Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph, Theodoros Pangalos said he was “very much afraid of what is going to happen” after Greek voters rejected the deal in elections last Sunday.
“The majority of the people voted for a very strange mental construction,” he said. “We want to be in the EU and the euro, but we don’t want to pay anything for the past.”
In yet another blow to the Afghan peace process, gunmen assassinated a senior member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council on Sunday morning. The attackers reportedly pulled up next to Maulvi Arsala Rahmani while he was stuck in Kabul’s rush hour traffic and opened fire killing the peace broker.
The murder of Mr. Rahmani comes less than a year after insurgents managed to kill the then head of the High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in his own home using a suicide bomber disguised as a Taliban messenger.
California is facing a much deeper budget deficit than expected due to weak tax revenues and slow progress in cutting budgets, Governor Jerry Brown said on Saturday.
Brown said the shortfall for the fiscal year ending on June 30 now stood at $16 billion, up from a previous estimate of $9.2 billion made in January.
When the Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng stole the show at an emergency Congressional hearing this month by calling into the chamber during a live television broadcast, few people noticed who was holding the cellphone.
But those within the tightknit community of Chinese dissidents in the United States, and their supporters, immediately recognized the man, who had arranged for Mr. Chen’s voice to be carried to Washington directly from his Beijing hospital bed: Bob Fu, a Chinese-born pastor who operates out of a squat, whitewashed house opposite a Family Dollar store here in Midland.
“When it comes to contacts in China, Bob’s network can’t be beat,” said Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, who convened the hearing to put pressure on the Obama administration and help ensure that Mr. Chen, a self-taught lawyer, would be allowed to leave China with his family to study law in the United States….
For anyone who has lost a parent long before he or she expected to, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are unsettling occasions, prompts to show appreciation that become prods to revisit grief.
They’re also proof that the world is full of accidental actuaries. I don’t know how else to explain it: the number of people who look at you and seem to calculate, correctly, that when you’re 33 years old, your mother should not yet be gone, and that there’s a good chance, according to median life expectancies, that she’s still around when you’re 37 and even when you’re 40, unless she had you late.
When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into his sixth day of “overtime” when an angel appeared and said, “You’re doing a lot of fiddling around on this one.”
And the Lord said, “Have you read the specs on this order?”
Ӣ She has to be completely washable, but not plastic;
”¢ Have 180 movable parts… all replaceable;
Ӣ Run on black coffee and leftovers;
Ӣ Have a lap that disappears when she stands up;
Ӣ A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair;
”¢ And six pairs of hands.”
The angel shook her head slowly and said, “Six pairs of hands… no way.”
Pope Benedict XVI will continue the expansion of the new Catholic Church structure created for former Anglicans by launching an ordinariate for Australia on June 15.
“I am confident that those former Anglicans who have made a journey in faith that has led them to the Catholic Church will find a ready welcome,” said Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne, who serves as president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.
I see her doing something simple, paying bills,
or leafing through a magazine or book,
and wish that I could say, and she could hear,
that now I start to understand her love
for all of us, the fullness of it.
It burns there in the past, beyond my reach,
a modest lamp.
—David Young (1936- )
Heavenly Father and gracious Lord, we thank thee for our mothers and all that they do for us. Help us to repay their love by being kind and cheerful in our homes, helping our mothers and the other members of our families; for Jesus Christ’s sake.
We beseech thee, O Lord, to enlighten our minds and to strengthen our wills, that we may know what we ought to do, and be enabled to do it, through the grace of thy most Holy Spirit, and for the merits of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength. Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved; thy throne is established from of old; thou art from everlasting. The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their roaring. Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty! Thy decrees are very sure; holiness befits thy house, O LORD, for evermore.
–Psalm 93
Congressional lawmakers seem to agree on two things: College student loan debt is out of control and something should be done about it.
Where they disagree is how to solve the problem. Currently they are looking at one piece of this puzzle: how to keep a lower interest rate on federally subsidized undergraduate student loans for low- and middle-income students which is set to double to 6.8 percent this June.
Isaiah Toney, a senior at George Washington University in Washington, said he is “extraordinarily happy” this issue is being raised, but he thinks the discussion has been too narrow.
Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
In 2006, The Falls Church and six sister congregations in Northern Virginia voted (overwhelmingly) to pull out of the Episcopal Church because, in our view, it had drifted so far from orthodox Christianity that we could not remain in good conscience.
Reasons for the division have been mainly theological, particularly focused on how we interpret the Bible, and what doctrines of the Christian faith are essential for leaders to maintain. The doctrinal divides have been widening for several decades, and in 2003 when a practicing homosexual was consecrated as Episcopal bishop, many realized that the divisions in the church were unresolvable.
We will stay in the Anglican Communion under the Archbishop of Canterbury, but through a different branch.