Five Best Airlines for Frequent Fliers

The Five Best Airlines for Frequent Fliers according to lifehacker.com survey:



1. Southwest Airlines

Southwest is the world's largest low-cost airline, one of the US's largest airlines overall, and services over 85 destinations in the continental US and Puerto Rico. Based out of Dallas, Southwest is well known for keeping its costs down (largely by only flying Boeing 737s and by pre-buying their fuel to avoid expensive fluctuations in fuel prices) and for passing those savings along to the customer. The airline has a number of programs designed for frequent travelers, from their Rapid Rewards miles program to the Rapid Rewards credit card, which is widely regarded as one of the best for travel rewards. Southwest also recently acquired AirTran to expand their portfolio. Those of you who nominated Southwest praised the company's egalitarian approach to seating (love it or hate it, Southwest has no reserved seating, first come-first serve), flexible flights and approach to rescheduling, and the fact that their frequent flyer rewards are based on dollars spent, not miles travelled making the A+ level easier to reach. Are they the most luxurious airline? Not at all—but they're affordable, available, and flexible.

2. Delta Airlines

Delta is probably one of the more surprising entrants in the top five. Based on Atlanta, it's the world's largest airline if you're counting fleet size or passengers flown. Like BA, it services all six inhabited continents, a total of 247 destinations both foreign and domestic. It's also one of the founding members of the SkyTeam alliance. Many passengers have a love-hate relationship with Delta (some of you voiced as much in the call for contenders thread) but its massive size means you'll probably have to fly with them at some point. Delta's frequent flyer program is called SkyMiles, and you can earn points by flying any SkyTeam member airline along with a few others (including Alaska!), or through any Delta branded credit cards. MIles with SkyMiles never expire, and can be used for tickets, upgrades, and more. Their redemption miles/points to rewards aren't that great, but if you fly a lot, you'll probably rake them up pretty quickly. Those of you who nominated Delta praised their fleet, the fact that they're extremely convenient, and that when you are a frequent flyer, you really are treated differently. One of you highlighted the fact that they have Biscoff cookies—which weighs pretty heavily in their favor in my opinion.

3. JetBlue

JetBlue is a low-cost airline based out of JFK International Airport in New York City, but that operates across the United States and also serves destinations in Central and South America (a total of 78 destinations). Although the company only started flying in 1998, it's earned a large and loyal following among passengers that prefer it  both for its generous TrueBlue frequent flyer program but also for its approach to passenger comfort, on-board technology, and customer service. Those of you who nominated the airline pointed out that they listen to consumer feedback on their frequent flyer program, their frequent flyer points never expire, service a number of regional and smaller airports (and offer lower ticket prices at those airports, which can save you money), and hey—unlimited snacks and in-flight entertainment on every flight don't hurt either.

4. British Airways

British Airways, the largest airline in the UK and a major international airline. While a number of our top five are domestic airlines with destinations in the United States, British Airways is based in London and is a founding member of the Oneworld Alliance of airlines, and after its 2011 merge with Iberia, it became one of the world's largest air carriers. BA and its subsidiaries service over 150 destinations on all six inhabited continents. BA has two frequent flyer programs: the Executive Club for BA flights proper, and the Diamond Club for British Midland International flights (which has since been rolled into the Executive Club). Membership in both programs is free, and you get qualifying points (called Avios) by flying any Oneworld partner airline (along with a few others, including Alaska Airlines!) Those of you who nominated BA praised the frequent flyer program for their exceptional redemption rate of Avios to dollars, which can make long, expensive trips extremely affordable, and for their exceptional, world-class customer service and on-board amenities for all passengers: something that many domestic carriers skimp on.

5. Alaska Airlines

Alaska Airlines, despite its name, services over 91 destinations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii. It's responsible for almost all air travel to Alaska from the contiguous United States, and is based in Seattle. It's sister carrier is Horizon Air, and the airline is fairly independent—it's not part of any other airline alliance. It's frequent flyer program, simply called "MIleage Plan," racks up the miles pretty quickly (especially if you're flying to Alaska), and is fairly generous. Your points never expire, and the list of partner airlines where flying gets you qualifying miles with Alaska is ridiculously long. Some of you who nominated Alaska pointed this out specifically—that even when you're not flying Alaska, you're earning miles and points you can eventually use when you do fly Alaska. Wi-Fi on all flights doesn't hurt either.

Photos by potowizard (Shutterstock), Aero Icarus, James, Aero Icarus, Aero Icarus, and Aero Icarus, and credits to Alan Henry.

European Parliament warned on US spying

   

     Since the revelation of Edward Snowden a US former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programs to the press, Germany's top security official has warned, "If you are worried about the US spying on you, you need to stop using Google and Facebook. " Internet users who fear their data is being intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency's should stay away from American websites run through American servers, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said.

     "If these reports are true, it's disgusting. The United States would be better off monitoring its secret services rather than its allies" Head of the European Parliament Martin Schultz said, "On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations."

     Consequently, Snowden is submitting asylum applications to various countries. The requests were made to a number of countries including the Republic of Austria, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Finland, the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of India, the Italian Republic, the Republic of Ireland, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Kingdom of Norway, the Republic of Poland, the Russian Federation, the Kingdom of Spain, the Swiss Confederation and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

     The requests join or update others previously made including to the Republic of Ecuador and the Republic of Iceland.

     The applications were delivered to an official at the Russian consulate at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow outlining the risks of persecution Mr. Snowden faces in the United States.

Is There A God? Crowdsourcing The Really Big Questions – ReadWrite

'via Blog this'
by: Brian S Hall

Technology has failed to answer life's biggest questions. Can crowdsourcing do better?

Technology enables our work, connects our world and changes our lives. So far, however, it has failed to definitively answer life's big questions, like:

• Is there a God?
• Are we alone in the universe?
• What's the best superpower to have? 

Where technology has foundered, though, perhaps the crowd - all of us - can succeed. After all, according to Wikipedia, the "wisdom of the crowd" is a well-documented principle:

The wisdom of the crowd is the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question. A large group's aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group.

Wisdom Of The Crowd

To find the answers to the questions that have eluded humankind from before the beginning of civilization, I consulted three popular sources of crowdsourced knowledge:

Yahoo! Answers: Anyone with a Yahoo ID can proffer a question or an answer. Regrettably, the site appears populated mostly by lonely teens - with a related level of expertise - and the design seems optimized for the late 1990s. 

Quora: Quora bills itself as "your best source of knowledge." Unfortunately, it insists upon your social media identity as the price of entry. The site does have a powerful search function, although many questions seem posed for no reason other than to show off how clever the asker is.

StackExchange: StackExchange is comprised of various mini-sites, called "communities," mostly technical in nature. There's an Ubuntu community, an Android community and many others. No registration is required. Questions can even be altered by users. The result is sort of like Wikipedia, albeit mostly for ephemeral data for very technically specific questions.

I searched all three for the answers to the big-picture questions listed above. I still haven't found what I'm looking for. 

Does God Exist? (Does Game of Thrones?)

On StackExchange, asking "does God exist" maddeningly brings up questions related to George RR Martin and something called the "eleventh metal." On Yahoo Answers, the very first response is a paid link to "Does God Exist at Amazon" - sadly, without a definitive answer. Quora fared much better. Perhaps too well, as a barrage of answers and related questions were quickly presented on a page of seemingly endless text.

The best answer? I scrolled through scores of responses on Quora and found this posted quote from Einstein - which may be no answer at all:

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

Are We alone In The Universe? (Signs Point To Yes)

Next, I searched for the answer to "are we alone in the universe?" On this question, StackExchange failed wonderfully - leading me down a rabbit hole of questions concerning Star Trek, Star Wars and waffle irons. Quora's crowd mostly just answered this question with another question. Define "alone" or define "we," for example. 

Surprisingly, Yahoo Answers offered what I considered the best response - if not exactly an answer:

There are, in theory, 750,000,000,000,000,000 solar systems in the visible universe. Do you really think that only 1 solar system out of 750 sextillion solar systems has life?  

The Best Superpower? (A Fast Answer)

Fine. Forget life's big questions. The singular conundrum that has plagued mesince I was a child is: "What is the best superpower." Here, at least, Yahoo Answers, powered in large part by youngsters, and Quora, its users a mash-up of Silicon Valley's biggest dreamers and daringest wannabes, were actually able to shed some light.

Super speed was never the superpower I dreamt about, but a Quora member,Gary Stiffelman, made a strong case:

My answer is super-speed, like The Flash. It displaces flight, invisibility, invulnerability, teleportation and a lot of other powers.  

It can even displace super strength, as hitting something millions of times in a few seconds has the same effect as a single super blow. Fun stuff.

No Guarantee Of Accuracy 

Sadly, for life's big questions, consulting the crowd has left me no wiser than before. Perhaps, even in an age of global connectivity, with information at our fingertips and technology all around us, there may be answers to questions we are still not yet ready to know - or can only discover on our own. 

As Wikipedia notes, "crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics." Maybe God isn't in the details...

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Social Media Visualized

Images courtesy of Brian Solis, Jess3

Pope Francis: Sunday Angelus, 2013-06-30 (full text)

Pope Francis prayed the Angelus on Sunday with faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square. In remarks before the traditional prayer of Marian devotion, the Holy Father spoke of the conscience as the interior space in which we can listen to and hear the truth, the good, the voice of God. Pope Francis praised his predecessor, Benedict XVI, as a model of docile attention to the voice of one’s conscience. “Pope Benedict XVI has given us a great example in this sense,” he said. “When the Lord had made it clear, in prayer, what was the step he had to take, he followed, with a great sense of discernment and courage, his conscience, that is the will of God speaking to his heart.” Below, please find Vatican Radio’s translation of the Holy Father’s remarks.

**********************************************************

Dear brothers and sisters,

This Sunday's Gospel (Lk 9:51-62) shows a very important step in the life of Christ: the moment in which, as St Luke writes, "[Jesus] steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem. (9:51 )” Jerusalem is the final destination, where Jesus, in his last Passover, must die and rise again, and so to fulfill His mission of salvation.

From that time, forth, after the steadfast decision, Jesus aims straight for the finish line, and even to the people he meets and who ask to [be allowed to] follow Him, He says clearly what are the conditions: not having a permanent abode; knowing how to detach oneself from familiar affections; not succumbing to nostalgia for the past.

Jesus also said to his disciples, charged with preceding Him on the way to Jerusalem to announce His coming, not to impose anything: if they do not find willing welcome, they are [simply] to proceed further, to move on. Jesus never imposes. Jesus is humble. Jesus extends invitations: “If you want, come.” The humility of Jesus is like this: He always invites us. He does not impose.

All this makes us think. It tells us, for example, the importance, even for Jesus, of conscience: listening in his heart to the Father's voice, and following it. Jesus, in his earthly life, was not, so to speak, “remote-controlled”: He was the Word made flesh, the Son of God made man, and at one point he made a firm decision to go up to Jerusalem for the last time - a decision taken in His conscience, but not on His own: ​​with the Father, in full union with Him! He decided in obedience to the Father, in profound intimate attunement to the Father’s will. For this reason, then, was the decision was steadfast: because it was taken together with the Father. In the Father, then, Jesus found the strength and the light for His journey. Jesus was free. His decision was a free one. Jesus wants us Christians to be free as he is: with that liberty, which comes from this dialogue with the Father, this dialogue with God. Jesus wants neither selfish Christians, who follow their egos and do not speak with God, nor weak Christians, without will: “remote-controlled” Christians, incapable of creativity, who seek ever to connect with the will of another, and are not free. Jesus wants us free, and this freedom – where is it found? It is to be found in the inner dialogue with God in conscience. If a Christian does not know how to talk with God, does not know how to listen to God, in his own conscience, then he is not free – he is not free.

So we also must learn to listen more to our conscience. Be careful, however: this does not mean we ought to follow our ego, do whatever interests us, whatever suits us, whatever pleases us. That is not conscience. Conscience is the interior space in which we can listen to and hear the truth, the good, the voice of God. It is the inner place of our relationship with Him, who speaks to our heart and helps us to discern, to understand the path we ought to take, and once the decision is made, to move forward, to remain faithful.

Pope Benedict XVI has given us a great example in this sense. When the Lord had made it clear, in prayer, what was the step he had to take, he followed, with a great sense of discernment and courage, his conscience, that is, the will of God that spoke to his heart – and this example of our father does much good to all of us, as an example to follow.

Our Lady, with great simplicity, listened to and meditated deep within herself upon the Word of God and what was happening to Jesus. She followed her son deep conviction, with steadfast hope. May Mary help us to become more and more men and women of conscience – free in our conscience, because it is in conscience that the dialogue with God is given – men and women able to hear the voice of God and follow it with decision.

After the Angelus, the Holy Father had these remarks:

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today in Italy we celebrate the Day of charity of the Pope. I desire to thank the bishops and all the parishes, especially the poorest ones, for the prayers and offerings that support the many pastoral initiatives and charitable activities of the Successor of Peter in every part of the world. Thank you all!

I extend my heartfelt greetings to all the pilgrims present, particularly to the many faithful from Germany. I also greet the pilgrims from Madrid, Augsburg, Sonnino, Casarano, Lenola, Sambucetole and Montegranaro, the group of lay Dominicans, the Apostolic Fraternity of Divine Mercy in Piazza Armerina, the Friends of the Missions of the Precious Blood, UNITALSI of Ischia di Castro and the children of Latisana.

I wish you all a good Sunday!

(Vatican Radio)

Pope Francis: Mass and Angelus on Sts Peter and Paul

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(News.va) Pope Francis marked the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul with Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, during which he imposed the pallium on thirty-four of the metropolitan archbishops installed over the past year. The pallium is the white, shawl-like woolen liturgical vestment worn over the shoulders of a metropolitan archbishop, which is the peculiar sign of a metropolitan’s office: it specifically symbolizes authority and union with the Holy See. Each year on the feast, the Metropolitan archbishops installed during the course of the preceding year travel to Rome to receive the vestment. The solemnity is also one of the two days in the liturgical year in which the ancient bronze statue of St Peter in the basilica is symbolically vested in an ornate red silk cope and crowned with the triple tiara. 

After processing into the basilica with the thirty-four new metropolitans and hearing the readings, Pope Francis delivered a homily in which he focused on the mystery of the Petrine ministry as one particularly ordered to confirming all Christians everywhere in faith, love and unity. “Faith in Christ,” said Pope Francis, “is the light of our life as Christians.“ Addressing himself to the new metropolitans, the Pope said, “To confess the Lord by letting oneself be taught by God; to be consumed by love for Christ and his Gospel; to be servants of unity. These, dear brother bishops, are the tasks which the holy apostles Peter and Paul entrust to each of us, so that they can be lived by every Christian.”

This was a theme to which the Holy Father returned after Mass, in remarks to the faithful gathered in St Peter's square for the Angelus prayer. “What a joy it is to believe in a God who is all Love, all Grace,” he said. Also at the Angelus, Pope Francis also greeted the delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, led by Metropolitan Ioannis Zizoulas. “Let us not forget that Peter had a brother, Andrew,” said Pope Francis, “who met Jesus first, spoke of Him to Peter and took Peter to meet [the Lord].”

Then Pope Francis asked all the gathered faithful to join him in praying a Hail Mary for Patriarch Bartholomew.

In conclusion, the Holy Father greeted all the pilgrim faithful who, from every part of the world, were come to celebrate the feast in Rome.

Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying | Politics and Law - CNET News

Facebook's outmoded Web crypto opens door to NSA spying | Politics and Law - CNET News: 

'via Blog this'

It's relatively easy for the National Security Agency's spooks to break outdated Web encryption after vacuuming up data from fiber taps, cryptographers say. But Facebook is still using it.

A Facebook data center. The company uses outdated Web encryption, which makes users' communications vulnerable to the National Security Agency. But the social network is planning to upgrade. (Credit: Facebook)

Secret documents describing the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus have highlighted vulnerabilities in outdated Web encryption used by Facebook and a handful of other U.S. companies.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA taps into fiber optic cables "upstream" from Internet companies and vacuums up e-mail and other data that "flows past" -- a security vulnerability that "https" Web encryption is intended to guard against.

But Facebook and a few other companies still rely on an encryption technique viewed as many years out of date, which cryptographers say the NSA could penetrate reasonably quickly after intercepting the communications. Facebook uses encryption keys with a length of only 1024 bits, while Web companies including Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox, and even Myspace have switched to exponentially more secure 2,048-bit keys.

Eran Tromer, an assistant professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University who wrote his 2007 dissertation on custom code-breaking hardware, says it's now "feasible to build dedicated hardware devices that can break 1024-bit RSA keys at a cost of under $1 million per device." Each dedicated device would be able to break a 1024-bit key in one year, he says.

"Realistically, right now, breaking 1024-bit RSA should be considered well within reach by leading nations, and marginally safe against other players," Tromer says. "This is unsatisfactory as the default security level of the Internet."

The NSA's budget is estimated to be at least $10 billion a year.

Facebook declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the company's encryption development plans, however, said the social network is working on switching over to 2048-bit keys relatively soon.

Encryption that's used to shield the privacy of Web browsing is known as RSA, a form of public key cryptography based on the fact that it is immensely difficult to factor large numbers. As microprocessor speeds continue to advance, however, RSA keys with lengths that were previously viewed as secure have fallen to brute force attacks.

"Some companies may not feel that intelligence agencies are a threat they care about, so may feel less pressure to upgrade," says Ron Rivest, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and the "R" in RSA. Tromer's published estimates of code-breaking times are "plausible," Rivest says, and it's possible that "additional benefits might be obtained by an intensive research and engineering push."

In 1999, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore built a custom machine called "Deep Crack," which performed a brute force attack against a 56-bit DES key (the equivalent of a 384-bit RSA key) in under 23 hours. An RSA key with a length of 768 bits was factored (PDF) in December 2009 by an international team of computer science researchers.

Factoring a 1024-bit RSA key is about 1,000 times as hard as a 768-bit key -- an expensive but hardly difficult task for the NSA or other well-resourced national intelligence agencies. That's why NIST recommended (PDF) that 1024-bit RSA keys are no longer viable after 2010, and companies that sell Web SSL certificates began to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys in favor of 2048-bit RSA keys a few years ago.

Google also uses 1024-bit keys, but in 2011 it implemented a clever trick called forward secrecy, meaning a different key is used for each encrypted Web session, instead of a single master key that's used to encrypt billions of them. The company said last month it will switch over to 2048-bit keys by the end of 2013.

"We would have preferred to move sooner, but operating at the scale we do, client compatibility is always an issue," says Adam Langley, a software engineer at Google. "Everything on the planet seems to connect to us."

Langley added: "We would have totally eaten the cost and the speed years ago -- if we could have done it without worries." As an additional precaution, Langley says, Google usually rotates its RSA keys every two weeks. (Facebook does it once a year, and is also planning to make forward secrecy a default setting for users, which few other companies do. Once Facebook switches to 2048-bit keys and forward secrecy, its users will be better protected against NSA surveillance than almost any other company.)

Beyond Facebook, other companies still using 1024-bit encryption keys include Capital One bank and Amazon.com's U.K. and Japan sites. Web sites that have veered in the opposite direction with 4096-bit RSA keys include Apache.org, Hugedomains.com, Openoffice.org, Phpbb.com, and Shareasale.com.

Classified NSA documents published by the Guardian over the last few weeks have sketched an outline of a massive surveillance system that vacuums up billions of Americans' e-mail messages and other private correspondence. One document prepared by the NSA's Special Source Operations directorate, for instance, said the agency had "processed its one-trillionth metadata record" by December 2012.

Documents that came to light in 2006 in a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation offer some insight into the spy agency's relationship with Tier 1 providers. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously "diverted" through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.

To be sure, even weak encryption is more privacy-protective than no encryption, which is still the default for routine Web browsing.

Chris Soghoian, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says companies that don't use strong encryption are "being cheap" because they can get "more encryption per second per server" with a shorter RSA key.

Tromer, the Tel Aviv University cryptographer, has described in a series of papers (PDF), including some co-authored with Adi Shamir, the "S" in RSA, how technological progress makes custom code-breaking hardware ever faster. Moving to 90 nanometer semiconductor technology that was reached in 2005 brings the cost to $1.1 million for hardware that breaks 1024-bit keys at the rate of one a year, not counting initial engineering and fabrication, he says. Today's 22 nanometer technology brings a "significant further reduction" in cost, he says.

Another technological approach the NSA or other well-resourced intelligence agencies could use -- putting aside social engineering attacks or intrusions into data centers -- is using off-the-shelf computers in a brute force attack against an RSA key.

"Why use specialized hardware?" says Arjen Lenstra, a number theorist and professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who participated in the successful 2009 effort to factor a 768-bit RSA key. A few "million CPUs for a year suffices for 1024 RSA," Lenstra says.

Langley, the Google software engineer, says his employer could devote some of its massive computing resources to breaking a 1024-bit RSA key if it chose to do so.

"It could be done today," Langley says. "We could do it if we really wanted." But, he adds, there are better ways to spend millions of dollars in a way that will "advance the state of cryptography research."

Stunning Photos Of The Supermoon From Around The Globe - Forbes

From Stunning Photos Of The Supermoon From Around The Globe - Forbes:

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Credits to Forbes.com

Pope modifies Mass: 'St. Joseph' added to Eucharistic prayers

     June 19, 2013. The Pope has approved a new addition to the Latin Rite Mass. The name of St. Joseph, will be included after the usual prayer to the Virgin Mary. 

The change in the text was also approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship. The modification itself was in the works under the Pontificate of Benedict XVI. Now, Pope Francis confirmed the decision. 

Up to now, the only reference to St. Joseph was in the so-called Roman Canon, and was introduced by the blessed John XXIII during the Second Vatican Council. 

Currently, the decree has only been published in Latin. So after the reference to the Virgin Mary, the phrase reads, 'cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso,' which translates to St. Joseph, her husband. But the Vatican is working on various translations in other languages. Since the change is simple, priests are allowed to put it into practice immediately.

NEW VERSION IN ENGLISH

II:

that with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,

with Blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

with the blessed Apostles

III:

with the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,

with blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

with your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs

IV:

with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

with blessed Joseph, her Spouse,

and with your Apostles

FULL TEXT OF THE DECREE:

Exercising his paternal care over Jesus, Saint Joseph of Nazareth, set over the Lord’s family, marvelously fulfilled the office he received by grace. Adhering firmly to the mystery of God’s design of salvation in its very beginnings, he stands as an exemplary model of the kindness and humility that the Christian faith raises to a great destiny, and demonstrates the ordinary and simple virtues necessary for men to be good and genuine followers of Christ. Through these virtues, this Just man, caring most lovingly for the Mother of God and happily dedicating himself to the upbringing of Jesus Christ, was placed as guardian over God the Father’s most precious treasures. Therefore he has been the subject of assiduous devotion on the part of the People of God throughout the centuries, as the support of that mystical body, which is the Church.

The faithful in the Catholic Church have shown continuous devotion to Saint Joseph and have solemnly and constantly honored his memory as the most chaste spouse of the Mother of God and as the heavenly Patron of the universal Church. For this reason Blessed Pope John XXIII, in the days of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, decreed that Saint Joseph’s name be added to the ancient Roman Canon.

In response to petitions received from places throughout the world, the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI deemed them worthy of implementation and graciously approved them. The Supreme Pontiff Francis likewise has recently confirmed them. In this the Pontiffs had before their eyes the full communion of the Saints who, once pilgrims in this world, now lead us to Christ and unite us with him.

Accordingly, mature consideration having been given to all the matters mentioned here above, this Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, by virtue of the faculties granted by the Supreme Pontiff Francis, is pleased to decree that the name of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary is henceforth to be added to Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV, as they appear in the third typical edition of the Roman Missal, after the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as follows: 

- in Eucharistic Prayer II: “ut cum beáta Dei Genetríce Vírgine María, beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, beátis Apóstolis”;

- in Eucharistic Prayer III: “cum beatíssima Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum beátis Apóstolis”;

- in Eucharistic Prayer IV: “cum beáta Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum Apóstolis ”.

As regards the Latin text, these formulas are hereby declared typical. The Congregation itself will soon provide vernacular translations in the more widespread western languages; as for other languages, translations are to be prepared by the Bishops’ Conferences, according to the norm of law, to be confirmed by the Holy See through this Dicastery.

All things to the contrary notwithstanding.

From the offices of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 1 May 2013, on the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker.

ANTONIO, CARD. CAÑIZARES LLOVERA

Prefect

ARTURO ROCHE

Archbishop Secretary

Source: http://www.romereports.com

The Farewell message of Pope Benedict XVI

     "The Lord gave us days of sun and of light breeze, days in which the fishing was good. There were also moments when there were stormy waters and headwinds, as was the case in the whole history of the Church, as if God was sleeping.

     But I always knew that God was in that boat and I always knew that the boat of the Church is not mine, is not ours, but is his and he will not let it sink.

  

     This was and is a certainty and nothing can obscure it. And that is why today my heart is filled with gratitude to God ... I would like everyone to feel the joy of being Christian. Let us never lose this vision of faith, which is the only true vision of the way of the Church and the world. In our heart, in the heart of each of you, let there be always the joyous certainty that the Lord is near, that He does not abandon us, that He is near to us and that He surrounds us with His love.

     Thank you!"

--- Pope Benedict XVI

Talent

   

    ''One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try."

     This man from Mindanao Philippines shows his talent with improvise electric guitar like instrument and exceptional voice. His expertise circulated across the entire country, that I myself amazed (though it's Filipino/Bisaya), I would say - his voice is the best - a True Simply Amazing.

 

  

     'Nothing great will ever be achieved without great mean, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.'