CHINA - As part of their requirements to enter into the SDR basket of currencies in October, China will soon be revealing the quantity of their gold reserves sometime between now and September 30. And with them also recently being appointed the managers of the M SDR internationalization program, debate over China implementing a gold backed currency is once again increasing at an accelerating rate. Whether it is through a gold backed SDR, or a gold backed Yuan, the world is rushing towards a return of some form of a gold standard. And unfortunately for the West, which has been spending their currencies bailing out their banks and propping up their stock markets, China has been the one cultivating economic partnerships that when the time comes, could catapult them into becoming the masters of the next global financial system.
USA - President Barack Obama on Friday vetoed legislation allowing families of victims of the September 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, which could prompt Congress to overturn his decision with a rare veto override, the first of his presidency. Obama said the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would hurt US national security and harm important alliances, while shifting crucial terrorism-related issues from policy officials into the hands of the courts. The bill passed the Senate and House of Representatives in reaction to long-running suspicions, denied by Saudi Arabia, that hijackers of the four US jetliners that attacked the United States in 2001 were backed by the Saudi government. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
VATICAN - The name of God cannot be used to justify violence, while “peace alone, and not war, is holy”, Pope Francis declared at the closing ceremony of yesterday’s gathering of religious leaders in Assisi, held on the 30th anniversary of the first such meeting called by St John Paul II.
USA - Confirming what many had suspected when viewing the sudden and intense collapse into anarchy that occurred in Charlotte this week, Todd Walther, spokesman for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police told CNN's Erin Burnett: "This is not Charlotte that's out here. These are outside entities that are coming in and causing these problems. These are not protestors, these are criminals."
UNITED NATIONS - The third leg of the world's intractable depression is yet to come. If trade economists at the United Nations are right, the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history. It may also prove to be the definitive crisis of globalized capitalism, the demise of the liberal free-market orthodoxies promoted for almost forty years by the Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD, and the Davos fraternity.
UNITED NATIONS - King Felipe VI’s call for Britain to return Gibraltar to Spain has drawn a scathing response from the British overseas territory’s government, with officials blasting the monarch’s “18th century mentality.” The Gibraltarian government was responding to a speech by the king at the UN General Assembly in New York. “On this first occasion at the UN after Brexit, to end the colonial anachronism of Gibraltar with an agreed solution between both countries to restore the territorial integrity of Spain and bring benefits to the people of Gibraltar and the Spanish area of Campo de Gibraltar,” the king said.
UNITED NATIONS - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to come “speak to the Israeli people at the Knesset in Jerusalem,” during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday.
USA - President Barack Obama affirmed this week that the Declaration of Independence recognizes that “individual human beings” have “God-given rights.” Yet, he insisted this was a “radical idea” at the time of the founding. Were he right — which he is not — history would see it as one radical idea Obama did not devoutly pursue.
USA - US film director Oliver Stone on Thursday accused President Barack Obama's administration of implementing a surveillance system worse than that of the feared Stasi secret police in East Germany. Obama "has created… the most massive global security surveillance state that's ever been seen, way beyond East Germany's Stasi, way beyond that. In the name of one thing - terrorism - to change all the rules is not a marginal response, it's an extreme response," he told reporters. "Let's beware of fascists and tyrants who tell us 'we are going to protect you'. I don't want that."
USA - The Obama Administration released a concerning new report this month with recommendations that would chip away at Americans’ religious liberty. The recommendations appear to be thinly veiled attempts to deny Americans their First Amendment right to religious freedom. Commission Chairman Julian Castro wrote some very hostile words in his personal statement in the report: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance … today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.”
USA - Former Assistant Treasury Secretary (in the Reagan Administration) Dr Paul Craig Roberts has a stark warning for the world. Dr Roberts says, “We changed our nuclear doctrine. It used to be we used nuclear weapons only in retaliation. There was no first use, but the George W Bush regime, the Neocons, changed our nuclear doctrine. It’s now a pre-emptive first strike.”
USA - A fresh transatlantic trade war is in the offing after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled against the European Union in a long-running legal battle over billions of pounds of state aid to aviation giant Airbus.
EUROPE - The European Union appeared more fractured than ever today after a powerful group of eastern states laid down a series of demands over migration and the economy. Members of the influential Visegrad group, which comprises of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, rejected migrant quotas and blasted the overbearing EU Commission with an incendiary ultimatum.
MIDDLE EAST - “Surely Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel. But Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land. We all have to do better,” the US president said at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
USA - Charlotte officials say they are preparing for more protests today following a night of violence over a police officer’s fatal shooting of an African-American man Tuesday in the University City area. The dead man was identified as Keith Lamont Scott, 43.