World

BBC Report: Chinese Babies Stolen; "Sold"
The BBC is reporting that dozens of Chinese babies have been forcefully taken from their parents by the government and sent into the international adoption system. The report–which I couldn’t find any trace of elsewhere–suggests that families breaking th

Why Germans Supported Hitler
It has long intrigued me why the German people supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. After all, every schoolchild in America is taught that Hitler and his Nazi cohorts were the very epitome of evil. How could ordinary German citizens support people

Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warnin

Food Stamps Create Jobs… in India
Michele Brown has seen Americans' struggles with jobs first hand. She lives in hard-hit Florida, spent 20 years in the real estate business and recently had her days as a nanny cut back after her boss had his own hours reduced.

Dust storms on rise in Western U.S.
Nestled in the San Juan Mountains at 9,300 feet, and surrounded by 13,000-foot peaks, Silverton, Colo., seems an unlikely place for a dust storm, especially with 2 feet of snow on the ground. So Chris Landry was alarmed the afternoon of April 3 when he sa

Crisis Plunges US Middle Class into Poverty
The financial crisis in the US has triggered a social crisis of historic dimensions. Soup kitchens are suddenly in great demand and tent cities are popping up in the shadow of glistening office towers. Even drug dealers are feeling the pinch.

Carbon trading won't stop climate change
ONE day renewable energy looks like a sunrise industry, the next, tumbleweeds are blowing around a setting solar panel. What has changed? The price of emitting carbon dioxide. In 2005 the European Union created the world's first proper carbon market, t

The secret's out: MI5 look for a real-life Q
Home affairs correspondent BRITISH security service MI5 is recruiting a real-life Q to equip its agents with the gadgets James Bond would dream of. The job of chief scientific adviser is being advertised on MI5's website, with the successful applicant e

Pentagon preps for economic warfare
The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis. The two-day event nea

Burger King to scrap ad after complaint
An advertisement for a new Tex-Mex style hamburger hangs in a Burger King window in central Madrid April 14, 2009. Mexico's ambassador to Spain said posters for the new "Texican whopper inappropriately display the Mexican flag, which is draped over a dimi

White House Seeks Bill on Climate by December
BOSTON -- Climate czar Carol Browner said she wants Congress to establish a broad U.S. greenhouse-gas policy before global climate-change talks near the end of the year. Speaking at a conference Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms.

Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions
HONG KONG -- This city's three billionaire Kwok brothers have just the answer for the rising waters threatening the global economy: the world's first life-size replica of Noah's ark, built to biblical specifications off the coast of this recession-struck

Georgia comes to German home schoolers' defense
Uwe Romeike told Associated Press that he moved his wife and five children to Tennessee because they were being persecuted for their evangelical Christian beliefs and home schooling their children in German, where school attendance is compulsory. He said

Rescue a 'true testament' to U.S. Navy
A Navy spokesman says the decision was made to kill the three pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips because Phillips was in "imminent danger" of being killed. He says Phillips was tied up, with his hands bound, as a pirate held an assault rifle to the

Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say
Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center contain highly explosive materials — proof, according to a former BYU professor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery. Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retired from Br

Warren Buffett takes charge
Warren Buffett hasn't just seen the car of the future, he's sitting in the driver's seat. Why he's banking on an obscure Chinese electric car company and a CEO who - no joke - drinks his own battery fluid. Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of inve

Chinese taste for fried food may keep vegetable oils hot despite slump
Permanently changed diets in China and the world's unrelenting appetite for fried food may defy the global recession and trigger a “stagflation” surge in the price of edible oils, commodity traders in Asia have said. Fears are growing that food oil mar

Chinese drywall poses potential risks
PARKLAND, Fla. – At the height of the U.S. housing boom, when building materials were in short supply, American construction companies used millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap. Now that decision is haunting hund

10 ways the new economy will look different
Cooke & Co. was the Bear Stearns of its time, a pillar of national finance. If it could fail, anyone could, and the US stock market collapsed that awful autumn. The price of real estate, railroads, and other hard assets crashed, too. Banks fell like w

Open house, anyone? 1 in 9 homes sit empty
CHANDLER, Ariz. — The white notice taped to the front window of a luxury home in the Vasaro subdivision is a telltale sign. "Bank-owned," says real estate agent John Groves, without skipping a beat. There are other clues. Dirt where a lush lawn shou

Sorry, But The Science Is Never 'Settled'
President Obama has said that the science of global warming is "beyond dispute," and therefore settled. This is the justification for the imposition of a carbon cap-and-trade system that will cost trillion. But Obama does not understand science.

Fire And Ice
Climate Change: An ice shelf in Antarctica begins to break apart, and the global warming hysterics immediately blame human activities for the crackup. Is it possible that there is some other cause?

Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism
Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Heated Controversy
Do firefighters believe 9/11 conspiracy theories? In the new season of the FX drama Rescue Me, firefighter Franco Rivera espouses the belief that 9/11 was "an inside job." According to a Sunday New York Times article, the show's writers added this asse

Giuliani: Obama's Iran Message Is Terrorist Bait (VIDEO)
Rudy Giuliani charged on Wednesday that Barack Obama's recent outreach to Iran -- specifically, the videotape message he offered to the Iranian people several weeks ago -- was actually abetting terrorism in that region. "Sending a videotape message int

Author who predicted crisis sees inflation ahead
NEW YORK (Reuters) - An author who saw the global financial crisis coming fears the next bubble will come in the form of inflation and has little confidence U.S. President Barack Obama's team is up to the challenge ahead. "The Democrats have replaced t

Solution To Drought: It's In The Genes
California is short of more than jobs, money and optimism these days. Several years of drought have dried up reservoirs, parched fields, damaged forests and caused regulators around the state to impose restrictions on water usage. California agricul

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

Making do making milk / Rising costs squeeze dairy farms, but quitting is no simple solution
WEST HAVEN -- Got milk? Kerry Gibson does. He's just not getting paid much for it. Gibson is one of many dairy farmers in Utah losing money every day by trying to make a living. At Gibson's Green Acres farm in West Haven, the state representative

Texas woman calls 911 over shrimp shortage in food
HALTOM CITY, Texas -- A woman called 911 to report she didn't get as much shrimp as she wanted in her fried rice at a Texas restaurant. Haltom City police on Tuesday released the taped emergency call, in which the customer is heard telling the dispat

Deeper Digital Penetration: The expanding invasion of the naked body scanners.
The naked body scanners are taking over. When we first checked in on them two years ago, the scanners, which see through clothing, were being deployed at a single airport. A few months later, they were upgraded to millimeter-wave technology, which deli

Geithner's 'Dirty Little Secret'
The 'dirty little secret' which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial sys

Birds Watch, Too
A significant look across a bar or an office can tell us volumes. Humans are so skilled at reading interest, boredom, fear and joy in other people's eyes that we forget how unique this skill appears to be in nature. Most species, including our cousins and

Has America become numb to tragedy?
PITTSBURGH - Does the name Byran Uyesugi ring a bell? Odds are not. What about Robert A. Hawkins? Or Mark Barton? Terry Ratzmann? Robert Stewart? Each entered the national consciousness when he picked up a gun and ended multiple lives. Uyesugi, 1999, H

A Shift to Make the Border Safe, From the Inside Out
Law enforcement officials have been cracking down on border crime for years. President Bill Clinton had Operation Gatekeeper. And President George W. Bush built a wall. But Ms. Napolitano’s initiative to send an additional 360 agents to the 2,000-mile

Ho-hum – The Collapse of the Dollar
Recently, the news has been rife with reports of the imminent collapse of the dollar. Now, I would have guessed that this story would be of inordinate interest – especially to Americans. What it means, fundamentally, is that their dollars are going

Commodities subject to laws of supply, demand
Unlike financial assets, commodities, for the most part, are subject to the laws of economic gravity -- supply and demand. Higher prices, for example in oil, led to a sharp reduction in demand as people lowered consumption or used substitutes. Falling pr

U.N. 'Climate Change' Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy
A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains

The Three Ways China May Deal With Growing U.S. Debt
“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Premier Wen said. “Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little bit worried. I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its prom

Ventura Details Upcoming Conspiracy TV Show
Ventura told listeners of the nationally syndicated Alex Jones show that the TruTV series he is working on will look into 9/11 and ask questions surrounding the stonewalling of the truth concerning the attacks. "To me that is the question we are going

Scared Cheney puts his head in the noose
So what was Cheney thinking? My guess is that he fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set

Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and

Food costs: Prices starting to get reined in
While prices may still seem painfully high in the supermarket aisles, long-suffering consumers are beginning to see a break in their grocery bills—a bit of good news amid economic gloom. Falling raw material costs coupled with a feeble economy have cur

Army vet billed ,000 for war wounds
(CNN) -- Erik Roberts, an Army sergeant who was wounded in Iraq, underwent his 13th surgery recently to save his right leg from amputation. Imagine his shock when he got a bill for ,000 for his treatment. "I put my life on the line and I was wounded

Hennecke: Trillion Dollar Bailouts Will Lead To Destruction Of Western Currencies
“The budget deficit is already out of control, we might be talking about trillion U.S. dollars, which is 20 per cent of GDP, which is absolutely staggering,” said Hennecke, reiterating that easy money was what caused the problems in the first place. “

Union Pacific Railroad says it has no control over drug smuggling
The Union Pacific Railroad has been butting heads with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for years about drugs found in railcars traveling across the border from Mexico. The U.S. Department of Justice this week filed lawsuits against the railroa

The Big Takeover
CAUTION: If you are sensitive to "spicy" language, don't read this article. It is however, a very informative article about the ongoing bailout of AIG. The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using

Scenes from the recession
The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into

Global gun control
There may good reasons for deploying the National Guard along the U.S.-Mexican border, but illegal firearms isn't one of them. The administration recently launched a study to examine whether soldiers should patrol the Southern border to staunch the flo

Russian president orders military rearmament
Mr Medvedev's bellicose speech risks causing unease in Washington and will dampen hopes of a rapid improvement in strained East-West relations. The president told defence ministry officials in Moscow that Nato's continued enlargement ambitions meant that

Bilderbergers excite conspiracists
The highest levels of the Obama administration are infested with members of a shadowy, elitist cabal intent on installing a one-world government that subverts the will of the American people. It sounds crazy, but that’s what a group of very persistent

Australia's Food Bowl, Like The World's, Is Drying Up
Twelve years ago, the rain stopped falling with any consequence in Australia’s prime food-growing region, bounded on the south by the Murray River and the west by the Darling. The clash between nature and agriculture in the Murray-Darling raised food pric

'Vampire' unearthed from Venice plague grave
Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century. Matteo Borrini, an anthropologi

Tent City
Jobless rate hits 26.7%, by Susan Meeker, Colusa Sun Herald: ...State labor officials estimate more than 2,900 of Colusa County’s 11,000 workers are unemployed, a significant increase in just two months. “We are seeing a lot more people with a higher l

In hard times, tent cities rise across the country
RENO, Nev. - A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer. In Portland, Ore., and Seattle, homeless advocacy groups have paired with nonprofits or fai

China’s Leader Says He Is ‘Worried’ Over U.S. Treasuries
BEIJING — The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao expressed concern on Friday about the safety of China’s 4092 trillion investment in American government debt, the world’s largest such holding, and urged the Obama administration to provide assurances that its invest

Pastor now tells how to prep for imminent catastrophe
A nationally known pastor and author who predicts an imminent catastrophe of God's judgment on America is now telling concerned Christians it is time for peace and preparation, not panic. "This is what I hear the Holy Spirit speaking to my heart concer

Ten Economic Predictions for 2009
I wish that my predictions were a bit more uplifting, but we are truly in dire straits with conditions only continuing to worsen. The United States is essentially bankrupt and running on borrowed money and borrowed time. Many Americans will be facing seve

8 really, really scary predictions
Known as Dr. Doom, the NYU economics professor saw the mortgage-related meltdown coming. We are in the middle of a very severe recession that's going to continue through all of 2009 - the worst U.S. recession in the past 50 years. It's the bursting of

Economic crisis hurts male workers most: U.N.
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world's economic crisis has cost more men their jobs than women in Western countries, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said on Thursday.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez tightens state control of food amid rocketing inflation and food shortages
Venezuela's public finances are unravelling, with oil prices at a barrel, while the national budget is calculated at a barrel. Inflation is running at over 30 per cent, yet with the new measures Mr. Chavez is seeking to ensure that his core suppor

Gates calls Pakistan 'most worrisome'
The "most worrisome" part of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan has become the havens the Taliban and other insurgents have carved out in neighboring Pakistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. Gates said the United States had a similar perch in Paki

Asian Stocks Fall to Five-Year Low as Global Recession Deepens
Asian stocks tumbled, dragging the regional benchmark index to the lowest in more than five years, as declines in Japanese wages and South Korean exports fueled concerns the global recession is deepening. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., Japan’s large

New Tactics in the Fight against Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis is second only to HIV as the worldwide cause of death from infection, and the pandemic is growing in many places. New tools are enabling scientists to study the TB-causing bacterium in greater detail, offering unprecedented insight into th

Kyrgyz president signs off on US base closure
Kyrgyzstan's president has signed a law to close a key US air base used as a staging post for military operations in Afghanistan. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's approval of the law is the last step before Kyrgyz authorities issue an eviction notice, which

Phoenix, kidnap-for-ransom capital
In broad daylight one January afternoon, on a street of ranch-style houses with kidney-shaped swimming pools, Juan Francisco Perez-Torres was kidnapped in front of his wife, daughter and three neighbors. Two men with a gun grabbed the 34-year-old from

Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production
After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks

The pending scramble for water
In 2008, Saudi Arabia ceased to be self sufficient in wheat production. It is looking to access land overseas to grow crops, possibly in Pakistan or the Horn of Africa. China is acquiring agricultural land in Southern Africa for similar purposes. And D

What Michael Phelps Should Have Said
Dear America, I take it back. I don’t apologize. Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months a year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brie

Nearly 7 million Zimbabweans need food aid: UN
HARARE (AFP) - - Zimbabwe's humanitarian disaster is far worse than anticipated with only six percent of the population formally employed and more than half in need of emergency food aid, a UN report said Thursday. Fewer than half a million Zimbabwea

Dispatches from the bottom of the Earth: Heading Home
Marine geophysicist Robin Bell is leading an expedition to Antarctica to explore a mysterious mountain range beneath the ice sheet. How long has it been since a bird landed on those peaks? The data enroute to us now will help us unravel the history and

UN leader in key Pakistan talks
The UN secretary-general has arrived in Pakistan for key talks expected to focus on regional security. Ban Ki-moon is also expected to discuss a possible UN commission into the murder of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.

Canada calls for political solution in Sri Lanka
OTTAWA (AFP) — Canada's top diplomat on Wednesday pressed for a ceasefire in Sri Lanka to allow civilians to escape fighting between government forces and rebels. Sri Lanka's government, which pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce a year ago, has so fa

U.S. becomes top wind producer, solar next
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.

Smooth Election Day In Iraq
Polls have closed throughout Iraq in a recent election, as citizens in this region voted for over 400 council seats. And, as Sheila MacVicar reports, there was little violence during the process.

EU calls for global carbon market
The European Commission wants to build a global carbon trading market as part of a plan to tackle climate change.

Iranian leader seeks US apology
Iran’s president welcomes the possibility of a change in US policy but demands an apology for past US “crimes”.

US envoy calls for end to Hamas weapons smuggling
JERUSALEM – George J. Mitchell, President Obama's special Middle East envoy, met with President Shimon Peres of Israel in Jerusalem on Wednesday as violence flared in Gaza.