Tuesday, December 13, 2011

News you can use dec 13 2011



A member of the Iranian parliament's National Security Committee said on Monday that the military was set to practice its ability to close the Gulf to shipping at the narrow Strait of Hormuz, the most important oil transit channel in the world, but there was no official confirmation.


The easiest way to deal with a debt spiral is to let it keep going and going.


WITHIN mere minutes of spotting a car travelling on a dusty track in the United States’ south-western desert, the Republic of Singapore Air Force’s (RSAF) latest and most lethal “smart” bomb found and hit its target.

Martial Law Comes To Your Cellphone...

WOW

From A-Z, the Arab Spring is Fake.

An online piracy bill in the House would "criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself," according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.


Seventy-six percent of those surveyed said most representatives do not deserve to be reelected, the highest number in the 19 years Gallup has asked the question and six points higher than in August, just after the contentious debate over raising the debt ceiling.


Latvia's largest bank scrambled Monday to head off a run among depositors who were gripped by rumours of the bank's imminent ruin.

Heralding a New Level of the Police State

Billionaire market speculator and philanthropist George Soros bought about $2 billion worth of European bonds from now-bankrupt MF Global — the same debt that pushed the firm to collapse, according to The Wall Street Journal.


A largely overlooked exchange from Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing includes what appears to be an admission from Attorney General Eric Holder that emails to and from him about Operation Fast and Furious may exist, and that he’s refusing to provide them to Congress.


After months of negotiations, the U.S. and Canada have unveiled new trade, regulatory and security initiatives to speed up the flow of goods and people across the border. The joint action plans provide a framework that goes beyond NAFTA and continues where the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) left off. This will take U.S.-Canada integration to the next level and is the pretext for a North American Homeland Security perimeter.

United Nations climate envoys have proposed the creation of a global “climate court” that would be responsible for enforcing a sprawling set of rules requiring developed countries to cut emissions while compensating poorer countries in order to pay off a “historical climate debt.” The proposals are contained in a draft document pieced together for the climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Representatives at the conference are struggling to come up with a compromise that negotiators from 194 nations can agree on.

Farmageddon, The Unseen War on American Family Farms, vividly conveys the stories of numerous farmers who found themselves on the wrong side of government food policy.

According to first-hand accounts and reports provided to Boiling Frogs Post by several sources in Jordan, during the last few hours foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, began to spread near the villages of the north-Jordan city of “Al-Mafraq”, which is adjacent to the Jordanian and Syrian border.


The prospect of European heavyweights like Italy or Spain turning to the IMF for rescue loans is worrying the United States and other nations that fear they could suffer losses on funds they have extended to the IMF.


As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.




Interesting Prospect...

An agreement reached by European countries for deeper economic integration was a step in the right direction but not a complete solution for the euro zone’s debt crisis, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist Olivier Blanchard said on Sunday.

As the evidence begins to mount pointing the accusing finger at the increasingly illegitimate corporate-financier occupiers of the West’s governments as having built up Russian opposition movements and being behind the current unrest filling Russia’s streets, the corporate media has already started to rewrite events as they unfold.


Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy head of the Guard, said in remarks broadcast on state television that the violation of Iran’s airspace by the US drone was a “hostile act” and warned of a “bigger” response. He did not elaborate on what Tehran might do.

The man who shot dead a campus police officer at Virginia Tech on Thursday before killing himself was a student at a nearby university who had stolen an SUV at gunpoint the day before, officials said.

This will be a weekly post, of weekend wrap ups, notables, and other editor musings.


Germany’s state and federal interior ministers have agreed to make a second legal attempt at banning the far-right National Party of Germany (NPD).

Ignoring ranks of riot police with unmuzzled dogs, gusting snow, and accusations by Vladimir Putin that protesters are dupes of the United States tens of thousands of Muscovites poured into Bolotnaya Square, across the river from the Kremlin, to vent their anger at alleged fraud and vote-rigging on behalf of the ruling United Russia(UR) party in last weekend’s parliamentary elections

There is compelling evidence that the United Nations collaborated in the forced sterilization of poor, rural women in Peru from 1995 to 1997. The controversy revolves around Peru’s National Program for Family Planning, which received funding from both the United Nations Population Fund and U.S. Agency for International Development. The Program included a campaign entitled Voluntary Surgical Contraception—that is, sterilization. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 people, mostly women, were sterilized.Doctors and hospitals were pressured to meet sterilization quotas. It’s not surprising that reports and testimonials of forced sterilizations abound.

Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the debt of BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA), Societe Generale (SOGN.PA), and Credit Agricole (CAGR.PA) on Friday, citing deteriorating liquidity and funding conditions.


Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.


Barely two weeks after a NATO helicopter disaster killed 24 Pakistani troops, the skies above the Afghanistan-Pakistan border may get even more dangerous. The State Department’s Islamabad embassy is hiring a contractor to coordinate air operations along the border to stop the flow of drugs and insurgents. Just what a tense situation calls for.


The agreement European leaders reached Thursday night was taken by some as a sign that the eurozone would avoid breakup. Not so fast. Economists, political leaders and other observers caution that the new pact does not go far enough to address the immediate liquidity crisis threatening European banks and governments.

TOP US military officer General Martin Dempsey has admitted he is “extraordinarily concerned” about the euro’s survival, pointing to potential civil unrest and the breakup of the European Union.

In an interview with Steven Weiss of The Jewish Channel following the Republican Jewish Coalition forum earlier this week Newt Gingrich said the Palestinians are an “invented people.”

Wall Street's poorly hidden, poorly coordinated agenda in Russia. Who is behind it? 

SPP by stealth...

Employers who pay their workers cash under the table to avoid payroll taxes, workers' compensation insurance and other government mandates are costing California about $7 billion annually in lost tax revenue and undercutting companies that play by the rules, state officials say. 

It's a battle of the Congressional antipiracy acronyms. In one corner are SOPA and PROTECT IP, the House and Senate bills that would bring site blocking, search engine de-listing, and more to the US in an effort to stop "rogue" sites. In the other corner, today's challenger: the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, called the "OPEN" Act (PDF).

An Oregon judge has ruled that a Montana blogger is not eligible for the legal protections afforded to journalists, letting stand a $2.5 million defamation verdict.


Google made its first foray into the growing field of social facial recognition technologies on Thursday, introducing Find My Face, a tagging suggestion tool for its Google+ social network.


The battle has pitted huge content generators like Disney and the motion picture industry against their online competitors, with each side reportedly spending some $90 million on lobbying efforts.

President Barack Obama promised that "No options off the table means I'm considering all options."


It seems that Monsanto may be having a rough week.

Who thought violent reprisals by “the people” are only contained to Greece.

The chance of a military strike on Iran has roughly tripled in the past year, the senior geopolitical risk analyst at Barclays Capital said on Thursday.

Soon after Virginia Tech officials at a hearing defended actions taken to notify the campus as a 2007 shooting rampage unfolded, the university on Thursday issued a series of warnings about gunfire on its campus five hours away.


The grim face of totalitarianism is emerging in the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) now before Congress.

Going after criminal cases targeting fraud has come down to what’s easier to prosecute for the Obama administration.