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Ten EU member countries will be holding referenda to ratify the new European constitution. All others will ratify it in their parliaments. Hungary and Lithuania have already done so.
In a major feature article, the Financial Times evaluated the likelihood of a positive vote in all 10 nations. While some qualified misgivings were expressed about expected passage in a few of these countries, the United Kingdom received the only outright negative evaluation. The article tersely stated: "Opinion polls predict a no vote."
This is not at all surprising to those who understand what the Bible foretells for Europe and the national origins of the British people. (To understand further, request our free booklet The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy.) The Channel gap between Britain and Europe is psychological as well as geographical.
Nonetheless, both the European Union and Britain's Labour government plan a massive effort to turn the tide. In fact, the EU is forming a "rapid reaction force" to influence Britons and convert them to European constitution supporters before the expected vote in the first half of 2006.
Britain's minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, expressed the Labour government's point of view: "The government has a secret weapon up its sleeve. These are the facts on Europe. For years people have just heard the myths, propaganda and the antiEuropean arguments from the isolationists. For eighteen months the facts about Europe will be put to the people and I'm confident they will not want to isolate Britain from Europe" (emphasis added throughout). A massive effort is obviously being planned.
The following questions should be asked: Will Britain finally approve the European constitution and perhaps eventually embrace the euro as its currency as well? And if it does, what will that do to the United Kingdom's special transatlantic relationship with the United States?
Britain's national newspapers are divided on these issues. The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and two or three tabloids basically support the euroskeptics. The others either come down on the side of approval of the EU constitution or are divided in their opinions. Curiously, one popular tabloid has opened a new office in Brussels to "expose the waste, greed, corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the European Union" (Financial Times).
To comprehend the ultimate significance of these momentous events, request our free booklets You Can Understand Bible Prophecy and The Book of Revelation Unveiled. (Sources: Financial Times, The Times [both London].)
According to BBC News, "Germany's unemployment rose above the psychologically important level of five million last month." Even more disturbing is the percentage figure of 12.1 percent, the highest since the Weimar Republic during the Great Depression. These figures were confirmed by the German Federal Labor Agency.
A recent report by Britain's Sunday Times said that the "New Europe [was] threatened by Germany's failures." After all, Berlin represents the EU's largest economy and so the country has been taken to task for setting a poor economic example. A big drain on financial resources has been the necessary funding of the former East Germany as it gradually recovers from the decaying effects of 45 years of communism.
If the unemployment figures should continue to worsen in Germany, some media observers will soon be talking about a possible recurrence of the '20s and '30s plus the potential resurfacing of German angst. Unprecedented economic woes were among the forces that thrust Hitler into power in 1933. (Sources: BBC News online, The Sunday Times.)
Three years before 9/11, columnist and author Peggy Noonan wrote of "nuts with nukes"—dictators and terrorists to whom the normal processes of rational thinking don't apply.
"When you consider who is gifted [with the ability or means to acquire weapons of mass destruction] and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States," she wrote (Forbes ASAP, November 1998).
In a January 2005 column she revived her phrase about "nuts with nukes," again commenting on how dangerous a world we inhabit. As if on cue, in early February the spokesman for Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, Ali Agha Mohammadi, vowed that it will never scrap its nuclear program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.
Barely a week later, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami promised "a burning hell" for any aggressor against his country. Meanwhile, European Union negotiations with Iran to halt its nuclear work were at a standstill, and it appeared that the issue may go to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions against Iran.
Almost simultaneously, North Korea publicly stated that it possesses nuclear weapons and will not return to the six-nation talks aimed at shelving its nuclear-weapons plans. North Korea's foreign ministry said that it needed the nukes for self-protection against "gangsters" such as the United States and that "only powerful strength can protect [North Korea's] justice and truth."
A few days earlier, North Korea had threatened to turn U.S. bases "into a sea of fire" should war break out on the Korean peninsula, and to "thoroughly" wipe out those who would aid the United States—presumably South Korea and Japan, hosts of U.S. bases. While an estimated 1 to 2 million North Koreans have starved to death in the last decade, the paranoid dictatorship fields an army of almost 1.2 million troops, the fifth largest in the world.
No wonder Jesus Christ said of the time of the end: "For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive . . ." (Matthew 24:21-22, New International Version).
To understand where these trends may be leading, request our free booklets Are We Living in the Time of the End? and The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy. (Sources: Forbes ASAP, Associated Press, Reuters, WorldNetDaily.)
We're hearing less and less of the United Nations since the Iraq war, perhaps primarily due to the routing of many insurgents, alleged UN graft and corruption and the recent Iraqi elections. Astute geopolitical analysts have pointed out the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, especially in light of 9/11 and the military coalition that scattered the forces of Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein.
Media observers have stated that Germany and especially France used the UN as a front to cover their economic activities shared with Saddam and as a forum to make bold statements against the United States. Now their silence and the silence of the UN are deafening and instructive.
History has a way of making its point. So has the United Nations become passŽ, a political anachronism? Whatever the answer, the Bible does show that many of the nations of the world will work together in the future to further their insatiable ambitions in a frightening new geo-political structure (Revelation 14:8; 18:3,21-23). Only a returning Jesus Christ will save humanity from their arrogant designs (Revelation 11:17-18). To learn more, request our free booklets You Can Understand Bible Prophecy and The Book of Revelation Unveiled.
How bad is anti-semitism in Europe? Back in 2002 Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that "in Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew." More recently Natan Sharansky, an Israeli government minister, released a report recording the number of anti-Semitic incidents as increasing by 20 percent in 2004. Recently both President Jacques Chirac of France and Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have publicly condemned anti-Semitism.
The American State Department blames "disadvantaged and disaffected Muslim youths as increasingly responsible alongside traditional far-right groups" (Sources: The Washington Post, The Economist.)
We don't often think of Fiji, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and other small Pacific island nations as having serious economic and social problems. Many are thought of as vacation and holiday paradises. Yet Australia is trying to help these tiny islands combat crime, tribalism, corruption, prostitution, the spread of HIV/AIDS, serious economic problems and other ills. Of course, not every island is as deeply affected as some others.
The Times published a story showing how "a number of Pacific states['] . . . long-term domestic anguish threatens to become a problem for the entire region" (Dec. 15, 2004). According to this article, Australia has put together a multimillion-pound rescue package involving sending police and an administrative staff, particularly to Papua New Guinea. (Source: The Times [London].)
Fatima Ibrahim, a Kurdish widow, expressed her feelings of liberty after voting in the first democratic elections in the past 50 years: "Now I feel that Saddam is really gone." She lost her husband, father and brother under Saddam's reign, never hearing from them again.
Returns on the watershed Iraqi election differed. Well over half of all eligible Iraqis voted, which of itself is astounding considering the insurgents' murderous threats. The insurgents also learned their heinous tactics failed. The Iraqis are to be commended for trading danger for freedom.
The prospects of a functioning democracy in Iraq must give Syria and Iran pause. Syria is supportive of the Iraqi insurgents; Iranian insurgents aren't discouraged from crossing the Iran-Iraq border. Jordan's king appears moderate to the election as does Egypt.
Is it possible that democracy could spread throughout the Middle East? The odds are against it, based on religion and a 4,000-year-old culture.
Bible prophecy indicates that an end-time "king of the South" (Daniel 11:40) will head up a likely Islamic confederation that will attack the forming European-centered superpower, leading to a great end-time conflagration. To learn more, request our free booklet The Middle East in Bible Prophecy. (Source: Associated Press.)
Health officials in New York City have issued warnings about two new strains of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) affecting homosexual and bisexual men.
The first, lymphogranuloma venereum, or LGV, is a form of chlamydia known for two decades in the tropics, but which in recent months jumped to Europe and now to New York. Among other things, it can cause permanent damage to the bowels and increase the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and other STDs.
On the heels of that disturbing announcement came one even more troubling—word of a rare and aggressive form of HIV/AIDS in one man that is resistant to most drugs and progresses rapidly to full-blown AIDS in a matter of a few months.
Some had predicted that this deadly development was only a matter of time, as the AIDS virus is well known for its ability to mutate—a primary reason that no effective vaccine has been developed.
With the development of powerful (and extremely expensive) drugs in the 1990s, many developed a false sense of security, thinking that AIDS was no longer such a deadly threat and, if infected, they could continue life pretty much as usual. Many homosexual men reverted to unprotected sex with many partners, as evidenced by increasing rates of syphilis, chlamydia and other STDs.
The man infected with this latest deadly strain illustrates the problem health officials face in trying to keep the disease under control. The man admitted to having had hundreds of sexual partners, many in sexual marathons fueled by methamphetamine, a powerful illegal stimulant.
Patrick McGovern, executive director of Harlem United Community AIDS Center, explained that "people become hypersexual when they're using crystal [methamphetamine], but crystal by itself can limit your ability to function sexually. So people combine it with something like Viagra, that lets them keep going for hours."Dennis DeLeon, the president of the Latino Commission on AIDS, said men using such drugs commonly have sex with 10 to 20 partners in a single night. Methamphetamine "is a drug where they just lose count," he said.
Such depraved practices bring to mind the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 1:24, where he notes that because men reject the idea of a great Creator and Lawgiver, God "has given them up to their own vile desires, and the consequent degradation of their bodies" (Revised English Bible). (Sources: Associated Press, Newsday, The New York Times.)
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Keywords: European Union Britain and the E.U. Germany Iran nuclear weapons North Korea methamphetamine AIDS Pacific Islands
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