North Korea's leader approved a plan to prepare standby rockets to hit U.S. targets, state media said Friday, after American stealth bombers carried out a practice mission over South Korea.

In a meeting with military leaders early Friday, Kim Jong Un "said he has judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation," the state-run KCNA news agency reported.

The rockets are aimed at U.S. targets, including military bases in the Pacific and in South Korea, it said.

"If they make a reckless provocation with huge strategic forces, (we) should mercilessly strike the U.S. mainland, their stronghold, their military bases in the operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in South Korea," KCNA reported.

Marc Faber, who authors the Gloom Boom & Doom newsletter, is usually pretty bearish on stocks and bullish on gold.

Lately, though, gold doesn't seem like it can catch a bid.

"Despite the continued reverberations regarding the Cyprus bailout and its involvement of bank deposits, gold struggled to maintain the positive momentum created in the first two weeks of March and instead now looks very likely to move lower, towards $1580/oz," wrote Deutsche Bank commodities analyst Xiao Fu in a note this morning.

So, what does Faber have to say about it?

Like many Palestine solidarity activists, I've long regarded Caterpillar as a callous firm. A trip to the Belgian city of Charleroi over the weekend reinforced this view.

Caterpillar recently announced that it is shedding 1,400 jobs from its Charleroi plant. The measure has been presented as "indispensable" for reasons of "competitiveness" by Nicolas Polutnik, the plant's chief executive. His rationale merits contempt. Caterpillar, which raked in a profit of almost $5.7 billion last year, is lengthening the dole queues in a city where unemployment already exceeds 20 percent.

War against workers

Far from having no other option than to "downsize," it is waging an ideological war against workers' rights. As the second largest US employer in the country, Caterpillar plays an active role in the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium. This grouping has seized on the global economic crisis to try and unravel hard-won gains by the country's labor movement. One of the chamber's top targets at the moment is automatic wage indexation - a requirement that employers increase their workers' pay when the cost of living rises.

Caterpillar's cruel disregard for the firm's own employees chimes completely with its support for Israeli apartheid. Documents published by the Israeli embassy in Brussels list Caterpillar machines made in Charleroi as being among Belgium's top exports to Israel.

A British judge comprehensively dismissed a high-profile legal attack on the University and College Union, it emerged on Monday. The case was brought after democratic union bodies discussed boycotts of Israel.

An Employment Tribunal ruled the claim of "institutional anti-Semitism," brought by union member and Academic Friends of Israel director Ronnie Fraser, was dismissed on all counts.

The ruling is a dramatic and comprehensive defeat for the Israeli "lawfare" strategy, and may even have backfired for its proponents who today descended into acrimonious internal back-biting.

Egypt's military spokesman says the country's naval forces have captured three scuba divers who were trying to sabotage an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean, while telecommunications executives blamed a week-long Internet slowdown on damage caused to another cable by a ship.

Another shoe has dropped in last week's story about the New Jersey family that stared down police officers and social services workers demanding access to their home and gun safe. As you may recall, Shawn Moore's Carneys Point home was visited by representatives from the Division of Child Protection and Permanency after he posted a photo of his 11-yr-old son holding a gun on Facebook.

That story became national news and members of the family appeared on TheBlaze TV's Wilkow! and other programs. During our initial investigation of the story, TheBlaze reached out to Governor Chris Christie's office for comment, but our calls were never returned. Perhaps that's because the Mr. Christie was busy taking action on the situation.

Last Friday, the Governor sent a letter to his Attorney General, Jeffrey Chiesa. The strongly worded letter was sent to TheBlaze by Sean Hannity of Fox News. In the official communication from the Governor, Christie stated;

"The public reports of this matter raise troubling questions concerning the facts and circumstances surrounding the investigation, the manner in which the investigation was conducted, and the procedures followed by law enforcement and the Division of Child Protection and Permanency."

Investor Jim Rogers is concerned about the safety of his money in bank accounts around the world now that Cyprus is "looting" money from big depositors to help fund the country's bailout.

Video of Jim Rogers on CNBC this morning 3/28/13:

"Run for the hills and hurry to get your money out" IMF condoning stealing of people's money.

March 28, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone "troika" officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn't just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand's Voxy reported on March 19^th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English's favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank's bail out.

Can They Do That?

Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor's funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank's, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into "bank equity." The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.

The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called "Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions." It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain "financial stability." Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state:

An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself - thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.

No exception is indicated for "insured deposits" in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks. The directive is called a "resolution process," defined elsewhere as a plan that "would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . ." The only mention of "insured deposits" is in connection with existing UK legislation, which the FDIC-BOE directive goes on to say is inadequate, implying that it needs to be modified or overridden.

A Real Video on Iran, Not "Argo," Not Hardly!

Democrats in the Kentucky state House voted on Monday to bring an override of Gov. Steve Beshear (R)'s veto of the state's controversial Religious Freedom Act to the floor for a vote on Tuesday. According to the Lexington Herald-Reader, the House's Democratic caucus only arrived at the decision after heated debate.

Amber Duke, communications manager of the Kentucky ACLU told Raw Story that the vote count on the House decision was 27 to 26 in favor of bringing the veto before the House, which is scheduled to convene at 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, but has not said when it will vote on the measure.

House Bill 279, known as the Religious Freedom Act would allow Kentuckians to ignore laws that they feel place an undue burden on their religious beliefs. More than 50 rights groups have opposed the bill, arguing that it would undermine anti-discrimination laws.

Gov. Beshear vetoed the law earlier this month after it passed easily in both houses of the state legislature, earning plaudits from the ACLU and other civil rights organizations that, like the governor, felt that the law was so broadly written as to open to door to legalized discrimination.