Tag Archives | Geopolitics

Western Banks ‘Reaping Billions From Colombian Cocaine Trade’

By on June 3, 2012 in News 8

Reports Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian:

The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

“The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on ‘producing’ nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs,” said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria. ”Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”…

Read More: Guardian… Read the rest

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United States And Israel Confirmed As Behind Stuxnet Virus

By on June 1, 2012 in News 15

imagesIt’s official — Barack Obama covertly made history by engaging in cyberwarfare against Iran. New York Times breaks the news:

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

… Read the rest

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UN Chooses Robert Mugabe As A ‘Leader for Tourism’

By on May 31, 2012 in News 4

Robert MugabeDavid Usborne writes in the Independent:

Never mind that Robert Mugabe is under a travel ban for his cruel stewardship of Zimbabwe since independence. The United Nations, in its wisdom, has designated him a “leader for tourism” and chosen the Victoria Falls, shared with Zambia, as the venue for a holiday industry conference next year.

At the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), based in Madrid, the thinking seems to be: “If the old man can’t visit us then we should visit him.”

The honour was made official when UNWTO head, Taleb Rifai, arrived at the Falls for a ceremony to name Zimbabwe and Zambia co-hosts of the 2013 conference … Kumbi Muchemwa, a spokesman for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said: “I can’t see any justification for the man being an ‘ambassador’. An ambassador for what? The man has blood on his hands. Do they want tourists to see those bloody hands?”…

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Exposing Bilderberg 2012

By on May 30, 2012 in News 32
Bernanke Leaving Bilderberg

Photo: Shepherd Johnson (CC)

Via We Are Change:

For decades, a shadowy and secret elite organization called the Bilderberg Group has plotted policy together that subjugates humanity under the cover of darkness.

On the first day of the Bilderberg Group meeting in Chantilly, VA on May 31st, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange will shine a much needed light on the group’s members and media pundits that have kept details about the group hidden from the American public.

Tune into www.ustream.tv/WeAreChange for a twelve hour broadcast outside the Bilderberg conference to watch twelve never seen before confrontations released live every hour. If you want to continue to hold these politicians accountable and make sure the elites continue to hear the voice of the people, visit and support WeAreChange.org.

We Are Change’s show schedule on Thursday May 31, 2012 10 am to 10 pm:

1. Tony Blair (10am)
2.

… Read the rest

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Selling Software That Kills

By on May 28, 2012 in News 3

Syrian Uprising MapWrites Jon Evans on TechCrunch:

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly “used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents,” and Cisco “has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression.” You can’t help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become.

So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously) track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time.

… Read the rest

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Bilderberg Power Brokers To Meet in Virginia This Week (In Another U.S. Election Year)

By on May 28, 2012 in News 21

Chantilly, VAIs history repeating itself? “Although most Bilderberg annual meetings are held in Europe—France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, England, Scotland, Norway—this US election year they’re again gathering at the Westfield Marriott Hotel in Virginia from May 30 to June 3.  Either they’re very fond of that place … or of US elections… or both…!” Via RT:

Every time a “Bilderberg Meeting” takes place, important things happen. The last time they met in the US was an election year, 2008—and the world got Obama. This year they’re back in the US: will they decide who the next president of the United State

­When in 2008 they gathered from June 5 to 8 in Chantilly, Virginia—just a stone’s throw from the Washington, DC—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were neck-in-neck in the battle for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidacy.

On June 5 of that year, Barack and Hillary mysteriously “disappeared” for some hours “somewhere in the DC area.” Their agendas blocked out, they clearly sneaked off to “Meet the Bilderbergers.”

The media kept mum about that, save for an Associated Press report on the campaign trail saying that, “reporters traveling with Obama sensed something might be happening between the pair (i.e.

… Read the rest

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Russia Wants To Build A Permanent Moon Base

By on May 27, 2012 in News 4

RoscosmosReports Aviation Week:

Mankind’s next objective in space exploration should be the establishment of a permanent international base on the Moon, in the “professional opinion” of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, instead of the near-Earth object (NEO) visit that is the stated goal of U.S. space policy.

Vladimir Popovkin, the Roscosmos head, told the Global Exploration Conference in Washington May 22 that the next big international exploration effort should build on the past 40-plus years of lunar exploration, and not repeat the sortie missions of the Apollo era.

“It’s a new Moon,” Popovkin said of his agency’s concept during a panel appearance with other space agency chiefs. A long-term permanent base could take advantage of the water-ice at the lunar poles, continue exploring the lunar surface, and prepare for the next leap into the Solar System, he says.

The concept, which is roughly the same one NASA pursued under President George W.

… Read the rest

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Teenager Beats Riddle That Baffled Issac Newton

By on May 27, 2012 in News 11

Newton By William BlakeNot bad. How about showing Americans kids how dumb they are? Via the Herald Sun:

Shouryya Ray is the first person to work out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project.

Shouryya won a research award for his efforts and has been labeled a genius by the German media, but he put it down to “curiosity and schoolboy naivety.”

“When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, ‘well, there’s no harm in trying,’” he said. Shouryya’s family moved to Germany when he was 12 after his engineer father got a job at a technical college. He said his father instilled in him a “hunger for mathematics” and taught him calculus at the age of six.

… Read the rest

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