Archive for March, 2010
Chavez Seals Arms-for-Oil Deal With ‘Europe’s Last Dictator’
March 31st, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
FoxNews - By Ed Barnes
While most experts say the deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doesn’t change the balance of arms in the region, they do concede that it represents a strengthening of Chavez’s military might.
Since 1992, when America cut off the sale of arms and spare parts to Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has been cobbling together a military machine made up mainly of weapons from Russia and other non-Western suppliers. Last week, in an oil-for-arms deal with “Europe’s last dictator,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Chavez was able to add a key element to his growing arsenal: advanced ground-to-air radar.
While most experts say the deal itself doesn’t change the balance of arms in the region, they do concede that it represents a strengthening of Chavez’s military might. Moreover, they say the deal also cements an alliance between the respective bad boys of their continents and allows both some wiggle room in their relations with nearby dominant powers.
See complete story at FoxNews:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/03/31/chavez-military-lukashenko-president/?test=latestnews
Praying to God for Help -Unprecedented Flooding
March 31st, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
FoxNews
For Flooded Northeast, the Worst Is Yet to Come
AP
“None of us alive have seen the flooding that we are experiencing now or going to experience,” Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri said Tuesday night. “This is unprecedented in our state’s history.”
CRANSTON, R.I. — Flooding on a scale rarely seen in New England forced hundreds of residents from their homes Wednesday, overwhelmed sewage systems and isolated communities as it washed out bridges and rippled across thoroughfares from Maine to Connecticut.
As three days of record-breaking rains tapered to a drizzle, forecasters warned the worst of widespread flooding was still ahead as rivers and streams had yet to crest — for the second time in a month.
In Rhode Island, which bore the brunt of the storm, residents were experiencing the worst flooding in more than 100 years. Stretches of Interstate 95, the main route linking Boston to New York, were closed and could remain so for days. Amtrak suspended trains through the area because of water on the tracks.
Every resident of Rhode Island, a state of about 1 million, was asked to conserve water and electricity because of flooded sewage systems and electrical substations. Rising waters either stranded hundreds of people or sent them to shelters. Many of those who stayed behind appeared shell-shocked, still recovering from floods two weeks ago caused by as much as 10 inches of rain.
Monica Bourgeois, 45, cried Wednesday morning as she stood outside her home in Cranston, where a sewer pump station gave out and hundreds of residents had evacuated by early Wednesday. The Pawtuxet River had turned her lawn into a lake and flooded her basement with six feet of still-rising water.
“It’s over the furnace. We’re afraid it’s going to hit the electrical panel. It’s so awful. The whole basement is destroyed. The whole basement is under water,” she said.
“I have absolutely no idea how we’re going to pay for this. I’m extremely, extremely worried. Do you know how much a new furnace costs? We’re just praying to God for some help.”
See complete story at FoxNews:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/30/meterologists-expect-dangerous-flooding-drench-east-coast/
Federal Spending - Fedspending.org
March 30th, 2010. Published under Government Data Research. No Comments.
Searchable databases on government contracts and grants - search where the money goes!
State debt woes grow too big to camouflage
March 30th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
MSNBC-NewYorkTimes
Economist: ‘When an accident is waiting to happen, it eventually does’
California, New York and other states are showing many of the same signs of debt overload that recently took Greece to the brink — budgets that will not balance, accounting that masks debt, the use of derivatives to plug holes, and armies of retired public workers who are counting on benefits that are proving harder and harder to pay.
And states are responding in sometimes desperate ways, raising concerns that they, too, could face a debt crisis.
New Hampshire was recently ordered by its State Supreme Court to put back $110 million that it took from a medical malpractice insurance pool to balance its budget. Colorado tried, so far unsuccessfully, to grab a $500 million surplus from Pinnacol Assurance, a state workers’ compensation insurer that was privatized in 2002. It wanted the money for its university system and seems likely to get a lesser amount, perhaps $200 million.
Connecticut has tried to issue its own accounting rules. Hawaii has inaugurated a four-day school week. California accelerated its corporate income tax this year, making companies pay 70 percent of their 2010 taxes by June 15. And many states have balanced their budgets with federal health care dollars that Congress has not yet appropriated.
‘On the edge’
Some economists fear the states have a potentially bigger problem than their recession-induced budget woes. If investors become reluctant to buy the states’ debt, the result could be a credit squeeze, not entirely different from the financial strains in Europe, where markets were reluctant to refinance billions in Greek debt.
See complete story at msnbc:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36093984/ns/business-the_new_york_times/
Iowa Town Renames Good Friday to ‘Spring Holiday’
March 29th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
ABC News - By RUSSELL GOLDMAN
Citing the Separation of Church and State, Davenport Nixes Holy Day
One week before the most solemn day in the Christian year, the city of Davenport, Iowa removed Good Friday from its municipal calendar, setting off a storm of complaints from Christians and union members whose contracts give them that day off.
“My phone has been ringing off the hook since Saturday,” said city council alderman Bill Edmond. “People are genuinely upset because this is nothing but political correctness run amok.”
Edmond said the city administrator made the change unilaterally and did not bring it to the council for a vote, a requirement for a change in policy.
“The city council didn’t know anything about the change. We were blind sided and now we’ve got to clean this mess up. How do you tell people the city renamed a 2,000 year old holiday?” said Edmond.
It didn’t take long for the city the resurrect the name Good Friday. Malin was overruled today and the words “Spring Holiday” disappeared.
Good Friday commemorates the day Jesus was crucified and died. Christians celebrate his resurrection the following Sunday, Easter.
To learn more, please continue the story at ABC News:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/iowa-town-renames-good-friday/story?id=10233061
World Opinion: Israel’s Right to Exist on Trial
March 28th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
CBN- Chris Mitchell - CBN News Middle East Bureau Chief
JERUSALEM, Israel — Next month, Israel celebrates its 62nd anniversary as a nation. With the approach of this milestone, many believe Israel faces two of the greatest threats to its survival.
The first is a potential nuclear Iran. The second could be just as dangerous: The spreading notion that the world would be a better place without Israel.
Growing Anti-Zionism?
- At the University of California’s Irvine campus, Muslim students shouted down Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren 11 times.
- On Turkey’s national television, a prime-time special portrayed Israeli soldiers executing Palestinian women and children in cold blood.
- Former Israel Defense Forces Chief Moshe Y’allon cancelled his trip to Spain fearing he’d be arrested on charges of war crimes.
- In March, dozens of cities held “Israel Apartheid Week,” comparing the Jewish nation to the former apartheid state of South Africa.
So what’s happening from the U.S. West Coast to the West Bank and around the world?
‘Delegitimizing’ Israel
When Israel was founded in 1948, its enemies outnumbered and out-gunned tiny Israel on the battlefield. But more than 60 years later, Israel boasts the strongest military in the Middle East.
No longer able to defeat Israel militarily, some say Israel’s enemies have shifted to another battlefield — the worldwide court of public opinion.
It’s spreading the notion that Israel is so bad, so racist, and so evil, it no longer has a right to exist. It’s an attempt to wipe Israel off the map, not with a nuclear bomb, but with slander and to promulgate the idea of a world without Israel.
Supporters of Israel see a very real and growing threat, a campaign - often coordinated - to delegitimize Israel, to undermine the very existence of the Jewish state.
“No more money for Israel’s crimes,” shouted one Anti-Israel demonstrator.
“You have an alliance of what many have called the Red/Green Alliance where you have on the one hand the leftists — political movements both in the United States and in Europe and throughout the western world joining forces very openly with Islamists — with radical Muslims and even moderate Muslims for that matter, saying that Israel has not a right to exist,” Caroline Glick, managing editor of The Jerusalem Post told CBN News.
“My concern is that other people — liberals, people of good will, people who don’t know much about this area — will fall into this trap and accept and slowly accept the notion that Israel is the new pariah,” said Shmuel Ben-Shmuel, director of the World Jewish Affairs in Israel’s foreign ministry.
See complete story at CBN:
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2010/March/Israel-on-Trial-in-the-World-Court-of-Public-Opinion/
The 4-Year Hunt for the Honey Bee Killer
March 27th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
CBS NEWS
New Urgency to Solve Mystery As Harsh Winter Further Drops Supply of Insects Crucial to Food Production
Excerpts:
CBS) Among beekeepers, the buzz this spring is about more colonies of honeybees dying.
CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports researcher Jerry Bromenshenk has been tracking the bee die-off for four years. This year ranks with the worst.
The die off, known as “Colony Collapse Disorder,” has killed about 30 percent of the hives in the United States over the past four winters. That’s a total of three to four million hives gone, with a loss of billions of bees. Each hive can be home to 30,000 bees or more.
….
Finding out why bees are no longer coping is getting urgent. Without bees to pollinate crops, we’d lose about a third of the food we eat.
“If you like something more than oatmeal for breakfast, if you like fruits and vegetables, things like that, that’s the things bees contribute to our diet,” says Pettis.
While its not unusual for people to be afraid of bees, perhaps what we should really fear is that one day we won’t have them at all.
Read the entire story along with videos at CBS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/25/eveningnews/main6333504.shtml?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesAreaMain;cbsnewsLeadStoriesHeadlines
CBO: Debt Will Rise to 90% of GDP
March 26th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
NEWSMAX
By: David M. Dickson
President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.
In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.
“An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying.”
The federal public debt, which was $6.3 trillion ($56,000 per household) when Mr. Obama entered office amid an economic crisis, totals $8.2 trillion ($72,000 per household) today, and it’s headed toward $20.3 trillion (more than $170,000 per household) in 2020, according to CBO’s deficit estimates.
That figure would equal 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product in 2020, up from 40 percent at the end of fiscal 2008. By comparison, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 109 percent at the end of World War II, while the ratio for economically troubled Greece hit 115 percent last year.
“That level of debt is extremely problematic, particularly given the upward debt path beyond the 10-year budget window,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
See complete story at NewsMax:
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/CBO-Debt-90-percent/2010/03/26/id/353921
Cyber Attack on U.S. Firms, Google Traced to China
March 24th, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
FOXNews.com
An Obama administration official told The Washington Times the U.S. was able, with some confidence, to link the cyber attack on Google and other U.S. companies, to Chinese government organs.
The cyber attack on Google and other U.S. companies was part of a suspected Chinese government operation launched last year that used human intelligence techniques and high-technology to steal corporate secrets, U.S. government and private-sector cybersecurity specialists told The Washington Times.
More worrying is the likelihood that the cyber attacks that led Google this week to end its cooperation with Beijing-controlled censorship and move its search engine service to Hong Kong included planting undetectable software on American company networks that could allow further clandestine access or even total control of computers in the future.
For complete article please go to FoxNews:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/24/cyber-attack-firms-google-traced-chinese/
Fox News Poll: 79% Say U.S. Economy Could Collapse
March 23rd, 2010. Published under World News Blog. No Comments.
FOXNEWS
Most American voters believe it’s possible the nation’s economy could collapse, and majorities don’t think elected officials in Washington have ideas for fixing it.
The latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent).
Just 18 percent think the economy is “so big and strong it could never collapse.”
Moreover, 78 percent of voters believe the federal government is “larger and more costly” than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent).
Who has a plan for dealing with the economy?
Overall, 35 percent of voters think the Obama administration has a clear plan for fixing the economy, down from 42 percent last summer (July 21-22, 2009).
Please go to FoxNews for complete story:
