Germans faced the prospect of summer holiday chaos yesterday as train drivers voted for an unlimited nationwide strike. It seems set to be the worst rail strike in 15 years and, along with a threat of industrial action by airline pilots, could bring the country to a standstill. Industrial relations, normally calm and consensual in Germany, are breaking down. The so-called Merkel miracle could thus soon start to evaporate.
Russia has committed an "act of aggression" against Georgia by firing a guided missile at its territory, officials in Tbilisi say. They say the missile landed outside the village of Tsitelubani on Monday, some 37 miles north-west of the capital Tbilisi, but did not explode. Russian officials have moved quickly to deny all of the accusations.
Israeli security officials on Monday warned citizens traveling in Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim countries to leave immediately due to a "concrete and severe" threat of terror attacks.
The UN Security Council has unanimously agreed on a resolution to send a joint UN-African Union force to the Darfur region of Sudan. Proposed as the world's largest peacekeeping force, there will be 20,000 troops that will incorporate the present 7,000 AU force already in Darfur plus 6,000 police. The Sudanese government has granted oil concessions throughout Darfur and other parts of the country, eager to extend beyond its present oilfields where the output is now peaking. To put such potential oil wealth under UN supervision and open to exploitation by Western governments rather than China is a key consideration behind the proposed peacekeeping intervention.
(UPI: Energy watch)
(UPI: Oil and gas pipeline watch)
President Ahmadinejad called Monday evening for establishment of an Islamic economic grouping by Muslim states to confront economic dominance of Western powers. "Selective policies, domination over sources of energy and unfair distribution of wealth originate from big powers economic dominance. ... Islamic states can form a powerful economic bloc with the help of an Islamic body such as the Organization of Islamic Conference."
President Bush charged Monday that Iran has openly declared that it seeks nuclear weapons - an inaccurate accusation at a time of sharp tensions between Washington and Tehran. "It's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon," he said during a joint press conference with Afghan President Karzai.
The same camp whose vocal endorsement led to the present catastrophe in Iraq are now hawkishly gazing at Iran. The same absurd and dangerous logic that defends the nuclear atrocities of 1945 can now be used to support the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
Hmmm...
Reports from Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces are reporting today that the US Military has 'unleashed' upon the World a devastating new weapon that they estimate at over 1.4 million pounds and is similar to the design of the 21,000 pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast detonated over Florida on March 11, 2003 prior to the Americans invasion of Iraq. Russian Military Analysts are presently theorizing that this massive explosion was a test of the code-named "Divine Strake" technology that the US had planned to detonate last year on their Nevada Nuclear Test Range, but were prevented from doing so by the uproar of its citizens, and has been planned to be used by the Americans against Iran's Nuclear Facilities. These reports state that this massive explosion was first detected by Russia's Cosmos-2422 HEO (highly-elliptical orbit) satellite, (which is designed for the detection of American ballistic missiles) at 08:48:40 UTC August 6 at the US Dugway Proving Ground Test Range in Utah, and which exactly corresponds to the time of a reported 3.9 Magnitude Earthquake occurring at the exact same location.
The day after President Bush marshaled political forces in Congress to grant him greater authority to engage in counterterrorism-related spying, the president stated that he would seek greater changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when the legislative branch returns to work in September. One constitutional scholar derided Bush's reasoning, particularly the tortuous language in his statement.
Most Americans disapprove of the Iraq war and of exporting democracy by force, yet neoconservative proponents of those policies advise the leading Republican presidential hopefuls. "There is an overwhelming presence of neoconservatives and absence of traditional conservatives that I don't know what to make of," said Richard V. Allen, former Reagan White House national security adviser. Critics say neoconservatism casts American foreign policy as a new and benevolent form of imperialism, and conflicts with the traditional conservative, who prefers US military power be reserved for defending against direct threats to America's vital interests.
Not gonna happen...
The United Kingdom should lose its independent voice at the UN and hand over its seat on the Security Council to the EU, according to the new Foreign Office Minister. He hopes it will happen "as quickly as possible. I'm a huge fan of it."
Washington is a city rich with powerful symbols. Visitors to the capital flock to the seats of government and monumental tributes to history with cameras always at the ready. But what they might not readily notice or capture for their photo albums are the religious symbols tucked away all over the nation's capital. Moses is practically a Washington insider because he appears in several Washington locales – more than any other person of faith.
[WAR: "Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel." (Malachi 4:4)]
It's a Bloodbath. That's the only way to describe it. We are now beginning to feel the first tremors from the massive credit expansion which began 6 years ago at the Federal Reserve. The trillions of dollars which were pumped into the global economy via low interest rates and increased money supply have raised the nominal value of equities, but at great cost. Now, stocks will fall sharply and businesses will fail as volatility increases and liquidity dries up. Stagnant wages and a declining dollar have thrust the country into a deflationary cycle which has - up to this point - been concealed by Greenspan's "cheap money" policy. Those days are over. Economic fundamentals are taking hold. The market swings will get deeper and more violent as the Fed's massive credit bubble continues to unwind. Trillions of dollars of market value will vanish overnight. The stock market will go into a long-term swoon. We are now in the first phase of Greenspan's Depression.
Germany, which last week became the first European country infected by the woes in the American mortgage market, suffered another blow Monday when a Frankfurt-based asset management firm closed one of its funds to halt withdrawals by rattled investors. "We had to close the fund because we got a lot of demands from people to get their money out."
The fallout of the US subprime mortgage market has Germany's banks scrambling to ensure the stability of their financial market. But they shouldn't be too hesitant about avoiding new risks. Every day, the financial sector conveys new evil tidings, especially from the US. The subprime mortgage market is falling apart, hedge funds are insolvent, billions of dollars wiped out, investors have lost their money and banks have been forced to close.
On any given day, investor attention and headlines this summer have focused on the wild gyrations in the stock market or the free fall in the riskier parts of the mortgage bond market, which has led to the demise of numerous home lenders and a few hedge funds. But behind all the volatility what has been happening in recent weeks is the virtual seizing up of nearly the entire spectrum of the credit markets — from mortgage-related securities to high-yield bonds and even European corporate debt. The trading-in-a-vacuum phenomenon is only the latest evidence of how the days of easy, cheap money for corporations and individuals alike have disappeared. The ripple effect is being felt by nearly everyone.
We are bust. We consume all we earn. We save nothing. We borrow $2 billion a day to finance our trade deficit and buy all those goods and gadgets at the mall. The Chinese save between 35-50% of all they earn. Wake-up call: This is not the 1950s. We are not the world's greatest creditor nation anymore, but the world's greatest debtor.
Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild, who helped France's renowned Rothschild winemaking and banking dynasty recover from the ravages of World War II, died Monday while vacationing at his Austrian hunting lodge. He was 90. Rothschild had been on a hunting trip at his lodge near the alpine village of Scharnitz outside Innsbruck when he suffered a fatal heart attack, police in the province of Tyrol said in a statement.
The US writer Noam Chomsky talks about the mechanisms behind modern communication, an essential instrument of government in democratic countries – as important to our governments as propaganda is to a dictatorship.
=========================
