Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar hegemony
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6819136/Gulf-petro-powers-to-launch-currency-in-latest-threat-to-dollar-hegemony.htmlThe Arab states of the Gulf region have agreed to launch a single currency modelled on the euro, hoping to blaze a trail towards a pan-Arab monetary union swelling to the ancient borders of the Ummayad Caliphate.
“The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.
The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar are to launch the first phase next year, creating a Gulf Monetary Council that will evolve quickly into a full-fledged central bank.
The Emirates are staying out for now – irked that the bank will be located in Riyadh at the insistence of Saudi King Abdullah rather than in Abu Dhabi. They are expected join later, along with Oman.
The Gulf states remain divided over the wisdom of anchoring their economies to the US dollar. The Gulf currency – dubbed “Gulfo” – is likely to track a global exchange basket and may ultimately float as a regional reserve currency in its own right. “The US dollar has failed. We need to delink,” said Nahed Taher, chief executive of Bahrain’s Gulf One Investment Bank.
The project is inspired by Europe’s monetary union, seen as a huge success in the Arab world.
Upbeat reports in the financial media, belie the effects of the ongoing credit contraction. Massive injections of central bank liquidity have prevented the collapse of financial markets, but have done little to ease the deleveraging of households or stimulate activity the broader economy. The crisis has stripped $13 trillion in equity from working families who now find their access to credit either cut off or severely curtailed by the same banks that received hefty taxpayer-funded bailouts. The fiscal strangulation of the millions of people who are no longer considered "creditworthy" is progressively weakening demand and spreading pessimism across all income levels. Growing public desperation was the focus of a special weekend report by Bloomberg News:
"Americans have grown gloomier about both the economy and the nation’s direction over the past three months even as the U.S. shows signs of moving from recession to recovery. Almost half the people now feel less financially secure than when President Barack Obama took office in January, a Bloomberg National Poll shows.
The economy is the country’s top concern, with persistently high unemployment the greatest threat the public sees. Eight of 10 Americans rate joblessness a high risk to the economy in the next two years, outranking the federal budget deficit, which is cited by 7 of 10. An increase in taxes is named as a high risk by almost 6 of 10.
Fewer than 1 in 3 Americans think the economy will improve in the next six months....Only 32 percent of poll respondents believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from 40 percent who said so in September." (Bloomberg)
The near-delirious optimism that followed the 2008 presidential election has fizzled in less than 12 months. While the policies of the Obama administration have improved Wall Street's prospects for record profits and lavish bonuses, ordinary working people continue to fight to keep their jobs and maintain their standard of living. Recent data show that household debt which surged during the boom years is being pared back at a historic pace. Household debt to disposable income has plummeted from 136 percent to 122 percent in a little more than a year, leaving many families with little to spend at the malls or shopping centers.
Severe retrenchment has triggered a shift towards personal thriftiness which is reducing economic activity and strengthening deflationary pressures. 2010 is likely to be even worse, as mushrooming foreclosures and commercial real estate defaults force banks to slash lending accelerating the rate of decline. This is from Bloomberg:
"Foreclosure filings in the U.S. will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac Inc. said. This year’s filings will surpass 2008’s total of 3.2 million as record unemployment and price erosion batter the housing market...
Biosingularity
http://biosingularity.wordpress.com
American diplomats in Pakistan face harassment and intimidation (+)
http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com
This does not bode well. American diplomats in Pakistan are relating tales of harassment and intimidation at the hands of the Pakistani military and the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. This is straining relations at a time when the Obama administration is insisting that the Pakistanis do more to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces that thrive in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
New York Times
It also appears to be an attempt to blunt the planned expansion of the United States Embassy to 800 Americans from 500 in the next 18 months, growth that American officials say is necessary to channel the expanded American assistance.
“They don’t want more Americans here,” another American diplomat said. “They’re not sure what the Americans are doing. It’s pretty pervasive.”
The harassment has grown so frequent that American officials said they regarded it as a concerted effort by parts of the military and intelligence services that had grown resentful of American demands to step up the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Though the United States has been sending large amounts of military assistance to the Pakistani Army, and helping its premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, the campaign shows the ambivalence, even “hatred” toward the United States in those quarters, the American official said.
The embassy has denied Xe operates in Pakistan. But those statements have collided with reports from Washington that Xe operatives were employed by the C.I.A. to load missiles onto drones that are used to kill Qaeda militants in the tribal areas.
The public distrust toward American officials has led many American diplomats to keep a low profile, and adopt a bunker mentality, American diplomats acknowledge. Americans are rarely seen in restaurants or shopping areas, and are in fact warned by security advisers to steer clear of such places.
The skittishness between the sides was put aside Wednesday when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was taken on a helicopter tour of the tribal area of South Waziristan by the chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to show off what the Pakistanis had achieved against the Taliban.
No Pakistani or American reporter was taken along, a sign that the Pakistanis preferred to keep the American help in South Waziristan quiet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/asia/17visa.html?hp
Neo-Resistance
The Red Violine
Why is Ahmadinejad's media burning Khomeni's Photos ?
Ahmadinejad's agenda is to draw a wedge between the pro-Khomeini Greens (i.e Mousavi and Karoubi) and the other ones--perhaps even the majority of greens, who cannot forgive IRI's crimes under Khomeini's rule. This is putting Mousavi and Karoubi and many other opponents of the IRI at odds with eachother. Mousavi and Karoubi cannot come out and "apologize" for crimes that took place when Khomeini was alive and they were at the helm of power. This doesn't mean they don't regret it, nor does it mean that they had much control over the megalomanic in chief. But, they CANNOT come out and side with those who denounce Khomeini.
On the other hand, those who are opponents of the concept of "velayat-e faghih" are in stark opposition to Khomeini--who AFTER holding a referendum to ask people if they wanted an Islamic REPUBLIC, tricked the nation into "absolute juriprudence" by modifying the constitution. So far, the Greens have been able to keep united by pointing the arrow in the direction of Khamenei; keeping the dead one alone and voicing their opposition against the killings that took place under this new supreme leader's watch. But the coup d'etat camp has now done a clever deflection of hatred (the undergarment of the Green movement) from Khamenei onto Khomeini.
I stumbled on a vide last week, where one of IRGC's commanders was speaking to university students (of Ahmadinejad ilk) and telling them how when he goes abroad and talks to Muslims no one knows Khamenei or Khomeini and that everyone talks about Ahmadinejad![video in Persian] (Actually, in some of those Imam-Zaman awaiting mosques, books have been circulating that describe a man "in the physical appearance of Ahmadinejad" that will be accompanying Imam Zaman!
I stumbled on a vide last week, where one of IRGC's commanders was speaking to university students (of Ahmadinejad ilk) and telling them how when he goes abroad and talks to Muslims no one knows Khamenei or Khomeini and that everyone talks about Ahmadinejad![video in Persian] (Actually, in some of those Imam-Zaman awaiting mosques, books have been circulating that describe a man "in the physical appearance of Ahmadinejad" that will be accompanying Imam Zaman!
Ahmadinejad's efforts to make backdoor deals with the 5+1 powers over the nuclear issue (such that they can all save face by sticking to their lines, but in private soften up their positions) is becoming a liability for the hardliners. In these situations, the best way to save Ahmadinejad's ass is to create a crisis and distraction.
Dr Soleimani-pour, the CEO of the financial group that bought 50% of Iranian Telecom Organization (the controversial deal of Iran's economic history) was found dead with his wife in his house. This man was overseeing the most powerful of the IRGC's cartels at the time of death, but also used to be a high ranking member of IRGC with focused participation in communication security and information. Investigations about the cause their death has not concluded.
- Speaking of telecommunications, yesterday this organization issued a statement that they will be upgrading one of the BSC centers that services several Tehran regions (the heart of conflict, I would say!) and that mobile networks will be disconnected for three days!
Could cheap drugs help save H1N1 patients?
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091109/meds_flu_091109?s_name=&no_ads=
Tamiflu anti-viral drug revealed as complete hoax; Roche studies based on scientific fraud
http://www.naturalnews.com/027734_Tamiflu_Roche.html ( Mike Adams )
The most popular anti-viral, by far, is Tamiflu, a drug that's actually derived from a Traditional Chinese Medicine herb called star anise.
But Tamiflu is no herb. It's a potentially fatal concentration of isolated chemical components that have essentially been bio-pirated from Chinese medicine. And when you isolate and concentrate specific chemicals in these herbs, you lose the value (and safety) of full-spectrum herbal medicine.
That didn't stop Tamiflu's maker, Roche, from trying to find a multi-billion-dollar market for its drug. In order to tap into that market, however, Roche needed to drum up some evidence that Tamiflu was both safe and effective.
A groundbreaking article recently published in the British Medical Journal accuses Roche of misleading governments and physicians over the benefits of Tamiflu. Out of the ten studies cited by Roche, it turns out, only two were ever published in science journals. And where is the original data from those two studies? Lost.
The data has disappeared. Files were discarded. The researcher of one study says he never even saw the data. Roche took care of all that, he explains.
So the Cochrane Collaboration, tasked with reviewing the data behind Tamiflu, decided to investigate. After repeated requests to Roche for the original study data, they remained stonewalled. The only complete data set they received was from an unpublished study of 1,447 adults which showed that Tamiflu was no better than placebo. Data from the studies that claimed Tamiflu was effective was apparently lost forever.
As The Atlantic reports, that's when former employees of Adis International (essentially a Big Pharma P.R. company) shocked the medical world by announcing they had been hired to ghost-write the studies for Roche.
It gets even better: These researchers were told what to write by Roche!
As one of these ghostwriters told the British Medical Journal:
"The Tamiflu accounts had a list of key messages that you had to get in. It was run by the [Roche] marketing department and you were answerable to them. In the introduction ...I had to say what a big problem influenza is. I'd also have to come to the conclusion that Tamiflu was the answer."
In other words, the Roche marketing department ran the science and told researchers what conclusions to draw from the clinical trials. Researchers hired to conduct the science were controlled by the marketing puppeteers. No matter what they found in the science, they had already been directed to reach to conclusion that "Tamiflu was the answer."
Canadians find clue that might explain severe H1N1 flu
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091216/H1N1_clue_091216/20091216?hub=TopStoriesV2
New Bacterial Behavior: Puzzling 'Dance' of Electricity-Producing Bacteria Near Energy Sources
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12
The metal-metabolizing Shewanella oneidensis microbe does not just cling to metal in its environment, as previously thought. Instead, it harvests electrochemical energy obtained upon contact with the metal and swims furiously for a few minutes before landing again.
Electrokinesis is more than a curiosity. Laboratory director and co-author Kenneth Nealson, the Wrigley Professor of Geobiology at USC and discoverer of Shewanella, hopes to boost the power of microbe-based fuel cells enough to produce usable energy./091215141518.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+International
Gender-Bending Chemicals in Minnesota Waters
http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/12/08/gender-bending-chemicals-in-minnesota-waters/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+planetsave%2Fcom+%28Planetsave%29
Minnesota, the state that made national headlines with the discovery of malformed frogs in the 1990s, has found endocrine disrupting chemicals and traces of pharmaceuticals even in some of its most remote and otherwise cleanest waters. Armed with substantial state funding, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has released a new report and is now continuing field work to determine the aquatic range of endocrine disrupting chemicals that can mimic hormones and cause changes to the reproductive system or development of organisms.
The new study found the hormones androstenedione in 64 percent of sampled lakes and 50 percent of sampled rivers, estrone in 55 percent of the lakes and 75 percent of the rivers, and 17β-estradiol in 55 percent of the lakes and 38 percent of the rivers. “These may be of human origin, naturally occurring, or both,” MPCA observed. Bisphenol-A was found in 45 percent of the sampled lakes and 38 percent of sampled rivers.
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