Gold Rush Threatens to Bring New Era of Genocide to War Torn Darfur

Photo Credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAHImpoverished tribes in war torn Darfur, the scene of decades of misery and genocide, now have one of the oldest reasons for fighting known to man: gold.

More than 800 people have been killed and 150,000 displaced since January as poor, but heavily armed tribes fight over the Jebel Amer gold mining region. That is more than double the number of people killed in political and ethnic fighting in 2012, and world leaders fear the mad dash for precious metal could be plunging the region into a new era of violence. Humanitarian groups say the Sudanese government, led by accused war criminal President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is pitting tribes against each other in a bid to get the most possible out of some 4,000 mines.

“Ten years after the genocide began, state-sponsored violence has once more taken hold of the region,” said Akshaya Kumar, a policy analyst for the Enough Project, a Washington-based humanitarian organization. “Cash-strapped and dollar-starved, Sudan sees gold as its new oil. The recent gold discoveries are fueling atrocities again in Darfur.”

When South Sudan split from Sudan two years ago, it took with it much of the nation’s oil wealth. With shrinking oil revenues, al-Bashir is seeking to increase the $2.2 billion worth of gold produced by the mines annually. And his strategy to keep control of the vast region’s gold, amid hundreds of thousands of amateurs in a virtual free-for-all, relies on fighters battle-hardened from decades of ethnic and religious war.

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Edward Snowden Says NSA Surveillance Programs ‘Hurt our Country’

Photo Credit: APBy Associated Press.

The National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has said that the mass surveillance programmes used by the US to tap into phone and internet connections around the world is making people less safe.

In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said that the NSA’s mass surveillance, which he disclosed before fleeing to Russia, “puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government”.

A US court has charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act, for disclosing the programmes which he described as a “dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed”.

“They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,” Snowden said.

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Snowden Warns of Government Spying in First Russia Video

By AFP.

U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden warned of dangers to democracy in the first video released of the fugitive since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August.

“If we can’t understand the policies and programs of our government we can’t grant our consent in regulating them,” Snowden said in one of the short video clips posted on the WikiLeaks website Friday night.

The anti-secrecy group said the videos were filmed Wednesday when Snowden met with a group of four retired US ex-intelligence workers and activists now seeking to promote ethics within the profession.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency computer administrator, is wanted in the United States for espionage and other charges after leaking details of vast U.S. telephone and Internet surveillance programs.

Dressed in a black suit and blue shirt with no tie and looking at ease, Snowden reiterated the dangers of NSA surveillance, saying indiscriminate spying was a “far cry” from legitimate programs.

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Dangerous Times: Obama Bows to the Mullahs

Photo Credit: isafmediaIt looks like the fix is in. The mullahs will certainly get their nukes and ICBMs, and neither Israel nor the Saudis (who are scared to death of the mullahs) will rely on American protection as long as Obama is in office. Obama just put out the welcome mat for Mullah Rouhani, the killer of 245 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1984, and the ultraleft UK Guardian just claimed that its readers voted for Great Humanitarian Rouhani to be the next winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The post-Stalinist Guardian is not known for telling the truth too often, and nobody knows if that “survey” is real or not. But the Guardian and the BBC are the two biggest hard-left organs of propaganda in Europe, and they have long promoted a kind of Hitler-Stalin Pact between European socialists in the EU and radical Muslims of both stripes in the Middle East. These are politically powerful signals, and they will be read as such around the world.

Here is the way the dominos seem to be falling: We are going back to a binary power split between Russia and the United States, with China dominating Asia. Our former allies like Israel and the Saudis are quickly moving away from us and seeking more trustworthy allies, notably Russia, as this column has pointed out before. Putin successfully protected his ally Assad in Syria against a pathetic Obama, who has systematically sabotaged the Pax Americana of the last seven decades. The U.S. only needed to betray a few allies (like Poland on anti-missile defense and Israel against Iran) to spur on our other allies to get the idea. Japan and South Korea may be drawn to China, and Japan is now said to be developing its own nuclear weapons, seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Europeans (who have lost the will to defend themselves) are looking to Russia as well, which is acting like the old Tsarist empire, promising to protect Western civilization against the barbarian hordes of imperial Islam. Vladimir Putin visited Jerusalem last year and sat down to talk with the Israeli Cabinet. He also prayed at a Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the Russian Orthodox Church has long staked its own claim. Putin says he is a Christian, and is often shown in photos with the ancient Patriarch of Moscow, the equivalent of the Catholic Pope.

Putin has dealt ruthlessly with his own Islamist terror threat from Chechnya, and the Europeans will huddle under any umbrella in the nuclear proliferation storm that is about to break loose. Serious nations defend themselves seriously. In the nuclear missile age, non-serious nations have to buy protection.

Huge discoveries of shale deposits around the world are promising to liberate industrial countries from the chokehold of the Persian Gulf oil — and once that’s gone, who will defend the Sunni Arabs against Iranian aggression? Texas is becoming the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Both Saudi Prince Bandar and Al Waleed, the richest zillionaire in Arabia, are publicly warning that the price of oil will soon go down as China, Poland, Russia, Germany, Britain and of course the United States are expecting domestic energy to supply their own needs for decades to come.

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Earthquake In Greece Hits Crete With 6.4 Magnitude Quake

Photo Credit: The InquisitrA Strong earthquake in Greece shook the island of Crete, causing some damage.

The quake had a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale, but early reports indicate that damage is minimal.

The Athens Geodynamic Institute said the quake occurred at 4:12 p.m. (13.12 GMT), 68 kilometers (42 miles) west of the city of Chania, in Crete, and 279 kilometers (172 miles) south of Athens. The epicenter was 23 kilometers (14 miles) under the sea.

Chania deputy mayor Manoussos Lionakis told The Associated Press: “The earthquake was very strong and lasted long… Fortunately, there was no serious damage. The worst I’ve heard was some rock falls in a ravine west of the city. A bus was trapped, but no one was hurt. We have removed the debris.

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Senior Pakistan Taliban Commander Captured in Afghanistan

Photo Credit: APThe State Department has confirmed that U.S. troops have captured a senior Pakistani Taliban commander in Afghanistan.

Deputy spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters Friday that U.S. forces nabbed Taliban terrorist leader Latif Mehsud in a recent military operation. Harf said Mehsud served as a senior deputy and trusted confidant of Pakistan Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

The Islamic extremist group claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing in New York’s Times Square in 2010 and has vowed to attack the U.S. again, according to Harf. She went on to say the group has also attacked U.S. diplomats and “countless” civilians in Pakistan.

The capture could be a significant blow to the Pakistani Taliban, which has waged a decade-long insurgency against Islamabad from sanctuaries along the Afghan border. They have also helped the Afghan Taliban in its war against U.S-led NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Latif Mehsud was arrested by American forces as he was driving along a main highway in eastern Logar province’s district of Mohammad Agha, said the Logar governor, Arsallah Jamal. The road links the province with the Afghan capital, Kabul.

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Edward Snowden Breaks Cover in Moscow to Collect Prize for ‘Integrity in Intelligence’

Photo Credit: Getty Images Edward Snowden has been pictured in public today for the first time since leaving Moscow airport.

The National Security Agency whisteblower emerged to collect the Sam Adams Associates Integrity in Intelligence Award.

The picture was published on the same day his father Lon Snowden arrived in Russia to see his son

Dressed in a black suit and open-necked blue shirt, Snowden was seen smiling alongside UK WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who took the leaker from Hong Kong to Moscow and also obtained his asylum.

The precise location of the award ceremony is not known, although it is believed to have been in Moscow.

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Taliban Mocks Shutdown: Lawmakers ‘Sucking The Blood Of Their Own People’

Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesEven the Taliban is mocking the U.S. government over the shutdown.

In a statement released to AFP, the terrorist group accused American lawmakers of “sucking the blood of their own people.”

“The American people should realize that their politicians play with their destinies as well as the destinies of other oppressed nations for the sake of their personal vested interests,” the Taliban said in a statement.

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GCHQ Leaks have ‘Gifted’ Terrorists Ability to Attack ‘At Will’, Warns Spy Chief

Photo Credit: MI5/PAAndrew Parker, the director general of the Security Service, said the exposing of intelligence techniques, by the Guardian newspaper, had given fanatics the ability to evade the spy agencies.

It comes at a time when the UK is facing its gravest terror threat, including from “several thousand” Islamist extremists who are living here and want to attack the country, Mr Parker said.

He used his first public outing since taking over at MI5 to launch a scathing attack on the Snowden leaks.

It is feared around Whitehall that the revelations have resulted in a “guidebook for terrorists” while there is frustration that the American is being heralded as some kind of heroic whistleblower.

Sources find it incomprehensible that exposing spy agency techniques for tracking terrorists has been argued to be in the public interest.

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Pan-African Magazine: Africa has 55 Billionaires

Photo Credit: APA pan-African magazine says Africa has many more billionaires than previously reported, 55 of them worth more than $143 billion including a Nigerian said to be the richest black woman in the world.

“Move over, Oprah!” Ventures Africa says in its latest edition published this week.

Editor-in-chief Uzodinma Iweala said Tuesday the magazine’s estimates are “on the conservative side.”

The report predictably identifies Nigerian manufacturer Aliko Dangote as the richest African worth $20.2 billion, among 20 Nigerians listed.

Africa Ventures put the average net worth of Africa’s billionaires at $2.6 billion and their average age at 65. The oldest billionaires are Kenyan industrialist Manu Chandaria and Egyptian property tycoon Mohammed Al-Fayed, both aged 84. The youngest billionaires are Mohammed Dewji of Tanzania and Nigerian oil trader Igho Sanomi, both 38 years old.

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Get your Fiscal House in Order: China Warns US as Superpower Expresses Concern for $1.3tn of Investments

Photo Credit: Glyn Lowe PhotoworksChina, the biggest foreign creditor of the United States, has waded into the American budget crisis, warning Congress that it must resolve the political impasse over the debt ceiling without further delay.

The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Zhu Guangyao, told America’s deadlocked politicians on Monday that “the clock is ticking” and called on them to approve an extension of the national borrowing limit before the federal government is projected to run out of cash on 17 October.

“We ask that the United States earnestly takes steps to resolve in a timely way the political issues around the debt ceiling and prevent a US debt default to ensure the safety of Chinese investments in the United States,” Mr Zhu told reporters in Beijing. “This is the United States’ responsibility,” he added.

The American government entered its seventh day of shutdown on Monday, following the failure of Congress to approve the national budget a week ago. And there was little sign of progress on the still more crucial issue of the fast-approaching “debt ceiling” deadline. Yet rather than indicating a willingness to negotiate, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, stated on Sunday that it was “time for us to stand and fight” over the budget. He added that a default was “the path we’re on”. American stock markets opened down in response to the belligerent comments yesterday, with the S&P 500 Index of leading shares shedding 0.5 per cent.

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