More and more cases of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe are being recorded. At the same time, increasing media interest has given voice to the anonymous suffering of people’s cases which are gaining international significance. This emerges from the 2011 report on cases of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe released…[this week] on the website of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe….Martin Kugler is a member of the Observatory, and described their work: “Our NGO”¦ started to cover these issues because there is a growing awareness in some international organisations like the United Nations or the OSCE who are concerned about human rights, and especially religious freedom. And the new and growing phenomenon in the western world in some countries in Europe is a kind of marginalisation of Christians.”

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Major steps toward the dis-establishment of Norway’s state church, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, were passed by the government on March 16 in its weekly session with King Harald V.
Expected to be adopted by the Parliament (Storting) in May or June this year, the proposals will make changes in the country’s constitution as well as in other church legislation, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs announced.

“I hope we have now prepared a good basis for the Church of Norway to be an open and inclusive national church, also in a multicultural and multi-religious setting,” Minister Rigmor Aasrud (Labour Party), said in a news release.

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French police are linking the shootings of four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse to the killings of three soldiers of North African descent in two separate incidents last week.

The same gun and the same stolen scooter were used in all three attacks, sources close to the investigation say.

A teacher and three children were shot dead at the Ozar Hatorah school, and a teenage boy was seriously injured.

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‘That was the most bitter and painful experience of my life,” observes Tom McMillen. “What happened in Munich was the most controversial and tragic sports competition in modern times.”

Mr. McMillen is a former college and NBA basketball star, Rhodes scholar, three-term Democratic member of Congress, and now successful businessman. We’re in his Northern Virginia office reminiscing about the continuing impact of the 1972 Olympic Games, held 40 years ago this summer. Overshadowing it all is the tragedy of what TV announcer Jim McKay called “the worst day in the history of sports.”

That was the hostage crisis in the Olympic Village, which culminated in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists (linked to the Fatah group that we now know enjoyed Soviet funding and training for many years). Four days later was the disputed basketball game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in which Mr. McMillen played a pivotal role.

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A man aged 20 has been arrested in northern Italy on suspicion of plotting an attack on a synagogue in Milan.

The suspect, described as Moroccan-born, was said to have had details of the synagogue and plans for an attack on his computer.

Police in London said a 40-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of collecting information useful to terrorism.

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The German Church’s accommodation of the Nazi regime reveals an appalling failure of basic Christian preaching and teaching. In [Edmund] Schlink’s understanding the failure of the churches was not so much caused by the persecution as revealed by it. “The forces outside the church showed up what was real in the life of these churches, and what was only an empty shell” (p. 100).

By God’s grace an astonishing renewal of the Church occurred as well. “The renewal began when the Church recognized the enemy’s attack as the hand of God ”¦ and when resistance to injustice became at the same time an act of repentance and of submission to the mighty hand of God” (p. 100). As the contrast with anti-Christian propaganda became more intense “the Church’s ears were re-opened to the Word of God. ”¦ But at the same time God’s Word challenged us, questioned the reality of our own religion, and forced us to recognize God simply and solely in His Word….”

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It was a very tough and closely fought home and away match set against Napoli.

Judges have convicted a Congolese warlord of snatching children from the street and turning them into killers.

The ruling is the International Criminal Court’s first judgment 10 years after it was established in The Hague as the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

Thomas Lubanga did not react as presiding Judge Adrian Fulford read out the verdicts Wednesday. He now faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment….

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The US, Japan and the European Union have filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, challenging its restrictions on rare earth exports.

US President Barack Obama accused China of breaking agreed trade rules as he announced the case at the White House.

Beijing has set quotas for exports of rare earths, which are critical to the manufacture of high-tech products from hybrid cars to flat-screen TVs.

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Christians do not have a right openly to wear a crucifix at work, the government is to tell the European Court of Human Rights.

Ministers are set to argue at the Strasbourg court that employers should be able to dismiss workers who insist on wearing a cross….

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said the government’s position was another sign that Christianity was becoming sidelined.

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Muslims are being used as “scapegoats” in the French election campaign in which halal slaughter has become a hot-button issue, the French Council of the Muslim Faith said yesterday.

The statement came a day after the prime minister, Francois Fillon, urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their “outdated” halal and kosher slaughter rules.

The council, asked about Mr Fillon’s comment on halal, said it “does not accept that Islam and Muslims be used as scapegoats in this [election] campaign”.

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The first suffering of Christ we must experience is the call sundering our ties to this world. This is the death of the old human being in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Whoever enters discipleship enters Jesus’ death, and puts his or her own life into death; this has been so from the beginning. The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Every call of Christ leads to death. Whether with the first disciples we leave home and occupation in order to follow him, or whether with Luther we leave the monastery to enter a secular profession, in either case the one death awaits us, namely death in Jesus Christ, the dying away of our old form of being human in Jesus’ call.
”¦.Those who are not prepared to take up the cross, those who are not prepared to give their life to suffering and rejection by others, lose community with Christ and are not disciples. But those who lose their life in discipleship, in bearing the cross, will find it again in discipleship itself, in the community of the cross with Christ. The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ, of the cross, and to take offense at the cross. Discipleship is commitment to the suffering Christ.

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditations on the Cross (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1998 [trans Douglas Stott]), pp. 14,16

[The] Greece youth unemployment rate has risen to 51.1%. It was 39% in 2010, 28.9% in 2009, 26.3% in 2008, 24.5% in 2007

–Alberto Nardelli as cited in this morning’s Telegraph.

Lionel Messi scored five goals, a Champions League record, as Barcelona thrashed Bayer Leverkusen 7-1 at the Camp Nou to win their last-16 tie 10-2 on aggregate.

Messi netted with two lobs, a fine low drive, a close-range finish and a long-range screamer to make history for the umpteenth time in his short career.

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The international community is set to restart talks with Iran on its nuclear program, the European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday, opening a diplomatic channel at a time of increased tensions between Tehran and Western powers.

Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, on Tuesday wrote to Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, that the EU proposed resuming talks “as soon as possible.” The agreement was a response to a letter from Mr. Jalili in February asking for talks at the “earliest” opportunity.

The announcement comes a day after U.S. and Israeli leaders met in Washington to discuss Iran’s nuclear-development program. The U.S. and many EU states have accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran has denied.

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Pinched by the global recession and tough-love budget demands of the European Union, the Italian government is looking for extra revenue, and has its eyes set on commercial properties owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
On Feb. 15, the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti announced it wants to revise rules on the tax-exempt status of church-owned commercial property. Although the exemption also applies to other not-for-profit entities, such as trade unions, political parties and religious groups, the Catholic church is its largest beneficiary.

“Such a move would have been unimaginable six months ago,” said Francesco Perfetti, a history professor at LUISS University in Rome. “After all, no matter whether you are a believer or not, the church is an integral part of Italy’s culture.”

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Vladimir Putin was poised to win a third term as Russian president but the opposition vowed to continue protests on Monday amid claims that the election was marred by widespread violations.

Two exit polls released after Russia’s 95,000 polling stations closed showed that the former spy who has dominated politics for the past dozen years gaining about 59 per cent of the vote. If confirmed by the final results, that would represent a comfortable victory for Mr Putin with no need to go into a second round of voting.

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European leaders are braced for the eurozone’s first ever sovereign default this week as Greece’s efforts to secure a €206bn (£172bn) “voluntary” bond swap looks increasingly unlikely.

Authorities in Athens are ready to enforce the controversial collective action clauses, or CACs, to impose the restructuring deal on all bondholders as the number of voluntary agreements look set to fall short of the required amount.
Credit rating agencies have warned they will declare Athens to be in default if the CACs are triggered which would be a dramatic culmination to a three-year rollercoaster ride for Athens, the eurozone and global markets.

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Fear and a lack of choice may carry the election for Mr Putin, but they cannot disguise the growing discontent across different classes, ages and regions. For those who have done less well than Ms Guseva over the past 12 years but still remember Soviet times, the 1990s are becoming less relevant. Polls show that the fastest decline in Mr Putin’s support is among poorer people over 55 years of age; they feel Mr Putin has not honoured his promises, and are tired of waiting. The conspicuous display of riches by corrupt bureaucrats heightens their sense of injustice. The number of people who no longer trust Mr Putin has risen to 40%, and people tell pollsters that the country is stagnating. “The regime is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the population,” says Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, a social-research outfit. Mr Putin’s victory will only make things worse.

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Watch it all. Clint Dempsey rocks.

I turned it on to see England trailing 2-0. They tied it up 2-2 with two late goals and then Robin got a spectacular winner off his left foot for the 3-2 victory. Quite the finish.

Watch it all–my oh my; KSH.

…[Italian Prime Minister Mario] Monti’s joint letter with twelve EU states last week calling for an end to self-defeating contraction marks a key moment in this crisis. If Francois Hollande is elected French president in May, the shift in Europe’s balance of power will be complete. Germany will lose its stifling grip on EU policy machinery. The EMU bloc will start to tilt towards reflation at long last.

Whether it can come soon enough to avert a social explosion across Europe’s arc of depression remains to be seen. Nor can such stimulus overcome the fundamental flaws of EMU since Germany is at an entirely place in the deform structure, with unemployment at 20-year lows of 5.5pc.

What is needed to save the South must endanger the North. Germany would overheat, pushing its inflation to 4pc or 5pc until Bild Zeitung erupts in Teutonic fury. It is impossible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives.

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European leaders have approved their latest aid package for Greece, raising hopes that the worst phase of the sovereign debt crisis is over and a persistent source of stress on global markets has been removed.

But Greece’s 130 billion euro ($172 billion) bailout highlights the weaknesses in Europe’s response to the crisis, some analysts say. The worry is that these problems could flare up and undermine recovery efforts in countries like Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

“I don’t want to be a Cassandra, but the idea that it’s over is an illusion,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University and co-author of “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” “I am amazed by the short-term psychology in the market.”

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The mood is growing surly in the south of Europe as austerity measures take hold. With unemployment at 20 percent in some countries ”“ and youth unemployment as high as 50 percent ”“ warnings are growing sharper about a troubling rise of populist feeling….

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Iran’s government ordered a halt to oil exports to Britain and France on Sunday, in what may be only an initial response to the European Union decision to cut off Iranian oil imports and freeze central bank assets beginning in July.

Britain and France depend little on Iranian oil, however, so their targeting may be a mostly symbolic act, a function of the strong positions Paris and London have taken in trying to halt Iranian nuclear enrichment and bring pressure to bear on Syria, one of Tehran’s closest allies.

Tehran may also be reluctant, when its economy has been damaged by existing sanctions, to deprive itself of revenues from its larger European customers. At the same time, it may be seeking to divide the 27-nation European Union between those who depend on Iranian oil and those who do not

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The next speaker was Cardinal Josip Bozanic, archbishop of Zagreb. “We want to talk of evangelization from our experience of life, our communion, and in view of a specific mission, that of the pastor,” said the Croatian prelate.

To this end, the archbishop of Zagreb added that the pastoral concerns are “social and spiritual,” and the latter are not opposed or separated but seen as “dimensions of one same integral development of persons and of human society.”

Cardinal Bozanic quoted the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, where Pope Benedict XVI recalls that a humanism that excludes God is an inhuman humanism, and that only an open attitude to transcendence can help in the promotion and realization of ways of social and civil life (cf CV 78).

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In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”

Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that “the same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,” which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that “about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.”

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Almighty and everlasting God, who by the power of the Holy Spirit didst move thy servant Cyril and his brother Methodius to bring the light of the Gospel to a hostile and divided people: Overcome, we pray thee, by the love of Christ, all bitterness and contention among us, and make us one united family under the banner of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Moody’s has reflected these constraints and exposures in its decision to downgrade the government bond ratings of Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain as listed above. The outlook on the ratings of these countries remains negative given the continuing uncertainty over financing conditions over the next few quarters and its corresponding impact on creditworthiness.

In addition, these constraints have also prompted Moody’s to change to negative the outlooks on the Aaa ratings of Austria, France and the United Kingdom. The negative outlooks reflect the presence of a number of specific credit pressures that would exacerbate the susceptibility of these sovereigns’ balance sheets, and of their ongoing austerity programmes, to any further deterioration in European economic conditions and financial landscape.

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