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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22922)	4/12/2005 2:13:58 PM
From: philv	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81247

Israeli arms trade with China. "Chinese ambassador to Israel Chen Yonglong has condemned the efforts by the US to choke off trade in arms between Israel and China. He said the two countries had joined together in a strategic partnership that would break into a more glorious dawn." globes.co.il Just simply unbelievable. The least one could say is that Israel has "hutzpah". But I am sure others can think of a few more choice words.

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22922)	4/13/2005 4:47:28 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81247

Psyching up US opinion for the impending Armageddon... against Iran: End of the world's a tough sell BY GLENN GARVIN ggarvin@herald.com I guess it's understandable that NBC executives, their ratings plummeting and the entrail-eating contestants on Fear Factor now the network's top attraction, feel certain that the end of the world is upon us. That doesn't make Revelations, the network's Biblically inspired six-episode series that debuts tonight, any more convincing for the rest of us. Billed as an epic confrontation between science and faith, Revelations is more like a fender bender between shallow writing and hack acting. For a religious epic, Revelations is oddly soulless. At the center of the series is an odd couple, Harvard astrophysicist Richard Massey (Bill Pullman, Independence Day) and renegade nun Sister Josepha Montifiore (Natascha McElhone, Solaris). They're thrown together when Massey's daughter, murdered by a Satanic cultist, starts speaking through a coma victim under Sister Josepha's care. In South Florida, no surprise; nobody who's been watching CSI: Miami the past three years could doubt that, when the gates of hell finally swing open, we'll get hit squarely in the butt. When the little girl recites the apocalyptic prophecies of the final book of the Bible (in Latin, incidentally; Vatican II apparently gets suspended for End Times), Massey and Sister Josepha embark on a mission to negotiate a peaceful settlement between God and Satan, which turns out to be even trickier than getting the cast of Friends back for that final season. Taking this stuff seriously is not easy when the cast itself is unable to do so. Pullman seems only slightly more annoyed that a cultist has chopped out the heart of his daughter than he might be with a sloppy term paper, and McElhone's shrill sloganeering is enough to make you seriously consider pulling for the Antichrist. But it seems unlikely that any cast at all could have saved Revelations' superficial script, which concentrates on thrills at the expense of ideas and winds up without many of either. The immensely popular Left Behind books used Biblical prophecy for gripping if pulpy fiction by using its characters to personalize theological conflicts. Revelations just skates by them. You might wonder, for instance, why a nun would want to thwart Armageddon, which the Bible says is the prelude to the return of Christ. But all you'll get is Sister Josepha's airy aside that the pope considers her a blasphemer. With such poofy plotting, I soon found my mind drifting from Revelations' story to such other considerations as, how did they sell this thing to advertisers? Next on Revelations: Locusts from Hell eat the eyes of fornicators and thieves! But first, a word from our sponsor . . . Revelations does achieve a certain level of inadvertent creepiness during the scenes in which church officials and doctors argue over whether to cut off the life-support systems of the little girl in the coma, which eerily presages the tragic final days of the Terri Schiavo controversy. Coincidence, not exploitation; Revelations was shot months ago. It's nonetheless unsettling. In the aftermath of the 2000 election, we merely made fools of ourselves in front of the whole United States. How unfortunate to think the entire cosmos may have been listening this time. miami.com