POLAND

The courage of the truth

“Today the Church in Poland is celebrating the ‘Day of the Pope’. It is a particular time of prayer for the beatification of the Servant of God John Paul II, of reflection on his teaching and of charitable action according to his appeals. Spiritually I associate myself with this initiative and extend my heartfelt blessing […]

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France: sustainable development

“If we don’t react in a rapid and determined manner, we will leave to our children an uninhabitable and dangerous world, an exhausted planet, a scarred humanity”. This is the conviction that inspired the choice of the theme for the 82nd Social Week in France, “Living differently for a lasting and sustainable development”, due to […]

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SOCIAL WEEKS

Italy: the common good

The 45th Social Week of Italian Catholics opened at Pistoia on 18 October; it will continue in Pisa until 21 October. This year’s theme is: “The common good today: a commitment that comes from afar”. The meeting is being held exactly a century after the first Social Week, promoted in Pisa in 1907 by the […]

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Germany: Misereor on “risky competition”

To mark World Nutrition Day (18 October), the German Catholic charity Misereor has drawn attention to the risky competition between use of plants for food and their exploitation as “biofuels’. “The growing demand for plants such as sugar beet, palm oil, soya or maize to produce energy represents a danger for the poor populations of […]

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Czech Republic: the bishops appeal to Myanmar

An appeal to the authorities of Myanmar to prevent “any recourse to violence, punish those who have participated in killings, end their siege of Buddhist monasteries and release all those arrested during the demonstrations: that is one of the most significant contents of the statement of the Czech bishops issued in recent days on the […]

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Portugal: petition against poverty

About 23 thousand Portuguese citizens subscribed a petition, delivered by the National Commission for Justice and Peace. The collected adhesions were delivered yesterday, October 17th – International Day dedicated to the struggle against poverty, – in the hands of the president of the Parliament, Jaime Gama. The document is to be debated by the legislative […]

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FRONT PAGE

The European weakness

Emancipated from British colonial power in 1948, Burmese democracy would survive for fourteen years before being usurped by the military in 1962. The military coup d’état led to the establishment of a totalitarian regime that has survived to the present day. Various uprisings aimed at toppling it have broken out. The democratic movement in the […]

di Louis Matoux Belgium

European dailies and periodicals

The German press is following with close attention the developments following the decision of the Turkish Parliament to intervene in Northern Iraq against bases of the Kurdish separatist movement, the PKK. Christiane Schlötzer comments as follows in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (18/10): “If the Turkish army were to cross the frontier, northern Iraq too would be […]

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European Employment Days

Over 200,000 people participated in the European Employment Days, held simultaneously in 230 European cities from 24 September to 4 October on the joint initiative of the European Commission and member states. The five hundred complementary events (labour grants, recruitment fairs, vocational guidance seminars and conferences on mobility) provided opportunities for the encounter between labour […]

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Mobility pensions

The eagerly awaited draft directive “relating to the minimum requisites to increase the mobility of workers by improving the acquisition and maintenance of rights to complementary pension” was adopted by the European Commission last week, after the changes made to it by the European Parliament during its first reading. The aim of the legislation is […]

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