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(Vatican Radio) The Vatican on Friday issued an urgent appeal to Venezuela’s leaders to suspend the new Constituent Assembly which, it says, is threatening the future of the South American nation.The strongly worded communique, issued by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, says Pope Francis is following closely the situation in Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro is headed towards a showdown with the opposition, as he pushes ahead with the inauguration of his new Assembly.The statement comes as the body's 545 delegates were expected to be installed at the legislative palace in the capital, Caracas, close to the chamber where the opposition-controlled National Assembly meets.The new Constituent Assembly has been tasked with rewriting the country's constitution and holds powers that override all other government branches.Opposition leaders have denounced the erosion of democracy and vowed they will only be removed by force. Over a hundred people have alread...
Rome, Italy, Aug 4, 2017 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Just eleven miles east of Rome lies the site of excavations of another ancient city, one which thrived in the last few centuries before Christ, but, overshadowed by Rome, eventually died out – though not before having its own thriving Christian community.The city, Gabii, was first occupied by small groups of settlers in the early Iron Age (9th-8th century B.C.). It eventually grew into a full-fledged city with walls and large public buildings, peaking around the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C.Evidence shows that it then began to shrink, probably because of competition from Rome, but archeologists working on the site have recently uncovered the remains of a tower of a church, and believe the city to have been a center for Christianity, if an unusual one, in the early centuries of the Church.“We know that there was a thriving Christian community and that it had a bishop as early as the 5th century, which is kind of unusual f...
Vatican City, Aug 4, 2017 / 05:26 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As tensions and deaths continue to rise in Venezuela over the government's push to re-write their constitution, the Holy See has urged the country's leaders to hold off on the constitutional assembly, focusing instead on alleviating the nation's crippling humanitarian crisis. “The Holy See expresses again her profound concern for the radicalization and aggravation of the crisis in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, with the increase in the number of deaths, wounded and those who have been detained,” read an Aug. 4 Vatican communique.Pope Francis, both directly and through Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, “closely follows that situation and it's humanitarian, social, political, economic and even spiritual implications, and assures of his constant prayer for the country and for all Venezuelans,” while inviting faithful around the world “to pray intensely for this si...
Washington D.C., Aug 4, 2017 / 06:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A new poll shows that seventeen percent of people in the U.S. now find polygamy to be morally permissible, citing an increase of acceptance among non-religious people as a major factor.“Though polygamous societies often justify their lifestyle on religious grounds, it is Americans who do not identify with any religion who are most accepting of the practice,” said Andrew Dugan, an analyst for Gallup.“Between 2011 and 2017, 32 percent of Americans who do not associate with a particular religion or have no religion at all said polygamy was 'morally acceptable,'” he said in a July 28 statement.In a Values and Beliefs poll issued May 3-7, Dugan commented that while public opinion hasn't shifted greatly on certain moral issues such as abortion, polygamy's approval rating has steadily increased 10 percent since 2003.Despite the practice of polygamy being often found in fundamentalist sects of ...
SYDNEY (AP) -- Two men facing terrorism charges in Australia were involved in an aborted attempt to place an improvised explosive device on an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney last month in a plot directed by the Islamic State group, police said Friday....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is revealing a brief advisory role with a firm related to a controversial data analysis company that aided the Trump campaign, The Associated Press has learned....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Special Counsel Robert Mueller is using a grand jury in Washington as part of an investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, a person familiar with the probe says....
London, England, Aug 4, 2017 / 12:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Recent statistics show that more than half of women seeking abortions in Britain last year were using at least one form of contraception.The statistics were based on 60,592 women who had abortions at clinics operated by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the country’s largest abortion provider.The BPAS report notes that 51.2 percent of women who sought abortions in 2016 were using at least one form of contraception, and that a quarter of these women were using methods considered to be the “most effective” forms, such as hormonal birth control pills and long-acting methods such as implants or IUDs.Typically, methods of abortion such as the IUD which is touted as being as high as 98-99 percent effective. However, this is with so-called “perfect use” and doesn’t account for human error, such as imperfect implantation methods.“While it is true that failure rates for LARCs (lon...
MILWAUKEE (AP) -- In the five years since a white supremacist fatally shot six worshippers at a Milwaukee-area Sikh temple, those affected by the tragedy have remained united by a mission to combat hatred....
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Since becoming an adult, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly drawn media criticism for what has been portrayed as a life of privilege at taxpayers' expense....
