© Unknown
Keeping interest rates low is considered the first line of defense for central banks bent on easing the credit crisis and getting banks to lend again. The Federal Reserve's target for the federal funds rate -- the overnight interest rate that banks charge each other - has been kept at a
rock-bottom 0% to 0.25% ever since December 2008.
A growing number of economists
now think it could stay there well into 2011 or even 2012, prompted by fears that a spreading debt crisis in Europe could hurt a budding U.S. recovery.
© Unknown
Germany's gift to the world
Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline.
The first has been sent in response to Israeli fears that ballistic missiles developed by Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, a political and military organisation in Lebanon, could hit sites in Israel, including air bases and missile launchers.
The submarines of Flotilla 7 -
Dolphin,
Tekuma and
Leviathan - have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels.
The flotilla's commander, identified only as "Colonel O", told an Israeli newspaper: "We are an underwater assault force. We're operating deep and far, very far, from our borders."
© FreeGaza.org
The farewell party to one of the boats in Turkey saw a huge crowd 'violently' wave flags and sing songs of hope for the 800 voyagers
Hours before its arrival, the foreign minister lashes out at the Gaza flotilla.
Avigdor Lieberman said Friday afternoon that "the flotilla is an attempt at violent propaganda against
Israel, and Israel will not allow a violation of its sovereignty at sea, in the air, or on land."
Lieberman, who spoke during a visit to the Forgein Ministry's situation room, added, "There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and despite the
Hamas leadership's war crimes and rocket fire, Israel is conducting itself in the most humanitarian manner, and is allowing the entrance of thousands of tons of food and equipment to Gaza."
XinhuaSat, 22 May 2010 09:07 UTC
© Unknown
Inside an Iraqi jail
The Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) said on Saturday that Israel's intelligence agency Mossad is interrogating Arab prisoners in Iraqi jails.
"I received calls from Jordanian prisoners at Iraqi jails and they informed us that Mossad is interrogating them and other Arab prisoners in jails in Iraq," Abdul Karim Shreideh, head of the prisoners and detention centers committee at AOHR, said in a press conference in the Jordanian capital of Amman Saturday.
"The prisoners said Mossad gives them the option to work with the agency as their agents and thus be able to leave the prisons or remain in jail," Shreideh told reporters at the conference held to launch the AOHR's annual report on situation of human rights in Jordan in 2009.
According to the organization, there are 33 Jordanians jailed in Iraq and thousands of Arab prisoners in Iraqi jails.
In the press conference, the AOHR President Hani Dahleh urged the Jordanian government to intensify steps to secure the release of Jordanians jailed abroad.
© AP Photo
A recruiter from Foxconn talks to job applicants outside the factory in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong province on Feb. 24, 2010.
A Chinese employee of Foxconn Technology Group jumped from a building to his death Tuesday, state-run media said, in the
10th suicide this year at the world's largest contract maker of electronics, such as the iPod, Dell computers and Nokia phones.
Police said Li Hai, 19, killed himself after working at the plant for only 42 days, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Foxconn did not immediately comment on the death.
The suicide is the ninth at Foxconn's massive plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, which employs more than 300,000 people. Two other workers have tried to kill themselves by jumping from buildings in Shenzhen but they survived. Another suicide occurred at a smaller plant in northern Hebei province in January.
Labor activists say the string of suicides back up their long-standing allegations that workers toil in terrible conditions at Foxconn.
They claim shifts are long, the assembly line moves too fast and managers enforce military-style discipline on the work force.
Comment: Here are the following deaths at Foxconn this year before today's suicide (May 25th):
January 8th: 19-year-old, Rong Bo, jumped off the company's dormitory building. His death was "covered up" by the company.
January 23rd: 19-year-old, Ma Xiangqian, died while working a night-shift in Shenzhen Guanlan plant. The reason of death was uncertain immediately, but an autopsy later
confirmed it to be from falling off the building.
February 23rd: 16-year-old, Wang Lingyan, was found dead of "natural causes" on her dormitory bed in the Langfang plant. Her death was also "covered up" by the company.
March 11th: a worker in his twenties, named Li, jumped to his death from the fifth floor of the dormitory at Shenzhen Longhua plant.
March 29th: 23-year-old, named Liu, jumped from the 14th floor of a dormitory at the Longhua plant.
May 6th: 24-year-old, Lu Xin, who joined Foxconn in August 2009, jumped from the 6th floor of the VIP hotel in Foxconn's Long Hua site.
May 11th: 24-year-old, Zhu Chenling, died after jumping from an apartment building near the Longhua plant.
May 14th: 21-year-old, named Liang, with "several" knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn's dormitories in Shenzhen.
May 21st: 21-year-old, Nan Gang, leapt from a four-story building in Foxconn's industrial complex in Longhua Township.
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw StoryFri, 21 May 2010 07:56 UTC
As BP withholds information on impact of massive oil spill, Coast Guard says that 'embedded' media have been allowed to cover response effort
As oil from the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico approached the US coastline, a CBS News crew was threatened by the US Coast Guard with arrest if they attempted to film a beach in South Pass, Louisiana.
"When we tried to reach the beach ... a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest," CBS's Kelly Cobiella reported on Tuesday.
Andrew Osborn and Peter Foster
The TelegraphThu, 13 May 2010 18:09 UTC
© AP Photo
US President Richard Nixon in Moscow with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1974
The extraordinary assertion, made in a publication sanctioned by China's ruling Communist Party, suggests that the world came perilously close to nuclear war just seven years after the Cuban missile crisis.
Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat since 1949, wrote that the most serious threat came in 1969 at the height of a bitter border dispute between Moscow and Beijing that left more than one thousand people dead on both sides.
New York Stock Exchange
Democracy throughout the world is under attack. Many people can make the argument that our democracy here in America is only an illusion, but even the illusion of democracy is crashing down. Tragedies are currently playing out across the world on an epic scale. Unprecedented economic and environmental catastrophes have become the norm. Billions of people, the overwhelming majority of humanity, have been sentenced to a slow death due to a concentration of wealth and resources within humanity's economic top 0.5%. Ultimately, short-sighted greed has proven to be humanity's most severe disease.
I: Democracy Vs. Oligarchy: Lessons from History
The experiment known as democracy is devolving into fascism before our eyes; the "
iron law of oligarchy" is once again asserting itself. From the Founding Fathers on, we have known that you cannot have a concentration of vast wealth and Democracy at the same time - and we currently have the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of the United States. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said,
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
BBCThu, 13 May 2010 06:35 UTC
© Reuters
Police officers in Tehran, Iran inspect a bag of Afghan-origin morphine among 1,114 kilograms of morphine seized from drug traffickers.
Thousands of Afghans have protested in the eastern city of Jalalabad against the alleged executions of a number of Afghan refugees in Iran.
Demonstrators rallied in front of the Iranian consulate, shouting slogans and throwing eggs.
This is the fifth and largest anti-Iran protest in Afghanistan in a fortnight.
Protesters say Iran has expelled 80,000 Afghans in recent months and executed many on drug smuggling charges. Iranian reports say officials deny the charge.
Several thousand Afghans have been arrested by the Iranian authorities and hundreds are reported to be on death row, correspondent say.
When Pope John Paul II was still living in Poland as Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, he claimed that the security police would accuse priests of sexual abuse just to hassle and discredit them. (
New York Times, 3/28/10). For Wojtyła, the Polish pedophilia problem was nothing more than a Communist plot to smear the church.
By the early 1980s, Wojtyła, now ensconced in Rome as Pope John Paul II, treated all stories about pedophile clergy with dismissive aplomb, as little more than slander directed against the church. That remained his stance for the next twenty years.
Today in post-communist Poland, clerical abuse cases have been slowly surfacing, very slowly. Writing in the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza, a middle-aged man reported having been sexually abused as a child by a priest. He acknowledged however that Poland was not prepared to deal with such transgressions. "It's still too early. . . . Can you imagine what life would look like if an inhabitant of a small town or village decided to talk? I can already see the committees of defense for the accused priests."
While church pedophiles may still enjoy a safe haven in Poland and other countries where the clergy are above challenge, things are breaking wide open elsewhere. Today we are awash in a sludge of revelations spanning whole countries and continents, going back decades---or as some historians say---going back centuries. Only in the last few weeks has the church shown signs of cooperating with civil authorities. Here is the story.
Comment: Here are the following deaths at Foxconn this year before today's suicide (May 25th):
January 8th: 19-year-old, Rong Bo, jumped off the company's dormitory building. His death was "covered up" by the company.
January 23rd: 19-year-old, Ma Xiangqian, died while working a night-shift in Shenzhen Guanlan plant. The reason of death was uncertain immediately, but an autopsy later confirmed it to be from falling off the building.
February 23rd: 16-year-old, Wang Lingyan, was found dead of "natural causes" on her dormitory bed in the Langfang plant. Her death was also "covered up" by the company.
March 11th: a worker in his twenties, named Li, jumped to his death from the fifth floor of the dormitory at Shenzhen Longhua plant.
March 29th: 23-year-old, named Liu, jumped from the 14th floor of a dormitory at the Longhua plant.
May 6th: 24-year-old, Lu Xin, who joined Foxconn in August 2009, jumped from the 6th floor of the VIP hotel in Foxconn's Long Hua site.
May 11th: 24-year-old, Zhu Chenling, died after jumping from an apartment building near the Longhua plant.
May 14th: 21-year-old, named Liang, with "several" knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn's dormitories in Shenzhen.
May 21st: 21-year-old, Nan Gang, leapt from a four-story building in Foxconn's industrial complex in Longhua Township.