Currency’s Days Seen Numbered: Investors Prepare for Euro Collapse
Banks, companies and investors are preparing themselves for a collapse of the euro. Cross-border bank lending is falling, asset managers are shunning Europe and money is flowing into German real estate and bonds. The euro remains stable against the dollar because America has debt problems too. But unlike the euro, the dollar’s structure isn’t in doubt.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
‘There Are No Simple Tricks to Resolve the Crisis’
In a SPIEGEL interview, Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, 40, urges the crisis-hit countries of Southern Europe to issue bonds backed by state-owned assets and rejects a proposal to give the euro rescue fund a banking license. The euro zone, he says, is like a family in which some members broke their promise to respect the rules.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Frank Gaffney: The Grand Deflection
A magician typically succeeds when the attention of the audience is diverted from his main activity onto some distraction. President Obama has raised this sort of deflection into a political art form.
Take, for example, the matter of revelations by five Members of Congress and the Center for Security Policy that there appear to be a number individuals working for or with the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The possibility that their influence may be helping to shape U.S. policy in ways that increasingly align it with the demands, ambitions and goals of the Brotherhood and other Islamists is a national security problem of the first order. That is especially true at a moment when Muslim Brothers are consolidating their hold on power in Egypt with the cashiering of two top generals at the hands of the Brotherhood’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi…
| — Hat tip: CSP | [Return to headlines] |
EU Warns France Over Roma Camp Purge
The European Commission is keeping a close eye on a new French purge on Roma camps to ensure expulsions are not arbitrary and discriminatory, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
French authorities on Thursday dismantled two makeshift camps housing 200 people near Lille, and flew 240 Roma gypsies from Lyon to Romania in the biggest repatriation of its kind since François Hollande succeeded Nicolas Sarkozy as president in May.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Norway: Oslo Attack Could Have Been Prevented: Report
Norwegian authorities could have prevented the first of the twin attacks that killed 77 people in July 2011 and arrested Anders Behring Breivik sooner as he carried out the second, investigators said on Monday.
“The attack on the government complex on 22 July could have been prevented through effective implementation of already adopted security measures,” an independent commission said in a report submitted to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
“The authorities’ ability to protect the people on Utøya island failed. A more rapid police operation was a realistic possibility,” it concluded in reference to the second attack by Breivik.
“The perpetrator could have been stopped earlier on 22 July,” it said.
On July 22, 2011, Breivik set off a car bomb outside government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, before going to Utøya, north-west of the capital, where he spent more than an hour gunning down another 69 people, mostly teenagers, and wounding others.
The victims, the youngest of whom had just celebrated her 14th birthday, had been attending a summer camp hosted by the governing Labour Party’s youth organization.
The Norwegian police have been harshly criticised for their slow response to the tragedy: more than three hours passed between the Oslo bombing and Breivik’s arrest on Utøya, even though his name had become known to Norway’s security services.
The Utøya shooting lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes, as police struggled to find a means of transport to the small island located on a lake, just 600 metres from shore.
In its almost 500-page report, the 10-member commission criticized the fact that due to bureaucratic red tape the street outside the government office complex was not closed to traffic in line with recommendations dating back to 2004.
This enabled Breivik to park a small rental truck carrying some 950 kilos of explosives at the foot of the prime minister’s 17-storey office building.
Stoltenberg was working at his official residence at the time and was not injured in the attack.
The commission, headed by lawyer Alexandra Bech Gjørv, also lamented police shortcomings before and during the Utøya shooting, noting the tardiness with which the description of Breivik and his vehicle were released, communication problems, failure to follow procedures, and inadequate means, among other things.
A total of 35 minutes passed between a first police patrol’s arrival on the shore of the lake and the moment when an elite police squad disembarked on Utøya.
Bech Gjørv said the police’s use of the time in the first phase of the Utøya response was “unacceptable.”
Two local police officers who arrived first on the lakeshore should have done everything possible to get to the island, according to police instructions in the event of a shooting.
Instead they remained on shore, saying they couldn’t find a boat to take them to the island.
It was ultimately the police’s elite Delta force, which arrived from Oslo some 40 kilometres away, that was first to land on the island at 6.27pm, albeit after experiencing difficulties of their own.
Their simple rubber dinghy was overloaded and broke down, forcing them to borrow two pleasure boats.
According to the commission, if procedures had been respected, police could have been on the island by 6.15 pm, or 12 minutes earlier, which could possibly have spared lives though the commission did not say as much.
The commission issued a list of 31 recommendations, ranging from better preparedness to limiting the availability of semi-automatic weapons and improving police helicopter capacity.
“The next crisis … will come. We have to act quickly,” Bech Gjørv said.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Norway Massacre ‘Could Have Been Prevented’
Police in Norway could have prevented the bomb planted by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo and arrested him sooner, an independent commission has concluded.
“The attack on the government complex on 22 July could have been prevented through effective implementation of already adopted security measures,” the commission said in a report submitted to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
“The perpetrator (Anders Behring Breivik) could have been stopped earlier on 22 July,” it said.
“The authorities’ ability to protect the people on Utoya island failed. A more rapid police operation was a realistic possibility,” it concluded in reference to the second attack.
On July 22, 2011, Breivik set off a car bomb outside government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, before going to Utoya, northwest of the capital, where he spent more than an hour gunning down another 69 people, mostly teenagers, and wounding others.
The victims, the youngest of whom had just celebrated her 14th birthday, had been attending a summer camp hosted by the governing Labour Party’s youth organisation.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Swedish Prince Speaks Out on Nightclub Attack
Sweden’s Prince Carl Philip has spoken out after he was attacked on Saturday night outside a nightclub in France, explaining that the assailant was unknown to him and that the matter is being investigated internally.
“It’s been an emotional and overwhelming experience. We feel fine considering the circumstances, but this is an incident that we want to handle privately,” the prince and his girlfriend Sofia Hellqvist told the Aftonbladet newspaper.
The 33-year-old prince was leaving the Baoli nightclub in Cannes, southern France, around 3am on Saturday morning when he was attacked by a man, prompting a scuffle as several people intervened.
A video of the fight (featured below) has also surfaced on the internet, where the prince is seen being hit while held in a headlock, with his girlfriend trying to diffuse the situation screaming “Darling, darling”.
The prince had spent the evening with Hellqvist, both of whom have now spoken to Swedish media “in the hope of avoiding speculation”.
“We had a pleasant night with our nearest and dearest. When we were leaving, Carl Philip was attacked by a stranger,” Sofia told Aftonbladet.
Talk that the assailant was possibly an acquaintance was also dismissed by the couple.
“We’ve heard from several people that our near friends were involved, and we truly want to highlight that this is not the case,” they told the paper.
Meanwhile, the Royal Court claims that the incident will not have any significant impact on Prince Carl Philip’s schedule, and that the matter is being investigated.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Tears Don’t Protect Against Murder
After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.
A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel, written as Willi Woss, was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.
While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.
The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and many of its top officials were dead.
Western law enforcement had failed to hold responsible even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in Europe’s capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out as a frightened guest of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Iraq Tells Total: Stop Dealing With Kurds
Iraq on Sunday gave French energy giant Total an ultimatum to either end its dealings with the autonomous Kurdistan region in the north or to sell its stake in a giant southern oilfield.
Iraq’s deputy prime minister responsible for energy affairs, Hussein al-Shahristani, also said Baghdad was considering offering foreign oil firms more lucrative contracts, as he admitted a recent auction of exploration blocks had not been as successful as officials had hoped.
Total “was requested to withdraw from this field, and it has been given a certain period to end this case by selling its share to another company or by ending the contract with Kurdistan,” Shahristani told AFP.
He did not specify the time by which Total, which said on July 31 that it signed an oil exploration deal with Kurdistan, needed to make a decision.
Kurdish authorities have signed dozens of deals with foreign energy firms on a production-sharing basis, contracts regarded as illegal by Baghdad which insists all such deals must go through the federal oil ministry and prefers per-barrel service fees.
The agreement between Total and Kurdistan came with relations between the autonomous region and Baghdad at a low ebb over multiple festering disputes, including over oil contracts and territorial claims.
Within a period of weeks, US oil firm Chevron and Russia’s Gazprom have also inked deals with Kurdistan, after American giant ExxonMobil signed an agreement with the region last year.
“Total announced that it signed contracts in Kurdistan and, because of that, the ministry of oil told them that they had breached Iraqi law,”
Shahristani said. “If it ends its contract with Kurdistan, it can proceed with the Halfaya field.”
Total is a minority member of a consortium led by China’s CNPC and also including Malaysia’s Petronas to extract oil from the Halfaya field in Maysan province, in a contract awarded in a December 2009 auction.
The field, which has known reserves of 4.1 billion barrels of oil, officially began pumping last month. It is expected to produce 535,000 barrels
of oil per day within five years.
CNPC has the biggest stake in the consortium at 37.5 percent, followed by Petronas and Total at 18.75 percent each, with Iraq’s state-owned South Oil Company holding a 25-percent stake.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Media Coverage of Syrian Violence Partial and Untrue, Says Nun
A NUN who has been superior at a Syrian monastery for the past 18 years has warned that media coverage of ongoing violence in that country has been “partial and untrue”. It is “a fake”, Mother Agnes Mariam said, which “hides atrocities committed in the name of liberty and democracy”.
Superior of the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery of St James the Mutilated in Qara, in Syria’s diocese of Homs, which is in full communion with Rome, she left Ireland yesterday after a three-day visit during which she met representatives of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Maynooth.
She told The Irish Times she was in Ireland “not to advocate for the (Assad) regime but for the facts”. Most news reports from Syria were “forged, with only one side emphasised”, she said. This also applied to the UN, whose reports were “one-sided and not worthy of that organisation”.
UN observers in Syria had been “moderate with the rebels and covered for them in taking back positions after the withdrawal of heavy equipment, as seen so tragically in Homs”, she said.
When it was put to her this suggested the whole world was out of step except for Syria, Russia and China, she protested: “No, no, there are 20 countries, including some in Latin America” of the same view.
The reason the media was being denied easy access to Syria currently was because in the Libyan conflict journalists placed electronic devices for Nato in rooms used at press conferences in that country, she said. “So Syria didn’t want journalists,” she said.
Christians make up about 10 per cent of Syria’s population, dispersed throughout the country, she said. The Assad regime “does not favour Christians”, she said. “It is a secular regime based on equality for all, even though in the constitution it says the Koran is the source of legislation.”
But “Christians are less put aside [in Syria] than in other Islamic countries, for example Saudi Arabia,” she said. “The social fabric of Syria is very diverse, so Christians live in peace.”
The “Arab insurrection” under way in that country included “sectarian factions which promote fundamentalist Islam, which is not genuine Islam”, she said.
The majority of Muslims in Syria are moderate and open to other cultural and interfaith elements, she said. “Wahhabism (a fundamentalist branch of Islam) is not open,” she added.
Christians in Syria were “doubtful about the future if the project to topple the regime succeeded”. The alternative was “a religious sectarian state where all minorities would feel threatened and discriminated against”, she said.
There was “a need to end the violence”, she said. “The West and Gulf states must not give finance to armed insurrectionists who are sectarian terrorists, most of whom are from al-Qaeda, according to a report presented to the German parliament,” she said.
“We don’t want to be invaded, as in Aleppo, by mercenaries, some of whom think they are fighting Israel. They bring terror, destruction, fear and nobody protects the civilians,” she said. There were “very few Syrians among the rebels”, she said. “Mercenaries should go home,” she said.
What she and others sought in Syria was “reform, no violence, no foreign intervention.” She hoped for “a new, third way, a new social pact where the right to auto-determination without outside interference” would be respected.
| — Hat tip: McR | [Return to headlines] |
Social Media is Lying to You About Burma’s Muslim Cleansing
I want people to be aware of some terrible blood libels by muslims attacking Buddhists, claiming there is some muslim genocide going on at Buddhists hands, while I am sure that Buddhists historical reputation shows them in excellent light, the imagery that muslims are using is compelling in a style they normally reserve for Jews in the blood libels we are used to hearing them fabricate.
taken from www.pakalertpress.com/2012/07/16/muslims-killing-in-burma-and-social-media-manipulating-images/
[Translate]
Faraz Ahmed | farazahmed.com
Social networking sites are abuzz with news about Muslims being killed in Burma.You can see the sporadic posting of pictures by different people with captions like ‘Muslims killing in Burma’, ‘Muslims slaughtered by Buddhists in Burma’ and so on.
Thus, I took on the mission to sort the truth out for myself once and for all and researched some pictures that I felt were dubious. Below are a few pictures and their original copies. You can evidently see the gross difference between them and how they are thrown out of context.
A picture shared on facebook:
[pic1]
I have found original version here:
www.tibetancommunity.be/news/chinaquake.html
This picture was taken in 2010 regarding Earthquake in China and tibetians community help and rescue in China. Now Islamic political parties and some other elements are sharing this image as Muslims killing / slaughter in Burma.
[pic2]
This was a picture shared on Facebook…
| — Hat tip: Vlad Tepes | [Return to headlines] |
Casino Mogul’s Frontman in China is Focus of Inquiries
Questions over a casino company’s payments to its Chinese representative highlight how often politics and profits are intertwined for Sheldon Adelson, the company’s founder and a major Republican donor.
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Racist Attacks Increase: Iraqi Stabbed to Death in Athens
A 19-year-old Iraqi immigrant died in the hospital after he was stabbed with knives by five unknown assailants riding on motorcycles. The attack took place late Saturday night in the centre of Athens. The assailants had earlier targeted two other foreigners, one from Romania and one from Morocco who managed to escape.
Greek police is looking for five people riding four motorcycles. The testimonies of the Romanian and the Moroccan, who were attacked in the same area, could not give clues about the assailants.
Attacks on immigrants by assailants on motorcycles revived last week, after a Pakistani was arrested for having severely injured and sexually abused a 15-year-old girl on the island of Paros at the end of July.
Attacks against Immigrants — August 7-13/2012:…
| — Hat tip: Anestos Canelides | [Return to headlines] |
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