cryptogon.com

The government avoided saying if it would order police to break up the crowds on Saturday, but at the stroke of midnight officers kept a discreet presence on the edges of the demonstrations.

Demonstrators kept quiet as city clocks chimed the beginning of a new day, many with sticky tape over their mouths in a gesture organizers said suggested they have things to say but were being gagged by the ban.

People are angry over Spain’s high unemployment rate and what they see as the national political parties’ ineptitude in dealing with a deep economic crisis. Protesters built a camp in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square Sunday, a week ahead of nationwide elections. Since then good-natured, peaceful and colorful gatherings have sprung up and grown around the country under the banner of “Real Democracy Now.”

Herman Spronck, head of the Dutch arm of the Salesian order, said in a statement Friday the priest served on the board of the “Martijn” organization, which is widely reviled but not illegal.

“Of course we reject this and distance ourselves from this personal initiative” on the part of the priest, Spronck’s statement said.

“Membership in such organizations does not fit with the ethos of the Salesian order.”

However, RTL Nieuws, which broke the story, published interviews both with Spronck and the priest, identified as 73-year-old “Father Van B.,” in which they defend some paedophile relationships.

“Society thinks these relationships are harmful. I disagree,” RTL quoted Van B. as saying. He served on Martijn’s board from 2008 until 2010, when the organization’s founder was arrested for alleged possession of child pornography. That case is ongoing.

RTL quoted Spronck as saying that “formally I always say that everyone must obey the law. But these relationships do not necessarily have to be damaging.”

From Friday, iron alloys containing more than 10% of rare earths will fall under the export quota, the commerce ministry said in a statement.

Rare earths are a collection of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table.

World manufacturers rely heavily on China for these minerals.

Rare earth metals are used in high tech goods such as mobile phone handsets, hybrid car batteries, wind turbines and weapons guidance systems .

These homes in Vicksburg are all situated along the Yazoo River, a tributary of the overflowing Mississippi River, and their owners have surrounded themselves with tons of earth and sand.

The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama, “seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world… publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position.”

The only problem is, it’s not much of a shift at all.The key word in that opening paragraph is that word “explicitly.” What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say? “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land “swaps” of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, amid a push to restart peace talks that failed, that a solution could be found that “reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”

Sound familiar?

Just ask Family Radio, the evangelical nonprofit that has plastered billboards and driven vans across the Bay Area and the world proclaiming the end of the world will be Saturday. The Oakland-based nonprofit has raised more than $100 million over the past seven years, according to tax returns. It owns 66 radio stations across the globe and was worth more than $72 million in 2009.

As The End nears, donations have spiked, a board member says, enabling Family Radio to spend millions of dollars on more than 5,000 billboards.

But it is not about money, say President Harold Camping and board member Tom Evans. It’s about spreading the Gospel and saving as many people as possible.

What will the nonprofit do with the millions of dollars left in the bank Saturday?

“When Judgment Day comes, if someone is a billionaire, how will they take their money with them?” said Camping, 89, during a phone interview Tuesday. “If we have any money left, and we will because we have to pay bills up to the very end “… it will all be destroyed because the world will be in a day of judgment.