Skeleton Replaces Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid

• “Copenhagen will be deprived of its Little Mermaid for six months, and we thought we should replace it. It’s April Fools, after all!” Hanne Strager, the head of exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, told AFP.
  The replacement — which even had a skeleton fish tail — was placed in the same position as the Little Mermaid and sat in her vacant spot for two hours, to the delight of tourists.

How symbolic of the European (and world) economic state.

Tarpley: US gov uses Google proxy to attack China

“Google is an arm of the US Gov’t. Google is cohabiting with the National Security Council…This is essentially a US Gov’t attack on China.”

• The yield on 10-year Treasuries – the benchmark price of global capital – surged 30 basis points in just two days last week to over 3.9pc, the highest level since the Lehman crisis. Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the US Federal Reserve, said the abrupt move may be “the canary in the coal mine”, a warning to Washington that it can no longer borrow with impunity. He said there is a “huge overhang of federal debt, which we have never seen before”.
• David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff said Treasury yields have ratcheted up 90 basis points since December in a “destabilising fashion”, for the wrong reasons. Growth has not been strong enough to revive fears of inflation. Commodity prices peaked in January and US home sales have fallen for the last three months, pointing to a double-dip in the housing market.
• Mr Rosenberg said the yield spike recalls the move in the spring of 2007 just as the credit system started to unravel. “The question is how the equity market is going to handle this back-up in rates,” he said.

I’m looking at numbers here, not advancing any political agenda.

Related: Social Security Payout to Exceed Revenue this Year

• This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
• The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.
• Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point — the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances.

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

Developing world violence aside, we’ve become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest.

But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive. Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5.

The spying includes attempted covert following, photographng, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.

I, and others were in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a new package of laws designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship. As such, the spying has an extra poignancy.

The possible triggers:

• our ongoing work on a classified film revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S, general, David Petraeus.
• our release of a classified 32 page US intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks (expose our sources, destroy our reputation for integrity, hack us).
• our release of a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the U.K. over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”.

• Portugal’s credit rating has been downgraded from AA to AA- by leading credit rating agency Fitch over concerns about its high levels of debt.
• Earlier this month, Portugal passed an austerity budget aimed at cutting its budget deficit.
• The downgrade heightened concerns about the health of some of Europe’s heavily indebted economies, forcing the euro lower against the dollar and the pound.

If spain takes a hit next…yowza.

• Madoff, 71, suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face after he was reportedly attacked last December by a prisoner who believed Madoff owed him money.
• After pleading guilty last year to running an enormous Ponzi scheme which tricked investors out of billions of dollars, Madoff is serving a 150-year-jail sentence at Butner federal prison in North Carolina.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, Madoff’s assailant was a “beefy” body builder with a drug conviction and a black belt in judo.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…but I wonder if the assailant’s description was made to sound ‘extra-tough’ to generate sympathy for Madoff.

I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

• “I started getting emails saying ‘have you heard of Benjamin Creme?’ and ‘are you the world teacher?’” he said. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’”
• Their reasoning? Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or “the world teacher”…
• There are many elements of his life that tick the prophetic checklist of his worshippers: a flight from India to the UK as a child, growing up in London, a slight stutter, and appearances on TV. But it is his work that puts him most directly in the frame and causes him the most anguish – the very things the followers of Share believe will indicate that their new messiah has arrived…
• While his goal appears to match Share’s vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.
• “What I’m arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works,” he said.
• “I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it.”

poortaste:

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. Here is information about the largest U.S. media firms.

Click through to find out who and what they all own.

• “China’s big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power,” Liu writes in his newly published Chinese-language book, “The China Dream.”
• “If China in the 21st century cannot become world number one, cannot become the top power, then inevitably it will become a straggler that is cast aside,” writes Liu, a professor at the elite National Defense University, which trains rising officers.
• His 303-page book stands out for its boldness even in a recent chorus of strident Chinese voices demanding a hard shove back against Washington over trade, Tibet, human rights, and arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.
• “As long as China seeks to rise to become world number one … then even if China is even more capitalist than the U.S., the U.S. will still be determined to contain it,” writes Liu.
• Rivalry between the two powers is a “competition to be the leading country, a conflict over who rises and falls to dominate the world,” says Liu. “To save itself, to save the world, China must prepare to become the (world’s) helmsman.”

• This was my Saturday’s lyrics to breakfast in sunny Bangalore: Monsanto has decided to tell the truth about something: its technology doesn’t work!, reports The Hindu. I’m going to need a second cup of chai to digest this, Monsanto speaking honest!? Indian farmers and scientist have been seeing this in their Bt cotton fields for a few years: pests become resistant to Monsanto’s genetically engineered toxins and thus farmers apply huge amounts of pesticides. Monsanto has always denied this, has the recent massive rejection of its Bt brinjal in India woken up its senses?
• For years Monsanto has been shouting that the main - read only - benefit of Bt cotton in India (the only genetically engineered crop planted here) was the reduction in pesticide use. Well, it seems they have just admitted this is not true. Pink bollworm, a serious pest for cotton farmers in India, is now resistant to the toxin in Bt cotton. Meaning that this bug is now sort of a super-pest that farmers will have to work harder and harder to avoid.
• What is Monsanto’s solution to this? Maybe you have guessed it: use Monsanto’s next weapon – same technology - Bt cotton 2.0. With double the amount of toxins (and almost double the price of non-Bt seeds).

• The European Union has reproached a number of its members over inadequate moves to tackle their soaring debts.
• Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands all came in for criticism in a report issued by the European Commission on Wednesday for using overly “optimistic” growth forecasts to cut debt levels to the EU limit of three per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
• The bloc’s executive arm also said that predictions and commitments given by a “majority” of 14 nations whose deficits are causing concern in Brussels were seen as likely to fall short.
• Among them was Britain, which was told to do more to cut its budget deficit, currently as high as that of Greece.

(ashes, ashes..we all fall down!)