Despite its evidently make-believe facade, the cooked-up story of the Saudi envoy assassination plot does not seem to be something which can be easily banished from the minds of the American powers that be.

The heat over Iran in the US government is growing rapidly. Some Republican congressmen have expressed their interest in waging an all-out war against Iran, a threat they keep refreshing every time they have an excuse. They have clearly stated that Washington should not dismiss the idea of resorting to military force against Iran, an idea which is being strengthened in Congress. "I don't think you should take it off the table," Michigan Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has said.

It is quite natural that he was vehemently supported by the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, who have always maintained an antagonistic approach towards Iran.

Hawkish Gingrich said on CNN, "Our goal should be the replacement of the Iranian dictatorship, and we have done nothing of consequence to systematically undermine the regime."

'We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,' prime minister says; Gadhafi son reportedly captured too

Sirte, Libya - Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled Libya with a dictatorial grip for 42 years until he was ousted by rebels in a bloody civil war, was killed Thursday when revolutionary forces overwhelmed his hometown, Sirte, the last major bastion of resistance two months after the regime fell.

Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril confirmed Gadhafi had been killed. "We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed," Jibril told a news conference in the capital Tripoli.


Initial reports from fighters said Gadhafi had been holed up with the last of his fighters in the furious battle with revolutionary fighters assaulting the last few buildings they held in his Mediterranean coastal hometown of Sirte. At one point, a convoy tried to flee the area and was blasted by NATO airstrikes, though it was not clear if Gadhafi was in the vehicle.

NBC's Adrienne Mong, reporting from Sirte, saw a massive convoy heading west toward Misrata. Gadhafi's body was rumored to be in the convoy, she reported, but NBC could not confirm that.

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

Billionaire Naveen Jain thinks that the moon's precious minerals as well as its mystique are worth exploration.

The Gist

• Naveen Jain wants to privatize the moon by exploring its precious minerals.
• His company, which calls itself MoonEx, was awarded a contract as part of NASA's $10 million Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data.

The moon is made of far more valuable stuff than green cheese. And one man wants to capitalize on that fact. NASA, which ended America's space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself.

Jain's company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon. "People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn't it just barren soil?" Jain told FoxNews.com. "But the moon has never been explored from an entrepreneurial perspective."

Commentary: 8 warnings for Washington and Occupiers


Worst-case scenario's closing fast: Occupy Wall Street growing. But no political power or allies yet. Feared yes, attacked by GOP proxy tea party. Soon the Occupation will explode into a new American Revolution.

When? A string of European bank collapses is dead ahead. And like the Arab Spring, they will trigger an economic disaster for American banks.

Yes, coming soon says Martin Weiss in his "7 Major Advance Warnings," which is "bound to have a life-changing impact on nearly all investors in the U.S. and around the globe." His new Weiss Ratings warnings are the "most important" in a 40-year career. The stress on Wall Street banks will force them back to Congress for more bailouts.

Warning eight: No new bailouts. That will push the economy into a deep recession.

Then what? New Glass-Steagall? Not enough. Tax the rich? Not enough. Perp walks? Not enough. Presidential commission? Useless promises. Occupy Wall Street will fail without a fundamental constitutional change. No compromise. Or Wall Street wins, again. We go back to the same free market, deregulated, too-greedy to-fail, conservative Reaganomics policies that have been destroying democracy for a generation.

This story from Bloomberg just hit the wires this morning. Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input. You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan. Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon. Bernanke is absolutely insane. No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks. His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.

Citigroup has agreed to pay $285 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was starting to collapse.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday that the big Wall Street bank bet against the deal in 2007 and made $160 million in fees and profits. Investors lost millions.

Citigroup neither admitted nor denied the SEC's allegations in the settlement.

"We are pleased to put this matter behind us and are focused on contributing to the economic recovery, serving our clients and growing responsibly," Citigroup said in a statement.

The penalty is the biggest involving a Wall Street firm accused of misleading investors before the financial crisis since Goldman Sachs & Co. paid $550 million to settle similar charges last year. JPMorgan Chase & Co. resolved similar charges in June and paid $153.6 million.

A decade on from a landmark genetic-sequencing study, promised progress on typhoid fever has not materialized, says Stephen Baker.

Genome sequences come thick and fast in modern science. Nature has just published an analysis of the genome of the naked mole rat, and a historic sequence of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, reconstructed from medieval victims of the Black Death.

What is the value of such research? In my field, infectious disease, the genomics revolution has been substantially less beneficial than was anticipated. To those of us who work in poor countries in which infectious diseases that have been all but eliminated in the West are still common, it is clear that the wide-eyed optimism and persuasive advocacy for genomics that were expressed at the turn of the century were at best naive, and at worst potentially damaging, diverting resources from more worthy causes. Certainly, the outcomes have not matched those promised as justification for funding the research.

I have personal experience of the hype and the reality. Ten years ago, I was an author on the paper that announced the genome sequence of Salmonella enterica Typhi, the microorganism that causes typhoid fever. The research was promoted with great fanfare, which declared that scientists were at a turning point in the fight against the disease. A decade on, we are no closer to a global solution.

The S. enterica Typhi sequence did help us to understand the biology of the organism and to address enigmas such as why it causes disease only in humans, how it develops resistance to antimicrobial agents and how it modulates the human immune response. And although not even the most optimistic genomics or public-health expert would have predicted eradication of the disease within a decade, the sequencing did at least make elimination a realistic target.

But the promised concrete benefits - bespoke treatments, next-generation vaccines and low-cost diagnostics - have failed to materialize.

WASHINGTON - Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher-ranking officials from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC

News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counter-terrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a "deputy commander in the Qods force" of the IRGC. Shahlai had long been regarded by US officials as a key figure in the Qods force's relationship to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The accusation "cult" is almost literally a "kiss of death" in our world, most particularly since September 11, 2001 when - allegedly - 19 fanatical Islamic terrorists - brought the most powerful nation on earth to its knees (or seemingly.) There were years of preparation for this event, including numerous very public "cult" events - Jonestown, Waco, Heaven's Gate, Solar Temple, Satanic Ritual Abuse cases, etc - that set the stage in the minds of the masses. By the time 9-11 rolled around, all you had to do was whisper "cult" and the nation was ready to march on the castle with firebrands and pitchforks.

So, it is not a good idea to use the word "cult" lightly in view of this hystericized societal state. (Never mind the fact that the word itself has drastically changed in meaning.)

As I mentioned in my article yesterday, on first reading about Eric Pepin accused of being a cult leader, having been falsely, slanderously, and libelously accused of same myself, my first instinct was to think "hang on a minute!" But, as I noted, reading further, there were too many troubling signs of a lot more below the surface of this glitch in the life of Eric Pepin when he was caught, literally, with his pants down.

We have been collecting data about Eric from the net (and elsewhere) so as to be better equipped to deal with someone who has egregiously attacked our right to investigate our world and warn our readers of potential dangers. This information is continually being added to the forum thread about Eric Pepin that is the object of his lawsuit as reported yesterday. Curiously, Rick Ross's pages about Eric Pepin have disappeared except for google cache...

And so, in view of the current situation of Eric Pepin and the Higher Balance Institute vis a vis sott.net, we thought it would be helpful to our readers to reprise an older article that lays out a lot of informational background to the psy-op games being played in our world and on the internet in terms of social and ideological vectoring. Remember, different ideologies can mask the same pathological behavior...