‘Egyptian Christians may face extinction,’ activist warns

An Egyptian activist jailed for ten months by the military following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 said that his countrymen will likely take to the streets again soon to topple the forces which removed the Islamist regime of Mohammed Morsi last month.

Speaking to the Times of Israel from the German city of Erfurt, where he is completing a Masters degree in public policy, Maikel Nabil, 27, said that — like the events of January 2011 — the ouster of Morsi on July 3 was “both a revolution and a coup.” He voiced concern about the mounting atmosphere of fear Christian Copts have experienced during and after the Brotherhood era, which has caused scores of them to flee the country.

“Some estimate that one third of Egypt’s 12 million Copts left the country over the past five decades, and that hundreds of thousands are leaving each year. They are being pushed out, and I fear they may even face a genocide and become extinct from Egypt,” Nabil said.

In this process, he asserted, the military has played as active a roll as the Muslim Brotherhood. As churches burned across Egypt in the wake of Morsi’s ouster, Nabil said the new regime opted for inaction in a bid to drive Christians out of Egypt.

“The military isn’t secular, it’s Islamic, though in a different way than the Brotherhood. It’s racist towards Christians, who are discriminated against within its ranks.”

“People in Egypt have wishful thinking; they believe the army will implement democracy and separation of religion and state. But people have already started to become disillusioned and they will continue to be disappointed in the future,” he said.

The army has also failed the loyalty test with the United States, he added. Despite billions of dollars in American military aid over the years, the Egyptian army rushed to China and Russia in search of support at the first sound of American criticism over its violent crackdown of pro-Morsi protesters.

“The aid to Egypt’s army hasn’t created any kind of loyalty towards the US,” he said.

With his arrest in March 2011, Nabil — an active member of the grassroots movement No to Compulsory Military Service – became the first political activist to be detained by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) which ruled Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster the previous month. Charged with “insulting the military” on his blog (which unusually contained a Hebrew section), Nabil went on a four-month hunger strike and was finally pardoned by the military in January 2012 following international pressure.

Commenting on the release of Hosni Mubarak from prison on Thursday, Nabil said that the Egyptian uprising was not about Mubarak the person but was rather a struggle for freedom and democracy.

“The majority of Egyptians think about the future, not the past, so Mubarak is not the question,” he said. “Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, Tantawi or Morsi are all essentially the same. The differences between them were very small in terms of the democratic freedoms they allowed.”

Nevertheless, a dramatic shift took place over the past year in Egyptian public opinion, Nabil opined. Egyptians moved from considering the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas legitimate political players to viewing them as “fascists and terrorists.”

Asked whether he feared the return of the Mubarak era, Nabil said he’s “not sure whether returning to that regime is good or bad.”

Spending the entire year of Morsi’s rule in Germany gave Nabil pause to consider the personal price he had paid for his principles. While still hoping to return to Egypt next year following the completion of his studies, Nabil is pessimistic. Mostly, he is critical of Egypt’s revolutionary groups, including the April 6 Youth Movement, which he says “ignored his suffering” and cut political deals with the SCAF.

“They instrumentalized human rights, and I paid the price,” he said.

From The Times of Israel

“Tepco Has Lost Control”

After a self-imposed gag order by the mainstream media on any coverage of the Fukushima disaster (ostensibly the last thing the irradiated Japanese citizens needed is reading beyond the lies of their benevolent government, and TEPCO, and finding out just how bad the reality is especially since the key driver behind Abenomics is a return in confidence at all costs), the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history is once again receiving the attention it deserves. 

This follows the recent admission by TEPCO of the biggest leak reported at Fukushima to date, which forced the Japanese government to raise the assessment of Fukushima from Level 1 to Level 3, even though this is merely the catalyst of what has been a long and drawn out process in which Tepco has tried everything it could to contain the fallout from the exploded NPP, and failed. And today, in a startling and realistic assessment of Fukushima two and a half years after the explosion, the WSJ finally tells the truth: “Tepco Has Lost Control.”

Here is how the mainstream media, in this case the Wall Street Journal, catches up with a topic covered extensively in the “alternative” media for the past several years:

“This is what we have been fearing,” said Shunichi Tanaka, chair of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, answering questions about the leak at a news conference. “We cannot waste even a minute” to take action.

Behind the leak is a more serious problem: During the past few months it has become clear that Tepco has lost control over the flow of water at the plant and that the problem is escalating, nuclear experts say.

Every day, the utility has to find a place to store around 400 tons of contaminated water that it pumps out of the radioactive reactor buildings, and Wednesday it warned that it is fast running out of space. Storage tanks set up on the fly during plant emergencies have started springing leaks, and Tepco can’t replace them with sturdier ones fast enough. Groundwater-contamination levels are spiking at the seaward side of the plant, and water is flowing into the ocean past a series of walls, plugs and barriers that have been flung up to impede its passage.

What does “losing control” mean in practical terms?

That lack of control is a big liability, said Kathryn Higley, a specialist in the spread of radiation and head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University, who spent a week in Fukushima earlier this year.

“You have to find ways to control water coming through the site,” Ms. Higley said. “With any sort of accident, you want to control the timing of what’s released and when it gets released.”

So far, the levels of radioactivity that have escaped to the outside remain relatively low, but some experts warn they may not stay that way—particularly as equipment ages and the heavy-duty work of dismantling the damaged buildings and removing the melted fuel rods proceeds. The radioactivity of the water in the most recent leak was so high that workers couldn’t get close enough to search for the cause until the remaining fluid in the tank was removed.

Tepco said it doesn’t think that water has flowed into the sea but can’t say for sure. Some of the flooded reactor basements are similarly too hot to approach, and it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are, or in what state.
The last statement bears repeating: “it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are.” Well as long as TEPCO is 100% confident there are no uncontrolled chain reactions taking place… Then again hundreds of tons of coolant must be cooling something.

“In the future there might be even more heavily contaminated water coming through,” said Atsunao Marui, head of the groundwater research group at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a member of a blue-ribbon panel set up in May to figure out ways of managing the radioactive water. “It’s important to think of the worst-case scenario.”

Indeed the “worst-case scenario” is an appropriate topic because as covered here over the weekend, it involves the potential death of millions of largely oblivious Japanese citizens. As for the long overdue mea culpa by a nationalized TEPCO, which also speaks for the entire Japanese government, it sounds hollow at best and makes one wonder what else is left unsaid.

Mr. Marui and others say the biggest reason for the scramble now is that Tepco—and the government bodies that oversee it—weren’t planning far enough ahead and waited too long to respond to problems they should have seen coming long ago.

“They’re only responding after the fact—they’re not thinking ahead,” said Hajimu Yamana, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University who earlier this month was named chair of a new institute charged with helping develop measures to tackle the longer-term work of dismantling the plant. “As an expert, I was watching it with frustration.”

“We have not remained idle, but we admit that we have been reactive,” Zengo Aizawa, Tepco executive vice president for nuclear public relations, said at a news conference Wednesday, during which the company was grilled about the leak. “We are very, very sorry for causing concern.“

The concerns are piling up. Earlier today Reuters reported that TEPCO “admitted to new spots of high radiation had been found near storage tanks holding highly contaminated water, raising fear of fresh leaks as the disaster goes from bad to worse.”

In an inspection carried out following the revelation of the leakage, high radiation readings – 100 millisieverts per hour and 70 millisieverts per hour – were recorded at the bottom of two tanks in a different part of the plant, Tepco said.

Although no puddles were found nearby and there were no noticeable changes in water levels in the tanks, the possibility of stored water having leaked out cannot be ruled out, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.

The bottom line, and what has become painfully clear, is that Japan simply can’t fix the problem. Even China has now figured it out.


China said it was “shocked” to hear contaminated water was still leaking from the plant, and urged Japan to provide information “in a timely, thorough and accurate way”.

What is strangest of all is that the Japanese people are far less concerned about the government’s cover up. Oh well: they have their distractions – like a plunging currency, and (transitorily) soaring stock market, in nominal terms of course.

Finally the following four charts from the WSJ provide a full breakdown of the current state of play at the devastated nuclear power plant.








FROM INFOWARS

American, Israeli And Jordanian Troops And CIA Agents Have Entered Syria, Le Figaro Reports

We have yet to see secondary confirmation of the following breaking news from the second largest French newspaper, Le Figaro, but if accurate, it means the Nobel Peace Prize winning president has just engaged in yet another unsanctioned by Congress war.

From Le Figaro, google translated:

According to our information, the regime's opponents, supervised by Jordanian, Israeli and American commandos moving towards Damascus since mid-August. This attack could explain the possible use of the Syrian president to chemical weapons.

According to information obtained by Le Figaro , the first trained in guerrilla warfare by the Americans in Jordan Syrian troops reportedly entered into action since mid-August in southern Syria, in the region of Deraa. A first group of 300 men, probably supported by Israeli and Jordanian commandos, as well as men of the CIA, had crossed the border on August 17. A second would have joined the 19. According to military sources, the Americans, who do not want to put troops on the Syrian soil or arming rebels in part controlled by radical Islamists form quietly for several months in a training camp set up at the border Jordanian- Syrian fighters ASL, the Free Syrian Army, handpicked.

...

According to this expert on the region, the idea proposed by Washington would be the possible establishment of a buffer zone from the south of Syria, or even a no-fly zone, which would cause opponents safely until the balance of power changes. This is the reason why the United States has deployed Patriot batteries and F16 in late June Jordan.

More here.

...

Why is the US, or rather Federal Reserve, desperate for a war with Syria?  It was all explained previously here, but here is the one chart that matters.

In brief: to allow the Untaper once the Taper ends, the US needs to find much more deficit funding needs, and as always there is no place better to achieve this than to spike the contracting spending budget by engaging in war.

And now, the ball is in Putin's court.

Zero Hedge

Egyptian Christians Cancel Church Services for First Time in More Than 1,600 Years

Several of Egypt’s Coptic Christian churches canceled Mass services last Sunday for the first time in more than 1,600 years amid the unprecedented wave violence against them.

Christian churches in Minya, located in Upper Egypt, canceled their Sunday Mass services after an attack by supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi last week that destroyed their monastery.

“We did not hold prayers in the monastery on Sunday for the first time in 1,600 years,” Selwanes Lotfy, priest of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram monastery in Degla, just south of Minya, told Egypt’s al-Masry al-Youm newspaper.

One of the extremists wrote on the monastery’s wall, "Donate [this] to the martyrs’ mosque.”

Pro-Morsi supporters have accused Coptic Christians of playing a disproportionately large role in the ouster of the former president. Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II was outspoken in his support of protests against Morsi in the days leading up to Morsi's ouster.

On the pope's Twitter account, he encouraged followers to join the protest movement. Following Morsi’s removal, the pope, along with his Muslim counterpart, the grand imam of al-Azhar University, Dr. Ahmed el-Tayyib, appeared together to endorse Egypt’s military roadmap for a new government.

Since Aug. 14, when the Egyptian military cleared two pro-Morsi encampments in Cairo, dozens of Christian churches, schools, businesses and homes have been targeted by Islamic terrorists. At least two Christians have also been killed in the violence. Pope Tawadros is believed to be in hiding.

On Wednesday, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) called on President Barack Obama to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Christian violence.

“We are observing with horror the way this horrifying and murderous Muslim Brotherhood assault on Egyptian Christians has been proceeding for several days with hardly any international reaction,” ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said in a statement. “The ZOA strongly condemns these attacks on innocent Christians across Egypt by the radical Muslim Brotherhood mobs.”

Coptic Christians constituted a majority of Egypt’s population until the Middle Ages, when Islam, introduced by the Arab invasions in the seventh century, eclipsed their religion. Today, Coptic Christianity comprises nearly 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, making it the largest single Christian community remaining in the Middle East.
Charisma News

Central Planners ensure Collapse

Lawmakers and central bankers in India, Indonesia, Turkey and several emerging-market economies are scrambling to contain the damage from falling currencies and to keep foreign investors from heading for the exits.

Money has poured out of those economies over the last few weeks, pushing down the prices of a wide array of assets, including stocks, bonds and currencies. 

The Indonesian rupiah dropped to its lowest level against the dollar since 2009.

In an effort to slow the exodus of foreign money from Turkey, the country’s central bank raised a key interest rate on Tuesday. That came as the Reserve Bank of India announced that it would start buying Indian government bonds later this week to “address the risks to macroeconomic stability.”
The indian rupee has plunged very recently and it is now at an all-time low vs the U.S. dollar. The Indian government had been making everything at his hands to kill the demand in the Indian gold market.

As a consequence of this measures Gold is now the most black-market trafficked item into India.

According to a Reuters article from earlier today, Australian bank Macquarie has reported that gold is flooding out of London and into Switzerland at a mind-boggling rate. Specifically, 240 tons were exported in May alone and 797 tons during the first half of 2013. That means gold is being exported at a annualized run rate of 17x the 92 tons exported for all of 2012. That’s insane.

Moreover, it seems a lot of that gold is being sent to Switzerland so that the 400oz bars can be melted down into different sizes that are more amenable to Asian sensibilities.

Very recently the dollar has been losing ground vs other major currencies. There has been continued liquidation from countries such as China, who own large amounts of dollars.

Well, eventually this will all unravel and get completely out of control. Bernanke seems to think he can turn off the money spigot simply by using the correct timing, and that this will not cause massive inflation. But they are causing inflation. Any person in the street who buys goods or services in America knows this. The U.S. continues to put out phony inflation numbers so they can can justify pumping all of this money into the system.

Eventually this is going to have serious repercussions. There is absolutely no doubt that this will end in disaster, and in the coming ‘Great Inflation,’ gold and silver will soar.

All of this has only solidified the reason why the Indian people buy gold and silver, which is to protect their wealth. Yesterday the IMF was talking about making an emergency loan to the Indians with them selling some of their large gold hoard. The idea was that this would theoretically help India with its balance of payments.

You have to remember the Western central planners never want to see the price of gold advance because it is an important alternative to holding U.S. dollars.

In Asia they are dumping dollars as quickly as possible without trying to crash the price of the U.S. currency, and at the same time they are desperately buying as much physical gold as they can get their hands on.

The bottom line here is this is rather tragic to witness the West near the edge of a cliff, as central planners recklessly endanger the entire global financial system and ensure that the West will eventually collapse.

Nunez Report

From King World News and Zero hedge

Are We Supporting Syrian Slaughter ?

Game Over: America Has Accepted Her Enslavement

Part two of this series show in some detail that Obama’s governance is following Cloward and Piven’s plan to collapse the government through the destruction of the economy through free trade agreements. Nothing short of a miracle can save this country from economic destruction.

America Is Dumber Than a Box of Rocks

Recently, I conducted an survey of a cross-section of Americans in which I asked the following two questions:

(1) Please describe the two key elements of a free trade agreement .
In my rubric, the correct answer would have included (1) the owners of manufacturing relocate their factories in foreign cheap labor markets; (2) the owners of manufacturing are able to ship their foreign goods back into America duty free (i.e. without tariffs).

(2) Describe one group who wins and one group who loses as a result of free trade agreements.

In the rubric, the correct answer would have identified the winner as the owners of the means of production who take advantage of the fact that tariffs do not apply to them and they have dramatically lowered their labor costs as a result. Respondents should have identified the loser in a free trade agreement as the person who loses their job in the because of the growth of cheap, foreign labor.

The Results Demonstrate Abject Ignorance
Out of 200 respondents who answered question one, only 2% (n=4) of those surveyed identified the two elements of a free trade agreement. Most of the respondents (45%) expressed the opinion which essentially stated or implied that free trade agreements are good for America because “”we are free to trade with whoever we want.”

Out of 200 respondents, over half (57%) believes that America is better off for having free trade agreements. About the same number (55%) could not identify one group that loses as a result of a free trade agreement except for those “who don’t want to participate.

It is interesting to note that all participants have incomes of under $150,000. Over half of the participants have income of under $60,000. The data shows that these people are most vulnerable to free trade agreements.

I have concluded that Americans do not even know what has hit them as we continue our slide into third world status. Yes, America you have almost arrived to third world status. If one takes away the top 1% in our country, we are a third world country. When more of us are on welfare (101 million people) than are working (97 million people), we have become a welfare state. A welfare state is representative of absolute poverty. At this rate, our poverty will soon rival the poverty rates of any third world nation.

If I were to make a sports analogy, our team is behind by 20 point in the 4th quarter and the players and their fans think that they are winning.

FYI On Free Trade Agreements
NAFTA and CAFTA have removed millions of jobs from our country. Eighty six percent of our manufacturing base is gone. From a national defense perspective, this is a prescription for destruction because in a protracted military conflict, factories are typically converted to war production centers in times of war. The implication is clear and that for the first time in our history, we are vulnerable to being militarily occupied.

Ignorance Abounds
In our recent history, being classified as middle class implied someone who was educated, lived in relative comfort and had a good degree of discretionary income. Today, what is left of the American middle class represents a growing trend in functional illiteracy, a woeful level of ignorance about current events, massive debt, little to no savings and a lifestyle that can best be described as one that is hanging on for dear life.

In my recent article when I detailed how damaging our emerging welfare state is destroying the well-being of our country, my article elicited a barrage of attacks from classic underachievers who want the government to become their third parent. No, I am not talking about the temporarily unemployed or the disabled. I am talking about absolutely able-bodied people who are capable of work and who will not work. Here are some examples of their rationale for staying on welfare.

“As a working poor, I would like more hours, can’t find them. As far as working the welfare recipients for their benefits, I’m sure the capable ones would go to work if they could make a reasonable amount of wages. Minimum wage(or lower), is not enough to live on, it has not come close to keeping up with expenses in the last 50 years.”

The above person is capable of working full-time. If his present employer isn’t providing enough hours to make ends meet, then get a second job. If this person is typing a response to an article on the internet defending his use of welfare, he could instead be typing his resume to send out instead. Is there any reason why the above person is not at least getting a job in telemarketing?

According to some welfare recipients, they are performing a patriotic duty by helping to create a brand new economy by being one of those who administer benefits to those who will not work.

“I guess it never occurred to the author that these social programs create jobs. If we stopped “welfare” tomorrow, how many people will find themselves out of work?”

There is a hidden pearl of wisdom in the above response from a presumed user of welfare in that there is even a secondary economy emerging to administer the benefits for those who will not work. Isn’t this akin to a Ponzi scheme? And with all Ponzi schemes, they always come crashing down.

Then of course we get people who are addicted to the system and engage in denial to lessen the psychological sting of having a life that produces nothing and only exists because of the indentured servitude of American taxpayers.

“Here’s the problem with the whole theory that millions of people are dependent on government. It’s simply not true.”


Cloward and Piven Have Won
The free trade agreements destroyed millions of American jobs and drove tens of millions of Americans to welfare. Many forget the cumulative effect of a free trade agreements. Not only do millions lose their jobs, but the reduction of spending power from the millions who are unemployed impacts the well-being of those in the service industries. The ripple effect from the free trade agreements explains how over half the potential work population in the United States end up on welfare.

Welfare has replaced the jobs lost to the free trade agreements. If 101 million Americans simply lost their jobs as a result of NAFTA and CAFTA, there would have been a revolution. Instead, the globalists have instituted a system of learned helplessness, in which people are conditioned to believe that their actions don’t make a difference because government will always take of them.

Bad News On the Horizon

The cold hard fact is that over half the country is unemployed and underemployed and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Obamacare is going to turn America into a nation of part-time workers. Further, there are many more free trade agreements on the horizon.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas is being implemented as we speak. This agreement creates a free trade agreement from the tip of South America to the North Pole. It also erases all borders with regard to immigration

HR 1777 is a bill making its way through Congress which provides for American taxpayer dollars to be used to build the necessary infrastructure to construct factories in Africa’s 54 countries. I have dubbed HR 1777 the ‘African Free Trade Agreement.” More jobs lost to another free trade agreements.

There is one more monolithic free trade agreement which is being brought online through administrative fiat and it called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its impact will be bigger than NAFTA.

The amount of free trade agreements is inversely correlated to the number of remaining American jobs. In a few short years, there will be no American economy as we know it and very few people are standing up and protesting. Why?

Welfare: The New American Way of Life

The Cloward and Piven disciple, President Obama, is following the plan to collapse America to the letter as seven out of every eight jobs that have been emerged since his inauguration, has been part-time jobs.

The Cato Institute states that a New York welfare recipient earns more money than a first year teacher. Why work? Who cares if this president, who was bred and groomed by known communists such as Bill Ayers, are dismantling this country piece by piece.

At one time, I believed that if we in the truthful media could raise enough awareness, we could stem the tide. I know longer believe that to be the case. There is no way to rally the nation I would now call the United States of Idiocracy. The coming conflict will need new leaders and that is what the alternative media is creating.

One person wrote a comment to part two which I fear is prophetic in which he said:

“First we tried the “soap box” and we found out that didn’t work.
Second, we tried the “ballot box” well that didn’t work either.
Third, the only box left is the “ammo box”. 

Sherman’s March to the Sea

Before you civil war advocates jump up and down and say “it’s about time,” I would invite you to read Sherman’s March to the Sea. There are very few winners in a civil war and most all of you reading these words have grown too soft to endure the hardships which accompany a civil war.

The fundamental question remains, how do we convince the tens of millions of able bodied people on welfare to not accept their fate and stand up for their rights when a new study by the Cato Institute, demonstrates that that 13 states pay welfare benefits pays of more than $15 per hour and 35 states pay welfare benefits which exceed minimum wage? The short answer is that we will not hear from them until their welfare benefits are cut off. Then all hell will break loose.

The Common Sense Show