summoned Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti to an unscheduled private audience. With the Italian elections looming within days, the pope has already gone public on endorsing Monti’s candidature for election as Italy’s prime minister.

Zero Hour at the Vatican: A Bitter Struggle for Control of the Catholic Church

When and if the new pope elect happens to be Italian, those who follow Bible prophecy have a reason to be concerned — and it does seem likely.

Benedict XVI, in short, knew what could happen to one who rebelled against a centuries-old tradition in a church in which suffering is far from foreign. But he also knew that it wasn’t just a matter of his own suffering — it was a matter of the exhaustion, weakness and sickness of the church at large.

The pope from Bavaria has given up. Nevertheless, when he announced his resignation last Monday, hastily and almost casually mumbling the words as if he were saying a rosary, as if he were returning the keys to a rental car rather than the keys to St. Peter, there was still a sense of how deeply his move has shaken the Catholic empire.

Archbishop of Berlin Rainer Maria Woelki calls it a “demystification of the papal office.” Already, he says, the pope’s resignation has changed the church.

Vatican bank president’s links to warship manufacturing blindsides Holy See

In the Vatican there’s a German pope, a German bank president with connections to German aristocratic families as well as a German military connection. Is history repeating itself?

ATICAN CITY — The Vatican was drawn into a new controversy Friday after acknowledging that its bank’s new president is also chairman of a shipbuilder making warships — a significant conflict for an institution that has long shunned ties to military manufacturing.

The Vatican announced to great fanfare that Pope Benedict XVI had signed off on one of the last major appointments of his papacy, approving Ernst von Freyberg as president of the Vatican’s bank, officially known as the Institute for Religious Works.

The Vatican spokesman was caught off-guard, though, when a journalist noted that the German shipbuilder von Freyberg chairs, Blohm + Voss, is known for its military ship construction.

The great Portuguese sell-off

First Greece was subjugated and forced to yield (still is) national sovereignty, now comes Portugal. One country at a time, the European continent is being captured via economic warfare. Be it the Troika  or the EU itself, all roads lead back to Europe’s powerhouse, Berlin, and it’s Fourth Reich making the capture. With the Vatican undergoing a leadership transition and possible candidate elected this St. Patrick’s Day, we could likely soon see the revived Holy Roman Empire.

Little by little, the Portuguese state is going down in defeat. In April 2011, when the country got a loan of €78bn from the troika (EC, ECB and IMF) to avoid bankruptcy, it committed itself to privatisation. But under the leadership of Passos Coelho, a model student of the fiscal discipline demanded by the troika, the sell-off of the “crown jewels” – what’s left of them, that is – has sped up.

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Losing control of their destiny

For the 80,000 or so inhabitants of Viana, like for the rest of the country, the powerful wave of privatisation is causing a lot of worry. “Some of these state enterprises are gems, others are junk buckets, but they’re all strategic assets. And we’re losing them forever,” worries Bernardo S Barbosa, head of the local weekly Aurora do Lima. The Socialist mayor, José Maria Costa, shares a growing national concern: the feeling that the country is losing its sovereignty. In a vast room at City Hall, this engineer by training reacts very angrily to the policy of the executive: “By taking away our public assets, which are so vital, to the benefit of foreign companies, and private interests at that, we’re losing control of our own destiny. I even fear that in the end it will affect our freedom and democracy.”

Pope Benedict XVI in shock resignation

Pope Benedict XVI is to resign at the end of this month after nearly eight years as the head of the Catholic Church, saying he is too old to continue at the age of 85.

The unexpected development – the first papal resignation in nearly 600 years – surprised governments, Vatican-watchers and even his closest aides.

The Vatican says it expects a new Pope to be elected before Easter.

Australia—Germany’s Strategic Pacific Partner

Germany strengthens its ties with Australia as its springboard for projection of power in the Pacific.

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Students of Bible prophecy are aware that in the latter days a northern power is set to spread its imperial reign “south and east” and ultimately into Jerusalem (Daniel 8:9).

In 1995 Australia and Germany signed the Australia-Germany Partnership 2000 Action Plan. This agreement, vigorously supported by Australia’s prime minister at the time, Paul Keating, and the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, mapped out Germany’s future in Australia.

Anne Applebaum on Europe: The world’s new superpower

… and now the press swings towards Europe as the next superpower.

With the U.S. slowly cannibalizing itself out of existence, a new power must fill the vacuum. Contrary to popular belief (mostly within the United States), the end of the United States doesn’t mean the end of the world. While heavy on the info regarding France, the only critical point the article left out is that all roads lead to Europe’s main engine: Berlin, Germany. There are many articles and additional commentary featured within Global Geopolitics’ archive to support this theory. As the world economic/social/political crisis continues to worsen, people will soon be looking to Germany for the answers. NATO, as the article says is (and has been for a long time) losing support. Eventually it will leave (as the Soviets have always wished for) as the United States of Europe will be able to independently function and field its own European Army.

The Fourth Reich is coming. Don’t believe it? Doesn’t matter. It’s going to happen. Today’s jokes are tomorrow’s reality.

“A decade of war is now ending,” U.S. President Barack Obama declared Monday. Maybe that’s true in America, but it isn’t true anywhere else. Extremists are still plotting acts of terror. Authoritarian and autocratic regimes are still using violence to preserve their power. The United States can step back from international conflicts, but that won’t make them disappear.

Fortunately, there is another power that shares America’s economic and political values, that possesses sophisticated military technology and is also very interested in stopping the progress of fanatical movements, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. That power is Europe.

‘Credible Deterrence’: Germany Plans to Deploy Armed Drones

First comes the merging of states via political and social solidarity. Then, next is the “European Army” member nations have been calling for. Sometime later, and through an upcoming “United States of Europe” lead and dominated by Germany, meet your new king of the northern hemisphere and next world superpower. Some who say China would be the next might be in for a huge surprise.

A document obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE indicates the German government is preparing to procure armed drones for foreign combat. Opposition politicians are outraged by the development and note that the use of weapons-equipped unmanned aircraft is legally dubious and possibly unethical.

Bowing to pressure from the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, the federal government in Berlin is preparing to deploy armed, unmanned drones in foreign conflicts. In an answer to an official query made by the far-left Left Party, which has been obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, the German government wrote that its experience in foreign combat operations has made it clear that reconnaissance vehicles must be armed “in order to provide protection against sudden and serious changes in the situation.”

Desert War

BERLIN/PARIS/BAMAKO (Own report) – The German Foreign Minister has confirmed Berlin’s readiness to become involved in the war in Mali. To his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Guido Westerwelle offered Germany’s “political, logistical, medical, and humanitarian” support for the intervention in France’s former colony. However, the German Minister of Defense, Thomas de Maizière, declared that there would be conditions to be met. Only when “the prerequisites are clarified and fulfilled” would Berlin be able to take part in the military mission. These statements from the German government show evidence of a dual strategy. On the one hand, Berlin is insisting on concessions to strengthen its position in French-dominated West Africa, and on the other, a German participation is supposed to thwart French-British unilateralism, as in the case of Libya. Berlin feels threatened by this sort of unilateralism, because since some time, Paris and London have been strongly enhancing their military cooperation, leading some in the German capital to suspect – not without reason – that this could be a means to escape Germany’s EU predomination, at least in the domain of military policy. In the meantime, the war in Mali has intensified after only a few days.

It Begins: Bundesbank To Commence Repatriating Gold From New York Fed

In what could be a watershed moment for the price, provenance, and future of physical gold, not to mention the “stability” of the entire monetary regime based on rock solid, undisputed “faith and credit” in paper money, German Handelsblatt reports in an exclusive that the long suffering German gold, all official 3,396 tons of it, is about to be moved. Specifically, it is about to be partially moved out of the New York Fed, where the majority, or 45% of it is currently stored, as well as the entirety of the 11% of German gold held with the Banque de France, and repatriated back home to Buba in Frankfurt, where just 31% of it is held as of this moment. And while it is one thing for a “crazy, lunatic” dictator such as Hugo Chavez to pull his gold out of the Bank of England, it is something entirely different, and far less dismissible, when the bank with the second most official gold reserves in the world proceeds to formally pull some of its gold from the bank with the most. In brief: this is a momentous development, one which may signify that the regime of mutual assured and very much telegraphed - because if the central banks don’t have faith in one another, why should anyone else? - trust in central banks by other central banks is ending.