The United States steps into the new fiscal year without a budget approved by Congress. According to Government Accountability Office, the national debt has grown to record high $16, 7 trillion or 73% of GDP (it exceeded this level only in the days of WWII). The figure is much higher according to informal sources (independent researchers like, for instance, James Douglas «Jim» Hamilton, an American econometrician currently teaching at University of California, San Diego). If the debt ceiling is not raised urgently, then the US may step into a new financial crisis, as President Obama warned. US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told the congressmen in a letter the country may go bankrupt on October 17, the default may take place by the end of October – the middle of November when the money flows get exhausted as Douglas W. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, points out.
Category: Head Stories
President Bashar al-Assad said that all the political decisions that have been taken by the west in the last ten years have been in support of al-Qaeda, intentionally or inadvertently. In an interview with the German Der Spiegel News Magazine, President al-Assad said that through Western support, now there are thousands of al-Qaeda fighters from 80 countries in Syria. Following is the full text of the interview: Der Spiegel: Mr. President, do you love your country? President Assad: Of course, and in this I am no different from most people. This is not merely about emotions, but rather about what one can do for his country if he has the power and especially in times of crisis; and at this particular time, I realize more than ever how much I love my country and so I must protect it.
US exceptionalism rhetoric poses extreme danger and is reminiscent of Nazi ideals and talk “before and during World War II,” Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said in exclusive interview with RT Spanish. Referring to US President Barack Obama’s statement that “America is exceptional” because it stands up not only for its own “narrow self interest, but for the interests of all,” Correa said: “Does not this remind you of the Nazis’ rhetoric before and during World War II? They considered themselves the chosen race, the superior race, etc. Such words and ideas pose extreme danger,” President Correa said on RT Spanish’ Entrevista program.
Mother Agnes Mariam Attacked…By Human Rights Watch! Since when does a human rights organization take to arguing the case for a military attack that will kill scores of innocent civilians? If you are Human Rights Watch, it’s all in a day’s work. The US regime’s favorite “human rights ” organization, which once praised the Obama Administration’s continuation of its predecessor’s torturous CIA “extraordinary rendition” program, pulled out all stops to bolster Obama’s claims that the Syrian government was responsible for the August 21st chemical attack near Damascus. As Obama was ready to teach Syria a lesson via Tomahawk cruise missiles, Human Rights Watch stood virtually alone in the world on the president’s side. The human rights group was not busy trying to help the victims or promote international diplomatic efforts to end the crisis.
The administration has been amping up stats about foiled plots to bolster support for mass surveillance In so many words, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted Wednesday that the Obama administration had issued misleading information about terror plots and their foiling to bolster support for the government’s vast surveillance apparatus. During Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange: “There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy.
Netanyahu’s UN Speech: Sounds Like a Sociopath? Iranian missiles will hit New York in “three to four years”. A nuclear Iran is like “50 North Koreas”. This could be the sound of a deranged, dangerous sociopath, or this could be the sound of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu addressing the UN General Assembly. Compare for yourself. Last week we had Iranian President Hassan Rouhani calling for the world to surf a WAVE (as in World Against Violence and Extremism). This week we had Bibi saying that was a “cynical” and “totally hypocritical honey trap”. In the world according to Netanyahu:
The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known — repeatedly — and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East. In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region.
Perpetual mass-media deception and pervasive surveillance encompass a never ending train of abuse that won’t end any time soon. As long as armaments factories continue producing weapons of death for the fortune 500 Wall Street elite who reside in U.S. capitalist society, war and threats of war will continue to expand and take on an ever deadly character. Over 1000 military bases stationed, world-wide, nuclear weapons, a nuclear, first-strike posture by U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems and thousands of tanks, planes, bombers, armadas, special forces killer teams, hundreds of proxies and the Central Intelligence Agency that massacres civilians in Pakistan with drones on a routine basis, not because the missiles are missing their targets as claimed but because slaughtering civilians is a rapacious and depraved tool of the U.S. war mongers and their imperial war machine–that includes the civilian CIA, for resource control against Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and any other nation the U.S. bombs to sustain its militarized war economy and claim to control the world’s most coveted petroleum resources in the Caspian Basin and Africa.
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider. It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”. He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Questions Plague UN Report on Syria A senior United Nations official who deals directly with Syrian affairs has told Al-Akhbar that the Syrian government had no involvement in the alleged Ghouta chemical weapons attack: “Of course not, he (President Bashar al-Assad) would be committing suicide.” When asked who he believed was responsible for the use of chemical munitions in Ghouta, the UN official, who would not permit disclosure of his identity, said: “Saudi intelligence was behind the attacks and unfortunately nobody will dare say that.” The official claims that this information was provided by rebels in Ghouta. A report by the UN Mission [1] to investigate use of chemical weapons (CW) in Ghouta, Syria was released last Monday, but per its mandate, did not assign blame to either the Syrian government or opposition rebels.