Link: http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/12/bp-and-its-accomplices

I DON'T know if you've heard this, but aside from BP, there's another troubled corporation that's trying to rehab its image--Toyota. Apparently they're preparing to release a new green car to replace the runaway Prius. The early word is that the secret new car will run on water--they call it the Hydro. There's just one catch--the water has to come from the Gulf of Mexico.

Link: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m68788&hd=&size=1&l=e

In a deal that has sweeping, long-term implications for millions of people living and working along the US Gulf Coast, the Obama administration has agreed to base the payments by BP to the oil disaster fund on the oil giant’s profits from its drilling operations in the Gulf. On Monday, BP made its first deposit into the disaster fund, which is overseen by "claims czar" Kenneth Feinberg, while top executives visited the White House to discuss the longer-term financial commitment. The initial sum was $3 billion, with another $2 billion to be paid during the fourth quarter of 2010. Thereafter, BP will deposit $1.25 billion each quarter for the next three years, bringing the total up to its original pledge of $20 billion..

Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mortgage-rates-hit-444-pct-as-apf-2266986134.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=2&asset=&ccode=

Growing pessimism over the weak economic recovery pushed mortgage rates to the lowest level in decades for the seventh time in eight weeks. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage hit 4.44 percent this week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. And some brokers say homeowners looking to refinance have even managed to do so for as low as 4 percent.

Link: http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/12/headed-for-a-double-dip

IN THE last few weeks, President Barack Obama has been touting the benefits of stimulus spending and a rebound in the auto industry. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner even wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times headlined, "Welcome to the Recovery."

Link: http://blogs.aljazeera.net/europe/2010/08/12/ignoring-obvious

I’ve just returned from Niger. There, tens of thousands of people are facing extreme hunger because of the droughts of the last two years. The rainy season is under way but the rains around the capital of Niamey have been torrential and persistent. It's not what is needed. The water is not nourishing the soil. It’s washing away the crops. It’s washing away homes. It is destroying lives.

Link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g6Y8m_33xEElqP68K5PAcKZ6KGng

An Israeli suspected of killing five people and wounding 13 in a stabbing spree that left a trail of fear across three US states was arrested in Atlanta trying to board a flight to Tel Aviv, US officials said Thursday. Elias Abuelazam, an Israeli national legally in the United States, was detained late Wednesday at the departure gate, Stephen Kremer, the area port director for US Customs and Border Protection in Atlanta, told AFP.The attacks began in late May in the working class town of Flint, Michigan, when a 31-year-old black man was stabbed. Over the next two months, 13 more men, most of them black, were attacked by the serial stabber in and around Flint. Five of the men died.

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/pat-tillmans-father-to-ar_n_680128.html

"You are a General," Tillman's father writes Jones after being presented with a briefing book of his findings. "There is no way a man like you, with your intelligence, education, military, experience, responsibilities (primarily for difficult situations), and rank... believes the conclusions reached in the March 31, 2005 Briefing Book. But your signature is on it. I assume, therefore, that you are part of this shameless bullshit. I embarrassed myself by treating you with respect [on] March 31, 2005. I thought your rank deserved it and anticipated something different from the new and improved investigation. I won't act so hypocritically if we meet again."

Link: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=13225

A third of the experts advising the World Health Organisation about the swine flu pandemic had ties to drugs firms, it has emerged. Five of the 15 specialists who sat on the emergency committee had received funding from pharmaceutical giants, or were linked to them through their research.

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6756:toben-materialism-of-western-democracies-is-exhausting-itself&catid=67:editorials&Itemid=138#comments

Dr. Fredrick Toben is a German author and founder and former director of the Adelaide Institute. He has written numerous books on education, political science and history and is best known as a historical revisionist who has extensively argued the veracity of Holocaust accounts by the Jewish historians. Due to his holocaust denial, he has been imprisoned three times in Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1302353/British-bunch-people-ruled-mafia-says-Irans-vice-president.html

The British people and David Cameron have been labelled ‘thick’ by a senior member of Iran’s government. In a blistering diatribe against Britain, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi said: ‘They have plundered the world in the last 500 years and the young lad in charge now is even more stupid than his predecessor. It’s as if God has made this nation servants of America and Zionists.’

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1302225/Blocked-jetstream-blame-freak-weather-Russia-Pakistan.html

A massive heatwave in Russia and the current devastating floods in Pakistan could be linked by the unusual behaviour of the jetstream, scientists believe. The jetstream is the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain. But meteorologists who study the phenomenon say that it is producing unusual holding patterns which keep weather systems in one place and produce freak conditions.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russians-fear-worst-as-fires-reach-chernobyl-fallout-zone-2050130.html

Radiation levels near Chernobyl could rise and pose long-term health dangers as deadly forest fires spread to land contaminated by the world's largest nuclear-reactor disaster, Russian environmentalists said yesterday.

Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52471

BP says it is no longer using toxic dispersants to break up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Gulf Coast residents claim otherwise, and say they have the sicknesses to prove it. On Aug. 5, Donny Mastler, a commercial fisherman who also works on boats, was at the Dauphin Island Marina. "I was with my friend Albert, and we were both slammed with exposure," Mastler, told IPS, referring to toxic chemicals he inhaled that he believes are associated with BP's Corexit dispersants. "We both saw the clumps of white bubbles on the surface that we know come from the dispersed oil." Both of their eyes were watering and their throats were burning, so Albert went to sit in his air-conditioned truck, while Mastler headed home.

Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08122010.html

I write about major problems: the collapsing US economy, wars based on lies and deception, the police state based on “the war on terror” and other fabrications such as those orchestrated by corrupt police and prosecutors, who boost their performance reports by convicting the innocent, and so on. America is a very distressing place. The fact that so many Americans are taken in by the lies told by “their” government makes America all the more depressing.

Link: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article20110

LEAP/E2020 is of the view that the effect of States’ spending trillions to « counteract the crisis » will have fizzled out. These vast sums had the effect of slowing down the development of the systemic global crisis for several months but, as anticipated in previous GEAB reports, this strategy will only have ultimately served to clearly drag States into the crisis caused by the financial institutions.

Link: http://www.infowars.com/fed-leads-america-to-the-brink-of-collapse/

When even the New York Times and CNN are admitting that the United States faces not only a double-dip recession but potentially a new great depression, any alarm bells that have not been rung should now be sounding loudly. Following in the footsteps of the New York Times’ David Krugman, who in June wrote that the United States had entered a third depression similar to the Long Depression of the 19th century, CNN Money carried an article yesterday brazenly entitled, Is this finally the economic collapse?.

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/08/2010812125348956495.html

An explosion outside a major radio station in Colombia's capital, Bogota, has injured six people, according to police. Officials said Thursday's blast was apparently caused by a car bomb that went off at 5.30am (10:30 GMT) outside the building of Caracol Radio in northern Bogota.

Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26142.htm

I can barely believe the words I am writing are not a nightmare from which I will soon wake up. A third of Pakistan is now under water, and fresh rainfall threatens two more waves of flooding in the southern Sindh province.

Link: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2010/08/12/the-war-on-terror-is-a-sham

Proponents of the U.S.-led "War On Terror" are mentally ill. Why? Well for one it is because they do not have the slightest clue what it is they are talking about. Also because the 'war on terror' is a complete sham, hoax and fraud with the most hypocritical connotation. Firstly, the United States in its bloody and brutal history, has routinely supported and carried out terrorism on its enemies and on innocent people whom it wanted to make enemies out of for political and economic gain.