The Chicken Run: Delivering KFC Via Smuggling Tunnel To Gaza, Not Too Fast but Satisfying

By FARES AKRAM: GAZA CITY - The French fries arrive soggy, the chicken having long since lost its crunch. A 12-piece bucket goes for about $27 here — more than twice the $11.50 it costs just across the border in Egypt.

And for fast-food delivery, it is anything but fast: it took more than four hours for the KFC meals to arrive here on a recent afternoon from the franchise where they were cooked in El Arish, Egypt, a journey that involved two taxis, an international border, a smuggling tunnel and an heroic young entrepreneur (Big X?) coordinating it all from a small shop here called Yamama — Arabic for pigeon.

“It’s our right to enjoy that taste the other people all over the world enjoy,” said the entrepreneur, Khalil Efrangi, 31, who started Yamama a few years ago with a fleet of motorbikes ferrying food from Gaza restaurants, the first such delivery service here.

There are no name-brand fast-food franchises on this 140-square-mile coastal strip of 1.7 million Palestinians, where the entry and exit of goods and people remain restricted and the unemployment rate is about 32 percent.

Peter Schiff Speaks At 2013 Las Vegas MoneyShow

SchiffReport

JAPAN: Why stimulate and inflate at this level is a crisis waiting to happen

Fudging the growth curve will build one Fujiyama of a debt, and a full-on Asian depression

The Slog: You often hear older hacks saying, “It’s a slow news day today”. As a blog-commentator, I long for slow news days. Slow news days are the ones where you actually stand a chance of getting to the bottom of something. Today is a very big and fast news day, so although it’s already 11.30 am here in France, I’ve got nothing of any value done at all.

Unfortunately, it’s a bad news day today, and that rhymes with J, and that stands for Japan.

The Truthseeker: Wall Street $$$$s the world

RT: Meet the Wall Street-International Monetary Fund Brothers of Destruction; why Ben Bernanke can't count; the 10-year hangover from the Tequila Trap; and the fox guarding the chicken coop. Seek truth from facts with Econned author Yves Smith, Web of Debt author Ellen Brown, former senior financial regulator Bill Black, Balkans specialist Nebojsa Malic, and globalization debunker Dr. Carlos Encinas. Source

Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out

Charles Hugh Smith: What happens to everyone in the ruling Elites and those desperately trying to join the ruling Elites when the debt-serfs stop paying and the tax donkeys drift away to lower-cost, lower-income lifestyles?

Turn on, tune in, drop out was a famous slogan of the 1960s counterculture popularized by Timothy Leary, who stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City in 1966.

Tune in referred to gaining an awareness of the countercultural spectrum of ideas and values, turn on referred to mind-expansion via psychedelics and drop out meant to drop out of conventional society; Leary later explained that "drop out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change."

Big Mac Index Exposes Flawed Inflation Data + Japanese Rally Will End in Tears + Bankster Peer Pressure

SchiffReport

Sen. Jeff Merkley planning to push amendment repealing ‘Monsanto Protection Act’

By Madison Ruppert: According to a report, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is planning on proposing an amendment to the upcoming farm bill repealing the rider known as the “Monsanto Protection Act.”
The rider quietly attached to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 resulted in a great deal of public outrage, leading to an apology from Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). Now it seems Sen. Merkley is trying to reverse the legislation after the massive outcry.
The “Monsanto Protection Act” is incredibly controversial because it allows Monsanto and similar companies to sell genetically engineered seeds even if a court order is issued to stop it.
A Merkley aide told the Huffington Post that Merkley will be pushing to get a floor vote on his amendment when the farm bill is taken up by the Senate next week.
Monsanto has won some major victories lately, not the least of which was the Monsanto Protection Act. The agricultural giant recently had the Supreme Court side with them over a landmark patent lawsuit and as a result, backed their notorious licensing agreement.

MOYERS ON WATERGATE - WB7

Soros Fund Buys over $25 million in gold equity call options

By Tekoa Da Silva: In a 13-F release issued by the SEC after market close yesterday, it was reported that Soros Fund Management LLC, founded and chaired by billionaire financier George Soros, significantly increased its gold related holdings, most notably, through the purchase of over $25 million dollars worth of call options on the GDXJ Junior Gold Miners index.

This stunning move by one of the world’s top performing hedge funds, suggests a powerful surge ahead for gold equities. It should be noted, that in the forty years prior to 2010, the Soros Fund averaged a 20% annual rate of return.
A breakdown of the 13-F data indicates that during the first quarter, the Soros Fund:
1. Maintained a $32mm stake in individual miners.
2. Added a staggering 1.1 million shares of GDX to its holdings, at a reported price of $37.84 per share. Total Soros Fund GDX holdings now stand at 2.666 million shares, at a reported value of over $100,000,000.

Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write

The H: Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

A reader informed heise Security that he had observed some unusual network traffic following a Skype instant messaging conversation. The server indicated a potential replay attack. It turned out that an IP address which traced back to Microsoft had accessed the HTTPS URLs previously transmitted over Skype. Heise Security then reproduced the events by sending two test HTTPS URLs, one containing login information and one pointing to a private cloud-based file-sharing service. A few hours after their Skype messages, they observed the following in the server log:

Pentagon plans to fight it's fascist ‘War of Terror’ for ever and ever

RT: Even after the panto cutting off the head of al-CIA-da, the United States Department of Defense doesn’t believe an end to it's war of terror is in sight. On Thursday, one Pentagon official predicted the mission against al-CIA-da could continue for another two decades.
Speaking to the Senate Armed Services early Thursday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Michael Sheehan said the Pentagon has no plans to pull out of its almost 12-year-old war overseas.
When asked for his take on how long the US war of terror could go on for, Sheehan told lawmakers, “At least 10 to 20 years.”
According to US President Barack Obama, the last combat troops will move out of Afghanistan in 2014. If remarks from Sheehan and others are at all accurate, though, in reality the war could last through the 2030s.

Fascist Gulag: Guantanamo Bay Cuba - 100 days of hunger strike + **bawbag special** BBC Sucks O Cocks News

The Artist Taxi Driver