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India predicts China war by 2017

Chinese army
© Unknown
The US and India have expressed concern over growing Chinese army power in the region.
The Indian army has predicted a war with its nuclear-armed neighbor China by 2017 as Beijing continues to strengthen its military muscle.

A secret military exercise, called 'Divine Matrix', by the Indian troops visualized a war scenario with China, the Hindustan Times reported Saturday.

"A misadventure by China is very much within the realm of possibility with Beijing trying to position itself as the only power in the region," a senior army officer told the daily following the maneuver.

An Indian military's assessment has outlined that Beijing would rely on information warfare (IW) to bring New Delhi down on its knees.

MIB

Israel planned to kill Prime Minister Erdogan

Turkish media sources detail information implicating the Israeli
Erdogan and Perez
© n/a
Erdogan talks during a debate on the Israeli war on Gaza in the presence of Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos on January 29. "I know very well how you hit and killed children on beaches," he said.
Mossad in a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.


An e-mail found on a personal computer belonging to one of the members of the underground Ergenekon organization exposed Mossad's role in the failed assassination efforts against Erdogan, Turkish media outlets reported on Friday.

The organization has been accused of orchestrating a coup plot against the current Turkish administration.

The indictment list tabled by the Turkish prosecution against the organization says that an Israeli journalist had sent the e-mail to a number of Ergenekon figures to inform them of Israeli readiness to assassinate the Turkish premier.

Nuke

US Army Confirms Israeli Nukes; Israeli Aid At Stake

The Army has let slip one of the worst-kept secrets in the world -- that Israel has the bomb.

Officially, the United States has a policy of "ambiguity" regarding Israel's nuclear capability. Essentially, it has played a game by which it neither acknowledges nor denies that Israel is a nuclear power.

But a Defense Department study completed last year offers what may be the first time in a unclassified report that Israel is a nuclear power. On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command report, the Army includes Israel within "a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east."

Chess

Entropy, Chaos and Power (Part 1)

AIG Bonuses
© Brian Fairrington/caglecartoons.com
The Swiss, a nation long famous for their devotion to banking secrecy, have decided to do away with all that and open the books of UBS to the US government; AIG bonuses are in the spotlight while in fact there is much more to AIG than meets the eye, hence the focus on bonuses; Babcock & Brown went into receivership; GE had its credit rating downgraded; and the G20 Finance Ministers met in Horsham (UK).

What looks suspiciously like a renewal of the British war against the Irish, in a bid to develop a renewed domestic terrorism threat, began with three murders; the circulation of a highly doctrinaire policy document to Missouri State Highway Officers, which flies in the face of the US Constitution, was thankfully brought to public attention, while the French held a bio-terror exercise with the premise that "anti-capitalist = terrorist".

Meanwhile with the focus on bonuses, and the AIG Financial Products ones in particular, are we seeing the beginnings of a manipulated class war? There's nothing like a good distraction to keep people from looking for the real bad guys.

Bad Guys

Report: IDF chief gave U.S. fresh intel on Iran nukes program

American sources told the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan that Israel Defense Forces chief Gabi Ashkenazi provided fresh intelligence to the United States concerning Iran's nuclear facility in Arak during his visit to Washington earlier this week, according to Israel Radio.

Ashkenazi on Monday said that while Israel was interested in exhausting diplomatic options against Iran's nuclear program, the army must nevertheless prepare itself for a military attack.

The army chief decided to cut short his trip in order to take part in a special cabinet session on negotiations for a deal to release abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Attention

"The Money Has Gotten Scarce ... but the Truth Is Getting Fierce"

Image
© Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Truth standing naked and bold holding the mirror.
The 1975 lyrics of Murray Head from Say it ain't so Joe seem appropriate for this stage in the Obama presidency:-
they told us that our hero has played his trump card
he doesn't know how to go on
we're clinging to his charms and determined smile
but the good old days have gone
the image and the empire may be falling apart
the money has gotten scarce
one man's word held the country together
but the truth is getting fierce
The question in our minds is just how fierce does the truth have to get before people wake up and really start questioning how the world works.

Surveying the world economy, the past two weeks saw most non-reserve currencies fall in value, as emerging economies and export-oriented countries are suffering capital flight. In past downturns some regions would experience this and not others, some countries and not others, but now capital flight and, it seems, both real and induced social unrest are widespread.

The beneficiary has been the U.S. dollar, which is surprising given the fact that the Federal Reserve has been "printing" money like crazy and the US government has been borrowing like crazy. "There is nowhere else to go" is the justifying mantra of the times. But what seems to be happening is that those making the bets remain convinced of US global military and economic hegemony. As we have been pointing out, the signs are that military force will be used and the era of "free trade" may be coming to an end. Some are pointing to "currency protectionism."

Bad Guys

The Pathological Mind: Without a Doubt

Image
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. "Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them...

"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."

Attention

Hamas condemns Gaza rocket strikes on Israel

Gaza's Hamas rulers issued rare criticism Thursday of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from the strip, saying now is the wrong time for such attacks.

The Islamic militant group has fired thousands of rockets at southern Israel in recent years. But Hamas said Thursday that it was not behind recent attacks and that it was investigating who was responsible.

It apparently fears that new rocket fire could disrupt the reconciliation talks currently underway in Cairo.

Comment: The following reports will shed some light on the question, who is really behind these attacks, that threaten the reconciliation talks?

Hamas blames 'Israeli collaborators' for launching rockets
Gaza residents: IDF troops posing as Hamas men
U.S. partner, not Hamas, firing rockets into Israel


Vader

The Scam and the Reality of Israel/Palestine

The scam of extremist Israeli's (who do not represent the whole of Israel) is that they don't want to be "pushed into the sea". One wonders why they would fear this since they have incredibly more atomic weaponry than the entire Arab world combined!

The Reality is that the extremists want the entire country of Palestine, as the quotes below make tragically clear . . .

"We must expel Arabs and take their places." -- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion stated: "We have taken their country....We must do everything to insure they never return....We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."

Binoculars

US ship in China spat was hunting subs

Image
© Associated Press/ US Navy
The military Sealift Command ocean surveillance ship USNS Impeccable is seen underway on Monday, March 9, 2009.
The U.S. Navy ship that got into a scrape with five Chinese vessels last weekend in the South China Sea was looking for threats such as submarines, presumably Chinese, in waters that China claims as its own, defense officials acknowledged Tuesday.

The United States maintains that the unarmed USNS Impeccable was operating legally in international waters when it was surrounded and harassed by the Chinese. Beijing responded hotly to a U.S. protest over Sunday's incident, and neither nation is backing down, even as they prepare for a much-anticipated first meeting between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao next month.

Although they would not be specific about the Impeccable's mission when it was intercepted by the Chinese ships, two defense officials said the ship is designed and equipped for sub-hunting work and was part of a calculated U.S. surveillance operation in the disputed South China Sea.

Comment: Wow, a somewhat different perspective from the bluster displayed in this article about the same event. Seems the US were not squeaky clean after all, spying on Chinese submarines in Chinese waters.