Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts is making some bold new claims about the Federal Reserve and its official government gold holdings. Dr. Roberts contends,

"They don't have any more gold. That's why they can only give Germany 5 tons of the 1,500 tons it's holding. In fact, when Germany asked for this delivery last year, the Fed said no. But it said we will give you back 300 tons . . . . So, they said we will give you back 20% of what you trusted us to keep for you over the next seven years, but they are not even able to do that."

Dr. Roberts goes on to say, "The stocks of gold at the Bank of England seem to be disappearing. The stocks of many of the gold trusts, such as GLD, are being looted . . . all of this gold is disappearing into Asian markets. The entire West is being drained of gold."

According to Dr. Roberts, this is an inflection point for the gold market.

Dr. Roberts says,

"The reason is: the ability to supply large amounts of gold to the bullion dealers to sell has diminished with the supply of gold and silver. What the Fed did was turn to massive 'naked shorts' of gold futures contracts. They don't have the real gold . . . so they come in and dump contracts, say in a period of 6 minutes, that are three times the amount of gold COMEX has to make delivery. . . . So, it drives down the price of gold. That's how they got the price down from $1,900 to $1,250."

The surgeon general's report could lead to more antismoking initiatives

Turns out, smoking cigarettes can be even deadlier than previously thought. And, according to a report released by the U.S. surgeon general last week, smokers could be paying for the added risks in more ways than one.

The report, released on the 50th anniversary of the first Surgeon General's report on the hazards of smoking, found that the habit is associated with a higher risk of diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, colorectal cancer and erectile dysfunction, in addition to previously well-known conditions such as lung disease, heart attack and stroke. For employers, which are already taking steps to discourage workers from smoking in an effort to lower health costs and improve productivity, the latest evidence showing that smoking is linked to more diseases may cause them to ramp up their antismoking efforts, experts say. "This will only accelerate the movement that we've already seen," says LuAnn Heinen, a vice president at the National Business Group on Health, a non-profit in Washington, D.C. that helps large employers develop health and wellness programs.

Washington - On January 22, 2009 President Obama signed an executive order that the United States Detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Cuba be closed no later than January 22, 2010.

Five years later Guantanamo is still open and it is not clear when it will actually be closed. Until a mass hunger strike in 2013 there seemed little urgency to close the facility. There have been a few detainees released since then and some easing of congressional blocking of transfers.

Of course, many detainees have been in Guantanamo not just five years but over a decade. Mahmud al-Mujahid has been at Guantanamo since January 11, 2002 when it first opened. Just this month the executive ruled that his "continued law of war detention" was "no longer necessary". Many of those cleared for transfer come from Yemen but Obama has yet to release any in spite of demands from Yemen that he do so and protests against their continued imprisonment.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo believes that pro-life activists, along with anti-gay activists and supporters of the Second Amendment, are not welcome in his state.

During a radio interview on Friday, Cuomo pointed out that Republicans were in the midst of a schism, where conservatives worked against moderate Republicans.

"Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves," he said. "Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that's who they are and they're the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are."

State Republicans blasted his comments, the New York Post reported, even as the governor walked them back on Sunday in an open letter to the newspaper.

The rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum are not as worried as they should be about the gap between rich and poor

Those on the outside might imagine that the business leaders who gather in Davos each year to chew the fat are concerned only about enriching themselves. Critics might imagine that the company bosses, jetting to the World Economic Forum 5,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps in their helicopters, mink-clad trophy wives in tow, are oblivious to the struggles of the poor. But they would be wrong.

As the rich and powerful make their last-minute preparations for their week up the magic mountain, they want the message to be sent out that they understand about inequality. They feel the pain. Truly they do.

The evidence for the "Davos gets it" line comes from the annual risk report compiled by the WEF. It asks 700 of its members what they think will be the most pressing threats to the global economy over the coming decade. Inequality is seen as the most likely risk.

Klaus Schwab, who created the Davos meeting in the 1970s, is pleased about that finding. As a good old-fashioned social democrat, he wants his members to take a history lesson and realise that capitalism cannot survive if income and wealth become concentrated in too few hands. For much of the 20th century, the more far-sighted business leaders realised this. They understood that their workers needed reasonable wages so that they could buy the goods and services they were making. They grasped the idea that a market system in its rawest form was incompatible with democracy and so acquiesced while some of the rough edges were knocked off via progressive taxation, welfare states and curbs on capital. Deep down, they feared that the Russian revolution would provide a template for disaffected workers in the west.

The 2014 World Economic Forum will also probably be talking about threat of internet meltdown, the situation in the Middle East - and the ongoing dearth of women delegates

More than 2,500 of globalisation's movers and shakers gather for their annual four-day mountaintop conclave this week, aware that the world is still being shaken by the events of half a decade ago.

When the World Economic Forum met in Davos in early 2009, it was against the backdrop of the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers a few months earlier, and a contraction in activity that raised fears of a second Great Depression. Since then, hopes of a quick return to business as usual have been dashed by sluggish recovery, an incomplete repair job on banks, rising inequality, growing political alienation and concerns about extreme weather events and internet meltdown.

Klaus Schwab, founder and chairman of the WEF, has told the business executives, academics and government officials attending Davos this year that much remains to be done. "Economic growth patterns, the geopolitical landscape, the social contract that binds people together, and our planet's ecosystem are all undergoing radical, simultaneous transformations, generating anxiety and, in many places, turmoil," he said.

Much also remains to be done if the WEF is to make progress on the gender quotas it set four years ago. Then it told its 100 corporate partners - attracted to the Swiss resort by the opportunities to hammer out business deals behind the scenes - that they could bring a fifth representative only if it was a woman. Yet the percentage of women attending is just 16%.

Saadia Zahidi, head of gender parity and human capital at the WEF, says efforts are being made to push gender up the agenda. This year's theme is "Reshaping the world" and Zahidi points to six sessions, including a key event with Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and the IMF's Christine Lagarde on on 25 January - though many delegates will have left by then.

The last thing the U.S. should do is become militarily embroiled in the conflict raging again in Iraq. But for Americans to shake their heads in lofty disdain and turn away, as if they have no responsibility for the continued bloodletting, is outrageous. Why? Because America bears a large part of the blame for turning Iraq into the basket case it's become.

The great majority of Americans don't realize that fact. They never did. So much of what the U.S. did to Iraq has been consigned by America to a black hole of history. Iraqis, however, can never forget.

In 1990, for instance, during the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush, called on the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. But when they finally did, after Saddam's forces were driven from Kuwait, President Bush refused any gesture of support, even permitted Saddam's pilots to keep flying their deadly helicopter gunships. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered.

[H.W. Bush later denied any responsibility for that uprising, but you can hear his appeal to the Iraqis in a documentary I produced with Michel Despratx, "The Trial of Saddam Hussein."]

Even more devastating to Iraq was the Draconian embargo that the United States and its allies pushed through the U.N. Security Council in August 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Americans have a strange need to believe that their "leaders" mean well. Nowhere is this more true than in foreign policy. Even when the horror of some government operation is revealed (usually after being kept from the American people), solemn pundits and elder statesmen will drone on about unintended consequences and the fog of war, while admonishing against "pointless" recriminations. Typically, the harshest accusation leveled against those responsible for a calamity is incompetence, and even that's rare.

Yet when one examines the U.S. government's bloody record in foreign affairs, it is tough to come away thinking that the long trail of death, mayhem, and devastation is anything but the result of malevolence in the pursuit of political and economic interest.

In a recent article, former 60 Minutes producer Barry Lando describes the horror inflicted on the Iraqi people by American officials, beginning in 1990 with the George H. W. Bush administration. Officials actually began making life hell for Iraqis well before that, as Lando discusses in this interview with Scott Horton. The U.S. government (specifically, the CIA) not only helped to bring Saddam Hussein to power, it supplied him the means and intelligence to use chemical weapons in his aggressive war against Iran in the 1980s. (The Iranians have not forgotten.) Collusion with Saddam continued right up until he invaded Kuwait, as U.S. officials helped instigate that event by meddling on both sides of the dispute.

David Bird, a reporter who covers energy markets for the Wall Street Journal, has been missing for nine days. Bird, who has worked for the parent of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, for more than 20 years, left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on the afternoon of Saturday, January 11, telling his wife he was going for a walk. Despite a continuous search by hundreds of volunteers and law enforcement officials, Bird has not been located.

Bird is 55 years old, approximately 6'1, and was last seen wearing a red jacket with yellow zippers according to officials. He and his wife, Nancy, have two children, ages 12 and 15. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Long Hill Police at (908) 647-1800.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Bird is a liver-transplant recipient and is required to take medication twice a day. He did not take his medication with him when he left for the walk.

NBC reported that sources close to the family said one of his credit cards was used in Mexico last Wednesday. Other media outlets have been unable to confirm that report. In the same news story, NBC reported that "the family believes that his coverage of OPEC may be related to his disappearance."

However, a careful review by Wall Street On Parade of the articles Bird has written for the Wall Street Journal since last October, shows that what he was regularly reporting on was a supply imbalance caused by overproduction of shale oil in the U.S. in the face of slacking demand.

On October 21, Bird wrote that "U.S. crude-oil futures Monday settled 1.6% lower, dropping to less than $100 a barrel for the first time since July on rising inventories and weak refiner demand. Prices dropped as the Energy Information Administration [EIA] reported U.S. crude-oil stocks rose for a fourth straight week, to the highest level since late June...The sluggish demand from refiners allows crude stocks to climb four-million barrels in the week ended Oct. 11, the EIA said in a report that was delayed from last week due to the government shutdown. That is the latest piece of a four-week build of 18.9 million barrels in stocks that has put pressure on prices, as refiners have lowered crude-oil processing runs by 1.26 million barrels a day since mid September..."

It's perhaps the greatest speculative bubble since Holland's 'Tulip Mania'

At the peak of tulip mania, circa 1637, a single tulip bulb sold for more than 3,000 Dutch guilders - that's 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman in those days. It was great while it lasted, but reality eventually caught up with the creative opportunists.

Man-made global warming, or as it likes to be referred to these days as 'climate change', had a grand plan in its heyday. The mythology was underpinned by a new economic model, one which hoped to monetize CO2 emissions - or more accurately, the absence of CO2.

Think of Al Gore and his associates like David Blood as the Bernie Madoff of the environmental movement. They created a market which has been disintegrating from day one, including a total collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange, but not before the principle players cashed in their shares and abandoned that hip. It's a epic story of modern day high priests and sooth sayers, political hubris and pseudo-scientific largess on a scale never before seen in history.

But their story is far from over. Get ready for the epic climbdown...

Contrarian Pirouette from Al Gore

For Al Gore and his investor fund partner David Blood, their current thrust is more like dancing in the dark than out of the box thinking, due to "warmists" and "peakists" now having to fight on several fronts at the same time. Writing in 'Wall Street Journal' and similar outlets several times in 2013, they soldiered forward with the claim that "fossil carbon assets" are headed for a bust, and "green energy" can only soar. Along with Britain's Lord Stern, the former World Bank chief economist and author of the Stern Report on "fighting" global warming, they say all fossil fuels are so dangerous for the world's climate they must be completely phased out by 2050 or before. Investing in these fossil carbon assets is therefore, they say, a guaranteed disaster.