Breaking News Thurs. Aug. 18, 2011

Well, what a day huh?
I had thought to get this posted early but...wanted to wait on the market and see what it would do first. These things sure will take you by surprise won't they? They do me anyway.
Dow ended down   419.33 pts and gold? Go Gold! LOL new highs for Gold at time of posting it is 1825.00

I'd like to thank e Brutto and Anonymous  for the great discussion in the comments section! He posted a couple great links for us. Here they are in case you missed them.
RT: China beats out America for Canadian oil 
and this one from Shadow Stats, can't believe I forgot about that site!
ShadowStats: Monetary Base and Money Supply 

Oh, and in the wee hours this morning, I got this from our friend RJ. Thanks RJ!

Also, take a look at this amazing research on Hubberts-Arms done by Grumalg. 
Historic effects of political party control on US Finances 

Thank you RJ at Global Glass Onion, (who never sleeps!) and the Ozarker at Conflicted Doomer. Please support them and the many wonderful bloggers who you can find linked on this blog and the forums linked at the bottom of every post. Go visit and make some new friends!
p.s. be sure to tune in Sunday to find out what smelled so good at my house today! :D


Japan
KyodoNews: Excessive levels of radioactive cesium found 100 km from plant
MarketWatch: Japan's trade surplus down 90.8% vs a year ago
World247: National › 35 deaths, 7,071 hospitalized due to heatstroke in one-week period - The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said Tuesday that the number of people who were taken to hospital due to heatstroke last week marked the highest so far this summer. For the week of Aug 8-14, the agency said that 7,071 people, suffering from heatstroke, were taken to hospitals throughout…
BlackListedNews: U.S. Knew Within Days that Fukushima Had Melted Down
Reuters: Japan may lift Fukushima beef shipment ban - Kyodo - Japan may lift its ban on shipment of beef from Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures as early as Friday, Kyodo news agency said on Thursday. 

Global Conflict
CNN: U.S. Marines: Use less oil, be more lethal - At a desert base in California, the Marines are testing devices that may help them become a deadlier, more self-reliant fighting force.

BBC: Several killed in Israel attacks - Israeli TV stations - Several people have been killed in a series of attacks on vehicles in southern Israel, Israeli television stations report.
LegitGov: Internet ban for teenagers accused of inciting riots on Facebook
TheGlobeAndMail: Harsh punishments for London rioters spark anger  
SeattlePI: Young Egyptian activists sent to prison — A military tribunal sentenced two young Egyptian activists to six-month prison terms after convicting them of insulting the army, a court official said Wednesday.

CNN: Israeli airstrike targets Gaza after 7 killed in southern Israel
Atlantic: Cutting Through Pentagon Spin About Businesses in Iraq
YahooNews: Israeli TV station reports 4th attack in south
LegitGov: 'US, Israel plan civil war in Lebanon'
ArizonaDailyStar: Raytheon teams with Israel on missile-intercept system 
BBC: Rallies held in Madrid ahead of Pope Benedict XVI visit - A number of the demonstrators clashed with police after marching to the central Sol square chanting slogans.
Earlier, Spanish police arrested a Mexican student for allegedly plotting to gas the anti-Pope rallies.
Reuters: Turkish warplanes attack PKK targets in Iraq - Turkey sent warplanes to attack Kurdish targets in northern Iraq on Wednesday, military sources said, hours after a rebel attack in southeast Turkey killed a dozen soldiers.
ZeroHedge: "The Global Plutocracy Is Terrified of Dissent"
Reuters: Turkish warplanes attack PKK targets in Iraq - Turkey sent warplanes to attack Kurdish targets in northern Iraq on Wednesday, military sources said, hours after a rebel attack in southeast Turkey killed a dozen soldiers.
BusinessInsider: Secret Middle East Peace Talks Held In London
Spiegel: Arson in Berlin: Car Burnings are a 'Precursor to Terrorism'

The last three nights have seen an unprecedented wave of car torchings in Berlin, but police are not sure who to arrest. Politicians on the left and right warn the attacks could lead to more dangerous forms of protest. Meanwhile, the failure to stop them could sway September's mayoral election.

Hosted: Official: Gunmen ambush Israeli bus, wound 4
BBC: Israeli bus shot at near border with Egypt
TheEconomist: The BlackBerry riots - Rioters used BlackBerrys against the police; can police use them against rioters?
IntelDaily: Number Of Iranians Applying For Asylum In Europe Rises
BBC: Libya conflict: Rebels capture key Zawiya oil refinery - An oil refinery outside the Libyan town of Zawiya, just 50km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, has been taken by opposition forces, a BBC correspondent confirms.
WhiteHouse.gov: President Obama: "The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way."
CNN: Bomb attacks in Afghanistan kill 26
UPI: Israel mulls goodwill gestures to Palestinian Authority
MSN: Turkish warplanes hit Kurdish rebels in Iraq
PM: 'Our patience has finally run out. Those who do not distance themselves from terrorism will pay the price'

Hacker News
Guardian: Phone hacking: News of the World reporter's letter reveals cover-up - Disgraced royal correspondent Clive Goodman's letter says phone hacking was 'widely discussed' at NoW meetings
BBC: Hacking 'widely discussed' at NoW
ABCNews: Hackers leak personal info of BART officers
MSN: Cops said to hold ex-US editor of UK tabloid in hacking probe - Fresh arrest comes amid renewed scrutiny on Murdoch's British newspaper stable

Financial News
PBS: Children in Poverty: How Are Kids in Your State Faring? 
Reuters: Regional factory activity hits 2-1/2 year low - Factory activity in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region slumped to a nearly 2-1/2 year low in August and home resales unexpectedly dropped in July, dashing hopes for a quick revival in economic growth.

BusinessInsider: Europe's Closed: Here's A Roundup Of The Damage 

CharlesHughSmith: And Off the Cliff We Go - Did the Federal Reserve's QE2 program last year simply push the inevitable stock market decline forward a few months? It would seem so. 

 CNBC: The Problem With Growth Data? It Isn't Always Reliable 
BusinessInsider: Morgan Stanley Just Slashed Its Growth Outlook, While Declaring The US "Dangerously Close" To Recession 
BusinessInsider: And Now The Fed Is Getting "Very Concerned" About The Funding Situation For European Banks 
BeforeItsNews: How to Build A Solid Escape From America Plan
Bloomberg: Wealthy Take Estate-Tax Exemptions Beyond Grave Until 2013
MyBudget360: Middle class annihilation one penny at a time – 64 percent of Americans do not have adequate savings for an unexpected $1,000 expense. The crushing blow to income and household wealth.

CEPR: Fun With the Arithmetic: That Crushing Debt Burden - It is important to remember that most of the people in Washington debates on economic policy do not know much economics. They tend not to be very good at arithmetic either. That is why they were blindsided by the collapse of the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy. As we get endless pontification about the crushing debt burden it is worth touching base with reality on occasion. In that spirit, CEPR brings you the latest data and projections on the ratio of the federal government's interest payments to GDP, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). As the chart shows the interest to GDP ratio is currently at a crushing 1.3 percent, near the post World War II low. However this figure overstates the burden somewhat. Last year the Federal Reserve Board refunded almost $80 billion to the Treasury. This was interest earned on government bonds and other assets it now holds. That leaves a net interest burden of 0.8 percent of GDP, by far the lowest of the post World War II era.
Yahoofinance: Sneaky Ways Coupons Make You Spend More
BaseLineScenario: s This A Second Great Depression – Or Could It Become Something Worse?
BusinessInsider: As Markets Crumble, Gold Rocketships Past $1800

MSNBC: Forgiving debt may be the answer to this mess  - Countries, homewoners are in modern-day debtors prison that helps no one
Bloomberg: Miami Declares ‘Financial Urgency’ as It Moves to Cut Worker Pay, Benefits
CNN: Europe's debt solution? Work longer
OilPrice: Dubai Freezes Utility Prices, Business Community Pleased
WashingtonPost: Is household debt still holding back the economy? - Higher consumer demand is critical to jump-starting the economy. But Americans won’t be inclined to spend and borrow more until they’ve pulled themselves out of the quagmire of debt left in the wake of the 2008 meltdown. 

Forbes: Singapore Posts Surprising Export Decline 
CreditWritedowns: Zulauf: "I expect the market to go below the latest lows in September" 
CNNMoney: Gas, food and clothing prices are on the rise

CNNMoney: Unemployment claims jump back above 400,000
RobertReich: The President’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)
Reuters: It’s the military, stupid - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has published a letter to Congress’s new Joint Select Committee, aka the supercommittee, with the changes they would like to see made to the budget and tax code. The supercommittee’s brief is pretty broad; it will be looking at ways to balance the federal budget by raising taxes and/or reducing expenditures. The Chamber, which represents business interests, strongly insists that the supercommittee slash entitlements and reform the tax code by lowering tax rates. From the Chamber letter: The Chamber urges you to consider how the current tax laws act as an impediment to worldwide competitiveness, a deterrent to saving and investment, and an obstacle to innovation and entrepreneurship...the current code needs a comprehensive reform to lower overall marginal tax rates, to encourage saving and investment, to foster global competitiveness, increase capital accumulation, attract foreign investment, and drive job creation. The problem with the Chamber’s argument about lowering tax rates to increase our global competitiveness is that the United States already has some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the western world. 

Ekathimerini: Greek unemployment rate hits all-time high  
NakedCapitalism: Quelle Surprise! Standard & Poor’s Execs Diddled in Mortgage Bond Ratings (Updated)
Ekathimerini: Bad checks, unpaid bills of exchange stifling the market - Rubber checks soared by over 43 percent year-on-year in the first seven months of 2011, asphyxiating the market further as credit lines continue to dry up. 
NakedCapitalism: MERS Case Filed With Supreme Court
BusinessInsider: Now The Good News: Why 2011 Is Not 2008 
BusinessInsider: What Are The Odds Of Another 20% Market Collapse? 
ZeroHedge: David Rosenberg's 12 Bullet Points Confirming The Double Dip Is Here 
Mish: Sentiment Leads Consumption; Sentiment Four Ways: Chris Puplava, Calculated Risk, Consumer Metrics; Gallup 
PoliticalCalculations: US, China Trade Decelerates Faster 
TheTelegraph: Even as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy talk, Europe's economy slides towards disaster - The EU leaders’ rhetoric in Paris makes it clear that they are not facing up to the existential crisis.
CNN: We need not just jobs, but jobs that pay
SHTFPlan: More Evidence: Slave Labor Not Cheap Enough; Walmart Has Ninth Straight Quarterly Decline in Sales 

Peak oil and Energy News
Grist: Mythbusters: debunking the claim that fuel economy standards ‘kill people’
BusinessInsider: Cantor Says No To New Stimulus Spending
EIA: U.S. Oil Rig Count Passes 1,000
NYT: Never Mind a Tiger in Your Tank: How About An Alligator?

Commodities/Metals 
MineWeb: Copper prices hurt by China growth worries, but aluminium stronger - Copper led most other base metals downwards as overheating worries continue to affect sentiment on China's growth prospects, but aluminium prices rose a little.
GATA: Venezuela tells Bank of England to ship the gold back
BeforeItsNews: Gold Breaks Thru Its Almighty Top

Environmental News 
DesdemonaDespair: The great oyster crash – ‘I’m afraid the ocean will be dead long before we have to worry about the other implications of global warming’
UPI: Somalia Suffers from Worst Drought in Century

ExtinctionProtocol: Solar flare activity prompts NASA news briefing in Washington 
ExtinctionProtocol: Conditions morph on solar surface for potentially damaging CME blast
HuffPost: BP Investigates New Oil Sheen Near Green Canyon Block In Gulf Of Mexico 
Spiegel: North Sea Oil Leak: Shell Under Fire Over Silent Tactics
CBSNews: BP investigating new sheen in Gulf 
ScientificAmerican: Why Carbon Dioxide Is a Greenhouse Gas - In making a case against CO2 as a greenhouse gas, the Galileo Movement relies on irrelevant facts while omitting pertinent ones.

ClimateSignals: Both drought and extreme rains hit U.S. in July
PermacultureUK: Bovine TB, Badgers and a Permaculture PerspectiveWhat is bovine TB? -  Why are we set to cull huge numbers of badgers to deal with it? Why can't we use a bovine tb vaccine? Cattle farmer and permaculturist Tim Green answers some of these questions - and poses more - in this controversial article

Spiegel: Phantom Panther Gives Italians Paws for Thought
AlterNet: Monsanto's 5 Most Dubious Contributions to the Planet - There's a whole lot more than just GMO seeds. Let's take a quick look at some of the biotech giant's most dubious contributions to society over the past century.
Discovery: Human Wastewater Pinned to Coral Disease 
Weather.com: Photos: Carolina Beach Waterspouts

BrisbaneTimes: The CWM effect: What climate change's biggest sceptics have in common
NewMatilda: The Great Big Crazy Carbon Conspiracy - The No Carbon Tax movement is getting bigger - and way more paranoid, as Adam Brereton discovered on the bus to Wednesday’s rally. When will the Coalition distance itself from this extremism?
What’s the appropriate way to react after seeing a 60-year old man holding a placard depicting Bob Brown riding Julia Gillard, drawn as a rocking horse?
Or when being told from a podium that we should emit more carbon dioxide because it increases crop yields and offers a solution to the third world’s food security issues? 

RawStory: World population will reach 7 billion this year: study 
MaxKeiser:  The latest brutal report indicates that home buying demand is likely falling to even lower levels
Lubbockonline: Crop, ranching losses reach record $5.2 billion in historic drought - Drought has scorched Texas farmers and ranchers for a record $5.2 billion in estimated lost income so far this year
TruthOut: BPing the Arctic, Again - Fast Tracking Shell’s Dangerous Drilling


America in Decline
ABCNews: Hunger and Children in America: a Slow and Steady Starvation - A little 2-year-old boy came to the hospital hungry, not just for dinner, but every day of his young life. He is smaller than he should be and his organs, including his brain, are not developing fully. And he lives in Boston, one of America's most prosperous cities.
MotherJones: Rick Perry's Overhyped Immigration "Soft Spot"
Cryptogon: Long Beach Police Department Claims Authority to Detain People for Taking Pictures “With No Apparent Aesthetic Value” 
USAToday: Discount-seeking consumers swipe newspapers to pad savings 
PBS: Americans Facing More Inequality, More Debt and Now More Trouble?

MSN: Airport security: You ain't seen nothing yet - Despite 10 years of changes, experts predict a very different future   

Food and Water
PBSVideo: American Experience  The Great Famine
The story of the American effort to relieve starvation in 1921 Soviet Russia.
WashingtonPost: Chart of the day: The food price spikes is still with us
CNN: U.S. places $40 million chicken order 
CalculatedRisk: Chicago Fed: Midwest Farmland Values Soar 
Bloomberg: Saudi Arabia Buys 660,000 Tons of U.S., European Hard Wheat 
TheGlobeAndMail: Water risk database backed by big U.S. companies

A consortium of large U.S. companies including General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical is backing a new initiative to help manage water supplies in regions threatened by shortages, reflecting growing concern about the importance of water to businesses. 

Guardian: GM corn being developed for fuel instead of food - Campaigners say plants being grown in US may worsen global food crisis, while farmers express cross-contamination fears
Chron: Drought costs farmers, ranchers record $5.2B 

Science and Technology
WSJ: China Debuts a Drone at Robotics Show 
ScientificAmerican: Marijuana Plant Sequenced

At last, the field of genomics has something to offer Cheech and Chong. DNA sequencing hit a new high last night with the midnight release of the Cannabis sativa genome. 

ScientificAmerican: China's First Space Lab Tiangong 1 May Launch Soon - The eight-ton experimental prototype is designed as a test bed for the technologies China will need for its future space station program
WiredScience: Mystery Fossils Link Fungi to Ancient Mass Extinction

SoftPedia: Flash Cookies Used to Track User Behavior
WSJ: Major Websites Using Stealthy ‘Supercookies’ to Track Users - Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows. The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.
Cryptogon: Single Seat Electric Vehicle Sets 1,000 Miles-Plus Record on Single Charge
MSNCosmicLog: What makes space blobs glow?

Medical and Health
PBS: Proposed Rules Call for 'Apples-to-Apples' Health Insurance Comparison 
CNN: What your cholesterol number really says
USAToday: Drug shortages set to reach record levels 
CNN: Brain-eating amoebas blamed in three deaths 
MSN: Price-gougers hike costs of vital drugs during shortage - 'Gray market' suppliers offer medications at an average 650 percent mark-up, survey shows
CNN: Growing body of research says dogs really can smell cancer 

Doomsteading, Gardening, Urban Farming
PermacultureUK: How to harvest chicken manure & accelerate your garden compost
eHow: Vegetable Garden Projects

Other News
Time: The Mennonite Rapes: In Bolivia, a Trial Tears Apart a Religious Community
Time: Justice for Rape Victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Hosted: Threat to David Letterman on Muslim forum 
ABCNews: Shark Attack in Seychelles Kills Honeymooner While Wife Sunbathed 
UPI: Neighbors complain about noisy tent church 
BBC: The witch trial that made legal history - In recent years children as young as three have given evidence in court cases, but in the past children under 14 were seen as unreliable witnesses. A notorious 17th Century witch trial changed that. 


Politics
TheAtlantic: Bachmann Staffer Arrested for Terrorism in Uganda in 2006 - The evangelical organizer who helped Michele Bachmann win the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa Saturday was previously charged with terrorism in Uganda after being arrested for possession of assault rifles and ammunition in February 2006, just days before Uganda's first multi-party elections in 20 years.
PBS: 'Tough Guy' Rick Perry Makes Waves on Republican Campaign Trail
YahooFinance: David Stockman: Rick Perry Is Right, the Fed Is “Totally Wrong”
TheGlobeAndMail: Rick Perry says he doesn't believe in global warming
MSN: 'Independent'? Maybe, but super PAC heavily backs Perry - 'Appears to be dropping all pretenses,' says critic, but it's not alone out there
UPI: Bachmann promises $2/gal gas as president
TheAtlantic: Bush's Crew Is Gunning for Rick Perry
TulsaWorld: Coburn says Obama not out to destroy country
MSNCosmicLog: Climate controversy spotlights GOP stands on science

The Forums
TinfoilPalace:Black Death study lets rats off the hook
TinfoilPalace:Fox News fears riots
TheOilAge:EIA:Renewable Energy Consumption Tops Nuclear for First Time
TheOilAge:How Long Before Water Rationing?
Hubberts-Arms:18th Aug - Another bad day on European Markets?
Hubberts-Arms:Historic effects of political party control on US Finances
SilentCountry:How Now Down Dow? Week of August 15-19
SilentCountry:Heading south in a post-crash world