19 Jan 2013

Point blank: Man aims gun at head of Bulgarian politician during speech

RT: A man boarded the stage and pointed a gas pistol at the head of a leading Bulgarian politician in front of a stunned party conference. Angry parliamentarians then pounced, beating him to a bloody pulp.
­Ahmed Dogan, the leader of the Turkish minority MRF party, known as the kingmaker of Bulgarian politics, was delivering an emotional speech in which he was about to announce that he was stepping down as chief of the party he founded in 1990.
Local video footage then shows a tall, heavily-built man wearing a laminated badge, later named as Oktai Enimehmedov, running into view, before holding the pistol an inch away from Dogan’s face. Dogan flinches, and Enimehmedov pauses for a second without firing, before the politician rapidly regains his composure and pushes away the assailant’s hand. Security personnel then run onto the stage, and overwhelm the failed assassin. What follow are unedifying scenes of a swarm of furious politicians repeatedly kicking and punching Enimehmedov on the ground as blood streams from his head.
It is not clear if Enimehmedov planned to shoot, as he appeared to have sufficient time to pull the trigger before Dogan even noticed him.

Frenzy in the Gold Market: The Repatriation of Germany’s Post World War II Gold Reserves

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky: The decision of Germany’s Bundesbank to repatriate part of its Gold Reserves held at the New York Federal Reserve bank has triggered a frenzy in the gold market.
German news sources suggest that a large portion of the German gold stored in the vaults of the New York Fed and the Banque de France is to be moved back to Germany.
According to analysts, this move could potentially trigger a chain reaction, prompting other countries to start repatriating the gold stored in London, New York or Paris…. “

If gold repatriation becomes a worldwide trend, it will be obvious that both the US and UK have lost their credibility as gold custodians. For gold markets worldwide, this move may mark a switch from “financial gold” to “physical gold”, but the process is definitely in its early stages.
The decision to repatriate the German gold is a big victory for a part of the German press that first forced the Bundesbank to admit that 69% of its gold is stored outside Germany. Almost certainly both the German press and at least several German lawmakers will demand a verification procedure for the gold bars returned from New York, just to make sure that Germany doesn’t receive gold-plated tungsten instead of gold. It seems that German decision makers no longer trust their American partners.

Welcome Home German Gold + Everyone Flee! - Max Keiser with Doug Casey

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the currency war masquerading as a 'storage plan,' the Bond Kings threatening the gold repatriating Germany with having a Libya done to them and the Mexican taco stand in Florida advising customers to invest in silver. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Doug Casey of CaseyResearch.com about German gold, Glenn's Gulch and future war. Source

US AFRI-CON: ‘Pentagon’s hand behind French intervention in Mali’

As French soldiers pour into Mali in the fight to push back the advancing so called 'Islamist militants', questions have been raised as to the motives behind the imperialist war. Author William Engdahl told RT the US was using France as a scapegoat to save face.
RT: At a time when France and the rest of the Eurozone are trying to weather the economic crisis, what's Paris seeking to gain by getting involved in another conflict overseas?
French soldiers walk past a hangar they are staying at the Malian army air base in Bamako. (Reuters / Joe Penney)William Engdahl: Well, I think the intervention in Mali is another follow-up to the French role in other destabilizations that we’ve seen, especially in Libya last year with the toppling of the Gadhafi regime. In a sense this is French neocolonialism in action.
But, interestingly enough, I think behind the French intervention is the very strong hand of the US Pentagon which has been preparing this partitioning of Mali, which it is now looming to be, between northern Mali, where al-Qaeda and other terrorists are supposedly the cause for French military intervention, andsouthern Mali, which is a more agricultural region. Because in northern Mali recently there have been huge finds of oil discovered, so that leads one to think that it’s very convenient that these armed rebels spill over the border from Libya last year and just at the same time a US-trained military captain creates a coup d’état in the Southern capital of Mali and installs a dictatorial regime against one of Africa’s few democratically elected presidents.
So this whole thing bears the imprint of US Africom [US Africa Command] and an attempt to militarize the whole region and its resources. Mali is a strategic lynchpin in that. It borders Algeria which is one of the top goals of these various NATO interventions from France, the US and other sides. Mauritania, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso. All of this area is just swimming in untapped resources, whether it be gold, manganese, copper.

What is to be done with the lawyers?

We have brakes to stop progress in Britain. They’re called solicitors.
The Slog: Of all the people who get in the way of things getting better in Britain – the civil servants, bankers, bean-counters, legislators and media gargoyles – none can top the lawyer for sheer destructive, bp-raising self-interest and pedantic idiocy. The problem is that they remain an immovable object in the way of progress: self-regulated by the dubious Law Society, allowed to encourage litigation using advertising, charging by the hour when they can, and an absolutely dominant influence in the legislature.
Now however, things have become even worse purely because it’s slightly easier to sue them for incompetence and malpractice than it used to be. New rules from the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority (SRA) spell out why and how the legals can be held accountable for mistakes, financial fiddles, and overly aggressive pursuit of libel claims. Some of the rules look very grand in writing, but they’re largely ignored in practice….as we have seen with Lord McAlpine and his best friend Andrew Reid. However, the lawyer being by nature paranoid, to incompetence and criminality we can now add anal caution as their normal mode of procedure.
When I bought our current house, the lawyer completely failed to spot a planning permission in the adjoining field. A large suburban house duly appeared there, and so we decided to sue the solicitor for dereliction. The next lawyer we approached agreed that it was an open and shut case, but told us “They will deny it for a few months and send a lot of letters back and forth, all of which will cost you money. Then they’ll hand the case over to their liability insurers, and they in turn will run you round the houses for several years, until a Court case finally takes place and you win. The damages will be laughably inadequate, and you’ll be out of pocket to the tune of around ten grand. Do you still want to sue them?” Of course, we didn’t.

Massive Fraud in Spain Threatens Entire Government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy; Protestors in Madrid Shout "Resignation"

Mish: I am piecing together a story of fraud and corruption involving the highest levels of Spanish government. My unnamed sources think it could bring down Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
However, the news articles I have (primarily in Spanish) are particularly choppy.

The brief background story is "black money" (under the table fraud or bribes) was paid monthly to top Partido Popular (PP) party leaders.

PP is the party of prime minister Rajoy. Amounts ranged from 5,000 to 15,000 euros per month, between executive secretaries, public officials and other members of the PP. Top party officials were aware of, approved, or were part of the scheme.

Ex-Treasurer Hides €22 million in Swiss Account
Starting with an article in English, the Irish Times reports Ex-treasurer of Spain's PP had €22m in Swiss bank

The beleaguered government of Mariano Rajoy has been embarrassed by revelations that its party’s former treasurer had a bank account in Switzerland containing up to €22 million.

Gulag USA: Woman gets $250,000 settlement after being thrown to the ground, hogtied by thug 'police' while pregnant

By Madison Ruppert: Tamara Gaglione was recently paid $250,000 in damages for being pulled over for talking on her cellphone, after which she was thrown to the ground and hogtied by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers on the shoulder of a busy freeway.
This type of behavior, while indeed disgusting, is far from surprising given that police hogtying women isn’t all that rare and a woman died of suffocation last year in the back of a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car after being kicked in the genitals and forced into the vehicle.
In this case, it seems that the dashboard camera is what ultimately held the officers accountable, just as a similar camera did in the case of a 66-year-old man who was beaten for no apparent reason.
The incident occurred in August of 2011 and resulted in charges of evading and resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license, all of which were dropped after a judge saw video footage of the incident captured from a dashboard camera of a CHP cruiser.
30-year-old Gaglione, 2 months pregnant at the time, was pushed face-first into the asphalt after an officer swept her legs with a kick. Another officer used his knee to pin her to the ground, all while she was pregnant.
Howard Price, Gaglione’s attorney, told the Huffington Post that Gaglione could hear officers talking about the video of the encounter on the way to the station.
Yet when Price requested the video in order to present it as evidence in Gaglione’s criminal trial, he was told no footage of the incident existed.

All Hail Kim Dot God

Submitted by Max Keiser:
To explain further, Mega’s terms say that nobody can access your stuff without your personal decryption key. And they don’t have it. Only you do. The company does, however, stipulate in the privacy policy that they might cooperate with law enforcement. But big deal; what are they going to turn over? When Twitter and Facebook cooperate with the authorities, they have access to your data. All Mega has is an encrypted file. Source

"Detonating The Japanese Debt Time Bomb" With Kyle Bass

Tyler Durden's picture The hyper-correlation of Japanese stocks and the JPY have led many to believe that Abe's miracle promise will be just the ticket to bring the nation's two-decade slump to an end - a 2% inflation target is all you need. However, in a brief CNBC interview, Kyle Bass explains that not only are 99.9% of people wrong about the crisis (explaining the critical aspect of the abrupt turn of twenty years of the 'procylicality of thought' - that deflation is the norm), but Abe's actions have actually brought forward the date of the "detonation of Japan's Debt Time Bomb.
It is the Japanese institutions that own JGBs and they own them at meager rates of interest simply because of the ingrained belief in deflation; when the government begins to target 2% inflation, the swing in forward expectations (he notes to monitor inflation swap breakevens) will be the trigger for Japan's implosion. Bass warns that "Japanese debt is around 24x central government tax revenue and when you sail into the zone of insolvency, nothing you can do will help," though he realizes that calling the end of the 70-year debt super-cyle to a specific date is naive, he does expect the 'bomb' to explode within 18 month to two years.
All of the components for this [bomb] to go off 'all of a sudden' are in place.

Facebook democracy: Anti-Zionist Israelis 'share' votes with Palestinians

RT: In a move of high-tech civil disobedience, thousands of Anti-Zionist Israeli citizens are donating their right to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections to their Palestinian neighbors via Facebook.
­The political initiative, called Real Democracy, so far has over 1,400 followers and is allowing Israelis to "donate" their votes for the Palestinian cause, giving their second-class citizen compatriots an opportunity to participate in general elections on Tuesday.
A snapshot of the Real Democracy movement's page on facebook.comThe founders of the initiative call their campaign an act of civil disobedience againstthe undemocratic nature of Israeli electionsthe election of a government which controls four million Palestinians without voting rights," quotes The Guardian.
The goal is to take the action a step further and allow Palestinians a potential say in the Israeli government’s “de facto control over the United Nations Security Council.”
Around a one and a half million Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, the other roughly two and a half million living in the country fall under the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and of Hamas in Gaza – and do not have an opportunity to vote in the elections that ultimately influences their lives.

Corporate Assassins Determine World Order - John Perkins

Abby Martin interviews John Perkins, economist and author of 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman', about how corporations are determining the world order, and how assassins take out those who challenge the system. Source

Zionists demolish a Palestinian village

At 11pm fascist zionist soldiers raided a small Bedouin village in the area of al Zour and al Helgela in the East of Jericho. The 'soldiers' furthermore attacked the residents on site.