NEW YORK – The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked UNESCO’s director-general Wednesday to suspend its sponsorship of a Palestinian children’s magazine, saying the magazine applauded Hitler for murdering Jews.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, the educational children’s magazine, Zayafuna, “includes terms glorifying jihad.”
The PMW report references an essay in the magazine by a teenage Palestinian girl. The girl wrote about meeting Adolf Hitler in a dream, who tells her that he killed the Jews “so you would all know that they are a nation who spreads destruction all over the world.” In the essay, Hitler tells the child to be patient regarding the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Jews.
In a letter to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations, wrote that the editors of Zayafuna “endorse Adolf Hitler as a role model for Palestinian children,” noting that a quarter of thechildren’s submission selected for publication by the magazine “express hatred for Jews and reflect messages transmitted through PA official media.”
“Apparently, the magazine’s positive m
essages on coexistence and peace apply to all but Jews and Israelis,” Samuels wrote. “Through a young girl, the Holocaust is presented as an act for the benefit of humanity.”
The Palestinian Authority’s deputy minister of education and its former minister of education are both on the magazine’s advisory board, Samuels noted.
UNESCO, Samuels said, has sponsored Zayafuna since August. The Hitler essay ran in the magazine’s February 2011 issue.
While Samuels noted the October edition states that “opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily express UNESCO’s views,” Samuels wrote that this disclaimer was “hardly a fitting response to the discovery of the repugnant Holocaust celebration in the February issue.”
Samuels recalled the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s suggestion last month “when ‘Palestine’ was welcomed into UNESCO, that the new member be tested by being held to the declared values of UNESCO.”
“Until Zayafuna publicly apologizes for its anti-Semitism, Palestine will have already failed that test,” Samuels wrote, and urged UNESCO to demand that PA President Mahmoud Abbas rescind funding for the magazine.
PMW head Itamar Marcus said his organization welcomes the Wiesenthal Center’s call to UNESCO to stop funding the magazine Zayafuna.
“UNESCO’s continued funding of a hate magazine makes them a participant in the hate promotion it disseminates,” Marcus said. “It would be a violation of basic moral principles to fund a Palestinian magazine that glorifies violence and jihad, and presents Hitler as a role model for children.
“The only way, it seems, the Palestinian Authority will ever stop its repeated hate promotion is if there are financial consequences to their hate promotion,” Marcus said. “Let us hope that UNESCO takes the morally decent route and stops the funding, and not the politically expedient route of turning away in the face of Palestinian hatred.”
Jerusalem Post
Some 11 Swiss banks must hand over thousands of client names and pay billions in fines to avoid tax evasion prosecution in the United States, according to reports.
Swiss newspapers claim the deadline for the US ultimatum passed on Tuesday night. However, banks are keeping tight lipped over claims that they would also have to provide all correspondence with offshore clients over the past 11 years.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has been steadily closing a net around Swiss banks ever since UBS admitted in 2009 to helping wealthy US citizens evade taxes. The Swiss authorities were then compelled to water down banking secrecy laws by handing over the names of nearly 4,500 UBS clients.
Since then, the DoJ and the US tax authority – the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – have been building cases against other Swiss banks that are alleged to have either opened secret accounts from scratch or poached UBS clients who wanted to dodge the crackdown.
Two tax amnesties have netted thousands of clients, some of whom have provided the IRS with details of how they opened their accounts and a so-called roadmap of which banks allegedly helped them evade taxes.
Hopes dashed
In addition, two former Swiss bank employees were arrested this year with at least one turning whistleblower to lighten his sentence.
Information gleaned by the SonntagsZeitung and Tages-Anzeiger newspapers points to the US authorities demanding some 6,500 account details and around $3 billion (SFr2.8 billion) in fines from the 11 banks. UBS paid a $780 million fine in 2009.
It has been widely reported that the Swiss authorities had hoped to negotiate a catch-all civil settlement that included all Swiss banks. But those hopes appear to have been dashed by the DoJ’s determination to pursue criminal probes into the 11 worst offenders.
The prospect of a criminal prosecution has placed banks under far greater pressure as a conviction could spell the end of their activities in the US.
Worried clients
“It appears that the US is pressing for a settlement similar to the UBS deal, which entailed a deferred prosecution agreement that included the payment of funds [fines], the disclosure of information and cooperation in further investigations,” US tax lawyer Scott Michel told swissinfo.ch.
Credit Suisse has already complied with the ultimatum – at least in part – by informing an unspecified number of US clients last month that it would hand over their names.
The bank, along with the State Secretariat for International Financial Matters, which has been handling Switzerland’s negotiations, declined to comment on the latest reports of a deadline for the 11 financial institutions.
But Scott Michel told swissinfo.ch that his office had received “multiple calls” from worried clients who wanted to come clean before the authorities caught up with them.
“If the name is provided by the Swiss before the account holder contacts the IRS, the IRS will likely take the position that any disclosure is untimely, leading to a risk of criminal prosecution,” Michel warned.
Little legal redress
Banking clients can expect little protection from the Swiss courts despite the strong tradition of legal banking secrecy in the country.
Under the terms of the UBS deal which was ratified by the Swiss parliament in 2010, the US authorities could legitimately demand information from other banks that demonstrate “behavioural patterns” of tax evasion.
Some 380 UBS clients appealed to the courts against the handover of their details to the US authorities, but only 100 cases were upheld – some of them only partially.
On Tuesday, a Swiss court rejected an appeal by a Credit Suisse client for more time to prepare a legal defence against the handover of his confidential data, according to the Reuters news agency.
Matthew Allen, swissinfo.ch
NEW YORK – Fitch Ratings on Wednesday warned again that the United States’ rising debt burden was not consistent with maintaining the country’s top AAA credit rating, but said there would likely be no decision on whether to cut the rating before 2013.
Last month, Fitch changed its U.S. credit rating outlook to negative from stable, citing the failure of a special congressional committee to agree on at least US$1.2-trillion in deficit-reduction measures.
“Federal debt will rise in the absence of expenditure and tax reforms that would address the challenges of rising health and social security spending as the population ages,” Fitch said in a statement.
“The high and rising federal and general government debt burden is not consistent with the U.S. retaining its ‘AAA’ status despite its other fundamental sovereign credit strengths,” the ratings agency said.
In a new fiscal projection, Fitch said at least US$3.5-trillion of additional deficit reduction measures will be required to stabilize the federal debt held by the public at around 90% of gross domestic product in the latter half of the current decade.
Fitch, when it lowered its outlook to negative, had said it was giving the U.S. government until 2013 to come up with a “credible plan” to tackle its ballooning budget deficit or risk a downgrade from the AAA status.
“A key task of an incoming Congress and administration in 2013 is to formulate a credible plan to reduce the budget deficit and stabilize the federal debt burden. Without such a strategy, the sovereign rating will likely be lowered by the end of 2013,” Fitch reiterated.
Rival ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating on the United States to AA-plus from AAA on August 5, citing concerns over the government’s budget deficit and rising debt burden as well as the political gridlock that nearly led to a default.
On November 23, Moody’s Investors Service, warned that its top level Aaa credit rating for the United States could be in jeopardy if lawmakers were to backtrack on US$1.2-trillion in automatic deficit cuts that are set to be made over 10 years.
The plan for automatic cuts was triggered after the special congressional committee failed to reach an agreement on deficit reduction. Moody’s said any pullback from the agreed automatic cuts to take effect starting in 2013 could prompt it to take action.
Financial Post
Despite the latest attempt by the European Central Bank to kick the proverbial can far down the road, the Eurozone remains under heavy pressure, and France’s AAA credit rating hangs from a thread. According to research by Nomura, France’s exposure to peripheral Europe tops €680 billion ($887 billion), more than 25% of its GDP, putting its banks at substantial risk in the event of another debt restructuring or an outright default among the PIIGS.
France’s biggest problem, and arguably the Eurozone’s, continues to be Italy. While Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, along with the ECB’s Mario Draghi, have praised Italy’s new Prime Minister, Mario Monti, for his attempts at implementing austerity and structural reform, some continue to believe the Eurozone’s third largest economy will be forced to restructure its debt.
From a piece I wrote back in November quoting Nouriel Roubini:
With public debt at 120 per cent of gross domestic product, real interest rates close to five per cent, and zero growth, Italy would need a primary surplus of five per cent of gross domestic product - not the current near-zero – merely to stabilize its debt. Soon real rates will be higher and growth negative. Moreover, the austerity that the European Central Bank and Germany are imposing on Italy will turn recession into depression.
The famed Dr. Doom was making the case for a restructuring of Italy’s debt. Nomura’s analysts paint another scary picture:
The size of Italy’s debt burden has precluded an official sector backstop up to this point, and debt restructuring may indeed be too much for the French banking system to handle. Figure 3 [reproduced in this article] shows the exposures of French banks to Italian assets and the appendix contains some illustrative calculations of potential losses for French banks. The losses for French banks in a situation of Italian exit/restructuring could generate losses in excess of 20% of French GDP.
French debt-to-GDP levels are expected to hit 90% in 2012. The “additional contingent liability” of an Italian restructuring would push France over the top, its debt-to-GDP levels jumping past 120%. “In addition, the jump would be even bigger if it happens in the face of declining French GDP,” wrote the analysts. Goldman Sachs’ economists estimated France would slide into recession in 2012, while official numbers show Q3 GDP inching up 0.4%.
Breaking the numbers down even further, France’s non-financial private sector holds about €265 billion ($346 billion) in Italian sovereigns, while the French public sector holds about €107 billion ($140 billion). All in all, French claims on Italian sovereign securities total €416 billion ($543 billion), which is about 16.3% of 2010 GDP.
Global banks rallied on Wednesday, in part acknowledging the ECB’s “long-term refinancing operations” (LTRO), considered by some to be backdoor QE. In the U.S., Morgan Stanley,JPMorgan, and Citi ended the day in positive territory.
For now, European policymakers appear to have kicked the can down the road enough to calm markets and ease funding pressures on their embattled banking system. But Merkozy & Co. still face a host of structural, political, and financial problems that will keep investors on edge throughout 2012. France’s exposure to Italy, it seems, is one of the most dangerous.
FORBES
The head of Britain's biggest state-controlled bank has warned that a eurozone country could leave the single currency during 2012, sending shockwaves around Europe's banking system.
Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton made the prediction during Jeff Randall's Christmas Dinner, a seasonal discussion between business leaders on Sky News.
He said: "I think it's likely that one country, a small country will drop out.
"It could be any of them because I think that some of these things will be driven by political events, as much as by economic circumstances and social unrest, and all of those sorts of things. But I think there is a very good chance that one country will fall out."
Sir Philip said such an event would "produce massive strains" in Europe's banking system.
"At the more extreme levels of that you would get a wave of recapitalisations of banks by governments throughout Europe," he added.
The chairman of RBS, which came near to bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis and is now 83% owned by the taxpayer, also admitted things could still go horribly wrong in Britain's banking system.
He said: "I don't think the system has been fixed. I think it is very much on the mend."
He then joked: "There is a ghoulish expression used in the City that the British banks are the best looking horse in the glue factory or the best looking pig in the slaughterhouse."
Meanwhile, the boss of Sainsbury's told the group that charity shops can have a detrimental effect on the British high street.
The supermarket giant's chief executive Justin King said: "Ultimately lots of charity shops potentially undermine vibrant new small businesses starting up, so I don't think we should assume that they are necessarily a benign force."
Imperial Tobacco's boss Alison Cooper also attended the gathering for the Jeff Randall LiveChristmas special.
She suggested that Chancellor George Osborne may need to be prepared to deviate from his rigid deficit reduction strategy, known as Plan A, during the coming year.
Ms Cooper said: "There will need to be some agility around it if necessary, on the basis of how the world evolves and to make sure that we're responsive to that but the core of it will remain."
Sky News
Economic Collapse writes: Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don't make dramatic changes immediately. If we do not educate the American people about how deathly ill the U.S. economy has become, then they will just keep falling for the same old lies that our politicians keep telling them. Just "tweaking" things here and there is not going to fix this economy. We truly do need a fundamental change in direction. America is consuming far more wealth than it is producing and our debt is absolutely exploding. If we stay on this current path, an economic collapse is inevitable. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers from 2011 that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.
At this time of the year, a lot of families get together, and in most homes the conversation usually gets around to politics at some point. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help you share the reality of the U.S. economic crisis with your family and friends. If we all work together, hopefully we can get millions of people to wake up and realize that "business as usual" will result in a national economic apocalypse.
The following are 50 economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe....
#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be "low income" or impoverished.
#3 If the number of Americans that "wanted jobs" was the same today as it was back in 2007, the "official" unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.
#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.
#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.
#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
#7 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.
#8 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
#9 A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.
#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
#11 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#12 Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.
#13 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.
#14 The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.
#15 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
#16 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.
#18 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.
#19 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 months in a row.
#20 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant. That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.
#22 New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.
#23 As I have written about previously, 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
#24 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#25 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%.
#26 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#27 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#28 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#29 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.
#30 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
#31 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
#32 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America's biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.
#33 Today, the "too big to fail" banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
#34 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
#35 According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.
#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.
#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before.
#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.
#39 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.
#40 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#42 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.
#43 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
#44 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars. That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.
#46 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#47 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.
#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.
The Market Oracle
WASHINGTON – A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of America's top business-lobbying group and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The break-in at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the boldest known infiltrations in what has become a regular confrontation between U.S. companies and Chinese hackers. The complex operation, which involved at least 300 internet addresses, was discovered and quietly shut down in May 2010.
It isn't clear how much of the compromised data was viewed by the hackers. Chamber officials say internal investigators found evidence that hackers had focused on four Chamber employees who worked on Asia policy, and that six weeks of their email had been stolen.
It is possible the hackers had access to the network for more than a year before the breach was uncovered, according to two people familiar with the Chamber's internal investigation.
One of these people said the group behind the break-in is one that U.S. officials suspect of having ties to the Chinese government. The Chamber learned of the break-in when the FBI told the group that servers in China were stealing its information, this person said. The FBI declined to comment on the matter.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Geng Shuang, said cyberattacks are prohibited by Chinese law and China itself is a victim of attacks. He said the allegation that the attack against the Chamber originated in China "lacks proof and evidence and is irresponsible," adding that the hacking issue shouldn't be "politicized."
The Chamber moved to shut down the hacking operation by unplugging and destroying some computers and overhauling its security system. The security revamp was timed for a 36-hour period over one weekend when the hackers, who kept regular working hours, were expected to be off duty.
Damage from data theft is often difficult to assess.
People familiar with the Chamber investigation said it has been hard to determine what was taken before the incursion was discovered, or whether cyberspies used information gleaned from the Chamber to send booby-trapped emails to its members to gain a foothold in their computers, too.
Chamber officials said they scoured email known to be purloined and determined that communications with fewer than 50 of its members were compromised. They notified those members. People familiar with the investigation said the emails revealed the names of companies and key people in contact with the Chamber, as well as trade-policy documents, meeting notes, trip reports and schedules.
"What was unusual about it was that this was clearly somebody very sophisticated, who knew exactly who we are and who targeted specific people and used sophisticated tools to try to gather intelligence," said the Chamber's Chief Operating Officer David Chavern.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/21/chinese-computer-hackers-hit-us-chamber-commerce/#ixzz1hFAWj9I9
