Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
Construction workers have discovered a mass grave from the Thirty Years' War while laying a pipeline in the German state of Bavaria.
Police training conducted by German experts in Libya was a repayment for Tripoli's help in securing the release of German hostages in the Philippines, according to a German newspaper report.
WHAT?!...
Gordon Brown is considering repealing the 1701 Act of Settlement as a way of healing a historic injustice by ending the prohibition against Catholics taking the throne. But doing so would have the unforeseen consequence of making a 74-year-old German aristocrat the new King of England and Scotland.
Without the Act, Franz Herzog von Bayern, the current Duke of Bavaria, would be the rightful heir to the British Crown under the Stuart line. The bachelor, who lives alone in the vast Nymphenberg Palace in Munich, is the blood descendant of the 17th-century King Charles I.
"If it [the Act] goes then the whole Catholic line is reinstated," said a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester. "Franz becomes the rightful claimant to the throne. We would just exchange one German family for another one."
[Europress] [Russopress]
A Hungarian minority group is pressing for greater autonomy in a region where its members outnumber Romanians. A new and more radical organization, the Hungarian Civic Party, has risen to challenge the establishment Hungarian party, which has been a member of each coalition government since 1996.
The Hungarian minority here, known as Szeklers, certainly believe their time for independence has arrived and that their proposed semi-autonomous state, Szeklerland, is an impending reality.
President Bush's last ever summit with Vladimir Putin ended in failure last night when the Russian president stood firm in his opposition to Washington's controversial missile defence shield.
President Putin is to become head of Russia's ruling party as well as prime minister after he steps down from the presidency. Putin is closely associated with United Russia and led its list of candidates in December parliamentary elections, but is not technically a member.
Israel has received more US tax money than any other nation on earth. During periods of recession, when Americans are thrown out of work, homes are repossessed, school budgets cut and businesses fail, Congress continues to give Israel massive amounts of our tax money; currently, about $7 million per day.
In sum, US aid to Israel has destabilized the Middle East; propped up a national system based on ethnic and religious discrimination; enabled unchecked aggression that has, on occasion, been turned against Americans themselves; funded arms industries that compete with American companies; supported a pattern of brutal dispossession that has created hatred of the US; and resulted in continuing conflict.
A senior member of the militant Palestinian group Hamas said Sunday that Israel has refused its offers for a temporary ceasefire proposed through Egyptian mediation. He said that Israel has responded negatively via the Egyptian mediators to an offer for a truce with the group both in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.
With fears of Iran's nuclear programme very much in mind, Israel embarked on its largest-ever home-front emergency drill Sunday, meant to simulate responses to war and other emergency situations, such as a large-scale terrorist attack.
The operative part of the five-day drill, dubbed 'Turning Point 2,' will begin Monday and will include, among other scenarios, simulated missile attacks on towns in populated areas.
Syria has raised the state of alert of its armed forces because it knows Hizbullah's revenge attack against Israel for the killing of Imad Mughniyeh is near.
If the US helps facilitate billions of dollars in business for Syria and builds up Damascus as the primary American ally in the Arab world in place of Saudi Arabia, the Syrians would be willing to discuss scaling back alliances with Iran and making peace with Israel, according to a senior Syrian official speaking to WND.
The official said Syria recently conveyed this message to numerous visiting foreign dignitaries, including US congressmen and Turkish mediators. He said Syria also demanded as a key condition for considering altering its alliances that the U.S. cease opposing Syrian influence in Lebanon.
"Syria is the key to the Arab world. We have influence with Hezbollah and Lebanon and hold many cards in the Palestinian and Iraqi arenas. The US needs to rethink the value of the investment it places in Saudi Arabia."
President Ahmadinejad is urging OPEC members to form a joint bank and stop pricing oil trades in US dollars. According to the Iranian government's Web site, Ahmadinejad told OPEC's Secretary General the cartel "should establish a joint bank as well as having joint currency."
President Putin said that Russia would honor all its contractual commitments to develop peaceful nuclear programs in Iran. "We have so far honored in full and plan to continue honoring contractual commitments to our Iranian partners in developing their nuclear programs for peaceful purposes."
An Israeli minister has threatened Iran with destroying the country if the Islamic Republic launches "an attack on the regime." "An Iranian attack against Israel would trigger a tough reaction that would lead to the destruction of the Iranian nation."
The threats come amid speculations that the Israeli regime is preparing for another war in the Middle East.
Iran says it developed missiles only to 'defend' against further attacks similar to that of the 8-year US-sponsored war on the country. He pointed to the 8-year Iraq-Iran War, in which Washington is widely believed to have provided the Ba'athist regime with weapons of mass destruction as well as vital intelligence in the hope of toppling the Iranian government.
He then reasoned that Washington is not worthy of trust because of its long history of advancing its interests at the expense of others with its 'satanic policies of world domination'.
"To justify its illegal presence in the Middle East and to gain unquestionable influence on Europe, America engineers crises and manipulates public opinion through psywar and propaganda. Such wrongdoings should wizen regional and European states, so they avoid the trap of Washington's satanic policies."
The neocon lackey General Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress this Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that "the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq."
Don't expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran.
(And: The General and the trap)
Oil held steady near $107, supported by fund interest, fears of more dollar weakness and OPEC's reluctance to boost output. The ailing US currency and expectations for further weakness are spurring investment and boosting the appeal of dollar-denominated commodities.
Why is Congress being sandbagged by the Bush administration on the thorniest of issues: the suspension of the US Constitution and the potential declaration of martial law in the event of a "catastrophic national emergency"?
More memos have recently surfaced that were written early in the Bush administration by John C. Yoo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel – the man who gave us the administration's horrifyingly narrow definition of torture as physical pain that must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
As difficult as it is to believe, the recently released memos are even scarier for the republic than is the original torture memo. Yoo – attempting to defend the ultra-expansionist view of executive power that the Bush administration, especially Dick Cheney, has endorsed – wrote memos boldly asserting that the president's power during wartime is nearly unlimited.
Even more tragic and dangerous for the republic than the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan have been President Bush's Yoo-surping of power from the other 2 branches of government and the creation of the "hyper-imperial" presidency.
What these polls fail to take into account is one factor likely to have a large – and possibly decisive – impact on the presidential race: I'm talking about the Barr Factor.
Yes, that Barr: the former Georgia Republican congressman who led the Clinton impeachment effort in the House, then later dissented from the red-state fascist tendencies manifested in the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the Bush White House's obsession with increasing presidential power, allying with the ACLU to fight the growing power of centralized state authority over our lives.
It looks like Bob Barr has let himself get talked into seeking the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party: according to my sources, he does so with the full support of Ron Paul. Which means it looks like the Paulian Revolution is not only alive and kicking, it's also in the best possible position.
Ron Paul supporters shook things up in at least three of Minnesota's congressional district conventions yesterday when they captured nearly all of the national delegates and alternates for the Republican National Convention this fall.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is actively courting the vice presidential nomination, a Republican strategist said. "Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for this." According to him, Rice has been cozying up to the Republican elite.
Optimism for a dollar rebound that pervaded the currency market at the start of the year is fading. Futures traders doubled bets against the greenback in the past 2 months, data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington show.
Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, which handle almost 40% of global foreign exchange trading, say the currency may slump to $1.65 per euro by October.
The German finance ministry plans to warn against intervention in favour of the US dollar at the forthcoming G7 meeting, Der Spiegel reported, citing an internal draft ahead of the talks. The ministry's experts believe verbal interventions that talk up a currency are inefficient.
Government intervention at a worldwide level is needed to address the credit crisis, the head of the International Monetary Fund said today. He said the credit crisis was far more than an American problem. "The crisis is global."
It looks like a fight to the death between the puffin-eaters and the fat cats. The Icelandic prime minister has declared war on the international financial speculators. He claims "false rumours" are behind a recent run on the krona, which has lost a third of its value.
The fear of the unknown that has rattled the stock market for months appears to be fading. The question now is whether upcoming corporate financial reports and readings on the housing market will further calm Wall Street's anxieties or rekindle them.
There is more than a 50% chance the US could go into recession, Allen Greenspan said in an interview published on Sunday. He also endorsed the Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the interview. "I'm Republican and I support John McCain, who I know very well and who I respect a lot."
Testimony presented to the Senate Banking Committee by the players in the Bear Stearns/JP Morgan bailout exposed, moment by moment, just how vulnerable our financial system is to collapse.
I sat spellbound watching Bernanke use terms like "severe" and "extremely difficult to contain" when referring to the damage that would have resulted in the collapse of Bear Stearns, the 5th largest investment bank in America.
"Given the exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default of Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain," said Bernanke.
Those words should send chills down every spine in America. It is clear that if they didn't act, according to all who testified, the consequences would have been "dire." The entire system hung in the balance on March 15.
By rewarding the criminals and screwing the victims, the Federal Reserve's behavior feeds into rumors and conspiracy about its true function.
Corporations have essentially become the government, and now they're bellying up to the bar.
As large corporations, and their trade associations, complete their takeover of the federal government -- a process that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called fascism in 1938 -- the corporations become the government.
As foreign buyers descend upon the US, capturing widening swaths of the industrial landscape and putting millions of Americans to work for new owners, these 2 cities offer sharply competing narratives for a nation still uneasy about being on the selling end of the global economy.
And with the dollar losing much value in recent years, the pace is picking up again, as some of the country's most valuable assets go on the block at bargain-basement prices. Foreign capital is putting more American businesses in the control of major enterprises based in Europe or Asia.
(Op-ed: Selling America behind our backs)
Rising food prices threaten economic stability and could trigger riots, Gordon Brown has been warned. The World Bank said this week that the price of staple foods has risen by 80% in the past 3 years.
For consumers in wealthy nations such as Britain soaring prices are squeezing household finances and keeping inflation up. But for developing nations they can lead to malnutrition and social disruption.
[CFR Opinion Roundup][Newseum][Global Incident Map][Earthweek][Day-Night Map][Tonight's Sky][Moon phase]
New superpowers are competing for diminishing resources. The outcome could be deadly.
The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognisably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to WW1.
Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.
Whether we wish to attribute current events to divine retribution or not, the simple fact is that throughout history man has been his own worst enemy. The short history of mankind can be summed up as a continual trampling of every social and natural law that has proven to benefit man's existence or aid him in his quest for peace and prosperity.
Tonight's sky
Look very near the western horizon, very shortly after sunset, for a very young waxing crescent moon. This moon won't set a record for the youngest moon ever seen. But it might be the youngest moon you've ever seen.
If you see the moon tonight . . . it'll capture your heart. The moon was new, or more or less between the Earth and sun, on April 5 at 11:55 p.m. EDT. Thus tonight's moon will appear nearly 2 days old and have just a fraction of its lighted portion visible.
As the line of sunset moves westward tonight, the moon will be inching slowly away from our line-of-sight to the sun. Thus from the west coast of the US this evening, the moon will be a somewhat fatter crescent, somewhat easier to see in a very clear western twilight sky.
[WAR: Tonight's moon -- with sunshine, earthshine, and and it's position in the stars (not its relationship to the equinox or barley) -- indicates that tomorrow is "New Year's Day". "YAHWEH said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt: 'This month (chodesh/new moon) is to be for you the 1st month (chodesh/new moon), the 1st month (chodesh/new moon) of your year.'" (Exo 12:1,2). It is the LIGHTS in the heavens (Gen 1:14) that determine time, not shadows on the soil cast by an Asherah pole or green grains on the ground!]
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