Iran intends to boost the volume of its oil swaps to 200,000 barrels per day by March 20, 2012.
Iranian officials say that by using newly devised mechanisms, the demand for trading oil through barter deals, rather than using cash, is climbing.
The barters involve swapping oil related products, such as crude oil for refined fuel.
Iran is the second largest oil exporter within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has voted to recommend Palestine for full membership. According to Israeli media, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a warning: “I…would urge the governing body of UNESCO to think again before proceeding with that vote because the decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations.”
The United States has threatened to stop paying its portion of UNESCO funding if it recognizes Palestine as a full member.
UNESCO has the authority to give a country full membership, even if the state is not recognized by the United Nations Security Council.
UNESCO has 58 members. 40 voted in favor of putting the Palestinian matter to a vote. 14 abstained. The United States, Germany, Romania and Latvia voted no.
The U.S. has also threatened to end financial aid going to Palestinians, if they become a UN recognized state. Many Israelis are worried that the U.S. will use that to justify ending financial aid to Israel as well. Aid to Palestinians is a drop in the bucket compared to what the U.S. gives Israel.
“The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. So while some folks may hear that we are departing in 2014 as a result of the Lisbon conference and the transition, we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”-John Allen, General USMC
The original publicly, and loudly stated goal of invading Afghanistan was to get Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda. A secondary goal was to topple the Taliban government. All those goals have been achieved, but General Allen says we’re not leaving.
The United States could be in Afghanistan for decades. Maybe we’ll even invade Pakistan, especially since the U.S. main stream media is now touting the Pentagon’s claims that the Taliban are using Pakistan as a base of operations.
There are Pakistanis that might call themselves Taliban, but the word means Student! So how many people are simply calling themselves a student, and U.S. intelligent agents are taking it as Terrorist?
Then there’s the Haqqani “network” which is nothing more than a family run freedom fighter operation (notice that any freedom fighter in Afghanistan is automatically labeled Taliban by the media), after all we invaded them, not the other way ’round! Once again, not one Afghan was involved with 9/11! Just as well, not one Pakistani was involved with 9/11!
Another thing, the majority of Afghans (42%) are Pashtun, they just happen to make up most of the members of the political organization called Taliban. Many of the people in northwestern Pakistan are Pashtun (second largest ethnic group in Pakistan). They are direct relatives of those in Afghanistan. That’s because northwestern Pakistan used to be part of the Kingdom of Afghanistan (before the British took control, in fact there was no Pakistan until after World War 2).
So, from the view point of the Pashtuns (who’re considered the dominant ethnic Afghans) they are not “using” Pakistan as a base, because they see that area of Pakistan as their ancestral Afghan territory to begin with. This is one of the reasons the Pakistani government is so hesitant to take direct military control over that region. Ever since the creation of Pakistan the northwestern territory has actually been under direct control of the Pashtuns.
Basically the United States has decided to wage war with the majority of the people in that region, in order to impose upon them a government run by a pro-U.S. minority. Sounds like Vietnam.
Towards the end of the war between the U.S. and Vietnam many people warned that the U.S. had to stay in Vietnam to prevent possible attacks against U.S. territories by Vietnamese commie terrorists. Gee, I guess we’re still waiting for those dreaded Vietnamese attacks, 36 years later!
Just because the main stream media isn’t reporting it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. For months now U.S. supported Israel has been launching ground raids into West Bank and Gaza Strip, while also launching air strikes on Gaza Strip.
Now the United Nations is finally saying something about it! The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says the amount of violence brought against Palestinians, by the Israeli military, has increased in the past year.
The number of Palestinian civilians killed or injured is a third higher than last year. Add to that the fact that illegal Israeli settlers have been on the warpath. Violent acts by settlers are up 38% compared to last year!
Just in the past few weeks Israeli settlers have forced Palestinians off their property, burned their homes, uprooted their olive trees and burned them, and just a few days ago attacked and tried to burn down a mosque. They also burned several Qur’ans.
Clearly Israel is at war with Palestine.
A Chinese newspaper gathered data from studies done around the world, about wealth, and the people who have it, and found that many common myths about having lots of money are false.
I always heard that “money doesn’t buy happiness”, turns out that’s a lie. One study, by Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, concluded:
1) Rich people are happier than poor people.
2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.
However, Psychologist David Myers says the degree of happiness depends on the relative disparity between the rich and the poor. Apparently the more impoverished a country is, the more happier the rich bastards become (is that why Wall Street is trying to take down main street U.S.A.?).
Also, University of Michigan researcher Ronald Inglehart discovered that once a person becomes wealthy, it takes even more and more money to keep them happy, like a drug addict (again, is that why Wall Street is trying to take down main street U.S.A.?).
What about the myth of suicides and rich people losing their money? Many people think of the Crash of ’29, when supposedly dozens of people jumped to their deaths, from their high rise offices, after losing all their money in the stock markets.
While some rich people do kill themselves, people living in poverty are still more likely to end it all. Several studies have been done, including by the UN World Health Organization, and they conclude that the majority of suicides involve people living in rural (poor) areas!
The Global Social Crisis: Report on the World Social Situation 2011
Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights, and the Agrarian Crisis in India
Poverty, Mental Illness and Suicide Linked
30 September 2011, for the first time since the March nuclear disaster, the Japanese government has found plutonium contamination outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuke plant compound.
There have been at least three other times plutonium was found. A couple of times it was found within the perimeter of the nuclear plant’s compound, but, in June a university team found plutonium outside the Fukushima Daiichi compound.
This latest (government confirmed) plutonium contamination was found 45 km (28 miles) outside the nuclear plant. It was detected in samples taken from six locations in the towns of Futaba, Namie and Iitate Village in Fukushima Prefecture, all northwest of the nuclear plant.
The isotopes included plutonium 238, 239 and 240.
Four university professors in four days, that’s how many have been assassinated by so called ‘democracy’ demonstrators in Syria. What does killing professors have to do with achieving democracy?
The latest professor to be killed was a nuclear engineer. Mmmm, does anybody suspect Israeli Mossad?
Along with the professors a police commander was also assassinated in the past four days.
“I think that the fact that there are links that exist between the Pakistani government and the Haqqani network, the nature of those can be assessed and is complicated. But there is no question that they have safe havens in Pakistan.”– Jay Carney, White House spokesman
September 28, U.S. President Barack Obama has endorsed the claims of Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who accused Pakistan’s intelligence agency of “exporting” violence to Afghanistan.
In 1969 President Nixon (a Republican) secretly ordered the bombing of Cambodia and Laos (Operation Menu), believing they were helping the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. The Operation Menu bombing lasted from March 1969 to May 1970, and failed to stop Viet Cong, or North Vietnam’s efforts to unite the country. The failure led to Nixon making peace with the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.
Will Obama (a Democrat) follow in Nixon’s footsteps?
But wait, we’re already bombing Pakistan with our UAVs. Oh, but the U.S. was already secretly bombing Cambodia under President Johnson (a Democrat), four years before President Nixon! It turns out that Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and Laos were simply an escalation of Johnson’s actions.
U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Obama had to consider military action against Pakistan.
“Right now there is a very serious threat to global peace: a new cycle of colonial wars, which started in Libya, with the sinister goal of refreshing the capitalist global system, within a structural crisis today, but without any limit to its consumer and destructive voracity.”-Nicolas Maduro Moros, Foreign Minister of Venezuela
Moros says the war in Libya was pushed by the mainstream media: “The logic of war having its spearhead in transnational mass media: let us bear in mind that the ‘Libyan Case’ was brought before the Security Council on the basis of intense propaganda by the western mass media, who lied about the alleged bombing of innocent civilians by the Libyan Air Force, not to mention the grotesque media setting of the Green Square of Tripoli.”
Moros points out that the so called no fly zone was anything but: “It’s worth wondering: what has the no-fly zone established by Security Council resolution become? How could NATO perform more than 20,000 missions against Libyan people if there was a no-fly zone? After the Libyan Air Force was completely annihilated, the continued ‘humanitarian’ bombing shows that the west, through NATO, intends to impose their interests in North Africa, turning Libya into a colonial protectorate.”
Moros points out that NATO violated the arms embargo they were supposed to be enforcing: “How can we say that an arms embargo was imposed on Libya, when it was NATO itself that introduced thousands of heavy weapons to support a violent upheaval against that country’s legitimate government? The embargo was, of course, meant to prevent the Libyan government from defending its sovereignty. This shows, once again, the cruel logic of international relations, where the law only applies to the weak.”
Moros warns that the United Nations is a puppet of Europe and the United States, and that will be the UN’s undoing: “If its secretary-general, along with the president of the International Criminal Court, take part in an act of war, as in the case of Libya, nothing can be expected from the current structure of this organization and there is no longer time for reforms: the UN does not accept any reform whatsoever, the illness within it is deadly.”
“The fact that British soldiers are reduced to watching what are effectively snuff movies shows the complete failure of the project in Afghanistan. It’s nothing to do with democracy, but a failure of war that is trickling down and resulting in a mental degradation among ground troops. Afghanistan is a dreadful situation and it is no better than it was a decade ago.”-Andrew Burgin, Stop the War Coalition
Burgin is talking about a documentary that’s being shown to British troops, called Kill TV nights, part of a three part series called Fighting on the Frontline. Officially it’s meant to desensitize troops, but it also justifies killing civilians.
In one scene a commander is actually warning peers not to mention any of the possible war crimes they’ve just committed: “This is not for discussion with anybody else; keep it quiet about what you see up here. It’s not because we’ve done anything wrong. But we might have done.”
In another scene an Afghan woman is targeted, and you can hear the helicopter pilots call her “snake with tits”.
A voice in the documentary sums up the attitude of the evil British Red Coat military: “I have absolutely no dramas with it. None at all. I don’t really care whether they think it’s a fair fight.”
I wounder if this will be the same attitude used against the people of the United Kingdom, when the protests really get going?