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Authorities have warned of possible mud rains and respiratory health risks

A massive dust storm blowing in from Africa has covered Athens and other Greek cities, tinting the sky yellow-orange, videos showed on Tuesday. 

According to meteorological services, the Sahara dust storm will be accompanied by mud rains, mostly in the northern and western parts of the country.

The storm coincided with elevated spring temperatures, intensifying its impact, local weather reports stated. The winds are expected to shift direction westward on Wednesday, resulting in lower dust levels.

“This is a phenomenon that occurs these months... it is usually accompanied by southerly winds and an increased temperature,” the director of research at the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development at the National Observatory, Dr. Kostas Lagouvardos told Athens-Macedonian News Agency.

He described it as an “important environmental problem because it affects many people, especially when the concentrations are high on the ground.”

READ MORE: Hot pink northern lights illuminate skies over Russia (VIDEO) 

Doctors are warning of increased risks to citizens, especially those with pre-existing respiratory conditions.

#شاهد| إغلاق المجال الجوي وتعليق الرحلات من وإلى مطار #بنينا الدولي في #بنغازي بسبب سوء الأحوال الجوية.#ليبيا_أوبزرفر #ليبيا pic.twitter.com/fCGiwBK1aw

The Sahara sandstorm forced Libya to suspend air traffic on Monday and Tuesday. It was accompanied by winds reaching up to 70 km/h, according to the Libya Observer. Video broadcast by local media showed a runway covered in a thick layer of sand.

The pathogen has been detected in 33 cattle herds in eight states, officials say

Particles of bird flu have been found in samples of consumer milk in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Tuesday, revealing the extent of an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI).

The virus has previously been detected in raw milk, the agency wrote, adding that while “pasteurization is likely to inactivate the virus,” the process is not expected to fully remove the presence of viral particles.

The FDA national survey further discovered traces of bird flu in “milk from affected animals, in the processing system, and on the shelves.”

“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the agency claimed, insisting that if the testing process finds “genetic material” from the virus, this “does not mean that the sample contains an intact, infectious pathogen.”

While the FDA insists there is no real concern about the safety of pasteurized dairy products, other agencies said produce from sick cows should not be on the shelves. “Only milk from healthy animals is authorized for distribution into interstate commerce for human consumption,” the National Milk Producers Federation wrote on its website.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has revealed that bird flu had been found in 33 herds of dairy cows in eight states as of Monday.

Although Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza has been circulating for more than 20 years, its spread to bovine livestock is causing alarm, the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday.

The concern “is that it’s showing up in a lot more samples, meaning the infection is more widespread in dairy herds than we thought,” a US public health official told the paper on the condition of anonymity.

Both the USDA and the FDA have urged consumers to avoid drinking raw milk as the situation evolves. Further results are expected in the coming days and weeks, authorities said.

Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman’s Auschwitz prisoner tattoo is still visible to this day, serving as a “never again” reminder as her Jewish grandchildren face a modern wave of antisemitism. “It’s like a cancer. If you don’t stop it early, it metastasizes. It’s going to kill the body. It’s killing our country.” She says that when she came to the U.S., it was “like I came to the Promised Land, and it was just a fabulous experience. And here it is today. I am shocked, I am pained, I’m scared. I’m scared both for America, I’m scared for the Jews, and it’s very painful for our young people.”
 

The post Auschwitz survivor: antisemitism is a ‘cancer’ spreading across America appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Jesus, when I see you held by your Mother,
Leaving her arms
Trying, trembling, your first steps
On our sad earth,
Before you I’d like to unpetal a rose
In its freshness
So that your little foot might rest ever so softly
On a flower!….

This unpetalled rose is the faithful image,
Divine Child,
Of the heart that wants to sacrifice itself for you unreservedly
at each moment.
Lord, on your altars more than one new rose
Likes to shine.
It gives itself to you…..but I dream of something else:
To be unpetalled!….”

The rose in its splendor can adorn your feast,
Lovable Child,
But the unpetalled rose is just flung out
To blow away.
An unpetalled rose gives itself unaffectedly
To be no more.
Like it, with joy I abandon myself to you,
Little Jesus.

One walks on rose petals with no regrets,
And this debris
Is a simple ornament that one disposes of artlessly,
That I’ve understood.
Jesus, for your love I’ve squandered my life,
My future.
In the eyes of men, a rose forever withered,
I must die!…

For you, I must die, Child, Beauty Supreme,
What a blessed fate!
In being unpetalled, I want to prove to you that I love you,
O my Treasure!…
Under your baby steps, I want to live here below
With mystery,
And I’d like to soften once more on Calvary
Your last steps!….

The post An Unpetalled Rose appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

As we get older, the temptation to be dissatisfied with our lives can grow.  A fear of aging, along with memories of past failures and mistakes, can obscure the good in the world around us.  A culture of consumption, distractions, and anesthetics, which is what we’ve created, feeds on that restlessness and profits from the anxiety that so often animates our desires.  In the process, it steals something uniquely human from us.  It reduces us to a bundle of material appetites.  And it resents anything transcendent because questions about meaning threaten the machinery of wanting and possessing more.

This is one of the reasons why beauty – real beauty – can seem so diminished in our daily lives.  Real beauty draws us up and out of ourselves; it connects us to realities that can’t be commodified.  It re-sacralizes the world, even if only for a moment.  And in doing that, it indicts the vulgarity, cynicism, and disorder that constitute so much of contemporary life.

But we’re better than our base appetites.  We deserve something more than commercialized, materialist junk.  And the reason why is simple: As the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in his book The Face of God, “the [human] face shines in the world of objects with a light that is not of this world – the light of subjectivity.”

Today’s social sciences tend to reduce individuals to data points and the human experience to patterns of behavior.  And of course it’s true that we humans are animated carbon, just like every other animal.  We have instincts and we reproduce more or less like every other animal.  But we’re not like any other animal.  We’re uniquely conscious of both our individuality and our mortality.  Which explains both our fear of loneliness and our need for meaning.  We’re the only species that buries and reveres its dead.  It’s in our nature to want more than this life can give; to sense that something more and higher might be possible.

Again, in The Face of God, Scruton wrote:

Take away religion, [take away] philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways they can represent their apartness.  Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead.  Biological reductionism nurtures this “living down,” which is why people so readily fall for it.  It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic.  It abolishes our kind, and with it, our kindness.

Beauty, in contrast, is an affirmation of our shared human dignity.  It reminds us of the goodness of life in an age of transgressive narcissism and repudiation of the past.  This is why, in the Catholic tradition, hostility to high culture; to excellence and precision in the life of the mind; and more recently and narrowly to the traditional Latin Mass, can seem so strange.

I grew up with the old form of the Mass.  I have no desire to go back to it.  It could often be mechanical and uninspiring, and the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were overdue and necessary.  When done well, they produce a form of worship that’s both reverent and profound.

But what the old Mass did have, when a priest celebrated it with humility and conviction, was a tactile beauty that appealed to all the senses, especially sight, sound, and smell.  And in doing that, it communicated, vividly, the mystery of an invisible reality — a God radically holy, a God radically “other than” us, but at the same time intimate, loving, and incarnate in our humanity.

People leave the Catholic Church and the wider Christian community today for many different reasons.  But one of those reasons is the unconvincing, bourgeois mediocrity that can be too common in our worship – which then infects the whole atmosphere of Christian life.

My point is simply this:  Ugliness kills the spirit and explains the impulse for desecration that infects so much of modern “art.”  Ugliness dumbs down the imagination, softens the brain, and hardens the heart.  People of faith have a hunger for beauty and mystery and belonging to a story; the story of a living, believing community, ongoing and true across cultures and time.  And they’re too often not getting that in their local churches.

In his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton wrote that:

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.  It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals seeking our place in a shared and public world.  We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust.  Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.  The experience of beauty guides us along this second path:  It tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perception as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.  But beings like us. . .become at home in the world only by acknowledging our “fallen” condition. . . .Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world to a “kingdom of ends” in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.

This is why a hunger for beauty and the religious frame of mind are so closely related and so vital for human flourishing.  They both flow from a humble sense of human imperfection while reaching for the transcendent.  For better or worse, it’s also why so many young families seek out the beauty and mystery of the old Latin Mass.

We need beauty to ennoble our imagination, to guide our scientific intuitions, and to poke through the blather and venom of “wokeness.”  We need it to see reality clearly.  We need beauty because it keeps us human.  Beauty tells us that despite our sins and failures, Creation is good.  And behind it is a Creator who loves us.

The post The Face of God appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as “the … Continue reading "The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point"

The post The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point appeared first on Antiwar.com.

When blasphemy and heresy meet sodomy…

Queer in Trier: ‘Bishop’ Ackermann Presides Over Ecumenical Rainbow Service for Aberrosexuals

In the Vatican II Sect, the Modernist layman Stephan Ackermann has been playing ‘Catholic bishop’ of Trier, Germany, since 2009. It was then that ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI appointed him to succeed ‘Bishop’ (now ‘Cardinal’) Reinhard Marx, who had been promoted to become ‘Archbishop’ of Munich and Freising.

Every year the Tier diocese celebrates the so-called Heilig-Rock-Tage. It is a 10-day church festival centered on the relic of the Holy Tunic (Heiliger Rock) of Jesus Christ. This year, the festival took place from Apr.… READ MORE

Mitch McConnell has accused the journalist of “demonizing” Kiev

The top-ranking Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, has claimed Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin convinced too many “rank-and-file Republicans” that spending billions of taxpayer dollars on arming Kiev against Moscow was harming Americans and wrecking the economy.

As a new multibillion-dollar US aid package to Ukraine was clearing the last procedural hurdles on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader McConnell attempted to pin the blame for months of delays on former Fox News anchor Carlson and former President Donald Trump.

“I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which was interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell told a press briefing.

“He convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake,” he added, arguing that Trump’s “mixed views” on Ukraine aid further fueled confusion over the official narrative in Washington.

“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell claimed. “That took months to work our way through it.”

Carlson recorded a lengthy interview with Putin in February, a first by a Western reporter since the conflict with Ukraine began. The pair discussed the ongoing hostilities and Moscow’s standoff with NATO.

The exchange went viral globally, garnering over 200 million views on X (formerly Twitter) alone, yet critics accused Carlson of not being confrontational enough with the Russian leader. The American journalist argued that most Western media outlets lie to their audiences, mainly by omission, and that the point of his interview was “to have more information brought to the West so people could make their own decisions.”

“I reject the whole premise of the war in Ukraine from the American perspective,” Carlson said in February, looking back at his conversation with Putin. “There’s a war going on that is wrecking the US economy in a way and at a scale that people do not understand.”

US President Joe Biden requested additional cash for Ukraine last October after burning through $113 billion in previously approved spending bills. However, the request had been stalled until this week due to opposition from Republican lawmakers, who argued that Biden was merely prolonging Kiev’s conflict with Russia while offering no clear strategy for victory or a peace agreement. Most Republicans voted against the aid bill on Saturday, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) overrode his own party by enabling a vote and pushing it through with unanimous Democrat support.

The name Francis X. Maier may not be well-known outside the inside circles of ecclesiastical life because he has worked diligently but effectively behind the scenes. He served for twenty-three years as senior aide to Archbishop Charles Chaput in the Archdiocese of Denver and then in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Before that, he served for fifteen years as editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register newsweekly, and earlier as a screenwriter and story analyst based in Los Angeles. He is currently a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Maier has written an excellent book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, just released by Ignatius Press, that should rightfully make his name better known. In this concise and readable book, Maier summarizes the frank and in-depth interviews that he conducted with 103 bishops, clergy, religious, and lay men and women from various backgrounds over a seventeen-month period, from December 2020 through May 2022. While the persons interviewed do not hesitate to point out the shortcomings that they see in the life of the Church as well as her strengths, they do so out of love for the Church and a fervent desire to fix the flaws of the human failings of its leaders and members.

In his introduction to the book, Archbishop Chaput writes: 

At heart, the Church is a “she”, not an “it”: the Bride of Christ; a mother of tenderness and the teacher of truth. And even in an age that derides her and dismisses the need for a God; even in an age when her weakness is often brutally obvious, the Church is younger, stronger, and more beautiful than her enemies have the capacity to understand or see.

Then Archbishop Chaput added a personal note about Maier. He wrote: 

In Denver, in the early days of our collaboration, I sometimes stopped by Fran’s office at the end of the day to think out loud or exchange ideas. I asked him once why he worked for the Church when he could do something else that paid more. He looked at me quizzically, and then said, “Because I love her.” 

In Chapter One of the book, Maier then explains why he loves the Church:

I love the Church because she is my home, my extended family, the mother who takes us back whatever our failures and mistakes. I love her for the grandeur of the art, music, law, architecture, and literature she has inspired. I love her for the brilliance of her intellectual legacy, which has no parallel in human experience. I love her for the good that remains in the civilization she shaped. I love her for her patience and mercy. I love her because she treasures and refuses to abandon the weak. I love her above all because what she teaches is salvific and true. There has never been a Christianity without the Church. She’s essential to the Christian life. The Church preceded the Gospels, not the other way around. And the Christian faith has never been merely a personal relationship with God, as important as that is. It has always been, beginning in the Upper Room, an assembly of believers, an ekklesia—a Church. I love the Church despite the sins of her leaders and her people, including my own.

The various chapters of the book consist of asking different audiences why they love the Church and what they would do to correct any perceived shortcomings in the leadership or life of the Church. While two chapters are interviews of priests, deacons, and bishops (not including me), the vast majority of people interviewed are lay Christian faithful, including a diocesan finance officer, the president of an investment advisory firm, university professors, theologians, legal scholars, business people, social scientists, journalists, immigrants, philanthropists, leaders of lay apostolates, husbands, wives, homeschooling mothers, and non-Catholic Christians. He asks them questions like:

Do you love the Church? If so, why, and what do you love about her?

What are your impressions of the Church, and have they changed over the years?

What are the biggest mistakes a diocese or parish typically makes?

What do you see as the major problems in the Church right now?

What issues, particularly in the United States, need to be addressed for a renewal of the Church to take place?

When you look for practical sources of hope right now, what are they?

Since so many people offer their opinions in this book, it is not surprising that they do not all agree, nor do all share the same advice. But that is one of the attractive qualities of this book, in that the reader will hear a variety of voices, some of whom they may identify with and others with whom they may not. A key indicator of what readers might expect in these answers is the number of times the following words appear in this book: Church–732, God–152, Jesus–70, faith–255, hope–63, and love–116.

The title of the book comes from the 1981 film True Confessions, based on the crime novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne. As Maier explains in the final chapter, True Confessions is 

not a happy portrait of the Church, her people, or her clergy. . . . The heart of both the novel and the film is the fractious relationship between two Catholic brothers: Des and Tom Spellacy. Des, played in the film by Robert De Niro, is a rising young monsignor, chancellor of the archdiocese, right hand to the cardinal, and on the fast track to be a bishop. Tom (Robert Duvall, in one of his finest roles) is an LAPD detective; the “black sheep” son of their Irish Catholic family. Cynical toward life in general and the Church in particular, Tom Spellacy is the lens through which the story unfolds. Tom is a complicated soul: resentful of his brother’s perceived goodness, calloused by the meanness of the streets, but also protective of his brother’s reputation. Des Spellacy is no less complex: smart, shrewd, ambitious, and (when necessary) ruthless—and also keenly aware of his own sin of pride, masked by a veneer of priestly piety. Onto Tom’s police plate drops the case of the murdered young woman. Where it leads provides the rest of the drama.

His point is that 

alongside the great good that can be achieved through Christian engagement in public leadership, great harm can be done to the Church and her mission when her people and her clergy confuse material success with service to the Gospel. A comfortable Church, a colluding Church, a publicly esteemed Church can very easily become a dead Church. And when faith is merely skin deep, it’s worth remembering that societies sooner or later shed their dead skin.

To prevent this disintegration of the Church’s vitality, Maier proposes nothing less than the call to sainthood: “We moderns tend to think that the era of the saints is over. But we’re wrong. It’s always the era of the saints.” This imperative of personal sanctity is not confined to clergy or consecrated religious, but extends to each and every person: “The task of any ‘new reformation,’ any purifying re-formation of Church and world, begins with each believer.”

In the end, a good book leaves the reader hungry for more, and that is how I felt when I reached its end. We hear directly from Maier only in the preface and chapters one and eleven, while the rest of the chapters are a blend of interview responses with Maier’s brief commentary. Those interviews provide a helpful cross-section of views on the strengths of the Church and suggestions for addressing the weaknesses of ecclesial life. But I found myself wanting to hear more from Maier himself because he obviously has a lot of wisdom to share.

For example, I took solace as a bishop in these words: 

Bishops in the Church tend to get blamed for everything. And sometimes they earn it. But bishops didn’t invent the birth control pill. They didn’t create the sexual anarchy that flowed from it. Bishops didn’t invent the transistor, or the microchip, or the cell phone, or video games, or gay dating apps, or the internet cocoon of pornography that’s destroyed millions of families and vocations. And bishops don’t have a magic wand to cancel out the massively negative influence of popular culture on their people.

Maier also has sound advice for everyone else in the Church when he says that we are 

harvesting the effects of a century of Catholic assimilation and naïve optimism about the compatibility of Catholic teaching and American culture. I’ve always believed in our potential as Catholic Christians to be a leaven in American life. It just hasn’t worked out that way. Of course, that can change. But it requires leaders, and their people, who think in terms of the long haul and commit to missionary witness as their first priority in thought and deed.

Maier’s love for the Church comes through in this book and is why others who love the Church will want to read it. Perhaps we can hope for a sequel in which we will get to hear more of Maier in his own words. 

Image by sidneydealmeida and licensed via Adobe Stock.

In the United States House of Representatives, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was known for his progressive views, while Ron Paul (R-TX) was known for his libertarian views. There were many times when the two representatives disagreed about American policy and legislation. But, there was also much overlap in their views in regard to United States foreign policy and liberty in America.

In this area of overlap, the two men worked together many times in the House, advocating for the US seeking peace abroad and protecting liberty at home. This collaboration has continued since both men left the House in 2013, with Dennis Kucinich serving as an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity that Paul founded soon thereafter.

Interviewed last week by Glenn Greenwald at System Update, Kucinich addressed a possibility he had floated back in 2007 when on the presidential campaign trail. Greenwald queried Kucinich about Kucinich, then participating in the Democratic presidential primary, having offered Paul, who at the same time was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, as someone Kucinich would consider asking to join his ticket as his choice for vice president. Responding to Greenwald, Kucinich spoke of how he “worked closely together” with Paul, who Kucinich referred to as “a straight shooter” and “a good man” and with whom Kucinich “saw a point of coalition on the issues that related to war and the folly of the United States going into one war after another.” “When I mentioned Ron Paul as a possible running mate in 2007, despite the fact that I gave some of my colleagues then the vapors, I felt it was really important to be able to show that my view is not dichotomized; I don’t think in terms of polarity,” Kucinich further stated.

What an interesting campaign that would have been. As Paul likes to say, “Freedom brings people together.” A joint campaign of Paul and Kucinich, focused on the areas where they agree could have helped break down the artificial dichotomy and polarity in American politics that Kucinich critiques. Instead of the example that we keep seeing in Washington, DC of the exercise of “bipartisan compromise” almost always leading to intervention abroad and the diminishing of liberty in America, Kucinich and Paul could have demonstrated how principled cross-parties and cross-ideologies action can advance peace and liberty. And, taking the hypothetical a step further, consider the effort the two men could have undertaken together from the White House to roll back the US government’s many foreign interventionist and liberty suppressing activities.

In their separate campaigns, Kucinich and Paul did much work educating and inspiring people in regard to matters of peace and liberty. Those efforts continue today to yield fruit. But, what if they had combined forces instead? A Kucinich/Paul — or Paul/Kucinich — ticket is an interesting alternative history to ponder.