The Courier Mail Brisbane Monday June 14 1948

ULTIMATUM BY ARABS

Stop Jews, UN Told

London, June 13 (A.A.P.).- Arabs have sent an ultimatum to the United Nations’ mediator (Count Bernadotte) threatening a general atack on all fronts if the Jews do not observe the ‘cease fire’ pact.

The ultimatum follows alleged breaches of Palestine truce by the Jews, reports Reuters Damascus correspondent.

Reuters and Associated Press correspondents in the Middle East report that United Nations truce observers, who have arrived in Palestine, are already investigating Jewish and Arab complaints of attacks by opponents.

Reuters Damascus correspondent says it is officially stated that the Jews, in another alleged breach, attacked on the southern Palestine sector at 2 a.m. yesterday.

A Jewish communique says that the Jewish settlement of Ein Geb, on the eatern shore of Lake Tiberias, was still under heavy Arab attack at noon yesterday.

Reuters Tripoli correspondent says that Arabs attacked the Jewish quarter of the town and set Jewish houses alight.

Shots and grenade explosions were heard. The authorities have imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Arabs Favour Single Nation

Reuters Amman correspondent says that King Abdullah of Transjordan has announced that if the Palestinian Arabs and Jews formed a single nation Transjordan “would not object to joining it”.

Abdullah added that if the Jews agreed to belong to the Arab nation in Palestine they would be allowed full citizenship and even self-government “in their own places”.

Count Bernadotte, after visiting Jerusalem and conferring with Jews and Arabs, left by air today for Damascus en route to Rhodes, where he will set up his headquarters.

The United States has agreed to supply Count Bernadotte with three transport planes, and will send more military observers if they are required.

Two Migrant Ships On Way

Two Jewish ships have left small French Mediterranean ports with nearly 1000 immigrants for Palestine. One of the ships also carried a consignment of arms, reports Reuters.

Colonel Michael Marcus, described unofficially as “a high-ranking United States Army officer, formerly on General Patton’s Third Army staff”, was killed while commanding Jewish operations in Jerusalem a Jewish official report says.

It was officially stated from Washington that there is no connection beween the United States Army and Colonel Marcus.

The Rumanian Government has officially recognised the State of Israel, reports the British United Press.

For sixty years oil has been sold for US$ exclusively, resulting in very large holdings of US$ in the hands of the oil-exporting nations. Together with the dollars earned by Chinese and Japanese exporters, there are now about 9 trillion US dollars offshore.This does not cause inflation in the US provided that the dollars are held as national reserves by each country and not spent or converted to other currencies. Some of the dollars have been so used, resulting in an accelerating fall in the value of the dollar and a rise in the value of the euro. Nobody likes this, including the Europeans.

Consider the position of the countries which hold those offshore dollars (offshore dollars= M3. To find out exactly how many dollars that is see these people). Their real worry is the loss of value of their dollar mountains. If they dump dollars their value falls even faster. If they buy US Treasury bonds as they have in the past, which in effect is loaning the dollars back to the US, the low interest rate return does not cover the depreciation. If they spend them on US stocks or real estate they could lose in a big way in those falling markets. When they spend them on real commodities such as oil or gold, prices skyrocket, which is also inflation. The euro-conversion option is maxed-out, the Japanese and Chinese economies have too many dollars already thanks, and they have already bought every bit of available US-manufactured military hardware. There is nowhere left for those dollars to go, and the tipping moment when the dollar’s decline becomes the dollar’s plummet seems near.

One development may offer a way out. The Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates which form the Gulf Cooperation Council intend to create a new currency. This would be backed by their US$ holdings. It also seems probable that oil sales would be denominated in this new currency. By re-badging their US$ as say “Gulf Dinars”, they would be decoupling “their” US$ from the domestic US$, and they would retain or gain value independently from the US$.

This move would also benefit all other world economies: there would be an alternative to converting to euros, reducing the upward pressure on that unit. Other nations, particularly China, could convert reserves for use in oil purchases knowing that they would not lose value. The Gulf nations would be a step nearer genuine sovereignty and independence; the US would have to pay for oil with export-earned dollars rather than just printing them, and the world would have a new reserve currency nominally run by people for whom usury is a sin.

It could also have the paradoxical effect of reducing the inflationary pressure on the US domestic economy, because other nations would no longer be offloading the national currency.

Industrial technology is not necessarily anti-Nature. It is just that our design is incomplete.

A complete design:

Collect the emissions from coal-burning powerstations, scrub them and pipe to large-scale clear plastic sheeting covered greenhouses. The high CO2 level inside causes plants to grow at an increased rate, and CO2 is converted to plant matter. Sell the tomatoes, and plow the stems into the soil. This increases the soil’s carbon content, as well as improving fertility and texture. Applied on a large enough scale, atmospheric CO2 becomes soil carbon.

While you are at it, the technology of sewage is also incomplete: electrolytically remove the heavy metal contamination, then pump inland and expose to air (oxygen) in tree plantations. Nature already provides the cascade of microorganisms necessary to convert this resource to fertiliser.

Both the above processes are economic. Both can generate profits. Both would reduce atmospheric CO2 and attract carbon credits. Why aren’t we doing it? Because like our economic system, our industrial system was not designed, it just happened.

Gisele Bundchen makes more money than any other supermodel, and she wants that money in any currency other than US dollars.
Gisele has recently signed contracts with Italian label Dolce & Gabbana and US hair products manufacturer Pantene. In both cases she insisted that payment not be in the failing US currency.

Bundchen is from Brazil, a nation which has experienced currency calamities, which might explain her being alert to the dangers of holding wealth in an unstable form. Wealthy Americans are also increasingly aware of this danger, which is one of the reasons we are seeing a flood of investment in gold; Australian mining companies and other Australian stocks backed by real assets. China, Japan and Gulf oil states with large $US holdings are joining the flight from the dollar.

The flow of depreciating $US into Australia should raise a question for the Treasurer and the Reserve Bank of Australia: if US dollars are not good enough for a supermodel, how come they are good enough for us? Peter Costello may never look as good as Gisele, but he could at least try to be as smart.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCs.keWwNdiY&refer=home

In legal history, a crime was understood as an unacceptable action which was proscribed by law. In the 1920s a new concept arrived with prohibition of alcohol and marijuana … the idea of a criminal substance. Now President Bush has another innovation, illegal knowledge. Speaking about Iran he said “So I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

Leaving from the alarming implications of this new kind of crime, the thought crime, for a moment, let’s look at the practicality of Bush’s aim of preventing Iran from learning how to make a bomb.

In the 1940s, a few thousand people had an understanding of how to make a nuclear weapon, and they were bound by military oaths of secrecy. By the late 1950s, however, any high school physics student could give you the lowdown. In the internet age, you just look it up on the net: here http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/design.htm or here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design 

If Iran required more detailed instructions, they were available. Remember this story from CNN January 2004? “The government of Pakistan has removed the founder of the country’s nuclear program from a government advisory post in the midst of an investigation into allegations that Pakistani officials shared nuclear technology with other nations, including Iran and Libya.” It turned out that Libya had the plans, so it is reasonable to assume that if Iran wanted them, they got them too.

Perhaps Bush means that he doesnt want the Iranians to have the practical, as opposed to theoretical, knowledge of how to enrich uranium? If so, it is a false hope. The Iranians already know that, have already done that. What is more, they have known how to do that for longer than is generally realised. One of the reasons they began the present enrichment program was because they were denied their share of the output of the enrichment plant in France which they part-owned.  The Eurdif plant was constructed in 1975 using a $1 billion loan from the then Shan of Iran. The deal was that Iran was to get ten percent of the nuclear fuel produced.  You do not put up one billion dollars to build a plant of any kind without seeing the detail plans. Iran, and Iranian technologists have been in possession of the knowledge forbidden by Bush for over three decades.

The IAEA says there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. The Iranians say they have no nuclear weapons programme.
Russia’s Putin says he can see no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. George Bush can produce no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, so in order to justify his continued threats, sanctions, and hostility against Iran he has resorted to a nonsensical accusation … the Iranians may not have acted criminally; they may not have possessed criminally, but they are guilty of knowing criminally.

The comments of retired Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, former US commander in Iraq, are remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, they are the only observations by a senior US figure which appear to be founded in the same real world the rest of us see. Secondly, and more remarkably, the comments have been headlined in the mainstream media throughout the world, including the US.
This is a signal not only that the Iraqi project is to be abandoned by the US/UK political and economic establishment, but that Bush is to be abandoned too. While it is entirely just that Bush bears shame and dishonour for the failures of his administration, the public should not be satisfied with that great fall. We should remember that the war on Iraq would not have occurred without the active participation of the mainstream media as propagandists.

Bush may have told the lies, but the media sold them. Similarly, the US economic crisis affecting the whole world is only partly due to Bush’s military expenditures. The ongoing collapse of the US$ and the loss of its status as world reserve currency are the work of the international bankers.

Here in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard is expected to call an election this weekend. The sudden collapse of media support for his great friend and ally George Bush Jr does not bode well for his campaign … but the signs were not good anyway, even with the unswerving loyalty of the Murdoch media empire. Let’s see if The Australian follows its stablemate The New York Times in tergivisating (that’s a parliamentary term meaning ‘to cross the house’).