(title unknown): Did The Pope Resign Because Gay Priests In The Vatican Were Being Blackmailed?
www.queerty.com
Pope Benedict XVI may have announced his retirement after a ring of gay priests was discovered in the Vatican, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It all started last May when the Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested for leaking almost 300 pages of papal correspondence that sugg...
Report: Pope resigned in wake of gay priest scandal - USA TODAY | www.queerty.com - Pope Benedict XVI may have announced his retirement after a ring of gay priests was discovered in the Vatican
(title unknown): Did The Pope Resign Because Gay …
Did The Pope Resign Because Gay Priests In The Vatican Were Being Blackmailed? www.queerty.com Pope Benedict XVI may have announced his retirement after a ring of gay priests was discovered in the Vatican, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It all started last May when the Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested for leaking almost 300 pages of papal correspondence that sugg...
### Putin at 2:27 ###
You can believe your eyes people - no interception was done, nothing artificial - it was a completely natural event. Big, fast rock enters atmosphere and burns up - rolling sonic booms follow, and glass windows get blown in. Oh, and a factory roof collapses. That's all folks. =) Would have loved to have been there to experience it though.
MOSCOW - With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the western Siberian sky Friday and exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million.
While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails as it arced toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.
The meteor above western Siberia entered the Earth's atmosphere about 9:20 a.m. local time at a hypersonic speed of at least 54,000 kph and shattered into pieces about 30-50 kilometers high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated it released 300 to 500 kilotons of energy and left a trail 500 kilometers long. Chelyabinsk is about 1,500 kilometers east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.
The shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000 square meters of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in Chelyabinsk were damaged. At a zinc factory, part of the roof collapsed.
The Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave and 48 were hospitalized. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass, officials said.
Scientists estimated the meteor unleashed a force 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, although the space rock exploded at a much higher altitude.
Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Vladimir Purgin said many of the injured were cut as they flocked to windows to see what caused the intense flash of light, which momentarily was brighter than the sun.
There was no immediate word on any deaths or anyone struck by space fragments.
Some meteorite fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul, the regional Interior Ministry office said. The crash left an eight-meter crater in the ice.
Russian television ran video of athletes at a city sports arena who were showered by shards of glass from huge windows. Some of them were still bleeding.
Other videos showed a long shard of glass slamming into the floor close to a factory worker and massive doors blown away by the shock wave.
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling so much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.
The many broken windows exposed residents to the bitter cold as temperatures in the city were expected to plummet to minus 20 Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) overnight. The regional governor put out a call for any workers who knew how to repair windows.
Social media was flooded with video from the many dashboard cameras that Russians mount in their cars, in case of pressure from corrupt traffic police or a dispute after an accident.
NASA said the Russian fireball was the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia, and flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Chelyabinsk is about 5,000 kilometers west of Tunguska. The Tunguska blast, attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.
The 50-metre space rock that safely hurtled past Earth at 2:25 p.m. EST Friday was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14 and was discovered a year ago. It came closer than many communication and weather satellites that orbit 22,300 miles up.
The asteroid was invisible to astronomers in the United States at the time of its closest approach on the opposite of the world. But in Australia, astronomers used binoculars and telescopes to watch the point of light speed across the clear night sky.
Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, called the back-to-back celestial events an amazing display. "This is indeed very rare and it is historic," he said on NASA TV.
One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall on Dec. 21, 2012 — when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world — but was delivered late by Russia's notoriously inefficient postal service.
Патриархат РПЦ должен быть ликвидирован, Белковский.mp4
Published on Feb 21, 2013
Политолог говорит о том, что Русская православная церковь в нынешнем виде не имеет никакого отношения к ортодоксальной церкви, не является ее правопреемницей и придумана Сталиным для обслуживания интересов власти. Именно поэтому современный Московский патриархат РПЦ должен быть ликвидирован.
American Spectator (blog)
What about religion? Ever since the Soviet Union fell the traditional Orthodox lands of Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet republics have been flooded with Western missionaries of religious sects foreign to the land. What is wrong ... Russian 'reset' blasted as 'failure'WND.com
ВОЗ: Западная Европа для детей безопасней, чем США, а Америка - чем Россия inoСМИ.Ru
Из 60 тысяч российских детей, усыновленных американскими семьями за два последних десятилетия, 20 погибли, и в среду российский детский омбудсмен заявил, что гораздо безопасней для детей находиться в Западной Европе. Некоторые чиновники в России призвали к ...
MOSCOW — A campaign of insinuation and insult has targeted Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and in a country where all power flows from the top downward, his boss, President Vladimir Putin, has done nothing all winter to stop it. Read full article >>
MOSCOW — A campaign of insinuation and insult has targeted Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev, and in a country where all power flows from the top downward,
his boss, President Vladimir Putin, has done nothing all winter to stop it.
Medvedev’s failings get an airing in the press, and nasty, anonymous video documentaries accuse him of all
sorts of treachery. Slights and humiliations are visited on him by the Kremlin,
seat of the presidential apparatus. Governors go around him. Bureaucrats ignore
him. Putin, in public, takes little care to hide his disdain.
Medvedev responds by repeatedly trying to demonstrate his loyalty to Putin,
which draws ridicule from politicians and pundits alike. As a consequence, the
cabinet of ministers Medvedev chairs is barely able to function.
The Kremlin could halt the abuse any time it wanted to, said Lilia Shevtsova
of the Moscow Carnegie Center. But Putin, she said, intends to send a clear
message to the rest of his circle that Medvedev is irrevocably out of favor. And
it is a symptom of one of Putin’s strongest characteristics, she added: “He
enjoys it when other people are being hurt.”
Gleb Pavlovsky, a once-trusted Kremlin insider who was fired in 2011, has a
darker view: that Putin has convinced himself that Medvedev betrayed him, has
conflated Medvedev with the political protesters who in fact oppose both men,
and is lashing out in all directions in a fight against demons that only he can
see.
This, Pavlovsky said in a recent interview, explains the anti-Americanism,
the trials of political foes and the strident denunciations of the liberal
elite. Worse, he said, the mood of distrust is infecting the whole political
establishment, ushering in what he called a Russian McCarthyism. A case in point
is the Duma, the lower house of parliament, where members try to outdo each
other in finding new menaces to ban while ignoring the challenges Russia
actually faces, he said.
The ‘tandem’
It wasn’t always this way. From 2008 to 2012, Medvedev was president and
Putin prime minister. Putin had already served two terms as president, and
stepping into the prime minister’s job was a way to remain in power without
violating the constitution. The idea was that they would be a “tandem” in
running the country, with Putin in control but Medvedev faithfully carrying out
the duties of the presidency.
It worked for a while, said Pavlovsky, a principal architect of the
arrangement. His hope, he said, was that it would constitute a transition toward
an actual electoral democracy. But even as Medvedev showed himself to be more
tentative and cautious than he had to be, he began talking in 2011 as though he
might seek reelection. Communications between the two leaders were bad, and
Putin, Pavlovsky said, suddenly sensed betrayal.
That is when he decided to take the presidency back. Medvedev acquiesced but insisted
on becoming prime minister, and Putin, perhaps out of misplaced fear that he
would become a leader of the opposition, agreed.
But Putin was so wounded by what he believed to be Medvedev’s motives,
Pavlovsky said, that he is now suspicious of everybody. This is not only bad
politics, he said, but it has left all those close to Putin unsure of where they
stand or what will happen.
“The tandem turned out to be destructive for both these politicians — they
damaged each other,” Pavlovsky said. “One was traumatized, and the other stopped
existing as a political personality.”
Putin could fire Medvedev any time he wants, although he isn’t normally one
to let people go.
“He can despise Medvedev, he can walk him around like a lap dog, he can
condescend to him — but he cannot just brush him aside,” Shevtsova said. “That
would undermine the tightness of the gang.”
More likely, she said, is that the president is preparing Medvedev to be the
scapegoat when some crisis comes along that requires one.
Putin may feel that he has to crush Medvedev before he can discard him, said
Kirill Rogov, an analyst at the Gaidar Institute, or else the prime minister
might rise again to challenge him.
‘Medvedev’s people’
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, both at the Brookings Institution, have just
published a book that analyzes Putin’s presidency, and they
pointed out at a recent forum that Medvedev, who is 13 years younger than Putin,
would have been a law student during the years of the great pro-democracy
demonstrations before the Soviet collapse and probably took part in some. Putin,
at that time, was a KGB officer in isolated Dresden, East Germany.
So in one sense Putin was right if he believed that the crowds of protesters
this past year in Moscow were “Medvedev’s people.” They are his age, largely
from his sort of background, and of the same modern sensibility.
Now Putin’s cherished “vertical of power” has been rerouted to bypass
Medvedev.
Putin’s 60 percent approval rating would be high in any true democracy, Rogov
said, but it is not sufficient in Russia’s “electoral authoritarianism.” Putin’s
system depends on there being no alternative, or no promise of one, and a
mythology of overwhelming consensus.
Alarmed by the opposition, Rogov said, Putin has moved forcefully to
“separate” the liberal, urban protesters from the rest of Russian society —
embracing traditionalism, nationalism and the church. “This is much more serious
than I thought even a month ago,” he said.
The new mood helps explain the most recent anonymous video attacking
Medvedev. It luridly accuses him of treasonously betraying Russia by going along
with NATO action in Libya.
Having embarked on this course, Putin cannot turn back, Rogov said. His
problem is that more and more people who have gone along with him up to now will
be repelled by the new fundamentalism. Putin used to be the defender of the
status quo, but now he is the agent of change — in a direction that plenty of
influential Russians will not care for.
“Putin is becoming a nuisance to the elite,” Shevtsova said. “At some point,
he will have to use force and coercion. That is the logic of the reign. But he’s
not ready. He’s not Stalin.”
Александр Лукашенко: Белорусская армия должна быть готова к внешней агрессии ИнфоРос
Белорусская армия должна быть готова к отражению агрессии извне. Об этом сегодня, 21 февраля, сообщил руководителям Минобороны Белоруссии Александр Лукашенко. Совещание с белорусскими "силовиками" прошло в Администрации президента и было посвящено подготовке к ...
Испортил ли Путин отпуск Лукашенко? inoСМИ.Ru
Встреча Александра Лукашенко и Владимира Путина в Сочи так и не состоялась. Хотя, согласно официальной информации, глава Белоруссии был приглашен в столицу зимней Олимпиады российским президентом. Значит ли это, что Путин демонстративно проигнорировал Лукашенко ...
“Certainly, we don’t intend to dramatize the situation, but as I’ve told the military, we have to keep our powder dry in order to counteract negative trends that emerge inside and outside our country,” added Alexander Lukashenko.
Resetting the Reset on Russian Relations American Spectator (blog)
What about religion? Ever since the Soviet Union fell the traditional Orthodox lands of Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet republics have been flooded with Western missionaries of religious sects foreign to the land. What is wrong ... Russian 'reset' blasted as 'failure'WND.com
Thursday witnesseda confluence of great minds descending upon the Heritage Foundation to discuss Russia in the wake of Obama and Putin’s re-election. Four of those minds made up the discussion panel, and though they came from notably different walks of life (Russian and American, liberal and conservative), they were remarkably united in their negative outlook.
The backdrop of the discussion involved President Obama’s much-touted “reset” of relations, and the various ways this policy had failed to change anything. On the contrary, all the panelists cited a growing strain of anti-Americanism, fueling laws like“DimaYakovlev,” banning Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
There is still much room for hope. Vladimir Kura-Murza, senior policy advisor to the Institute of Modern Russia, described how a growing civil society that had turned out against Putin’s re-election for the largest “political”protests since 1991. This group was primarily urban, middle class, connected to the internet, pro-democracy, and going nowhere fast.
On the other hand, Mr. Kura-Murza, buttressed by comments from Dr. Steven Blank, explained that Putin’s regime is quickly expanding its portfolio of repression. This includes expansions in what it means to commit an act of “high treason.” Anyone thought to undermine “constitutional order, sovereignty and territorial and state integrity” counts, and they can even be tried and fined posthumously. The panel also made it very clear that “the Gulag is back,” citing numbers of political prisoners held since Putin’s inauguaration.
Dr. Katrina Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation, emphasized that serious human rights violations are difficult to track and cover in an environment of state-controlled media, where organizations that receive outside funding are required to register as “foreign agents.” She also commented on a growing amount of tension for non-orthodox religious groups as the Duma seeks to make blasphemy a criminal act.
All of this happens to be congealing in a period of U.S. disengagement. Mr. Kura-Murza noted that the State Department blandly congratulated the Russian people on their successful election on the same day as the election protests. As the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan and quietly stops talking about a “new silk road,” they cede Central Asia to Russia’s sphere of influence. Finally, Russian moves to block action in Syria and Iran have so far met no apparent American resistance.
The panel explained that Russia was bent on an anti-democracy trajectory, and that this stood out as the lynch pin to understanding their stance towards America. By staying true to its principles, America should eventually be able to find a worthy response.
About the Author
Jackson Adams is an editorial intern at The American Spectator, a former teacher, ski instructor, and political campaigner, and a graduate of Theology from the University of Oxford.
Великое отречение : Портал Богослов.Ru
www.bogoslov.ru
28 февраля 2013 г. Папа Римский Бенедикт XVI по собственному желанию оставит пост главы Римско-Католической Церкви. Данный поступок, последний аналог которого случился шесть веков назад, потряс не только верных чад Римского престола, но и многочисленную светскую общественность. Своими рассуждениями,...
Грани.Ру | Александр Скобов: Казус Белковского
grani.ru
Надеюсь, Станиславу Белковскому, вызванному на допрос по доносу группы смешных членов Госдумы, в ближайшее время ничто серьезное не угрожает. Но именно в ближайшее время. Так что не стоит себя успокаивать тем, что уголовное преследование Белковского за статью о необходимости церковной реформации в Р...
О фальшивой докторской степени из Гарварда зав.кафедрой МГИМО
memoryfull.livejournal.com
Меня зовут Дмитрий Скугаревский, и я выпускник факультета Международных экономических отношений МГИМО 2011 г. Расскажу, как доцент, зав.кафедрой МГИМО, присвоил …
Cancel Putin's academic title: "Лекарство от плагиата": Владимир Путин стал кандидатом экономических наук, защитив диссертацию в горном институте Санкт-Петербурга в 1997 году... Главная часть кандидатской диссертации Владимира Путина - …
Александр Морозов
картина будет совершенно нацистская: абсолютно чистые, без всякой недвижимости, без счетов за рубежом, преданные путину до гроба НОВЫЕ ДЕПУТАТЫ (в том числе и бизнес). Такие "идеальные заводы круппа" плюс бюрократия + искренние эсесовцы. вероятно, "штирлиц" переходит к построению идеально системы...
Резиновые формулировки законов плюс их соответствующая трактовка полицейской и судебной властью – это и есть наше сегодняшнее «правовое поле». Пытаться переиграть нынешний режим на этом поле бессмысленно. С таким же успехом арестованный по статье об «антисоветской пропаганде с целью подрыва и ослабления существующего строя» мог доказывать следователю КГБ, что критика недостатков не подрывает и ослабляет, а, наоборот, «лишь укрепляет наш родной крепостнический строй». Единственно возможный тут способ противостояния – гражданское неповиновение.
Грани.Ру | Александр Скобов: Казус Белковского
grani.ru
Надеюсь, Станиславу Белковскому, вызванному на допрос по доносу группы смешных членов Госдумы, в ближайшее время ничто серьезное не угрожает. Но именно в ближайшее время. Так что не стоит себя успокаивать тем, что уголовное преследование Белковского за статью о необходимости церковной реформации в Р...
via NYT > Europe by By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN on 2/22/13
The lower house of Parliament voted for a bill to bar government officials from holding bank accounts outside of Russia, signaling that the measure may win final approval.
Резиновые формулировки законов плюс их соответствующая трактовка полицейской и судебной властью – это и есть наше сегодняшнее «правовое поле». Пытаться переиграть нынешний режим на этом поле бессмысленно. С таким же успехом арестованный по статье об «антисоветской пропаганде с целью подрыва и ослабления существующего строя» мог доказывать следователю КГБ, что критика недостатков не подрывает и ослабляет, а, наоборот, «лишь укрепляет наш родной крепостнический строй». Единственно возможный тут способ противостояния – гражданское неповиновение.
Грани.Ру | Александр Скобов: Казус Белковского
grani.ru
Надеюсь, Станиславу Белковскому, вызванному на допрос по доносу группы смешных членов Госдумы, в ближайшее время ничто серьезное не угрожает. Но именно в ближайшее время. Так что не стоит себя успокаивать тем, что уголовное преследование Белковского за статью о необходимости церковной реформации в Р...
Russia: Foreign Assets Bill Advances New York Times
The lower house of Parliament on Friday voted overwhelmingly for a bill to bar government officials from holding bank accounts or stocks outside of Russia, signaling that the measure is likely to win final approval. The vote, the first of three ...
Russia meteor triggered nuclear warning system Christian Science Monitor
A far-flung system of detectors that make up a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty network made its largest ever detection when a meteor exploded over Russia's Ural mountains last week. Skip to next paragraph. In Pictures: Meteors. Related stories ...
MOSCOW (AP) — Moscow should "temper emotions" over the death of a Russian boy adopted by an American family, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said Friday after the U.S. ambassador urged Russian authorities and the media to stop their "sensational exploitations" of the case.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian lawmakers gave initial backing on Friday to legislation that would prevent senior officials holding bank accounts or stocks abroad, a move by Vladimir Putin to show he is tackling corruption. If approved by both houses of parliament and signed by the president, the package of laws will give deputies and other state officials three months to decide whether to close foreign accounts and sell stocks abroad - or quit. ...
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