All posts tagged: lay

In Vatican summit’s final document, delegates call for more lay and female church leaders

In Vatican summit’s final document, delegates call for more lay and female church leaders

Published by skeptic

VATICAN CITY (RNS) – After three years of discussions at every level of the Catholic Church, a summit of Catholic bishops and lay people at the Vatican ended Saturday (Oct. 26), with the publication of a document laying out a vision for structural reform of the church and calling for the hierarchy to make more room for lay leaders, especially women. The final document of Vatican Synod on Synodality presented pathways to a more inclusive and transparent church that gives all Catholics a say on the future of the institution. It proposed changes to canon law that would allow lay people to be better heard by their bishops, national bishops’ conferences and even the pope. The 52-page document serves as the final statement on the summit, which brought nearly 400 prelates, lay Catholics, nuns and brothers to Rome for the past month. Pope Francis announced that he will not publish an ‘apostolic exhortation’ as is customary at the end of a synod. The pope signed Saturday’s document instead, suggesting that it constitutes official church teaching. …

As I Lay Dying | Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying | Christine Smallwood

Published by skeptic

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard became famous for paying extraordinarily close attention to the texture of everyday experience, yet he has always been attuned to what might lie beyond it. His second novel, A Time for Everything (2004), was about angels. In A Man in Love (2009), the second volume of his autobiographical opus My Struggle, he described the christening of his first daughter, Vanja. After the ceremony the priest offered Communion. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Karl Ove proceeded to the altar, knelt, drank the wine, and took the wafer on his tongue. “Why had I done it?” he wrote. “Had I become a Christian?” Then there was what I had been working on over the last year. Not what I wrote, but what I was slowly realizing I wanted to explore: the sacred…. It was about flesh and blood, it was about birth and death, and we were linked to it through our bodies and our blood, those we beget and those we bury, constantly, continually, a storm blew through our world …

Charges Against Cuellar Lay Bare Azerbaijan’s Influence Attempts

Charges Against Cuellar Lay Bare Azerbaijan’s Influence Attempts

Published by Sam

As tensions flared over disputed territory in the Caucasus region in the summer of 2020, Azerbaijan’s squadron of high-priced Washington lobbyists scrambled to pin the blame on neighboring Armenia and highlight its connections to Russia. Unbeknown to members of Congress, Azerbaijan had an inside man who was working closely with the Azerbaijani ambassador to Washington at the time on a parallel line of attack, according to text messages released by federal prosecutors. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat now charged with accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent in a yearslong scheme, indicated in a text that he planned a legislative maneuver to try to strip funding from Armenia because it hosted Russian military bases. Azerbaijan’s ambassador responded enthusiastically. “Your amendment is more timely than ever,” the ambassador, Elin Suleymanov, wrote to Mr. Cuellar. “It is all about Russian presence there,” added Mr. Suleymanov, who referred to the congressman as “Boss.” Mr. Cuellar’s legislative gambit did not go far. But by the time of the text exchange, his family had accepted at least $360,000 …

Tesla Will Lay Off More Than 10% of Global Workforce

Tesla Will Lay Off More Than 10% of Global Workforce

Published by skeptic

Signs of turmoil at Tesla multiplied on Monday after the electric car company told employees it would lay off more than 10 percent of the work force to cut costs and two senior executives resigned. The job cuts, amounting to about 14,000 people, come as the company faces increasing competition and declining sales. The management changes and layoffs are a reminder of the unpredictability of Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, at a critical time for the company. Mr. Musk has not outlined a plan to reverse a decline in car sales, and he appears focused on long-shot ventures such as a self-driving taxi, rather than new models that would help Tesla compete with cars being introduced by established carmakers and new rivals from China. “As we prepare the company for the next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” Mr. Musk told employees in a Monday morning email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. “There is …

Advance of Islamic State affiliates ‘could lay ground for new wave of terrorism’ | Islamic State

Advance of Islamic State affiliates ‘could lay ground for new wave of terrorism’ | Islamic State

Published by skeptic

Islamic State (IS) remains defeated in its core strongholds of the Middle East but has made significant progress in Africa and parts of south Asia, winning territory and resources that could serve as a launchpad for a new campaign of extremist violence, analysts and officials believe. European governments have moved to their highest levels of alert for years after the attack on a concert hall in Moscow last week by militants from IS which killed 140 people. Within 48 hours, France increased its surveillance and risk warning to the highest level and Italy too ordered enhanced measures. In Germany, officials described an “acute risk”. The attack in Moscow, the most lethal Islamist extremist operation ever in Europe, was claimed by IS which, officials believe, has been planning new operations against European targets for several years. Map Between 2015 and 2019, when IS ran a so-called caliphate across a swath of land it controlled across eastern Syria and western Iraq, the group’s central leadership had little need of its newly established affiliates to launch operations in …

Who killed Marielle Franco? Arrests lay bare nexus of politicians, police and paramilitaries | Brazil

Who killed Marielle Franco? Arrests lay bare nexus of politicians, police and paramilitaries | Brazil

Published by skeptic

More than a decade has passed since Rio’s homicide chief sat down for an interview with the city’s bestselling magazine to boast of a dramatic drop in murders. “There’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” proclaimed Rivaldo Barbosa, whom the publication described as an industrious, church-going former air force sergeant who had instructed detectives to solve 10 murders a month. “[Killers] will always leave clues,” he said. “It’s our duty to find the evidence and arrest the culprits.” Few who read that glowing 2013 profile of “Rio’s Sherlock” would have anticipated the plot twist to come. At around 6am on Sunday, there was a knock at the door of Barbosa’s luxury lakeside apartment in west Rio, not far from the homicide squad he once ran. Outside stood a cluster of federal police officers investigating one of the most shocking and high-profile murders in Rio’s history – the 2018 shooting of the Rio councillor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes. Their arrest warrant carried Barbosa’s name. Barbosa had taken over as Rio’s chief of …

Shabab Militants Lay Siege to Hotel in Somali Capital

Shabab Militants Lay Siege to Hotel in Somali Capital

Published by Sam

Five assailants with the terrorist group Al Shabab stormed a hotel in a highly fortified area close to Somalia’s presidential palace on Thursday night, engaging security forces for about 12 hours in sustained fighting that left three people dead and injured 27 — including members of parliament — before the militants were finally killed, according to Somali officials. The attack underscored Al Shabab’s enduring capacity to stage attacks on a high-profile target in the capital, despite an aggressive counteroffensive by the Somali government, backed by the U.S. military. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud promised to eliminate the group by fighting it militarily, ideologically and financially, when he came to power in mid-2022. The militants with Al Shabab, a Qaeda-linked group, stormed the SYL Hotel in central Mogadishu after 9:30 p.m. local time, a police spokesman, Kasim Ahmed Roble, said Friday. Video footage broadcast on local television showed mangled cars and widespread destruction near the hotel’s entrance, while debris and blood covered the hotel’s floors inside. “It is a disappointment for the Somali people that an explosion …

Biden State of the Union address to lay out economic vision

Biden State of the Union address to lay out economic vision

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President Joe Biden will highlight his economic record and lay out plans to reshape the tax system and reduce the deficit in his State of the Union address Thursday. Biden is expected to double down on his economic populism by pushing his regulatory and antitrust policy ahead of an expected rematch against former President Donald Trump in November. Biden will propose to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%. Trump lowered the rate from 35% to 21% with his 2017 tax law. Biden will also call for raising the 15% corporate minimum tax to 21% when he unveils his budget next week that will reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, according to a senior administration official. Biden previously passed a 15% minimum corporate tax rate in his 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Biden will also tout measures he took to lower prescription drug costs and crack down on junk fees. His administration in recent weeks has called on grocery stores to lower prices and accused some companies of shrinkflation, where consumer products become …

Starbucks Mideast stores to lay off 2,000 amid Gaza war boycotts

Starbucks Mideast stores to lay off 2,000 amid Gaza war boycotts

Published by skeptic

A franchise operator that runs Starbucks outlets in the Middle East and North Africa region said Tuesday that it will lay off 2,000 workers amid calls for boycotts of the American coffee giant linked to the ongoing war in Gaza. “As a result of the continually challenging trading conditions over the last six months, we have taken the sad and very difficult decision to reduce the number of colleagues in our Starbucks MENA stores,” the Kuwait-based Alshaya Group said in a statement, using the acronym for the Middle East and North Africa. The news was first reported by Reuters. What’s BDS, the movement to boycott Israel with a new social media following? “Alshaya Group has been the licensed partner for Starbucks in MENA for over 25 years and we are extremely proud of the business we have built, with over 1,300 coffee shops and 11,000 colleagues,” the company said, adding that the affected employees will be provided with support. The American coffee giant became embroiled in boycott calls on TikTok after it sued Workers United, …