Bible Prophecy Coast To Coast

Why Muslims Hate Christianity

Prophecy of Earthquake coming to Italy-Dr. Owuor

USAID must leave Russia by October 1

This week it was officially disclosed in Moscow and Washington that during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vladivostok earlier this month Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his United States counterpart, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that the foreign aid agency USAID must curtail its operations and leave Russia by October 1. According to Russian diplomatic sources, last June, Lavrov warned Clinton that Moscow wanted USAID out, while the official note of eviction was handed to the US Ambassador in Moscow Michael McFaul by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on September 12. It has been reported in Moscow that Clinton wrote a letter to Lavrov, asking to allow USAID to continue its work in Moscow until next May, promising the aid agency will gradually wind down its existing programs and will not engage in signing new aid grant contracts. But Russian government sources told journalists they want USAID out immediately (Kommersant, September 20).

In an official statement, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused USAID of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs and “attempting to influence the outcome of elections by distributing aid grants.” According to the statement, Russia does not need foreign aid or “foreign guidance” of its civil society (www.mid.ru, September 19). President Vladimir Putin expressed through his press service full support for the expulsion of USAID (Vedomosti, September 20).

USAID has given aid money to the election monitoring group Golos, which helped expose massive vote rigging by the Russian authorities during parliamentary elections last December (see EDM, December 1, 2011). The electoral fraud has given the ruling pro-Kremlin United Russia party a majority in the Duma, though in fact it had lost the election. The exposed fraud triggered massive anti-Putin pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow that are seen in the Kremlin as a fifth column of an international conspiracy, led by the US State Department, plotting regime change in Russia. Using the majority in the State Duma gained through fraud, United Russia and the Kremlin have been hurriedly adopting legislation to further suppress the Russian opposition and officially brand human rights groups as foreign agents (see EDM, December 13, 2011; June 8).

Ousting USAID seems to be a logical move by the Putin regime, since this will surely undermine the work of Russian human rights organizations the Kremlin sees as its enemies. In Russia there is no economic incentive to make charitable donations since they do not provide tax exemptions, while the Russian rich are ordered by authorities to donate only to state-approved organizations. Billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s wealthiest man in 2004, was arrested in 2003 and is still behind bars serving a 14-year sentence. His wealth was confiscated, allegedly for tax fraud, but in fact for donating to opposition parties. Another billionaire, Alexander Lebedev, says his business interests have been attacked because he donates money to the opposition and does not “recommend anyone to follow [his] example” (Kommersant, September 20).

USAID has been active in Russia since 1992 and has distributed some $2.7 billion, helping human-rights groups in documenting election fraud and human rights abuses, supporting AIDS education, treatment of tuberculosis and improvement of infrastructure programs. The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, lamented the ouster of USAID from Russia, while at the same time declaring the policy of a “reset” of relations with Russia, begun by President Barack Obama in 2009, a success that will be continued—an announcement met with satisfaction in Moscow (RIA Novosti, September 19). In the run-up to the November elections, the Obama administration seems to be ready to accept any abuse or insult by the Putin regime in an attempt to continue the pretence that the failed policy of the reset is “a success.” Such appeasement is not only morally wrong—it incites Putin to be increasingly aggressive in foreign and internal policies.

This week, the strategic Kavkaz-2012 (“Caucasus-2012”) war games began in the North Caucasus, planned to last until September 23. On September 17, Putin visited a specially choreographed exercise at the military training ground Rayevsky near the port city of Novorossiysk. Russian troops simulated an encounter with a US Marine expeditionary force that was presumed to have landed on the Russian Black Sea coast. The simulated Marine force pressed deep into Russia with armor and air support to possibly take over the natural gas and oil export terminals in the region—or maybe one of Putin’s lavish palace residences. The Russian military used tanks, guns, missiles, jets, bombs, helicopters and anti-aircraft missiles to successfully decimate the invaders. Putin announced he was impressed, personally handed out medals to the troops that repulsed the presumed Marine invasion and called on the Russian military “to keep its powder dry.” In a transparent reference to the United States, Putin declared “the use of military force is increasing in international relations,” and the Russian military must be ready “to defend national interests” (RIA Novosti, September 17).

The Russian authorities have refused to allow foreign observers to oversee Kavkaz-2012. NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has publicly called for more transparency and complained that the Western Alliance was not provided by Russia with reliable information about “the purpose of the exercise, where does it take place, how is it conducted?” (www.euronews.com/2012/09/12/nato-chief-talks-to-euronews-on-911-anniversary). Moscow has dismissed the complaint as untrue, and several Moscow-based military attachés, including one from the US Embassy, were invited to visit the Rayevsky training ground together with Putin and his press corps (Kommerasnt, September 17, 18). However, a US diplomat later told Jamestown the military attachés were not provided with any detailed information about the exercise or what was actually happening on September 17 near Novorossiysk and were sent back to Moscow the same day. Kavkaz-2012 is continuing on land, air and sea in the North Caucasus, the Black Sea and the Caspian without any observers and under an almost total news blackout. Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze believes the Kavkaz-2012 exercise “may threaten the stability and security of not only Georgia, but the entire region.” Vashadze recalled that the similar, “though smaller in size,” military exercise Kavkaz-2008 in July 2008 was a precursor to a war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 (www.newsgeorgia.ru/politics/20120917/215215058.html).

The Jamestown Foundation

America's Decaying Infrastructure

You can tell a lot about a nation by the condition of the infrastructure.  So what does our infrastructure say about us?  It says that we are in a very advanced state of decay.  At this point, much of America is being held together with spit, duct tape and prayers.  Our roads are crumbling and thousands of our bridges look like they could collapse at any moment.  Our power grid is ancient and over a trillion gallons of untreated sewage is leaking from our aging sewer systems each year.  Our airports and our seaports are clogged with far more traffic than they were ever designed to carry.  Approximately a third of all of the dam failures that have taken place in the United States since 1874 have happened during the past decade.  

Our national parks and recreation areas have been terribly neglected and our railroads are a bad joke.  Hurricane Katrina showed how vulnerable our levees are, and drinking water systems all over the country are badly outdated.  Sadly, at a time when we could use significant new investment in infrastructure, our spending on infrastructure is actually way down.  Back during the 50s and the 60s, the U.S. was spending between 3 and 4 percent of GDP on infrastructure.  Today, that figure is down to about 2.4 percent.  But of course we don't have any extra money to spend on infrastructure because of our reckless spending and because of the massive amount of debt that we have accumulated. 

 While the Obama administration is spending more than half a million dollars to figure out why chimpanzees throw poop, our national infrastructure is literally falling apart all around us.  Once upon a time nobody else on the planet could match our infrastructure, and now we are in the process of becoming a joke to the rest of the world.

The following are 21 facts about America's failing infrastructure that will blow your mind....

#1 The American Society of Civil Engineers has given America's crumbling infrastructure an overall grade of D.

#2 There are simply not enough roads in the United States today.  Each year, traffic jams cost the commuters of America 4.2 billion hours and about 2.8 million gallons of gasoline.

#3 It is being projected that Americans will spend an average of 160 hours stuck in traffic annually by the year 2035.

#4 Approximately one-third of all roads in the United States are in substandard condition.

#5 Close to a third of all highway fatalities are due "to substandard road conditions, obsolete road designs, or roadside hazards."

#6 One out of every four bridges in America either carries more traffic than originally intended or is in need of repair.

#7 Repairing all of the bridges in the United States that need repair would take approximately 140 billion dollars.

#8 According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, our decaying transportation system costs the U.S. economy about 78 billion dollars annually in lost time and fuel.

#9 All over America, asphalt roads are being ground up and are being replaced with gravel roads because they are cheaper to maintain.  The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt roads into gravel roads, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.

#10 There are 4,095 dams in the United States that are at risk of failure.  That number has risen by more than 100 percent since 1999.

#11 Of all the dam failures that have happened in the United States since 1874, a third of them have happened during the past decade.

#12 Close to half of all U.S. households do not have access to bus or rail transit.

#13 Our aging sewer systems spill more than a trillion gallons of untreated sewage every single year.  The cost of cleaning up that sewage each year is estimated to be greater than 50 billion dollars.

#14 It is estimated that rolling blackouts and inefficiencies in the U.S. electrical grid cost the U.S. economy approximately 80 billion dollars a year.

#15 It is being projected that by the year 2020 every single major container port in the United States will be handling at least double the volume that it was originally designed to handle.

#16 All across the United States, conditions at many of our state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at best.  Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a billion dollars long....

More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York's are at least $1 billion. Hawaii officials called park conditions "deplorable" in a December report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.

#17 Today, the U.S. spends about 2.4 percent of GDP on infrastructure.  Meanwhile, China spends about9 percent of GDP on infrastructure.

#18 In the United States today, approximately 16 percent of our construction workers are unemployed.

#19 China has plans to build 55,000 miles of highways by the year 2020.  If all of those roads were put end to end, it would be longer than the total length of the entire U.S. interstate system.

#20 The World Economic Forum ranks U.S. infrastructure 23rd in the world, and we fall a little bit farther behind the rest of the developed world every single day.

#21 It has been projected that it would take 2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years just to repair our existing infrastructure.  That does not even include a single penny for badly needed new infrastructure.

So where did we go wrong?

Well, one of the big problems is that we have become a very materialistic society that is obsessed with short-term thinking.  Investing in infrastructure is something that has long-term benefits, but these days Americans tend to only be focused on what is happening right now and most politicians are only focused on the next election cycle.

Another major problem is that there is so much corruption and waste in our system these days.  The government certainly spends more than enough money, but very little of that money is spent wisely.  A lot of the money that could be going toward rebuilding our infrastructure is being poured down the toilet instead.  For much more on this, please read my previous article entitled "16 Sickening Facts That Show How Members Of Congress And Federal Workers Are Living The High Life At Your Expense".

Unfortunately, it is probably appropriate that our infrastructure is decaying because we are decaying in just about every other way that it is possible for a society to decay.

We are decaying economically, politically, mentally, emotionally, physically, morally and spiritually.

We are a complete and total mess.  So why shouldn't what is happening to our infrastructure on the outside match what is happening to us as a nation on the inside?

And sadly, we simply do not have the money that we need for infrastructure because of all the debt that we have piled up.  The federal government, our state governments and our local governments are all struggling to stay afloat in an ocean of red ink, and unfortunately that means that spending on infrastructure is likely to be cut even more in the years ahead.

So get used to rotting, crumbling, decaying infrastructure.  What you see out there right now is only just the beginning.

Economic Collapse

Iran hacked into US bank websites

Security officials believe Islamic Republic regime is behind cyber attacks on US banks; say claims hacking came in response to publication of anti-Islam movie a 'cover story'
Ynet

The Iranian regime is behind continuing cyber attacks this week that slowed the websites of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, national security officials told NBC News Friday.

One of the sources said the claim by hackers that the attacks were prompted by the online video mocking the Prophet Mohammed is just a cover story.

The news site said the attack was described by one former US official familiar with the attacks as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to US sanctions on Iranian banks.

On Tuesday many customers discovered that access to the consumer banking website of Bank of America was unavailable, and JPMorgan Chase on Wednesday had the same problems, which multiple sources linked to a denial-of-service attack, in which a website is bogged down by a large number of requests.

A Chase spokesman said Wednesday that the consumer site was intermittently unavailable to some customers, but did not acknowledge then that there was an attack.

On Thursday, Chase said slowness continued but was resolved by late afternoon Eastern Time. Bank of America acknowledged on Tuesday that its site had experienced slowness, but would not say what caused it.

NBC explained that a group of hackers from the Middle East claimed responsibility for the cyber attack. In a statement published online the group explained that their actions came in response to the "Sacrilegious movie" that has caused riots throughout the Muslim world.

But a different source said this was just a cover story to hide the fact that the Iranian government is behind the attack.

Last week a financial services industry group, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, warned US banks, brokerages and insurers to be on heightened alert for cyber attacks.


Ynet

Iran pours more troops into Syria, ready to target Israel from Syria and Lebanon

This is like Risk game board...

Iran continues to fly military personnel and quantities of weapons into Syria by civilian aircraft which cut through Iraqi airspace, American intelligence sources disclosed early Thursday, Sept. 20. UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon also said that, "Unfortunately, both [Syrian] sides, government and opposition forces, seem to be determined to see the end by military means."

Clearly, Iran is augmenting its military involvement in the constantly escalating Syrian civil war, broadening it into a multinational conflict which threatens to drag Lebanon in, by means of the Iranian-Syrian ally, Hizballah.

The UN Secretary General's statement implying that the two Syrian sides are determined to fight to the bitter end is echoed in Iran’s resolve to fight to the bitter end for Assad, on Syrian soil.

Tehran is not hiding its actions. Sunday, Sept. 16, Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Commander Gen. Ali Jafari said openly that Al Qods Brigades units were present and operational in both Syria and Lebanon.

No comment on this revelation has come from the US, Israel or Israel’s military (IDF) chiefs - notwithstanding its menacing import, namely, that Tehran is no longer hanging about and waiting for its nuclear program to be attacked in order to punish Israel, but is getting ready for a pre-emptive operation.

Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have chosen silence in the face of what any other nation would regard as a casus belli: the open deployment of enemy forces on its northern and eastern borders.
This must have been the catalyst for the IDF’s surprise two-division strength drill Wednesday on Israel’s Golan border with Syria. But the IDF spokesman sounded almost apologetic when he explained that the exercise had nothing to do with the events in Syria or with Hizballah, and that it was no more than a routine drill for testing preparedness.

DEBKAfile's military sources say that, in the current climate, no military operation by any army on the Syrian border – especially one of this magnitude – may be regarded as “routine.” Only a week ago, the Golani Brigade concluded a large military exercise in northern Israel including the Golan. That sort of frequency must have operational connotations: The IDF is evidently keeping the army on the move and in a constant state of readiness to fight a real war without delay on terrain made familiar by repeated war games.
IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz has a penchant for expressing himself through symbols, his method of overcoming the restrictions placed on his tongue by military and other constraints.

On New Year’s Eve last week, the general handed military correspondents a small gift: The Hebrew edition of the American writer Richard David Bach's "There's No Such Place as Far Away."

For the Golan drill Wednesday, he decided to attach Maj. Gen. (res.) Nati Sharoni, chief artillery officer in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to his party of advisers and observers.
The book was a clear message to Tehran and doubting Thomases at home that the IDF is fully capable of an operation against Iran’s nuclear program and of successfully accomplishing any mission far from its shores.

Gen. Sharoni’s presence at the Golan exercise, and the exercise itself, was a warning to Iran, Hizballah and Syria that they will be disappointed if they hope to catch Israel unready, as it was by the surprise attack which almost overcame the IDF 39 years ago before the tide of war was turned back against Egypt.

DEBKAfile