USA - An investigation recently called for by New York governor Andrew Cuomo after the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant reported nuclear material leaking into the area's groundwater reveals a staggering 80% increase in contamination over previous samples.
USA - You might think that government watch lists are reserved for violent radical extremists. You might be wrong. Here is a short list of pretty non-terrifying and easy ways to land yourself on a government watch list.
ISRAEL - Posters glorifying the 9/11 hijackers and late terrorist leader Osama bin Laden were displayed in the city of Mukalla in Yemen this week in a three-day event dubbed “O Aqsa, We Are Coming,” organized by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The event’s title refers to the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. According to a report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the AQAP-affiliated Al-Athir media agency shared photos from the first evening of the event on Twitter, showing hundreds of people, many of them youths, in attendance. The MEMRI report said that the phrase “O Aqsa, we are coming,” has become almost an official sign-off for AQAP in any productions by its official media arm, al-Malahem.
USA - Mitt Romney’s speech did the trick. He convinced me to vote for Donald Trump. …You know they are growing desperate and fearful of losing power and control of this country. The Fed is fearful of him. The global titans of industry fear their outsourcing scheme is going to end. When Trump wraps up the delegates needed, they will either threaten him or outright try and assassinate him. The next 8 months are going to be a wild ride and the outcome will determine in which direction this Fourth Turning turns.
USA - The Republican party descended into full-scale civil war on Thursday, with its last presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, launching withering attacks against current front-runner Donald Trump, who responded with fury.
USA - An ugly wave of rhetoric is showing up on the social media platform Twitter since GOP front runner Donald Trump scored a series of successes on Super Tuesday. Beginning Wednesday, dozens of Tweets appeared, explicitly calling for Donald Trump’s assassination. Most of the tweets appear to be from accounts of black Americans.
UK - The eurozone's fledgling attempts to create a full-blown fiscal union has no democratic legitimacy, one of the single currency's founding fathers has warned. Professor Otmar Issing - a former chief economist at the European Central Bank and architect of the euro - said EU policymakers would not dare put their plans to transfer budgetary sovereignty to Brussels before electorates as they would fail at the first hurdle.
JAPAN - Japan has joined the EU, Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden in imposing negative interest rates. Indeed, more than a fifth of the world’s GDP is now covered by a central bank with negative interest rates. Japan has been desperate to boost consumer spending for years. At one point it even issued shopping vouchers to stimulate demand.
VATICAN - Pope Francis says the Catholic Church won’t accept donations if contributors profit from underpaid labor. The pontiff, who earlier called money the ‘dung of the devil’, stressed the Church needs “hearts that are open to God`s mercy,” not “dirty money.”
MIDDLE EAST - The six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council has designated Lebanon's Hezbollah movement a terrorist group. The GCC's secretary-general accused the Iran-backed Shia group of recruiting youths from Gulf states for attacks. Hezbollah is a key political and military force in Lebanon, and is involved in the conflict in Syria. The GCC decision appears to be the latest measure by Saudi Arabia and its allies aimed at countering Hezbollah's power over Lebanon's government. The GCC's designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation brings it into line with the United States and the European Union, although the latter has only blacklisted the group's military wing.
USA - Are you a religious extremist? For years, world leaders have been endlessly proclaiming that we need to eradicate “extremism”, but what actually is “extremism”? Many would point to the ISIS jihadists over in the Middle East that are beheading people that don’t agree with them as examples of religious extremists, and I think that very few people would argue with that.
USA - The Daily Signal has done extensive reporting on an ongoing train-wreck in a public elementary school in Minnesota over the imposition of the transgender ideology on kindergarteners. The debate pits parents of kids just out of diapers against school administrators in league with transsexual activists and at least one professional guild of psychologists.
RUSSIA - A Russian faces up to a year in prison for saying "there is no God" during an argument on social media, his lawyers said Wednesday. Viktor Krasnov also wrote the "Bible is a collection of Jewish fairy tales" during the discussion on European social networking site Vk.com in 2014, lawyer and human-rights activist Pavel Chikov posted on his Facebook page. Krasnov, whose offending posts have been deleted, is on trial in his native city of Stavropol in southern Russia, according to the local magistrate's website. Charges were filed in the fall of 2015 and the trial began on Monday, according to his lawyer.
EUROPE - A recession in Europe could lead to the collapse of the eurozone, as the single currency would buckle under the political turmoil unleashed by a fresh downturn, a leading investment bank has warned.
USA - When one of our major politicians gets something exactly right, we should applaud them for it. In this case, Donald Trump’s call to audit the Federal Reserve is dead on correct. Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does – including Barack Obama.