Iranians chanting "death to Israel" and "death to America," converged from nine points in the Iranian capital for a rally attended by most of Iran's top officials.

Ahmadinejad took a short walk in the crowd, rallying in support of his comments that the Islamic world could not tolerate the Jewish state in its heartland. He said Western criticism carried no weight.

"My words are the Iranian nation's words," he told the official IRNA news agency, when asked if he had a message for the world.

Israel's Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said Iran should be expelled from the United Nations after its president called for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments at a conference called the "The World without Zionism," reported by the official Iranian news agency, drew condemnation from Western countries.

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 17, 2005 (Zenit.org).- The most effective medicine to alleviate drug addiction could be the Eucharist, suggests the founder of the Community of the Cenacle.

Sister Elvira Petrozzi, addressing the Synod of Bishops last Wednesday, explained how devotion to the Blessed Sacrament changed the lives of many youth recovering from drug addiction.

"What therapeutic method or medicine could I offer them?" she asked, referring to drug addicts. "There is no pill that can give them the joy to live and peace in the heart!"

"The Eucharist cannot be understood by one's brain, but it is felt in the heart," she said. "If you trustfully kneel before him, you will feel that his humanity present in the consecrated host reawakens God's image in you that returns to shine.

"It is the 'Eucharistic miracle' that I have been contemplating for so many years. The Eucharist creates not only a personal dynamism, but also a dynamism of the people."

Catholic bishops have stood firm in an end-of-synod message which upheld Church teaching on priestly celibacy and reaffirmed the denial of Holy Communion to those who divorce and remarry.

In a "message to the people of God" marking the end of a three-week gathering of 250 bishops at the Vatican, the bishops called on political leaders to enact laws protecting marriage and the family, outlawing abortion and euthanasia.

"We ask that they be promoters of the dignity of every human being, from conception till natural death," the document said on Saturday.

"We ask them to enact laws which respect the natural rights of marriage and the family."

The bishops were also unyielding on the rule whereby members of other Christian Churches are not allowed to share in the Catholic Communion, and they bemoaned a "lessening of the sense of the sacred" in the manner in which Catholics attended the mass.

Hurricane Wilma became the fiercest Atlantic hurricane ever seen as it churned toward western Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula on Wednesday, and threatened densely populated Florida after killing 10 people in Haiti.

The season's record-tying 21st storm, fueled by the warm waters of the northwest Caribbean Sea, strengthened with unprecedented speed into a Category 5 hurricane, the top rank on the five-step scale of hurricane intensity.

Oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico were expected to escape this storm but Florida's orange groves were at risk.

Winchester, who has become a touchstone on the disaster circuit thanks to his book on the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, .... did, however, get a question from a middle-aged woman. " When you say extinct," he recalls her asking incredulously. "Do you mean, even Americans?"

This kind of national hubris explains in part why the world's sole superpower remains oddly unprepared for natural disasters. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was widely anticipated and the flooding which ensued was preventable. Indeed, in the year 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) named the three most likely scenarios to hit the US. They were a terrorist attack, a levee-breaching hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco.

At the same time, President Teddy Roosevelt, whom President Bush has often cited as a role model, kick-started a rescue effort that involved the nation's longest hospital train. William Howard Taft, then secretary of war, dispatched some 200,000 rations from the Canadian border. Before long, every tent owned by the US army was in San Francisco.

"The San Francisco earthquake was not caused by God," he says unequivocally, " but forces we understand - and understand now better thanks to it."

Al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, has urged the militant network's leader in Iraq to prepare for an Islamic government to take over the country when U.S. forces leave, according to a letter released on Tuesday by U.S. intelligence officials.

"We must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations, and their plans to fill the void behind them," Zawahri told Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a July 9 letter that U.S. officials say was obtained during counterterrorism operations in Iraq.

The Pentagon disclosed the letter's existence on October 6, telling reporters it appeared to be authentic. But military and intelligence officials have not released details of where, when, how or by whom it was obtained.

"I ask you, then, to spread the love of good journalism, journalism which is not satisfied with unfounded rumour, with the invention of some overheated imagination which is passed on to the public as ‘People say that . . .’. Report with facts, with results, without judging intentions, upholding the legitimate diversity of opinions in a calm way, without resorting to personal attacks. It is difficult for people really to live together harmoniously when there is no real information. And real information does not fear the truth and does not allow itself to be led away by motives of intrigue, false prestige or economic advantage."