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Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, mounted a direct attack on the Government over the invasion and occupation of Iraq when he used a national memorial service commemorating the servicemen killed in the conflict to accuse Tony Blair and his ministers of failing to “measure the price” of military action. Delivering his address in St Paul's Cathedral before a congregation including the Queen, Gordon Brown and Mr Blair himself, the spiritual head of the Church of England accused the former prime minister of indulging in rhetoric before the 2003 invasion, while leaving ordinary servicemen and women to pick up the...

TONY Blair is set to be made the first President of Europe in weeks, The Sun can reveal. He will be nominated by EU leaders in Brussels if, as expected, Ireland backs the hated Lisbon Treaty in tomorrow's referendum. A senior Government source said: "If we get a 'Yes' vote it will all move very, very quickly. Tony could be named by the end of October." The leaders of the EU's 27 nations, not the voters, will choose the president. Former PM Mr Blair would not formally take up the powerful position until all EU countries ratified the Treaty. Even...

A senior Government source said: "If we get a 'Yes' vote it will all move very, very quickly. Tony could be named by the end of October." The leaders of the EU's 27 nations, not the voters, will choose the president.

Tony Blair is in line to be proclaimed Europe’s first president within weeks if the Irish vote “yes” in today’s referendum. Senior British sources have told The Times that President Sarkozy has decided that Mr Blair is the best candidate and that Angela Merkel has softened her opposition. The former Prime Minister could be ushered into the European Union’s top post at a summit on October 29. Ms Merkel, the German Chancellor, was opposed to Mr Blair because she believed that the post should go to a country that had adopted the euro but British sources said that she may...

Tony Blair has revealed that after ignoring a stern warning from his great-grandmother about marrying a Catholic, he now finds his new-found faith has become the driving force in his life as he seeks to clear up the world's religious conflicts. Speaking to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper, Blair said today he considers Pope Benedict's belief that God is central to politics, society, economics and culture "brilliant". Weeks after a packed Catholic conference in Italy gave Blair an ovation for his words about the universality of Catholicism, the pope's newspaper was equally effusive, calling the convert "a gentleman, educated,...

British human rights lawyer, Cherie Blair has called on the Church to reconsider its opposition to artificial contraception because it may be holding back women's careers. Ms Blair is wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. She told an audience at Edinburgh International Book Festival she believed the church should be "more positive" about permitting women to use artificial birth control as a means of regulating their fertility, UK's The Herald reports. A devout Catholic who encouraged her husband, Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, to convert from Anglicanism after he left office in 2007, Mrs Blair has previously...

Jayson Blair knows his new profession — life coach — smacks some people in the face like a bad punchline. "People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'" Blair, 33, resigned from the Times in 2003, leaving a journalistic scandal in his wake. The resulting furor led the paper's top two newsroom executives to...

LONDON (Reuters) - Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be asked to testify to a panel investigating the Iraq war, the head of the inquiry said Thursday. Former civil servant John Chilcot said the inquiry, set up by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, would look at British involvement in the war, covering the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July this year. "The people we invite to give evidence will be those we judge ... are best placed to supply the information we need to conduct our task thoroughly," the inquiry chairman told a news conference....

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.” On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com. In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them. An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a...

Around the world, government-run health care is failing patients. Long waiting times, rationing or denying life-saving treatments and lower-quality care are common in government systems like Great Britain and Canada. Maybe that’s why major government systems are looking to the United States for innovations that make health care work better for everyone. Some policymakers in Congress want a public plan to “compete” with private health insurers. Everyone agrees that we can improve our health care system, but why would anyone expect government-run health care to work for patients in the United States when it doesn’t work for other countries? Click...

The post of President of the European Council is enshrined in the EU's reforming Lisbon Treaty, which can't come into force until all 27 member states have ratified it. So far only 23 nations have completed that process. Whoever is picked for the job would serve a two-and-a-half-year term, renewable once. The new top job is also aimed at finally answering former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's famous 1970 question: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?" If the Lisbon Treaty does get the greenlight, notably at a second Irish referendum on the subject due in...

June 9, 2009 FDIC is calling the Kettle Black In a column at www.Marketwatch.com - David Weidner compares FDIC's Sheila Blair to Donald Trump. As weidner put it, Blair is "stepping where the government's other banking regulators refuse to go: the executive suite." Weidner continued "Blair's attack has been mostly good news for those interested in seeing a stable, if not sexy, banking system. By threatening the things most precious to bank executives -- their pay and jobs --." Blair and the FDIC? This is definitely a case of the emperor having no clothes if there ever was one. What...

Tony Blair believes Gordon Brown's political future is doomed because of 'the darkness in his heart' and his 'lies' - and feels Mr Brown has no one to blame but himself. The former Prime Minister's devastating verdict on his successor is a blow to Mr Brown's hopes of surviving further moves to topple him, expected this week. Publicly, Mr Blair has kept out of the row. However, The Mail on Sunday can disclose that privately he shares the view held by Labour rebels that Mr Brown will lead the Party to a disastrous defeat at the next Election. ..................................................

WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

A leading figure in the Catholic church has claimed that the charity threatens human rights and religious freedom. At a conference in the Vatican, Prof Michel Schooyans, an expert on bioethics and demography, said Blair wanted to remake the world's major religions and use them to expand "new rights". The Belgian priest argued that its goals could not be realised "except at the price of sacrificing religious freedom, of the imposition of a 'politically correct' interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures and of the sabotage of the natural foundations of law". Mandrake reported earlier this month that William Chapman, the foundation's...

Daily Blog Obama & Blair: False Messiahs? BY Tom McFeely Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:50 AM Msgr. Michel Schooyans, an international human-rights expert, says President Barack Obama has a flawed, totalitarian vision of human existence. In his May 1 address at the Vatican to the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, posted here at the Chiesa.com website, Msgr. Schooyans warned that Obama is motivated by a “messianic” desire to reorder the world in keeping with the president’s political pro-abortion philosophy. One of the significant aspects of the talk given by Msgr. Schooyans, who is professor emeritus...

KIGALI (AFP) – Former Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sunday praised genocide-scarred Rwanda as "an inspiration to the world," after talks with President Paul Kagame. "Rwanda has in a remarkably short period of time become a role model for Africa," said Blair, highlighting the small central African state's tourism industry just 15 years after a genocide that that left around 800,000 people massacred during a 100-day carnage. "A country that was once a no-go area attracted more than a million visitors in 2008," Blair stated. "It is one of the most stable countries in Africa," he added.

TOLEDO, Ohio, May 5, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bishop Leonard Blair of the Diocese of Toledo has forbade a gay-friendly “Catholic” ministry from presenting a workshop on gay and lesbian ministry at the Sisters of St. Francis’s convent in Tiffin, Ohio, reports the Toledo Blade. Bishop Blair, who was recently commissioned by the Vatican to investigate the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization representing 95% of the nation’s nuns, sent a letter to the head of the Sisters of St. Francis, Jacquelyn Doepker, requesting that she cancel the workshop that was scheduled for May 1.  "The positions of New Ways...

Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention." When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of...

Secretary of state Hillary got into a verbal tussle this afternoon with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher during today’s Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Congressman Rohrabacher asked her if she agreed with former VP Dick Chaney's suggestion that more interrogation memos be declassified, specifically the ones that showed that the interrogation techniques resulted in avoiding major terror attacks on US Soil . Clinton avoided the question by responding, “It won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information.” Rohrabacher shot back, ““ Madam Secretary, I asked you a specific question…Dick Cheney has asked that specific documents...