(ria) A U.S. company has won a tender to supply 55,000 metric tons of wheat to Egypt, which faces grain shortages after its main supplier, Russia, banned grain exports amid severe draught, the Masrawy news portal said on Thursday. The company is expected to deliver the wheat from September 16-30, at a price of $277.5 per metric ton. U.S. and EU companies earlier won a contract to supply around 500,000 metric tons of wheat to Egypt, one of the world's largest grain importers. more ...
(gm) Is Germany systematically opposed to Islam? Of course Germany is a constitutional state under the rule of law, or Rechtsstaat as the Germans call it, with a functional system for the protection of minorities, with a free press and all the concomitant possibilities for the free formation of opinion. And yet to understand the true state of a society it always pays to revisit its declared fringes and examine the true situation of the minorities in it. more ...
1. It is now more than 10 years since the currency crisis struck Malaysia. Much has been written about the crisis and the controls imposed by the Malaysian Government to stop the devaluation of the Ringgit.
(birn) The pipeline deal between Russia, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece envisages completion of the project by 2015. During the often blazing heat that suffocates Serbia during the summer, it can be easy to forget how close, last winter the whole country came to freezing, when a dispute broke out between Russia and Ukraine, shutting off gas supplies to great swathes of South Eastern Europe. more ...
Nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In this insightful analysis, global reporter Pepe Escobar focuses on the ongoing energy struggle across "Pipelineistan" and the Great Game of business, diplomacy and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. He delves into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the "AfPak" battleground. There, U.S. planes and unmanned aerial drones are killing combatants as well as civilians, while, in Afghanistan, Washington continues to build new military bases. Under the carnage of war, courses the Liquid War. more ...
(birn) Habit of hoarding savings in cash at home, which deprives the economy of much needed investment, could prove hard to shift. Kosovars have little faith in banks, if figures are anything to go by. Though deposits in banks are worth a total of about 1.5 billion euro, it is thought that Kosovars have approximately the same amount of money outside the banking system, hidden “under the pillow”, as the phrase goes. Like many Kosovars, Sejdi Morina, a car salesman from Pristina, prefers a cash-only economy. more ...
(gm) The United States spent over $52 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008, but only 10 percent of that went toward preventing a nuclear attack through slowing and reversing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology. That is the main finding of Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities, a new study that uses publicly available documents and extensive interviews with government officials and experts to calculate the U.S. nuclear security "budget. more ...
(zaman) Studies are currently under way to enable Turkish exporters to use the local currency of neighboring countries instead of the US dollar when engaging in foreign trade, Foreign Trade Minister Kürşad Tüzmen has said. Speaking in Ankara on Sunday, Tüzmen said Turkish exporters trading with Russia recently demanded to use the Russian ruble in their trade, suggesting that exports would increase in this way. "Also some Iranian exporters have recently suggested using the TL in their trade with Turkey. more ...
(gm).Tony Montana provided an acute geo-economic description of world affairs today. He said, ‘first you get the money, then you get the power, and then you get the woman’. If the history of the Spanish Empire is anything to go by, Montana is certainly correct. Besides the great wealth extracted from South America, the Hispanic legacy is proof that they also ‘got the woman’... This process is exemplified currently by the United States which benefits enormously from issuing the worlds reserve currency; the dollar. Yet recent developments indicate that the strategic asset the U.S. more ...
(www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net). Just weeks after President George W. Bush signed the Order creating a new US military command dedicated to Africa, AFRICOM, events on the mineral-rich continent have erupted which suggest a major agenda of the incoming Obama Presidency will be for the son of a black Kenyan to focus US resources, military and other, on dealing with the Republic of Congo, the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, the oil-rich Darfur region of southern Sudan and increasingly the Somali ‘pirate threat’ to sea lanes in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. more ...
(ips). With 1.3 trillion dollars spent every year on the world's militaries, countries enmeshed in conflict are often flooded by weapons which are then turned against helpless civilian populations, say human rights organisations pushing for an international treaty to closely regulate arms sales. "If a country is likely to be involved in warfare, then it is unjustifiable to sell arms. There must be regulation or control of arms -- especially when the countries that are buying them are involved in a conflict," Valentino Deng told IPS in an interview. more ...
