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Showing posts from December, 2016

Personal New Year's Message

"For I know the plans I have for you" declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" Jeremiah 29:11 Dear friends, Another year has passed. Usually, during the last days of every year, most people contemplate what happened in the past year and try to envision and plan their next steps. Last year, in my New Year's message , I wrote that "2015 was a year filled with fear and uncertainty." When I composed  last year's me ssage, it was a few weeks after Brussels was locked down beca use of fear s of a terrorist attack. Unfor tunately, this became a reali ty when a double bomb attack took place  Brussels on the 22nd of March , followed by other terrorist attacks in Nice and more recently in Berlin.  Moreover, the humanitarian tragedies that came as a result of conflicts around the world, especially in the Middle East, were also prevalent  this year and they are expected to continue to shock...

Even after different manipulative efforts, the Parliamentary Assembly says a clear NO to surrogacy

On Tuesday the 11 th of October, the last debates and votes  on a controversial recommendation on surrogacy took place in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). This recommendation was based on a rejected resolution that asked for a legal framework for the so-called “not-for profit surrogacy”. Interestingly, the first report was rejected in its entirety  by the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development (SOC) of PACE last March, forcing the rapporteur to draft another report. However, the resolution of the new report was also rejected in a Committee meeting last September.  Strangely enough, a  recommendation that was  based on the r ejected resolution was adopted. This was a mistaken decision. This became evident by  the fact that before the plenary debate, the SOC voted with a large majority two amendments (24 against 16 for the first amendment and 27 against 16 for the second) to  this controversial...