Chief Rabbinate of Israel cuts ties with Vatican over Holocaust bishop

Gledhill, Religion Correspondent and Richard Owen in Rome

In a measure of Jewish anger around the world at the decision to reinstate the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X, the Chief Rabbinate has written to the office of Pope Benedict XVI condemning Bishop Richard Williamson's comments as "odious" and "outrageous". The letter was leaked to the Jerusalem Post.

Jewish leaders in the UK have also protested at the lifting of the excommunicatons on Bishop Williamson and three other bishops.

Bishop Williamson, who was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and converted to Catholicism as a young man, has in the past endorsed the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He told Swedish television that no Jews died in gas chambers, and that up to 300,000 died in the Holocaust. Historians generally accept that six million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.

According to The Jerusalem Post, the Chief Rabbinate also cancelled a meeting scheduled for March 2-4 in Rome with the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.

In a letter to the commission's chairman, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Chief Rabbinate Director-General, Oded Weiner, wrote that "without a public apology and recanting, it will be difficult to continue the dialogue".

Meanwhile, the Pope moved today to calm tensions when he uses his weekly audience to reaffirm his "full and unquestionable solidarity with Jews" and said that the attempt to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust should remain a warning for all people.

Activists threaten to close Heathrow

By Alan Jones, Press Association
Friday, 16 January 2009

Activists behind an annual climate change camp today threatened to close down Heathrow in an early sign of direct action aimed at stopping a controversial third runway being built.

Leaders of the annual event will meet later this month to discuss future demonstration, including some which they warned would be aimed at shutting the airport down completely.

The development came as a group calling itself the Climate Suffragettes smashed glass doors at the London offices of the Department for Transport (DfT)in protest at the Government's go-ahead for Heathrow's expansion.

One of the activists behind the annual climate camp pledged: "We will be the spanner in the works of third runway construction."

The group pointed out that at the 2007 camp, which was held near Heathrow, about 2,000 people decided not to shut the airport itself, but target BAA's offices.

Sally Wintour, who took part in the 2007 camp, said: "Gordon Brown is prioritising the profit margins of BAA and the aviation industry over the climate and the local community of Sipson.

"We invite anyone in the UK who has lain awake and worried about climate change and their children's future to come down and join us in using direct action to prevent this ecological and social catastrophe from unfolding."

A so-called "flashmob" will be held at Heathrow at midday tomorrow by a range of anti-aviation expansion groups and more action is being planned.

The Climate Suffragettes said three women wearing red sashes hurled bricks at the doors of DfT's Westminster building at 4am.

The bricks were wrapped in notes that read: "No third runway, the Suffra-jets are back," they said.

A spokeswoman for the group, which compares itself with the 20th century campaigners for votes for women, said: "The Government has opened the floodgates for radical action."

Conservative leader David Cameron today issued a clear warning to industry not to invest money and energy in the proposed third runway at Heathrow, as he reaffirmed his party's commitment to scrap the project if it won power.

Some observers have suggested that the green light given by Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon yesterday represented a guarantee that it would go ahead, as the scheme would be too far advanced by the time of the next election for an incoming Tory administration to halt it.

But Mr Cameron today flatly rejected this assumption, stating: "The third runway is just not going to happen."