After 3 days of talks, envoys from the US, EU and Russia said they could no longer rule out dividing the province into Serbian and Albanian segments.
Damascus does not believe Prime Minister Olmert's public statements of reassurance that Israel has no intention of attacking Syria, and is genuinely concerned about an Israeli preemptive attack, according to official Israeli assessments. Assad, according to this school of thought, believes Olmert's public comments that Israel has no belligerent intentions toward Syria are merely part of a "conspiracy" to lull the Syrians into complacency.
Africa will provide all of the 26,000 peacekeepers to be sent to Sudan's Darfur region, the head of the African Union has said. Sudan's government has long opposed the involvement of non-African soldiers.
Chad is as geographically isolated as places come in Africa. It is also among the continent's poorest and least stable countries, the scene of recurrent civil wars and foreign invasions since it gained independence from France in 1960. None of that has put off the Chinese, though. The same is happening in one African country after another. In large oil-exporting countries like Angola and Nigeria, China is building or fixing railroads, and landing giant exploration contracts in Congo and Guinea. In mineral-rich countries that had been all but abandoned by foreign investors because of unrest and corruption, Chinese companies are reviving output of cobalt and bauxite. China has even become the new mover and shaker in agricultural countries like Ivory Coast, once the crown jewel in France's postcolonial African empire.
One of Iraq's senior Sunni Arab leaders accused Iran of sponsoring Shia death squads and plotting a "genocide" against Sunni Arabs. He also warned in a bitter open letter to his fellow Sunni Muslims that the ethnic conflict in Iraq would spread throughout the Arabic-speaking world. "If you think what is happening to us will end at Baghdad then you are wrong. By God, this war that started in Baghdad will not stop here. It will extend to every Arab spot where the Arabic tongue is spoken. It is a war of history."
Iran's Defense Minister has accused the US of covertly supporting terrorist cells in Iraq. "The only solution to the problem of instability in war-battered Iraq would be for the US to pull out its troops and withdraw support for terrorist groups."
President Ahmadinejad has replaced Iran's key oil and industry ministers, a major Cabinet reshuffle widely seen as increasing his control over industries that are the source of most of the country's revenues.
Democrats and a Republican lawmaker have said any military action against Iran could put the US president on a collision course with Congress. The US lawmakers on Friday cautioned Bush following his threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq. It's been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike. But the authorization would be no easy sell.
Top White House aide Karl Rove, seen by many as the brains behind George W Bush's presidency, has said he will resign at the end of August.
(WSJ: The mark of Rove)
The Bush administration doesn't need the approval of the oil companies to pursue its grandiose agenda of world domination, using the vast Iraqi oil reserves as one more of its weapons.
It is easy to understand that the human being in possession of too much power over a people is a very large time bomb waiting to go off.
Because of periodic purges and a generally intolerant attitude toward internal debate, the conservative movement has dumbed itself down.
The European Central Bank injected another $65.3 billion into the banking system today in a bid to soothe rattled credit markets, but said that market conditions are "normalizing." Japan's central bank said it injected $5 billion into money markets.
According to the Financial Times, the ECB may seek to arrange a currency swap with the US Federal Reserve – a move allowing it to lend dollars to European banks struggling to meet short-term dollar funding needs. A currency swap – reportedly due in the next few days – is seen as a helpful way of dealing with the market turmoil and is likely to be welcomed by the US Federal Reserve.
(Reuters: ECB-Fed currency swap politically tricky)
During what are supposed to be the dog days of August, financial markets are extremely interesting again. How serious are these developments and what are the implications? The assumption is that most banks are all right. It is this assumption that ensures the general liquidity of the system. But when things go wrong confidence is fragile. The dealers do not know that a bank is in trouble until it is too late. So rumour and suspicion hold sway. In these conditions, they may become generally unwilling to lend to any but the most top-notch banks and, accordingly, the interest rates facing most banks may rise uncomfortably. Dealers would rather buy government bills or simply leave their cash sitting in the account with the central bank. There is then the danger of a real liquidity crisis.
China sought to dampen speculation that it would conduct a massive sell-off of US dollar holdings, with a central bank official saying the dollar remained a mainstay of its foreign-exchange reserves. China's $1.3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves are the largest in the world and are believed to be comprised largely of dollar assets, potentially giving Beijing enormous sway over the dollar's value and currency markets worldwide.
Deutsche Bank has hired Alan Greenspan as a senior adviser to its investment banking division. The timing of the move is somewhat ironic given that many in the financial community have pointed the finger of blame for the current market woes at Greenspan.
At stake is control of the Northwest Passage and, with it, what could be huge deposits of oil and natural gas in the seabed below. In a 21st-century twist unimaginable to Cook and Peary, global warming has begun to melt the polar ice, exposing potentially huge deposits of hitherto unreachable natural resources. Some geologists believe that one-quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas may lie below the thawing ice. With oil at $70 a barrel, the rewards of discovery could be huge.
A retired French army colonel is aiming to take a stratospheric leap into the record books by completing a 1000mph skydive from the edge of space. Aiming to become the first human being to break the sound barrier in free-fall, he will ascend to an altitude of 25 miles in a helium-filled weather balloon before plunging to earth at supersonic speed.
One of the most common problems in cancer patients who choose to undergo conventional cancer therapy is recurrence. They might think they have beaten their cancer with chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, only to find a few years later that tumors have spread into other tissues. Conventional medicine has not yet caught on to what's happening here, but the reason why this phenomenon occurs is quite simple: Conventional cancer treatments only treat the symptoms of cancer (tumors or growths) and do not actually do anything to help the patient regain a level of health necessary to keep cancer in check. A tumor is not technically a disease. It is a symptom of an underlying imbalance in the patient. Unless you treat and reverse the underlying imbalances, you will never eliminate the underlying cause of the cancer.
Use your head for a change
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