Russia-NATO War Games Run Risk of Actual War (Source newser.com) Like a game of Risk, Russia and NATO have not only been suspiciously eying each other in recent months, but also conducting military exercises in border areas that the Washington Post says are making Europe “a region of high military drama.” Now a UK-based think tank is warning that these war games could lead to real conflict if they don’t start communicating and scaling down their activities, the Guardian reports. The European Leadership Network says that although reps from both sides may insist these training exercises—including a flurry of activity in March for Russia and in June for NATO, per the Post—are against hypothetical opponents, it’s clear there are definite foes in mind, and that alleviative measures need to take place ASAP to stave off a possible confrontation.

Russia steps up demand for U.S. to drop European missile shield (Source Reuters) Russia urged the United States on Friday to scrap plans to station parts of a missile shield system in Europe now that Iran has reached an agreement with world powers to limit its nuclear program. Moscow has long opposed the plan, which it sees as a threat to its nuclear deterrence, and vowed to retaliate if it goes ahead. Washington has previously assured Moscow the shield was meant as protection from “rogue” states like Iran, and not directed against Russia. Since the July agreement under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of U.N., U.S. and European Union sanctions, Moscow has stepped up its rhetoric against the missile shield. “We don’t see any reason to continue with the program, let alone at such an accelerated pace and with a clear aim at the Russian nuclear potential,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters. Ryabkov said Moscow ruled out the possibility of using mid-range ballistic missiles with non-nuclear warheads to target Europe. “So I conclude that the U.S. administration is artificially stitching arguments together behind a decision to continue and increase the pace of creating the European missile shield that was in fact taken for different reasons,” he said. If the shield goes ahead, Russia has said it would retaliate, including by deploying short-range Iskander ballistic missiles in its enclave of Kaliningrad, on the border with NATO members Poland and Lithuania. Ryabkov also said Russia and Iran had agreed on two bilateral deals as part of implementing the wider nuclear agreement, and were now discussing the details. He said Russia would take in some 8 tonnes of low-enriched uranium from Iran in exchange for supplies of natural uranium. Moscow and Tehran would also produce medical isotopes at Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility.

Impending U.S. Dollar Collapse Should Be Getting Attention, Not China’s Devaluation, Financial Analyst (Source economiccollapsenews.com) Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and bestselling author of “Crash Proof,” believes the impending collapse of the United States dollar should be getting the attention of investors and news outlets and not the devaluation of the Chinese yuan. Speaking in an interview with Newsmax TV on Tuesday, Schiff explained that the U.S. economy has an abundance of problems but China’s monetary policy isn’t one of them.The contrarian investor stated that China’s economy isn’t experiencing a freefall and the current devaluation is minuscule. He noted that the yuan’s value has substantially increased over the past several years compared to the U.S. dollar. “So this move was motivated not by the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar, but between the yuan and all the other currencies because the dollars is in a bubble right now,” he said. “The dollar is very overvalued … and the dollar is a bubble. This dollar bubble is going to burst.” He added that the U.S. economy is in a much worse situation right now than the Chinese. This is something, Schiff says, the Federal Reserve will have to admit. He also averred that the Fed won’t raise interest rates this year and will have to do another round of quantitative easing. “That’s going to sink the dollar and then the Chinese are going to have to revalue their currency much higher in the future against the dollar and it’s the dollar collapsing that’s going to hurt the US. Not this recent move by China,” Schiff posited. The reasons why the U.S. dollar has been trading well since the financial crisis is because of hope, hype and speculation. Schiff alluded to the immense trade deficit with China, and how China is producing all things the U.S. consumers and can’t produce. On the other hand, however, the U.S. doesn’t produce anything the Chinese want to consume. Overall, Schiff asserts, the Chinese economy is “far more powerful” and “far more dynamic” than the U.S. economy. This is why the U.S. suffers from massive deficits. “But people believe in the myth of this US economy, they believe that this bubble is genuine, they made the same mistake in the late 1990s, they made the same mistake right before the financial crisis of 2008. They’re making a mistake again,” said Schiff. We’re on the verge of a much worse financial crisis than the one we went through in 2008 and it’s going to take the form of a currency crisis. You’re talking about currency wars. American is going to win the currency war, which is a race to the bottom, and you don’t want to win a currency war because a currency war is different from most wars in that the object is to kill yourself and unfortunately, we’re going to succeed. At the time of this writing, the Dow Jones has fallen more than 200 points, while the Shanghai Composite Index has hiccuped just 40 points.

HOW SMARTPHONES DESTROY CHILDREN’S BRAIN (Source blacklistednews.com) Screen time wasn’t always a problem. Before the advent of smartphones and tablets, kids only had the chance to watch television. With outside time, outings, and school, it was uncommon for kids to spend more than a little bit of time with a screen at any given time. However, statistically, most kids spend hours in front of various screens every day! This is very harmful, particularly during the first three years of a child’s life. The American Association of Pediatricians does not recommend any screen time prior to the age of two, but by the age of two, 90% of kids watch television regularly. The screen time a child gets continues to increase as they age.
You can see the effects by looking at today’s teenagers, who often have difficulty communicating in real life. Look at a group of teenagers and you’ll see that most, if not all, are on their phones, rather than paying attention to each other. Let’s get one thing straight: educational TV and games are a hoax when you’re talking about babies and toddlers. Simply put, kids at this age do not get anything from educational material delivered electronically. They are better off learning from hands-on play and reading. Children should be interacting with caregivers or other people the vast majority of the time. Young children are designed to learn from human interaction, which is taken away from them when they learn from screens.

Heavily armed ‘Oath Keepers’ inject disquieting element in Ferguson (Source Reuters) Four white men carrying military-style rifles and side arms added a disquieting element to riot-torn Ferguson, Missouri, when they began patrolling the streets before dawn on Tuesday, which police quickly labeled “inflammatory.” The men said they were part of a group called “Oath Keepers,” which describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former U.S. soldiers, police and first responders who aim to protect the U.S. Constitution. Many in the crowd questioned the wisdom of openly carrying such heavy weapons into an emotionally charged situation. The group, led by a man identified only as John, wore bulletproof vests and carried their rifles with barrels pointed downward. They said they were in Ferguson to protect a journalist from the conservative “Infowars.com” website.

Pope creates global prayer day for ‘Care of Creation’ (Source AFP) Pope Francis has established an annual day of global prayer “for the Care of Creation” to boost support for the environment, the Vatican said Monday. The first day of prayer next month coincides with the buildup to a worldwide conference to roll back the peril of climate change. “I wish to inform you that I have decided to institute in the Catholic Church the ‘World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation’ which, beginning this year, is to be celebrated on 1 September,” the pope said in a letter released by the Vatican. Francis said he had been inspired by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, who have been praying for the environment on that date since the late 1980s. “The celebration of this Day, on the same date as the Orthodox Church, will be a valuable opportunity to bear witness to our growing communion with our Orthodox brothers and sisters,” the Pope said. “We live at a time when all Christians are faced with the same decisive challenges, to which we must respond together, in order to be more credible and effective.” The prayer day “will offer individual believers and communities a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation” and reflect upon “the adoption of appropriate lifestyles,” the letter said. Francis has become a leading defender of the environment, particularly in the fight against climate change. He published an environmental encyclical earlier this year which denounced exploitation of the poor and waste of the planet’s resources. He is due to address the UN Special Summit on Sustainable Development in September. That gathering comes amid efforts to forge a worldwide deal on climate change in Paris in December, with the aim of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels.

Pope Francis says the detonation of atomic bombs over Japan stands as ‘permanent warning’ (Source AP) Pope Francis says the detonation of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago remains “a permanent warning to humanity” to reject war and ban weapons of mass destruction. The pope recalled the U.S. detonation of atomic weapons as “a tragic event that still arouses horror and revulsion.” He said the bombings of the Japanese cities had become a symbol of mankind’s destructive power when science and technology are put to “distorted use.” U.S. planes dropped two atomic bombs on two days in August 1945, unleashing unprecedented destruction that killed more than 200,000 people and left survivors with lifelong psychological and physical scars. It was the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used

The US Economy Continues Its Collapse (Source globalresearch.ca Last Friday’s employment report was a continuation of a long string of bad news spun into good news. The media repeats two numbers as if they mean something—the monthly payroll jobs gains and the unemployment rate—and ignores the numbers that show the continuing multi-year decline in employment opportunities while the economy is allegedly recovering. The so-called recovery is based on the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate. This measure does not include any unemployed person who has become discouraged from the inability to find a job and has not looked for a job in four weeks. The U.3 measure of unemployment only includes the still hopeful who think they will find a job. The government has a second official measure of unemployment, U.6. This measure, seldom reported, includes among the unemployed those who have been discouraged for less than one year. This official measure is double the 5.3% U.3 measure. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is over 10% after six years of alleged economic recovery? In 1994 the Clinton regime stopped counting long-term discouraged workers as unemployed. Clinton wanted his economy to look better than Reagan’s, so he ceased counting the long-term discouraged workers that were part of Reagan’s unemployment rate. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to measure the long-term discouraged with the official methodology of that time, and when these unemployed are included, the US rate of unemployment as of July 2015 is 23%. An unemployment rate of 23% gives economic recovery a new meaning. It has been eighty-five years since the Great Depression, and the US economy is in economic recovery with an unemployment rate close to that of the Great Depression.

What China’s Devaluation Means to the U.S. Economy (Source wallstreetonparade.com)Markets received a seismic jolt from China on Tuesday as it devalued its currency, the Yuan, by the most in two decades, cutting its daily reference rate by 1.9 %. The move sparked instant selloffs in stocks, commodities, and emerging market currencies as well as a drop in the yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note, which is trading early this morning at a yield of 2.16 %. The devaluation was interpreted in the markets as a sign of capitulation by China to forego a stable currency policy in a last-ditch effort to revitalize sluggish export growth. On Friday, China reported that its exports had plunged by 8.3 % overall in July with dramatic declines of 12.3 % to the European Union and 13% to Japan. Exports to the United States fell by 1.3%. While China announced that the currency devaluation was a one-off move, the prevailing fear in global markets is that it marks a new round in the raging currency wars where countries are now competing to debase their currencies in hopes of making their exports more competitively priced in global markets. The move spells trouble for the U.S. on a number of fronts. As of 8:39 a.m. in New York, stock futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were in the red by 147 points. The U.S. imports more goods from China than any other country. Through June of this year, the U.S. had imported $226.7 billion in goods from China versus $150.4 billion from Canada and $145.1 billion from Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Federal Reserve has been struggling to avoid importing deflation into the U.S.; this devaluation move now means that Chinese goods flowing into the U.S. just got cheaper and the ability of U.S. exporters to compete in global markets just got a lot harder. According to a Federal Reserve report released on July 17, the rising value of the U.S. Dollar is having a significant negative impact on large U.S. based multinationals. The report noted that “The dollar’s strength likely explains roughly a third of the recent decline in profits earned from foreign subsidiaries” and that “Firms with high foreign sales tend to be larger and account for almost 75% of S&P 500 nonfinancial earnings excluding oil and utilities.” As we have reported before, this global currency race to the bottom cannot be solved by central banks. The problem is directly rooted in the unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality that plague this era. In the U.S., that problem springs directly from Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system.

Target Will Stop Separating ‘Girls’ Toys From ‘Boys’ Toys in Stores (Source time.com) Separate toy sections for boys and girls will soon be no more at Target. The company announced Friday that it is eliminating gender-based signs in some if its departments, including Toys, Home and Entertainment. “Over the past year, guests have raised important questions about a handful of signs in our stores that offer product suggestions based on gender,” the company said in a press release. “Right now, our teams are working across the store to identify areas where we can phase out gender-based signage to help strike a better balance.” In the toy section, Target will no longer use colors like pink and blue on the back walls of shelves to denote gendered sections of the department. In bedding, boys and girls sections will be merged into a single kids section. The changes will be implemented over the next few months. Target’s announcement comes two months after an Ohio woman tweeted a picture of a sign in Target’s toy section with separate labels for “building sets” and “girls’ building sets.” The image went viral and sparked a debate about the appropriateness of gender-specific toys.