Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fukushima Fallout: Throwing Radioactive Caution to the Wind and Sea

Fukushima Fallout: Throwing Radioactive Caution to the Wind – and Sea (Source RT) In the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power meltdown following the tsunami of March 11, 2011, the international community has totally failed in keeping the public properly informed and protected from the fallout. Scientists and environmental officials continue to express concern, even now, at the unusual events and wonder about the causes. At the same time, the media present the facts, but fail to make any connection whatsoever to the ongoing state of affairs stemming from the tragic 2011 events at Fukushima. Seabird die-off reported around Kodiak, Alaska: A September 2015 audio report from Robin Corcoran, biologist from the Kodiak Wildlife National Refuge, confirms local reports that “emaciated” bird carcasses are washing up on Kodiak Island shores. Julia Parish, speaking on behalf of the University of Washington’s Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, states that the spikes in deaths are two to three times higher than normal. Josh Saranpaa of the Wildlife Center of the North Coast was quoted as saying, “Every bird we’re seeing is starving to death. It’s pretty bad.” Saranpaa added, “When you see so many starving, something is not quite right out there.” The warming ocean and the toxic algae bloom are offered as possible explanations for the die-offs. Warming oceans, it is explained, cause the fish to swim deeper than the birds can dive while the toxic algae bloom runs from California straight up to Alasak. Parish concludes that it has been a really “odd” year with multiple regional scale events. She says that there is not much that researchers can do except wait and watch.

 

 

Russians Hacked Dow Jones for Stock Tips

Report: Russians Hacked Dow Jones for Stock Tips (Source Newser) Citing interviews with four anonymous sources, Bloomberg reports Russian hackers broke into Dow Jones & Co. servers a year or so ago and stole stock information before it was public. Dow Jones, which is part of News Corp and owns the Wall Street Journal, claims it’s unaware of any such hack, despite the FBI confirming the incident to both Bloomberg and CNBC. “We are looking into whether there is any truth whatsoever to this report by a competitor news organization,” Dow Jones says in a statement released to CNBC. The FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have spent months trying to figure out how hackers could profit from what they stole, concluding they were likely looking for stock tips contained in embargoed information and unpublished stories, Bloomberg reports. Dow Jones admitted to another cybersecurity breach last week in which hackers tried to get contact and payment information from around 3,500 customers. According to Bloomberg’s sources, this new hack is more serious than the one Dow Jones addressed publicly. It’s unclear if the two incidents are related.

Jerusalem Chaos is a Warning of Things to Come

Jerusalem Chaos Is a Warning of Things to Come (Source globalresearch.ca) Among Palestinians and Israelis, the recent upsurge in violence has been variously described as the children’s, lone-wolf, Jerusalem and smartphone intifadas. Each describes a distinguishing feature of this round of clashes. The steady erosion of Fatah and Hamas’ authority during the post-Oslo years, as the Palestinian factions proved incapable of protecting their people from the structural violence of the occupation, has driven Palestine’s orphaned children to the streets, armed with stones. The growing hopelessness and sense of abandonment have led a few so-called “lone wolves” to vent their fury on Israelis with improvised weapons such as knives, screwdrivers and cars. These attacks have attracted the most publicity, becoming the equivalent of the second intifada’s suicide bomber. But they serve chiefly as a barometer of Palestinian despair. Jerusalem is the centre of events, with the Palestinians’ only unifying symbol, Al Aqsa mosque, at its heart. For Palestinians, the incremental takeover of the compound – and the West’s indifference – is like watching the mass dispossession of 1948 play out again in slow motion. In addition, Jerusalem is the main fault line. Israel’s illegal annexation of the city has left Palestinians there in an extreme form of isolation – indefinitely stateless and supremely vulnerable. Israel has little but stopgap measures to defend against the protests. Its intelligence agencies cannot predict the lone wolf, its guns cannot deter the knife, its military might cannot subdue the craving for justice and dignity. Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side. Lynch mobs of Jews patrol Jerusalem and Israeli cities, calling out “Death to the Arabs!” A jittery soldier causes pandemonium by firing his rifle in a train carriage after a bogus terror alert. An Israeli Jew stabs another because he looks “Arab”. Meanwhile, politicians and police commanders stoke the fear. They call for citizens to take the law into their own hands. Palestinian workers are banned from Jewish towns. Israeli supermarkets remove knives from shelves, while 8,000 Israelis queue up for guns in the first 24 hours after permit rules are eased. Some of this reflects a hysteria, a heightened sense of victimhood among Israelis, fuelled by the knife attack videos. But the mood dates to before the current upheavals.

 

The Federal Reserve is in Panic: the Growth of Employment is “Submerged in Economic Stagnation

The Federal Reserve is in Panic: the Growth of Employment is “Submerged in Economic Stagnation” (Source globalresearch.ca) In her public discourses, the president of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, has avoided the serious problems that the United States economy suffers. In accord with the President of the Federal Reserve, the process of recovery of the North American economy has been strengthening for considerable time. And, because of this, if the FOMC has not raised the cost of credit is due, above all, to a high rate of “obligation” and “responsibility” with the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the truth is that the United States economy is not exactly in good health. The labour market data published during the 12 months before March of 2015 is not as robust as was presumed by the Federal Reserve: the Department of Labor recognized recently that it had overestimated the jobs created by the private sector by at least 255,000. On the other hand, during the month of September the non-agricultural employment reached 143,000, much less than the 200,000 hoped for. The greatest reversals were in sectors tied to external trade and energy. The rise of the dollar, and the fall in prices of commodities and the extreme weakness of global demand with the rest of the world precipitated the structural deterioration of the US economy. The bad news does not end here: the numbers of the jobs generated in July and August were also lower. Now we know that in August only 136,000 jobs were created, rather than the 176,000 originally reported: while in the month of July there were created 21,000 fewer jobs than those counted in the previous revision. Hence it is now clear that the fall of the unemployment rates in recent months depends more on the reduction of the rate of participation in the labour market — as a consequence of the despair of thousands of US citizens — and less on the creation of quality long range jobs: on Friday October 2 it was announced that in September 350,000 persons abandoned the search for work. There is no turning around, in the United States job growth has been submerged in stagnation.

 

Oversold Markets, Rising Equities, the Derivatives Implosion, The Fed Looses Credibility

Oversold Markets, Rising Equities, the Derivatives Implosion, The Fed Looses Credibility (Source jsmineset.com) While the markets were oversold and due a bounce, the “bounce” came with a backdrop of very dire news! Day after day brought forth new and consistently worse news. In no particular order of importance;

Deutsche Bank reported a $6.5 billion loss (10% of their net equity), UBS joined the derivatives implosion party and required a capital raise, Glencore ‘fessed up to $100 billion in debt versus the previous $19 billion (with three or four other major commodity firms in the same boat), the Bank of England required their banks to disclose how much of this debt they were exposed to, China’s yuan surpassed the yen in the settlement of global trade, China also went live with their alternative settlement of trade in yuan (non dollars), Saudi Arabia and Norway disclosed they are now in deficit and thus no longer “buyers” of dollars (are they now sellers?) …

and the U.S. was effectively kicked out of the Middle East!

A serious meltdown is Underway? The Fukushima Daiichi Plant No. 2 Nuclear Reactor Fuel is Missing

A Serious Meltdown is Underway? The Fukushima Daiichi Plant No. 2 Nuclear Reactor Fuel is Missing (Source Dissident Voice)  The World’s Never Seen Anything Like This.The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant No. 2 nuclear reactor fuel is missing from the core containment vessel.1. Where did it go? Nobody knows. Not only that but the “learning curve” for a nuclear meltdown is as fresh as the event itself because “the world has never seen anything like this,”  Never. Utilizing cosmic ray muon radiography with nuclear emulsion, researchers from Nagoya University peered inside the reactors at Fukushima. The nuclear fuel in reactor core No. 5 was clearly visible via the muon process. However, at No. 2 reactor, which released a very large amount of radioactive substances coincident with the 2011 explosion, little, if any, signs of nuclear fuel appear in the containment vessel. A serious meltdown is underway. “The researchers say further analyses are needed to determine whether molten fuel penetrated the reactor and fell down.”2 In short, researchers do not yet know if the molten hot stuff has penetrated the steel/concrete base beyond the containment vessel, thus entering Earth. The Nagoya University research team, in coordination with Toshiba Corporation, reported their findings at a meeting of the Physical Society of Japan on September 26th.

Currency War: Dragging the World Toward World War III

 

Currency War: Dragging the World Toward World War III (Source thetrumpet.com) In 1934, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlawed the private ownership of gold. After confiscating billions in bullion, Roosevelt shocked the world by revaluing it. The cost for an ounce of gold, previously set at $20.67, was suddenly $35. Overnight, Roosevelt devalued the dollar by 69 percent. The president told the country that it was a radical effort to stimulate America’s economy. A cheaper dollar would make America’s exports less expensive and help American companies sell more products to the rest of the world, he said. More money would flow into America, and more jobs would be created. It did those things. And it also marched the world another giant step closer to war. From the world’s perspective, President Roosevelt’s actions felt like a full-on economic broadside designed to steal a bigger chunk of a stagnating global economy. To the world, it was another—albeit much bigger—salvo in an ongoing global currency and trade war! And it responded in kind. Today, the economic guns of 1934 are thundering once more. The world’s economy is mired. China, Europe and America face sluggish growth. Commodity prices have cratered. And demand for materials has been blown to smithereens. Meanwhile, global debt is skyrocketing. And stock markets are rattled. Desperate nations are doing everything they can—including destroying their currencies—to stimulate their economies and keep disruptive internal social forces at bay. Could we really be headed toward world war again? The parallels are ominous. It is in this current tense climate that, on August 11, China surprised the world by initiating the greatest single-day devaluation of the yuan in China’s history. China is today’s financial kamikaze. There will be others. As former Pentagon financial warfare consultant James Rickards wrote, “While the outcome of the current currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.” The world is goose-stepping toward full-scale trade war—and ultimately World War III. This dangerous sequence of events is something the Trumpet has been warning about for years. It is something Herbert W. Armstrong famously forecast to millions of people on radio and in print. Throughout his 53-year work, he often described the conditions that would precede the biblically prophesied economic collapse of the United States. Despite then being the most stable currency in the world, the American dollar would one day be in “jeopardy of being DEVALUED,” he wrote back in 1968 (co-worker letter, March 26, 1968). When the dollar plummets, he warned, inflation will erupt and this will lead to “eventual economic COLLAPSE for the United States.”

U.S. drawing a line against Putin in Europe

U.S. drawing a line against Putin in Europe (Source politico.com) Often criticized for being naïve and complacent about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the Obama administration and its European allies are intensifying their planning and training for a potential conflict on NATO’s eastern flank, hoping to send the strongest possible message about Russian aggression. Deterring Putin was a central theme at a conference here hosted by the U.S. Army, attended by generals from 38 European countries. Officials described escalating NATO activity — including a massive training exercise now underway and talk of U.S. troop increases — in terms reminiscent of the 1980s, when the alliance stared down Soviet-made Warsaw Pact tanks in central Europe. Tan and brown desert camouflage is out; forest greens are in. The NATO exercise, named Trident Juncture, is the largest in more than a decade; it began in mid-October and wraps up late next week. It involves 36,000 troops responding to the invasion of a fictitious region called Ceresia by a hostile neighbor employing so-called hybrid guerrilla warfare tactics like those Putin has adopted in Ukraine. Operating in Spain, Portugal, Italy and surrounding Atlantic waters, the counter-force includes submarines, fighter jets and U.S. Marines storming beaches with landing craft. The training is partly designed to increase military readiness—a sign of concern that Putin might launch another rapid military operation like his March 2014 seizure of Crimea, which caught the U.S. and Europe flat-footed.

NATO discussing increasing troops near Russia’s borders

NATO discussing increasing troops near Russia’s borders: WSJ (Source Reuters) Member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are discussing increasing the number of troops stationed along the Russian border and putting them under formal alliance command, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing diplomats and military officers. One plan would place battalions in Poland and three Baltic states, while another would have a single NATO battalion in the area, according to the newspaper. Since Russia annexed Crimea from neighboring Ukraine last year, countries in the area have been concerned about its next move, especially after the Russian military stepped up its exercises in the region, according to the Journal. Reuters did not confirm the report.

China signs giant Airbus deal as Merkel visits China

China signs giant Airbus deal as Merkel visits (Source Yahoo) China inked a giant aircraft contract with European manufacturer Airbus Thursday, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel began a visit with European leaders increasingly competing for market share in the world’s second largest economy.  Merkel’s trip comes between a high profile visit to Britain by Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month, when he stayed at Buckingham Palace in London, and ahead of a trip to China by French President Francois Hollande next week. China is the European Union’s largest trading partner and several major EU countries including Germany, Britain and France are wooing the country in the hope of winning business and becoming hubs for the growing overseas trade of China’s yuan currency. The competition has made for awkward moments between the countries and their ally the US, China’s greatest geopolitical rival, including their decisions to join Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank despite Washington’s opposition. Observers question whether the increased investment comes at the cost of softening stances against human rights abuses by the Asian giant, which has used political access as a cudgel to punish countries that criticise its behaviour. However Merkel, who met with both the Chinese president and Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing on Thursday, also held talks with human rights activists on the first day of her trip to China, her spokesman said Thursday.