Ukraine (UA): Shutdown

In Ukraine, schools have been closed, all public events have been banned and restrictions imposed on people’s movements after the country confirmed its first death from H1N1 swine flu.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced a three-week period of precautionary measures and health officials are said to be considering introducing quarantine across the country..

An outbreak of flu and pneumonia has killed 30 people in western Ukraine since mid-October, but until now officials have been insisting the H1N1 strain was not the cause.

A health ministry spokeswoman said not all the dead were tested, but checks on one body have proved positive.

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Rail traffic in Ukraine will be restricted due to the epidemiological situation in the country, Health Minister Vasyl Kniazevych has said.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said earlier that travelling between the regions and abroad could be restricted. Border guards also tightened controls, and if they find any symptoms of flu in people who cross the state border, they will immediately send them to local hospitals. Quarantine was imposed in the country’s nine western regions due to the epidemic of the H1N1 influenza, commonly known as swine flu. It was also decided to declare a three-week ban on all mass events and introduce a three-week holiday period at all educational institutions.

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Tymoshenko said the government would also be banning “all public gatherings, every concert and every cinema showing for three weeks.” The government will also introduce “special regimes” to limit the movement of Ukraine’s citizens from one region to another for non-urgent purposes, she said. Ukraine has borders with four EU countries

No men OR women needed: Scientists create sperm and eggs from stem cells

Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.


Opponents argue that it is wrong to meddle with the building blocks of life and warn that the advances taking place to tackle infertility risk distorting and damaging relations between family members.

The U.S. government-funded research also offers the prospect of a 'miracle pill' which staves off the menopause, allowing women to wait longer to have a child.

It centres on stem cells, widely seen as a repair kit for the body.
Scientists at Stanford University in California found the right cocktail of chemicals and vitamins to coax the cells into becoming eggs and sperm.


The sperm had heads and short tails and are thought to have been mature enough to fertilise an egg.

The eggs were at a much earlier stage but were still much more developed than any created so far by other scientists.


The double success, published in the journal Nature, raises the prospect of men and women one day 'growing' their own sperm and eggs for use in IVF treatments.

The American team used stem cells taken from embryos in the first days of life but
hope to repeat the process with slivers of skin.

The skin cells would first be exposed to a mixture which wound back their biological clocks to embryonic stem cell state, before being transformed into sperm or eggs.

Starting with a person's own skin would also mean the lab-grown sperm or eggs would not be rejected by the body.

The science also raises the possibility of 'male eggs' made from men's skin and 'female sperm' from women's skin.

This would allow gay couples to have children genetically their own, although many scientists are sceptical about whether it is possible to create sperm from female cells, which lack the male Y chromosome.

The U.S. breakthrough could unlock many of the secrets of egg and sperm production, leading to new drug treatments for infertility.

Defects in sperm and egg development are the biggest cause of infertility but, because many of the key stages occur in the womb, scientists have struggled to study the process in detail.

Researcher Rita Reijo Pera, of Stanford's Centre for Human Embryonic Stem Cell
Research, believes new fertility drugs are just five years away.

However, safety and ethical concerns mean that artificial sperm and eggs are much further away from use.

Dr Reijo Pera said any future use of artificial eggs and sperm would have to be subject to guidelines.

'Whether one builds the boundaries on religion or just on an internal sense or of right and wrong, these are important. In this field, it is not "anything goes".'

Scientists at Newcastle University claimed to have made sperm from embryonic stem cells earlier this year but the research paper has been retracted.

Dr Allan Pacey, a Sheffield University expert in male fertility said: 'Ultimately this may help us find a cure for male infertility. Not necessarily by making sperm in the laboratory, I personally think that is unlikely, but by identifying new targets for drugs or genes that may stimulate sperm production to occur naturally.

'This is a long way off, but it is a laudable dream.'

Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said that IVF should be the preserve of married couples.

'The question is, why are we creating artificial gametes (eggs and sperm) and aborting 200,000 babies a year when there are many, many couples willing to adopt?'

Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, warned that any flaws in the artificial sperm or eggs could be passed on to future generations.

Anthony Ozimic, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: 'The use of artificial gametes in reproduction would distort and damage relations between family members.

'There are no instances of any major medical advance achieved by abandoning basic ethical principles such as safeguarding the right to life.'

First U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War

First U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War

Senior diplomat in Afghanistan said he believes the war is simply fueling the insurgency

WASHINGTON -- A former Marine who fought in Iraq, joined the State Department after leaving the military and was a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan has become the first U.S. official to resign in protest of the Afghan war, the Washington Post reported early Tuesday.

Matthew Hoh, who describes himself as "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," said he believes the war is simply fueling the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, dated Sept. 10 but published early Tuesday. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The move sent ripples all the way to the White House, the paper said, where officials immediately appealed for him to stay out of fear he could become a leading critic.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff, but Hoh declined. He then flew home and met with Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke told the Post he disagreed that the war "wasn't worth the fight," but did agree with much of Hoh's analysis.

"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview with the newspaper. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."

The revelation comes as President Obama pledged on Monday not to "rush the solemn decision" to send more troops to battle in Afghanistan as he weighs military options on what to do next in the troubled war.

The administration is debating whether to send tens of thousands more troops to the country, while the Afghan government is moving to hold a Nov. 7 runoff election between President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah. The runoff comes after complaints by international monitors of fraudulent voting in the first election.

ABC News, citing unnamed sources, reported Monday evening that Obama will likely announce his decision for Afghanistan between that nation's runoff presidential election on Nov. 7, and the president's departure for Tokyo, Japan, on Nov. 11.

"I won't risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary," Obama told service men and women at Naval Air Station Jacksonville on Monday. He promised a "clear mission" with defined goals and the equipment needed to get the job done.

Obama, who is in the process of weighing options put forward by the Pentagon that include various levels of increased troops, spoke of the latest example of the dangers and sacrifices there -- helicopter crashes that killed 14 Americans in the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years.

NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN stand up for FOX NEWS in defiance of Obama Administration, refused to interview Pay Czar unless Fox allowed to as well.

It’s come to this: White House tries to bar Fox News from interviewing pay czar

Decide for yourself what the most disgraceful aspect of this is. Was it the fact that Gibbs told Jake Tapper explicitly on Monday that the White House wouldn’t try to dictate to the press pool who should and shouldn’t be included — before doing precisely that? Was it Anita Dunn going out of her way to say she respects Major Garrett as a fair reporter — before the administration decided he didn’t deserve a crack here at Feinberg? Or was it the repeated insistence by Dunn and Axelrod that of course the administration will make its officials available to Fox — before pulling the plug today?

The other networks deserve the praise they’re getting for standing up to the Baby-in-Chief, but if they had acquiesced in this freezeout, a precedent would have been set that would have been eagerly used by future Republican presidents to close them off too. And don’t think they weren’t all keenly aware of it.

Obama's war on Fox & half the country

October 22, 2009
Obama's war on Fox & half the country
By Allan Erickson

On the one hand, we should celebrate the war between Fox News and the White House.


It is a good thing President Obama & Co. are angry with Fox. It means Fox is doing its job, you know, holding the Executive Branch accountable, like a real news organization. This is good news. Traditionally in America, the Fourth Estate's role has been to challenge those in power, challenge the assumptions, examine the assertions, and check for accuracy, all the while carrying both sides of the story.


A real news organization serves the people, acting as a check on power by informing people so they can make good decisions at the polls.


The fact that Fox is holding Obama's feet to the fire should cause rejoicing.


On the other hand, there are three bad news dimensions to all this: the rest of the media is content to lick Obama's boots, true to pattern Obama is glad to selfishly attack a private news organization (by the way, the most highly rated television news group in the nation), and the more Nero fiddles, the higher the flames.


Barack Obama is happy to fight a war on Fox.


Oh, that the Commander in Chief would fight the war on terror with as much energy and focus.


The truth is Barack Obama is becoming a most divisive President.


He preaches unity with his mouth, but with his hands, he sows seeds of division. Do not forget how he applied thug tactics during the campaign while denigrating Fox, insulting average Americans as gun-toting Bible thumpers, encouraging racial tensions as he always had through 'community organizing,' i.e., ACORN. Never forget how his machine took money from overseas. Remember how he raised an enormous war chest via the internet with no way to track donors. Don't overlook the thug tactics used during the Texas caucuses, how law enforcement was instructed to suppress media criticism in Missouri, how free speech and a free press were quelled in Chicago when a reporter sought to cover Obama's Chicago activities via Annenberg and Ayers and 'education reform.'


Notice today his army of Czars: radical leftists, race baiters, anti-American globalists, distinctly and angrily opposed to most traditional American values.


And now we have his media czar Anita Dunn singing the praises of Chairman Mao, and bragging that the Obama campaign controlled the media. All this coming at a time she calls Fox nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece. (Never mind that half of Fox's viewers are Democrats and Independents, according to a recent survey by the Global Marketing Research Center.)


Thanks to the internet (which Obama seeks to control as well), those who are wise consumers of media and news have been paying attention. They know full well this President and his operatives are capable of most anything now. The lies and misrepresentations increase almost daily.


Journalists with an ounce of integrity see through the octopus ink now being spewed in the water, for this is what the war on Fox is all about, clouding the issues, providing cover, defense and retreat. How odd to see a radical Leftist President in Nixonian garb.


Fox has been the only news TV organization willing to challenge this President on both foreign and domestic policy. Fox is the only TV outfit with guts enough to run stories about ACORN corruption. Fox is the only television organization covering what the roughly half the American people think about healthcare reform and cap 'n trade, doing so with real coverage of Town Hall Meetings and Tea Parties. Fox is the only substantive television news group asking the tough questions about Afghanistan.


The rest of the major media are either silent, complicit, or cheerleaders for this Government, a government populated in the main by radical leftists devoted to the destruction of our Republic, traitors by any definition.


In case you have not noticed, the Constitution is taking a back seat to the EU and the U.N., and economic freedom is being absorbed into the socialist kool-aid served daily throughout D.C., the media, and the public schools.


Fox has challenged all this, and so Fox must pay. Fox must pay, as Limbaugh did last week, by being tied to the scourging post and beat with lies, slander, and condemnation, excoriated in public by the most vicious and cruel campaign ever witnessed, unless you consider how Obama's operatives treated Sarah Palin and her family to a similar whipping post.


And the beatings will continue.


So the battle lines are clearly drawn. The President has made a clear declaration of war on at least half of his own people. Obama & Co. have made it clear: if you disagree with this President, you will be hounded, threatened, condemned and destroyed. How Maoist. (Dunn was not kidding.)

This is the change you voted for, this is the hope you expected, and this is the dawning of a new American age of unity, purpose and prosperity?


The only remaining questions are: how long will the People put up with Al Capone in the White House, how far will Al Capone push things, what will be the end game (2010 or 2012?), and how many bodies will he leave in his wake, both at home, and abroad?

1 IN 6 AMERICANS IN POVERTY

Revised formula puts 1 in 6 Americans in poverty
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer
Tue Oct 20, 8:41 am ET

WASHINGTON – The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed.

A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government's official figure.

The disparity occurs because of differing formulas the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Science use for calculating the poverty rate. The NAS formula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 percent, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans, according to calculations released this week. That's higher than the 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million, figure made available recently under the original government formula.

That measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care or geographical variations in living costs. Nor does it consider non-cash government aid when calculating income. As a result, official figures released last month by Census may have overlooked millions of poor people, many of them 65 and older.

According to the revised NAS formula:

_About 18.7 percent of Americans 65 and older, or nearly 7.1 million, are in poverty compared to 9.7 percent, or 3.7 million, under the traditional measure. That's due to out-of-pocket expenses from rising Medicare premiums, deductibles and a coverage gap in the prescription drug benefit.

_About 14.3 percent of people 18 to 64, or 27 million, are in poverty, compared to 11.7 percent under the traditional measure. Many of the additional poor are low-income, working people with transportation and child-care costs.

_Child poverty is lower, at about 17.9 percent, or roughly 13.3 million, compared to 19 percent under the traditional measure. That's because single mothers and their children disproportionately receive non-cash aid such as food stamps.

_Poverty rates were higher for non-Hispanic whites (11 percent), Asians (17 percent) and Hispanics (29 percent) when compared to the traditional measure. For blacks, poverty remained flat at 24.7 percent, due to the cushioning effect of non-cash aid.

_The Northeast and West saw bigger jumps in poverty, due largely to cities with higher costs of living such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Census Bureau said it expedited release of the alternative numbers for this month because of the interest expressed by lawmakers and the Obama administration in seeing a fuller range of numbers. Legislation pending in Congress would mandate a switch to the revised formula, although the White House could choose to act on its own.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that because the revised formula factors in non-cash government aid, the amount of increase in poverty from 2007 to 2008 was generally smaller compared to the current measure.

"Food stamp participation rose during the first year of recession and appears to have softened what could have been an even greater increase in financial hardship," he said.

Sherman said the revised formula could take on greater importance in measuring poverty for 2009 as more Americans take advantage of tax credits and food stamps under the federal stimulus program. Food stamp assistance currently is at an all-time high of about 36 million.

US Dollar in Major Decline

In today's fast market action, the U.S. dollar has continued its historic decline, falling still further on world markets.

That puts the dollar just an eyelash away from breaking through its all-time low!

Meanwhile, the prices we pay for gold, oil, food and many other critical natural resources are hopping:

Oil has jumped to over $79 per barrel, its highest level this year and nearly DOUBLE its March low.

Copper has just surged by a whopping 4% today.

And gold is back up to $1,061 per ounce, poised for ANOTHER major surge.

OBAMA POISED TO CEDE US SOVEREIGNTY, CLAIMS BRITISH LORD

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.

A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation will be available here once compiled. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.

Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Lord Monckton received a standing ovation and took a series of questions from members of the audience. Among those questions were these relevent to the forthcoming Copenhagen treaty:

Question: The current administration and the Democratic majority in Congress has shown little regard for the will of the people. They’re trying to pass a serious government agenda, and serious taxation and burdens on future generations. And there seems to be little to stop them. How do you propose we stop Obama from doing this, because I see no way to stop him from signing anything in Copenhagen. I believe that’s his agenda and he’ll do it.

I don’t minimize the difficulty. But on this subject – I don’t really do politics, because it’s not right. In the end, your politics is for you. The correct procedure is for you to get onto your representatives, both in the US Senate where the bill has yet to go through (you can try and stop that) and in [the House], and get them to demand their right of audience (which they all have) with the president and tell him about this treaty. There are many very powerful people in this room, wealthy people, influential people. Get onto the media, tell them about this treaty. If they go to www.wattsupwiththat.com, they will find (if they look carefully enough) a copy of that treaty, because I arranged for it to be posted there not so long ago. Let them read it, and let the press tell the people that their democracy is about to be taken away for no good purpose, at least [with] no scientific basis [in reference to climate change]. Tell the press to say this. Tell the press to say that, even if there is a problem [with climate change], you don’t want your democracy taken away. It really is as simple as that.

Question: Is it really irrevocable if that treaty is signed? Suppose it’s signed by someone who does not have the authority, as I – I have some, a high degree of skepticism that we do have a valid president there because I -

I know at least one judge who shares your opinion, sir, yes.

I don’t believe it until I see it. … Would [Obama's potential illegitimacy as president] give us a reasonable cause to nullify whatever treaty that he does sign as president?

I would be very careful not to rely on things like that. Although there is a certain amount of doubt whether or not he was born in Hawaii, my fear is it would be very difficult to prove he wasn’t born in Hawaii and therefore we might not be able to get anywhere with that. Besides, once he’s signed that treaty, whether or not he signed it validly, once he’s signed it and ratified it – your Senate ratifies it – you’re bound by it. But I will say one thing; they know, in the White House, that they won’t be able to get the 67 votes in the Senate, the two-thirds majority that your Constitution has stipulated must be achieved in order to ratify a treaty of this kind. However, what they’ve worked out is this – and they actually let it slip during the election campaign, which is how I know about it. They plan to enact that Copenhagen treaty into legislation by a simple majority of both houses. That they can do. But the virtue of that – and here you have a point – is that is, thank God, reversible. So I want you to pray tonight, and pray hard for your Senate that they utterly refuse to ratify the [new] Treaty of Copenhagen, because if they refuse to ratify it and [Obama] has to push it through as domestic legislation, you can repeal it.

Regardless of whether global warming is taking place or caused to any degree by human activity, we do not want a global government empowered to tax Americans without elected representation or anything analogous to constitutional protections. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew their progeny allowed a foreign power such authority, effectively undoing their every effort in an act of Anti-American Revolution. If that is our imminent course, we need to put all else on hold and focus on stopping it. If American sovereignty is ceded, all other debate is irrelevant.

Edited to add @ 8:31 am:

Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose:

38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

World Government (heading added)
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.

To Redistribute Wealth (heading added)
b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts [read: the "climate debt" Monckton refers to], including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, © a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.

With Enforcement Authority (heading added)
© The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; © a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange [read; enforcement].

Bloomberg, Dollar to Hit 50 Yen, Cease as Reserve

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar may drop to 50 yen next year and eventually lose its role as the global reserve currency, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.’s chief strategist said, citing trading patterns and a likely double dip in the U.S. economy.

“The U.S. economy will deteriorate into 2011 as the effects of excess consumption and the financial bubble linger,” said Daisuke Uno at Sumitomo Mitsui, a unit of Japan’s third- biggest bank. “The dollar’s fall won’t stop until there’s a change to the global currency system.”

The dollar last week dropped to the lowest in almost a year against the yen as record U.S. government borrowings and interest rates near zero sapped demand for the U.S. currency. The Dollar Index, which tracks the greenback against the currencies of six major U.S. trading partners, has fallen 15 percent from its peak this year to as low as 75.211 today, the lowest since August 2008.

The gauge is about five points away from its record low in March 2008, and the dollar is 2.5 percent away from a 14-year low against the yen.

“We can no longer stop the big wave of dollar weakness,” said Uno, who correctly predicted the dollar would fall under 100 yen and the Dow Jones Industrial Average would sink below 7,000 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. last year. If the U.S. currency breaks through record levels, “there will be no downside limit, and even coordinated intervention won’t work,” he said.

China, India, Brazil and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency. Hossein Ghazavi, Iran’s deputy central bank chief, said on Sept. 13 the euro has overtaken the dollar as the main currency of Iran’s foreign reserves.

Elliott Wave

The greenback is heading for the trough of a super-cycle that started in August 1971, Uno said, referring to the Elliot Wave theory, which holds that market swings follow a predictable five-stage pattern of three steps forward, two steps back.

The dollar is now at wave five of the 40-year cycle, Uno said. It dropped to 92 yen during wave one that ended in March 1973. The dollar will target 50 yen during the current wave, based on multiplying 92 with 0.764, a number in the Fibonacci sequence, and subtracting from the 123.17 yen level seen in the second quarter of 2007, according to Uno.

The Elliot Wave was developed by accountant Ralph Nelson Elliott during the Great Depression. Wave sizes are often related by a series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence, pioneered by 13th century mathematician Leonardo Pisano, who discerned them from proportions found in nature.

Uno said after the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the U.S., Europe and Asia will form separate economic blocs. The International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights may be used as a temporary measure, and global currency trading will shrink in the long run, he said.

Does CO2 Drive climate change ??

The Global Warming climate change argument is based on the premise that climate change is driven by CO2, specifically CO2 created by humans. IE: car fumes, plane exhaust, factory pollution.

However, there is no proof that human created CO2 drives climate change, in fact scientists look at past major climate change events and find no evidence of CO2 beign the cause, human or otherwise.

Here is a good video starting to explain this issue.
Please start to educate yourself on this issue as to whether Global Warming is real or not.




Also, interestingly the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, is sueing Al Gore for fraud hoping that the court case will settle this debate once and for all.



John Coleman, who founded the cable network in 1982, suggests suing for fraud proponents of global warming, including Al Gore, and companies that sell carbon credits.

"Is he committing financial fraud? That is the question," Coleman said.

"Since we can't get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue," Coleman said. "I'm confident that the advocates of 'no significant effect from carbon dioxide' would win the case."



Coleman says his side of the global-warming debate is being buried in mainstream media circles.

"As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there's been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that's been erased," he said.

"I think if we continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at last begin to realize that they've been scammed on this global-warming thing."


Coleman spoke to FOXNews.com after his appearance last week at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, where he called global warming a scam and lambasted the cable network he helped create.

"You want to tune to the Weather Channel and have them tell you how to live your life?" Coleman said. "Come on."

He laments the network's decision to focus on traffic and lifestyle reports over the weather.

"It's very clear that they don't realize that weather is the most significant impact in every human being's daily life, and good, solid, up-to-the-minute weather information and meaningful forecasts presented in such a way that people find them understandable and enjoyable can have a significant impact," he said.

"The more you cloud that up with other baloney, the weaker the product," he said.

Coleman has long been a skeptic of global warming, and carbon dioxide is the linchpin to his argument.

"Does carbon dioxide cause a warming of the atmosphere? The proponents of global warming pin their whole piece on that," he said.

The compound carbon dioxide makes up only 38 out of every 100,000 particles in the atmosphere, he said.

"That's about twice as what there were in the atmosphere in the time we started burning fossil fuels, so it's gone up, but it's still a tiny compound," Coleman said. "So how can that tiny trace compound have such a significant effect on temperature?

"My position is it can't," he continued. "It doesn't, and the whole case for global warming is based on a fallacy."

Report: North Korea Test-Fires 5 Short-Range Missiles

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea fired five short-range missiles off its east coast on Monday, news reports said, even as South Korea proposed working-level talks with its communist neighbor.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency, citing an unidentified South Korean government official, said the North test-fired two short-range missiles on Monday morning and three others on Monday afternoon from mobile launch pads.

Yonhap said the missiles were surface-to-surface KN-02 rockets with a range of up to 75 miles.

The reported launches were the first since the regime conducted a barrage of seven ballistic missile tests in early July, and come despite signs North Korea is reaching out to rival South Korea and the United States after months of heightened tensions over its missile and nuclear programs.

The South's conservative government has reciprocated by taking more steps to engage more with the North, but shows no signs of easing its pressure on the North to disarm.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Belfast Monday that the American efforts to proceed with talks with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions will proceed despite the new tests.

"Our goal remains the same," she told reporters after a meeting with Northern Irish business leaders. "Our consultations with our partners and our allies continues unabated. It is unaffected by the behavior of North Korea.'

Clinton was to fly later to Moscow to meet with Russian leaders on a variety of issues, including nuclear reduction concerns.

Yonhap said the North has issued a no-sail zone in areas off the country's east and west coasts Oct. 10-20 — an apparent indication the country could carry out more missile tests.

YTN television network carried a similar report to Yonhap, saying the missiles were fired off from sites south of the country's Musudan-ri missile site on its northeast coast.

South Korea's Defense Ministry and the National Intelligence Service — the country's main spy agency — said they could not confirm the reports.

Earlier Monday, South Korea proposed working-level officials of the two sides meet Wednesday discuss how to prevent floods in the Imjin River running through their heavily armed border. The South also proposed a separate meeting of Red Cross officials on Friday to discuss reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

However, Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said that Seoul had no plan to resume high-level dialogue with the North.

Ties between the divided Koreas had been soured after conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office early last year with a pledge to get tough with Pyongyang's communist government. Tension on the peninsula further heightened after the North conducted a long-range rocket test in April and a second nuclear test in May.

Pyongyang, however, has recently reached out to Seoul and Washington. The regime toned down its threatening rhetoric, released detained South Korean and American citizens and pledged to resume key stalled joint projects with South Korea.

The Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, which means that the two Koreas are still technically at war.

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

NASA Bombs Moon

This friday, October 9th, NASA will bomb the SOuth Pole of the Moon
on a mission to find water.
The LCROSS spacecraft will guide an empty centaur rocket into the crater Cabeus
(the crater with the greatest amount of Hydrogen).
Crashing the 2 - tons object will create a wider crater.

Scientists expect the impact will cause a huge cloud of dust,
gas and vaporized water that will be clearly visible from Earth
observatories and telescopes.

Impact scheduled to be at 11:30 am LONDON - 5:30 am MEXICO CITY.

Astronomers have been thinking the rain of comets brought water to the moon.
In the past 2 years 2 American spacecrafts have reported hints of hydrogen and oxygen.
Finding water would be great news for the NASA, it would mean unlimited fuel for any
future moon base.
Seeking a source of fuel has been a high-priority mission for the NASA, following
ex-President George W. Bush's "vision for space exploration" who said would
start with "a foothold on the moon."

The U.N. Outer Space Treaty prohibits non-peaceful activities on the moon.
Article IV states, “The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all
States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment
of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons
and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.”

Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Centre has been receiving tweets to stop the moon bombing.

Stocks Take a Beating

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Stocks sold off at the start of the new quarter as disappointing jobless claims data left Wall Street bracing for Friday's unemployment report. After locking in 15% gains for the third quarter, the Dow Jones Industrial Average started off the new three-month period by taking a 204.89-point plunge, dropping 2.1%, to 9507.39, while the S&P 500 slid 27.4 points, or 2.6%, to 1029.68. The Nasdaq Composite edged down 64.94 points, or 3.1%, to 2057.48.
Losses were broadbased with financials, commodities, technology and home stocks hard hit. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Gold and Silver Index, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, and the KBW Bank Index all sank more than 4%.
Stocks fell early after the Department of Labor said there were 551,000 new jobless claims last week, up from an upwardly revised 534,000 the week prior and topping expectations for 535,000.
Those data, paired with a worse than expected report on private sector job losses earlier in the week, have traders cautious ahead of the most-anticipated data of the week, Friday's unemployment report, says Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at ChannelCapitalResearch.com.
"You've seen chinks in the armor, so people are hesitant -- especially with it coming on a Friday," says Roberts. "There's uncertainty, and until there's some sort of resolution, people are going to be nervous."
Adding pressure to the market, Goldman Sachs changed its forecast for September nonfarm payrolls from a loss of 200,000 to a loss of 250,000, wrote James DePorre, founder and CEO of Shark Asset Management, on RealMoney.com.
In other data Thursday, Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index edged down 0.3 points to 53.6, vs. expectations for a rise to 54. The Chicago PMI spurred selling earlier in the week, when it indicated a contraction in manufacturing.
"Tentative signs in housing, automobile, Chicago PMI and several other economic indicators continue to remind us that the month of September was weaker than generally expected," writes Seabreeze Partners' Doug Kass. He later adds that, "at the risk of being the boy who cried wolf, I believe that market participants have a false sense of security in rising equity share prices."
"Plenty of stocks were pumped up by mark-up buying. The pump-up and subsequent support underneath is now gone," writes Jim Cramer on RealMoney.com."We know that jobless claims aren't improving. That's a real negative, especially for retail and banks. But, and this is a big but, we are not seeing the right stocks go up if we are signaling another dip down."
Not all of the recent data have been negative. Among the day's surprises, construction spending unexpectedly increased by 0.8% in August, and pending home sales rose by 6.4% vs. expectations for a much smaller, 1% gain.
At the same time, the Department of Commerce said personal income increased 0.2% in August, in line with the prior month's increase, and spending ticked up 1.3%, respectively, vs. 0.3% in July. Both readings were slightly better than expected.
In other news Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the House Financial Services Committee on regulatory reform. Bernanke told members of Congress that a council of regulators should monitor systemic risk, while all systemically important financial firms should be subject to a consolidated regulator.