Foreign News and Analysis Since April 2005 -- formerly China Confidential -- What's Really Happening in the WorldForeign Confidential ™
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Top Barclay's Officials Resign Over Rate Rigging
Prolonged Power Outage Overshadows US Independence Day
No Quick Fix; Nation's Aging Infrastructure Increasingly Vulnerable
Will Sectarian Cleansing Accompany Syria's Splitting?
Secular Palestinian Leadership in Danger of Losing Out to Hamas
UN Says N. Korea Still Violating Sanctions
Monday, July 02, 2012
New Hk Leader Promises to 'Humbly' Listen After Protest
Kim Jong-Il Ordered Uranium and Plutonium Weapons
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Iran Threatens to 'Wipe Israel Off the Face of the Earth'
PRI Claims Victory in Mexico's Presidential Election
Everything Old is New Again
Hezbollah Could Target Cargo Ships
A Tribute to Yitzhak Shamir, 'Man of Steel'
Al Qaeda Plans to Blow Up Jet Ahead of Olympics: Report
Romney Could Win With Ultimate Flip-Flop
A Modest Proposal for Republican Victory in 2012
World Powers Agree and Disagree on Syria
Situation Clear as Mud
Iran Says it Will Deploy Subs in Caspian Sea
Saturday, June 30, 2012
US-Russia Relationship Overshadows Geneva Talks on Syria
Iran Arming Warships With Short-Range Missiles
Egypt's President Vows to Free Terrorist From US Jail
'Moderate' Muslim Brotherhood Leader Makes Fiery Speech
Friday, June 29, 2012
Murdoch Sums Up Papers' Future in a Word: Digital
When asked by analysts about his papers’ future, Mr. Murdoch replied: “The answer is one word: digital.” He said the new company would double down on its digital efforts and that news was “the most valuable commodity in the world” even if “people are buying fewer papers printed on crushed wood.”
-June 29, 2012 article in The New York Times about Rupert Murdoch's plans to separate the media and entertainment and publishing divisions of News Corporation
IDF Preparing for New Kind of Syrian Threat
Dozens Reported Killed in Syria Shelling
Senior Iran Official Says US Makes Empty Threats
Asteroid Hunters Raising Money for Orbiting Space Telescope
Massive Asteroid Collision Could End Life on Earth
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Foreigners Baffled by US Health Care Controversy
Hollande Challenges German Austerity
Israeli Idiot Stages 'Miss Holocaust Survivor' Pageant
Fascist-Loving Latvia's Austerity Model Exposed
Greek Bank Worker Commits Suicide
German Austerity Claims Another Greek Life
US Downs Missile in Space to Test Shield
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Mongolia Sits Atop World's Largest Untapped Coal Deposit
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Scandal, housecleaning … and a showdown nears as evidence is exposed, wrongdoing probed. Read more.
America's aging power lines need to be replaced, buried; but the cost seems staggeringly high. So prolonged power outages and life-threatening, economically devastating blackouts are accepted as inevitable. Read more.
An electrical transmission and distribution system that was largely built from the 1930s to the '70s must be upgraded--without crushing ordinary people and businesses with soaring energy costs--if the United States is to avoid slipping into Third World conditions. But the likelihood of a solution--massive government spending on infrastructure at home instead of on unnecessary interventions abroad--is slim at best in the Age of Austerity.
Syria is in the process of splitting into cantons along ethnic divides. Will massacres be part of the process? An experienced observer argues that sectarian cleansing--slaughter of thousands of civilians--is inevitable absent international intervention. Read more.
Comment: Syria need not follow the Lebanese script. Nor must it follow the Libyan script. The United States and Russia have the power to manage a solution that ends the bloodshed. Political neutrality should be on the agenda for serious consideration--a federal Syrian state made up of autonomous cantons. International peacekeepers will probably be needed. But there is a difference between peacekeepers and the so-called humanitarian intervention that replaced the Libyan regime (which no longer threatened the West) with an Islamist one.
The secular nationalist PA is increasingly in danger of being swept away by Islamist Hamas, and the Israeli government is doing little to prevent this (nightmare) from happening, according to a critical analysis. Click here to read it.
A long-awaited UN report says North Korea continues to defy sanctions by importing luxury goods for its ruling elite (while the masses starve) and attempting to sell arms to Syria.Read more.
A defiant reception for Hong Kong's controversial new leader--a street demonstration that drew tens of thousands of protestors. Click here for the story.
Japan is reported to have obtained a North Korean regime document that supposedly confirms that Dear Leader ordered massive production of both uranium- and plutonium-based nuclear weapons. Read more.
Iran announced new missile tests and again threatened Israel with annihilation. Read more.
The PRI, which ran Mexico for 71 years until losing power in 2000, has claimed victory in the country's presidential election. Read more.
Israel is concerned that in a future war with Iranian proxy Hezbollah the Lebanese Islamist terrorist group could target cargo ships in an attempt to blockade the Jewish State. Read more.
Ehud Olmert on the remarkable life and heroism of Yitzhak Shamir. Click here to read the essay.
Western security services have reportedly unearthed an Al Qaeda plot to blow up a passenger jet in the run-up to the London Summer Olympic Games. A Norwegian convert to Islam is said to be the suicide bomber tasked with destroying the aircraft. Read more.
Set forth below is a modest proposal for how the Obamacare-hating Mitt Romney, a moderate, Massachusetts Republican-turned-vicious, rightwing austerian, could win the White House this November.
The presumptive GOP candidate, who gave his state Romneycare, the health insurance program on which the much maligned Obamacare is clearly based, simply needs to come out strongly for replacing Obamacare with Medicare--for everyone.
Medicare is an extremely successful and popular federal program that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans ages 65 and older and younger people with disabilities as well as people with end-stage renal disease. All that is needed is to amend the existing law in order to be able to accurately modify and end the preceding sentence with the words "all Americans."
That's what the American people really want--universal Medicare with access to supplemental insurance costing, say, $200 a year, as per the present program, and the option, of course, for rich and super-rich citizens to add premium, private insurance products that could provide them with luxury hospital suites, physician house calls, private jet airlifts for facelifts and emergency Botox injections, whatever.
Copyright © 2012 Foreign Confidential™
World powers meeting in Geneva agreed on a Syrian peace plan; but the United States and Russia immediately disagreed on a key point--the fate of the Syrian dictator. Read more.
Iran says it plans to deploy "light submarines" in the Caspian Sea. Read more.
Washington's (worsening) relationship with Moscow is casting a shadow over talks in Geneva aimed at ending the Syrian bloodbath. Officials from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council--the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France--gathered Saturday in Switzerland's second most populous city, a center for international finance and diplomacy. Envoys from Arab countries were also in attendance. Read more.
Comment: The diplomats should use neutral Switzerland as an inspiration for a possible solution to the Syrian crisis, strange as this may seem. A politically neutral, federated Syrian state, comprised of, say, three autonomous provinces, or cantons, would be in the best interests of all concerned parties, including the U.S., Russia, and Syria's neighbors--Arab states as well as Israel. Russia could conceivably keep its naval installation at Tartus; and Russian arms companies could be compensated over time for losing $1 billion in annual sales of weapons to Damascus (in the wake of losing $4 billion in yearly sales to Libya following the NATO-backed, Islamist-led takeover of that Arab nation).
Related: Reflections on the Tragedy of Syria
Copyright © 2012 Foreign Confidential™
Iran is clearly preparing for a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf. Click here for the story.
In his first public speech, Egypt's Islamist leader, Mohamed Morsi, vowed to free the blind sheik jailed in the United States, Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Read more.
Another Iran is emerging.
Related: Many Egyptians Fear Islamization
Read the entire article here--essential reading for anyone with a serious interest or involvement in media and advertising.
The IDF is preparing for a new threat--possible waves of Islamist terrorist attacks along Israel's northern border with Syria resulting from a total breakdown of regime authority across much of the Arab country. The Syrian situation is increasingly complex and dangerous. Read more.
Syrian opposition sources say the Assad regime's "relentless" shelling of a Damascus suburb killed dozens of people. Read more.
Iran's parliamentary speaker says the United States makes empty attack threats against Iran in order to pressure and disrupt other countries. Read more.
Scientists are raising money to launch a space telescope into a Venus-type orbit in order to track menacing, monster-sized asteroids. Read more.
Except for the United States, every civilized nation on earth, including Israel, France, the UK, and Canada, has universal health care. In contrast, America's for-profit health care system seems cruel and inhumane to citizens of those and other democracies.
Obamacare, as Republicans insist on referring to the (ironically Republican/Romney-rooted) Affordable Care Act, will help to alleviate some suffering. But the controversial law, upheld today by the U.S Supreme Court (which has evolved into an ant-democratic, monarchial body) is basically a boon to a loathsome insurance industry that labors night and day to find ways to deny ordinary people the coverage for which they and/or their employers have paid.
Many of America's foreign friends--especially Europeans and Canadians--are baffled by the U.S. health care controversy. They understand that most Americans have long wanted universal health care in the form of national health insurance--meaning Medicare for all--and that Obamacare is at best merely a small step toward achieving this critically important goal.
The French president is leading the European rebellion against German austerity. Read more.
A shandah that boggles the mind … an arrogant Israeli idiot staged a "Miss Holocaust Survivor' pageant. Read more.
The so-called success is a scam--made possible by dividing ethnic groups--which can't be exported. Read more.
German austerity claimed another life in Greece today when an agricultural bank worker plunged to his death from the Acropolis. Read more.
Germany is bent on leveraging its economic dominance of Europe into political dominance, forcing nations like Greece to surrender sovereignty to a Berlin-run economic and monetary union. Austerity-obsessed Angela Merkel is the first German chancellor since Hitler to attempt such a radical change in Germany's power relations with its neighbors--an overthrow of the status quo.
But the strategic objective extends beyond Germany. The economic and financial elites aim to restructure Europe through a massive and unprecedented upward transfer of wealth that will drive the middle classes into poverty and push the poor to the edge of extinction. The project's purpose is to strip European workers of their rights and benefits in order to bring them into line with Third World pay levels and living standards.
An iron heel is descending.
The United States successfully used a Raytheon intercept missile in a high-stakes test of a missile shield designed to defend against possible future attacks by North Korean and Iranian nuclear warheads. Read more.
Click here to read all about the scramble for resources in Mongolia, the international rivalry, the stakes, the intrigue. Mongolia is in the news.
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