From NPR News: Will Israel charge soldiers

Will Israel Charge Soldiers In Gaza Civilian Deaths?

http://n.pr/1Fd0dUU

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From BBC news : Pope hails Abbas as ‘angel of peace’

Pope hails Abbas as ‘angel of peace’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32769752

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From BBC news : Pope Francis to canonise Palestinian nuns

Pope Francis to canonise Palestinian nuns

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32757345

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From BBC : Trapping humidity out of fog in Chile

Trapping humidity out of fog in Chile

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Words of wisdom.

The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.

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Lone Christian in Iraqi Delegation, a Nun, Denied Visa by Obama State Dept. | The Stream

Read the article “Lone Christian in Iraqi Delegation, a Nun, Denied Visa by Obama State Dept.” here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417679/malice-toward-nun-nina-shea

Sister Diana wants to tell Americans about ISIS persecution of Christians in Iraq, but the State Department won’t let her in. Why is the United States barring a persecuted Iraqi Catholic nun — an internationally respected and leading representative of the Nineveh Christians who have been killed and deported by ISIS — from coming to Washington to testify about this catastrophe? Earlier this week, we learned that every member of an Iraqi delegation of minority groups, including representatives of the Yazidi and Turkmen Shia religious communities, has been granted visas to come for official meetings in Washington — save one. The single delegate whose visitor visa was denied happens to be the group’s only Christian from Iraq. Sister Diana Momeka of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena was informed on Tuesday by the U.S. consulate in Erbil that her non-immigrant-visa application has been rejected.

via Lone Christian in Iraqi Delegation, a Nun, Denied Visa by Obama State Dept. | The Stream.

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Iraqi Christians have lost everything – except their faith, nun tells Congress :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

By Matt Hadro

Photo:  Sister Diana Momeka, OP appeared before the House of Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington D.C. on May 13, 2015. Credit: Matt Hadro/CNA.

Washington D.C., May 13, 2015 / 03:41 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Having lost their homes, their heritage and their sense of dignity, Iraqi Christians victimized by the Islamic State feel abandoned by earthly powers, but their faith in God has only grown, an Iraqi nun told members of Congress May 13.

The faith of homeless Iraqi Christians is “increasing more and more,” Sister Diana Momeka, O.P., told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Many of the displaced lived in devastating conditions – families taking shelter in containers, parents without jobs and children without an education.

But Sister Diana insisted the spirit of the people has not been broken by the adversity.

“It’s making us stronger,” she said.

“We were displaced, yet we feel that the hand of God is still with us…In the midst of this darkness, this suffering, we see that God is holding us,” she explained, adding that it is a “gift of the Holy Spirit” to be able to stay and have faith through hardship.

Sister Diana was part of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, originally from Mosul in Northern Iraq. Islamist militants bombed their convent in 2009, and after the prioress sought protection from the local government and found none, Sister Diana and the community moved to Qaraqosh.

The ISIS onslaught caught up to them last summer. As the Islamic State swept through parts of Iraq and Syria, establishing a strict caliphate, more than 120,000 Iraqis were displaced on the Nineveh Plain, faced with the decision to convert to Islam, stay and pay a jizya tax to ISIS, or leave immediately.

The religious community moved again, this time to Kurdistan. “We were driven out of our homes in a couple of hours,” the nun described, “without any warning.”

Almost no Christians are left in Mosul, Sister Diana said, except for about 100 Christian hostages of ISIS.

Slated to testify before a congressional committee as part of an Iraqi delegation, Sister Diana’s application for a visa was initially denied by the local U.S. Consulate because of her status as an internally-displaced person.

Amid mounting pressure, she was later able to enter the United States and testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee May 13 regarding “ISIS’s war on religious minorities.”

“I am but one, small person – a victim myself of ISIS and all of its brutality,” Sister Diana stated in written testimony before the committee.

“Coming here has been difficult for me – as a religious sister I am not comfortable with the media and so much attention,” she admitted. “But I am here and I am here to ask you, to implore you for the sake of our common humanity to help us.”

The Christians in Northern Iraq lost “most everything” when ISIS destroyed and desecrated churches, shrines, and other sacred sites, she said.

“We lost everything that today, every Christian that’s living in the region of Kurdistan, we feel we don’t have dignity anymore. When you lose your home, you lose everything you have. You lose your heritage, your culture.”

When monasteries that have existed for centuries have been destroyed, it is a sign that “your history is gone, you are nothing anymore,” the Iraqi nun explained.

Children are growing up without proper education and whole families’ lives have “changed tremendously,” she said. “We’re abandoned, that’s how we feel.”

The local and regional authorities have been of little help to the displaced, Sister Diana said in her testimony, calling their reaction to the crisis “at best modest and slow.” The Kurdish government allowed Christian refugees to enter its borders but did not offer any more significant aid.

The Church in Kurdistan has been a big help to Christians, though, providing food, shelter, and other support, she noted.

Ultimately, the displaced want to return home and not to be re-settled elsewhere, witnesses at the hearing insisted.

“There are many who say ‘Why don’t the Christians just leave Iraq and move to another country and be done with it?’“ Sister Diana stated in her testimony. “Why should we leave our country? What have we done?”

“The Christians of Iraq are the first people of the land,” she said. “While our ancestors experienced all kinds of persecution, they stayed in their land, building a culture that has served humanity for the ages.”

“We want nothing more than to go back to our lives; we want nothing more than to go home.”

Tags: Refugees, Faith, ISIS, Iraqi Christians

via Iraqi Christians have lost everything – except their faith, nun tells Congress :: Catholic News Agency (CNA).

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They lived Christianity: Italy’s saints of social action :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

By Andrea Gagliarducci

Turin, Italy, May 15, 2015 / 04:25 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to Turin is an opportunity to reflect on the outstanding group of saints whose lives embodied Catholic social teaching in 19th century Turin, when the Piedmont region underwent an industrial revolution and secularizing trends amid struggles to build a unified Italian state.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Holy See’s emeritus Secretary of State, stressed the importance of these “social action saints” ahead of the June papal visit to Turin, the Piedmont regional capital.

Cardinal Bertone spoke to CNA from the Turin International Book Fair, where he was presenting his book “Faith and the Common Good: Christian Proposals for Contemporary Society,” published by Vatican Publishing House. The work is a collection of his writings and speeches about Catholic social teaching.

The cardinal is from Piedmont and is a member of the Salesian congregation, founded by St. John Bosco. This saint dedicated himself to the betterment of Torinese youth in the 19th century. He founded the Salesians to educate the impoverished young and to prepare them for occupations.

Cardinal Bertone stressed that the social action saints “contributed in shaping the society with a multiplicity of charitable works, social and educational initiatives, thus bringing the name of Piedmont to the farthest lands.”

These saints helped Italian immigrants and indigenous peoples who needed assistance and education “to achieve an integral development.”

Pope Francis will be in Turin June 21-22 in the midst of the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of St. John Bosco’s birth, thus paying homage to one of the most prominent social action saints from Piedmont. During his trip, the Pope on June 21 will visit the St. Joseph Cottolengo institute, named for another of these social action saints, to meet with sick people.

According to Cardinal Bertone, the presence of the “social saints” prove that Italian society was shaped by Christian values despite the fact that the movement towards the establishment of the Italian state appeared to take a path far from Christian values.

The social action saints flourished in mid-19th century Turin and its vicinities, such as the small northern Italian State of Savoy, whose territory included sections of the present-day Italian regions of Piedmont, Liguria and Sardinia.

Many of these social action saints took inspiration from one another, Cardinal Bertone recounted.

“St. John Bosco was the founder of the Salesian family, apostle to the young people,” the cardinal explained. “He was inspired and guided by St. Joseph Cafasso.”

St. Joseph Cafasso, a Piedmont priest, was also an inspiration for his nephew, Bl. Joseph Allamano, who founded the Missionaries of the Consolation. These missionaries “brought the Gospel and human progress to Africa.”

Cardinal Bertone then discussed St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, “the apostle of the very least ones, who – as Pope Francis would put it – opposed the ‘throwaway culture’ and took care of the sickest and most abandoned people.”

Among St. John Bosco’s collaborators was St. Leonardo Murialdo, who founded the Congregation of St. Joseph. Cardinal Bertone said he may be considered “the apostle of workers, as he was close to workers unions.”

St. Luigi Orione took inspiration from St. John Bosco and St. Leonardo Murialdo in his work with young people. He drew on the example of St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo for his care for the sick.

Cardinal Bertone said St. Luigi Orione founded charitable works “according to the needs he would discover in Italy, Europe and in America.”

Finally, Cardinal Bertone recalled the example of Blessed Francis Faa di Bruno, an engineer and mathematician who took care of women workers, a new reality in the industrial era.

Cardinal Bertone said that the experience of these social action saints developed further and would reach out to “the extreme frontiers.”

Among the various initiatives, Cardinal Bertone recounted that Salesian missionaries from Piedmont in 1905 traveled to the distant Argentine town of Ushuaia, the southernmost city of the world. There they promoted the cultivation of potatoes and livestock.

Cardinal Bertone said there are Salesian weather stations from Piedmont established in the Italian region of Liguria and in the far south of Argentina that are still in operation.

Tags: Cardinal Bertone, Catholic Social Teaching, St. John Bosco, St. Joseph Cafasso

via They lived Christianity: Italy’s saints of social action :: Catholic News Agency (CNA).

Pope Francis: Fear and joylessness are signs of bad spiritual health :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

By Ann Schneible

PHOTO:  Pope Francis at the papal ordination of priests in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 26, 2015. Credit: Bohumil Petrik/CNA.

Vatican City, May 15, 2015 / 11:40 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his daily homily on Friday Pope Francis said that Christian communities become “sick” when they live in fear and fail to be joyful – even when times are difficult.

“When the Church is fearful and when the Church does not receive the joy of the Holy Spirit, the Church is sick, the communities are sick, the faithful are sick,” the Pope said during Mass at the Santa Marta residence May 15.

He added that the Christian community grows “sick with worldliness” when “it does not have the joy of Christ.”

“A Christian without joy is not Christian. A Christian who continually lives in sadness is not Christian. And a Christian who, in the moment of trial, of illness, of so many difficulties, loses peace – something is lacking in him.”

These two words – “fear” and “joy” – and what each means for the Christian community, were at the center of the Holy Father’s homily.

Speaking first on fear, Pope Francis explained: “A fearful Christian is a person who has not understood the message of Jesus.”

This kind of fear provokes a self-centered selfishness which leads to a sort of paralysis. It “harms us. It weakens us, it diminishes us. It even paralyzes us,” the Pope said.

Recalling how Jesus told Saint Paul to speak and not be afraid, he said: “Fear is not a Christian attitude.”

Rather, it is an attitude of a “caged animal” who lacks the freedom to look forward, create, and do good, being prevented by a sense of danger.

“This fear is a vice,” he added.

Pope Francis said this fear and lack of courage jeopardizes the health of those communities which to forbid everything in an effort to always be safe.

“It seems they have written on the gateway: ‘Forbidden,’” he said. “And you enter into this community and the air is stale, because it is a sick community.”

MORE: via Pope Francis: Fear and joylessness are signs of bad spiritual health :: Catholic News Agency (CNA).

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Bird on a wire-Perla Batalla_ Special_Features “I’m Your Man”

Leonard Cohen‘s Bird on The Wire:

The most beautiful interpretation of “Like The Bird On The Wire”, ever. Perla flies like a dove above all, off a wire up in the skies, and dive on the winds of the accordion, so divinely played. Perla Batalla is the priestess of freedom and joy of life everlasting in this magnificent scene: Sweet like nectar, and the salt of the Earth. If Leonard is the man, Perla is the woman, the lover, enchanter, charmer, the voice.

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee

If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you

Oh, like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me

But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

Songwriters
COHEN, LEONARD

Published by
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Read more: Leonard Cohen – Bird On The Wire Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Saint of the Day for Saturday, May 16th, 2015: Saint of the Day for Saturday, May 16th, 2015

Saint of the Day for Saturday, May 16th, 2015

St. Simon Stock

Although little is known about Simon Stock’s early life, legend has it that the name Stock, meaning “tree trunk,” derives from the fact that, beginning at age twelve, he lived as a hermit … continue reading

More Saints of the Day

St. Simon Stock St. Abdas of Susa St. Abdas St. Adam St. Andrew Bobola St. Annobert St. Brendan St. Carantac St. Domnolus St. Felix & Gennadius

St. Fidouls St. Forannan St. Germerius St. Hilary St. Honoratus of Amiens St. Honoratus of Amiens St. John Nepomucene St. Peregrinus of Terni St. Peregrinus of Auxerre St. Ubald Baldassini

quotation: If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.Agatha Christie

If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) Discuss

today’s holiday/celebration: Maifest

Maifest

The original Maifest in Hermann, Missouri, was a children’s festival founded in 1874. The festival was revived in 1952 as a German ethnic festival for people of all ages. Held the third weekend in May, the festival offers German folklore, songs, music, and food in celebration of the arrival of spring. Black beer, cheese, sausage, crackers, and bratwurst are served, and there are band concerts and musical shows. More… Discuss

today’s birthday: Tamara de Lempicka (1898)

Tamara de Lempicka (1898)

Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish painter whose bold artistic style epitomized the cool, sensual side of the Art Deco movement. Following her first major show, in Milan, Italy, de Lempicka emerged as the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. She relocated to the US in 1939 and soon became a favorite artist of Hollywood‘s stars. What current world-famous pop star is an avid collector of de Lempicka’s work? More… Discuss

this day in the yesteryear: The First Academy Awards (1929)

The First Academy Awards (1929)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in 1927 by Louis B. Mayer and others to raise the standards of film production, and its first Academy Awards were presented not long after. Hosted by actor Douglas Fairbanks and director William C. DeMille, the first Academy Awards ceremony recognized individuals who had made outstanding film achievements in 1927 and 1928. The gold-plated statuettes given to awardees are popularly known as “Oscars.” How did they get this nickname? More… Discuss

Cobalt

Cobalt is a silver-white, lustrous, hard, brittle metal that is chemically active and rarely occurs uncombined in nature. It is, however, often found in meteoric metal. Cobalt compounds have been used for centuries to impart a rich blue color to glass, glazes, and ceramics. The element has been detected in Egyptian sculpture and Persian jewelry from the third millennium BCE. The word cobalt is derived from the German word for “goblin.” Why was the element thus named? More… Discuss

word: ossify

ossify

Definition:	(verb) To change into bone; to become set in a rigidly conventional pattern.
Synonyms:	rigidify, petrify
Usage:	It takes millions of years for organic remains to ossify and turn into fossils. Discuss.

Smart Applications: Nutrition Data (FROM SOFTSYSDROID)

Find out what the food you consume is made of so you better understand how many calories you daily food intake deposit for…rainy days… But what if those rainy days don’t come?

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American mouthpiece for al Qaeda killed

American mouthpiece for al Qaeda killed
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From NPR News

At Least 71 Dead As Strong Earthquake Rocks Nepal http://n.pr/1ORdRPH

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Smart applications: HOW LOUD IS YOUR NIGHBOR’S DOG BARKING?

Download the free app and findout!

SOUND METER: FROM SMART TOOLS

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Words of wisdom.

Everyone may be a fool but nobody is a fool forever.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.bmt

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From France 24 :

IS group seizes key Iraqi city of Ramadi

http://f24.my/1EaNBJK

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From France 24 :

IS group seizes key Iraqi city of Ramadi

http://f24.my/1EaNBJK

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From France 24 : Ucraine. ..

Ukraine passes law to ban Soviet-era symbols

http://f24.my/1Hmq0gT

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From CNN : Palmyra: Will ISIS bulldoze ancient city?

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From CNN : Egypt’s ex-leader Morsy sentenced to death

Egypt’s ex-leader Morsy sentenced to death

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From CNN : Sources: U.S. forces kill ISIS figure in Syria

Sources: U.S. forces kill ISIS figure in Syria

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From CNN : Egypt’s ex-leader Morsy sentenced to death

Egypt’s ex-leader Morsy sentenced to death

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From BBC news : US anti-nuclear activists ‘released’

US anti-nuclear activists ‘released’

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