An assassination plot against President Obama has been foiled in Turkey. US officials are allegedly taking the threat “very seriously.” However, the president did not need to change his schedule. The man who had been planning the attack was arrested last week in Turkey. Read more…
Since last week’s historic election of Barack Obama’s as the next U.S. president, a number of high-profile Europeans have been sticking their feet in their mouths while commenting on the situation (Well, some were being outright racist). For example, a leading Austrian television journalist said - on camera - that he “wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man.” The Italian Prime Minister tried to joke about it, by describing Obama as “young, handsome and even suntanned.” The National Democratic Party of Germany ran the headline, “Africa Conquers the White House,” on their website. And these aren’t even the extremists. Read more…
A set of blueprints found in a Berlin apartment prove the Nazis had been planning the genocide of European Jews for longer than earlier thought. The yellowing blueprints to Auschwitz are dated 23 October, 1941, and show the plans for the concentration camp located near Krakow, Poland. The plans have rooms “gas chamber,” “crematorium,” and “corpse cellar,” proving beyond a doubt that Auschwitz was more than just a labor camp, as Holocaust deniers believe. Read more…
The leader of the far-right political party in Austria was dismissed yesterday after admitting to an affair with his former mentor, the man whom he succeeded. Jörg Haider, 58, died earlier this month in a high-speed car crash (after heavy drinking in a gay bar). The dismissed leader, Stefan Petzner, 27, had revealed his relationship with Haider in an interview, which led to his sacking. Read more…
From The Nation:
Myth 1. It’s a dangerous world. We face an array of serious national security threats that require an experienced Commander in Chief.
Myth 2. The surge has worked. To withdraw from Iraq now would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and embolden Islamic extremists.
Myth 3. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists. We therefore must redouble our military efforts there or face another terrorist attack.
Myth 4. Iran is responsible for much of the violence against US forces in Iraq; by using its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, it threatens to dominate the Middle East.
Myth 5. To talk to the leaders of “rogue” states like Iran and Cuba without conditions legitimizes their position and weakens American leverage.
Myth 6. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian state pursuing an anti-American agenda aimed at reconstituting the Soviet Union in the form of a new Russian empire.
Myth 7. Because the American military is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must increase the size of our conventional armed forces.
Myth 8. A League of Democracies would create a global coalition for peace and freedom and would enable the United States and its democratic allies to intervene to solve humanitarian and other crises when the UN Security Council is paralyzed.
Myth 9. Globalization has strengthened the economy, and we cannot avoid it by hiding behind protectionist walls.
Myth 10. The world needs American leadership.
Interesting myths, no? To find out more about why they are myths, click and read The Nation:
John McCain’s “our economy’s fundamentals are strong” might be one of the dumbest things ever said in a campaign. Maybe even dumber than this:
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Frankel responded, “I’m sorry … did I understand you to say, sir, that the Soviets are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there?” Ford responded, “I don’t believe … that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of these countries is independent, autonomous, it has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
In response Carter said he’d like to see Ford “convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.”
News reports about the debate were dominated by Ford’s statement and its potential effect on the race. Most observers felt the debate proved to be a turning point and the key to Carter’s narrow electoral victory. A post-debate Gallup poll on October 15 showed Carter six percentage points ahead of Ford, 48 percent to 42 percent.
From Business Week:
The sudden war in the Caucasus brought Georgia to heel, reasserted Russia’s claim as the dominant force in the region, and dealt a blow to U.S. prestige. But in this part of the world, diplomacy and war are about oil and gas as much as they are about hegemony and the tragic loss of human life. Victory in Georgia now gives Russia the edge in the struggle over access to the Caspian’s 35 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas. The probable losers: the U.S. and those Western oil companies that have bet heavily on the Caspian as one of the few regions where they could still operate with relative freedom.
At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.
But after the mauling Georgia got, “any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead,” says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn. The risk of building a pipeline through countries vulnerable to the wrath of Russia is just too high.
The Russia-Georgia war thus may have dealt a blow to 15 years of American economic diplomacy. Back in the mid-1990s, Clinton Administration officials looking at a map of the recently dismantled Soviet Union grasped a singular fact about its southern perimeter: The newly independent countries there were overflowing with oil and natural gas but had to ship it via Russia to reach customers. Without pipelines of their own, the Caspian states would never fully develop their energy industries, or be politically independent of Russia. The lack of pipelines also curbed the export potential of companies like Chevron, which owns half of Tengiz, the giant Kazakhstan oilfield. After first resisting, BP and Chevron backed the American pipeline strategy.
Is it just me or is the tension - and soon, lack of civility - between Russia and the USA greater now than it was during the Cold War?:
President Vladimir Putin has withdrawn Russia from a key post-cold war international arms treaty, paving the way for the deployment of Russian forces closer to Europe.
The withdrawal of Russian participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty was signed into law today.
The United States, the European Union and Nato had urged Putin not to suspend the treaty, seen as a cornerstone of European security.
Read more.
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