Originally posted at The Saker,

The situation in Syria has reached a watershed moment and a dramatic escalation of the war appears imminent. Let’s look again at how we reached this point.

Two weeks ago, in our latest report on the Hong Kong housing market, we observed that according to the local Centaline Property Agency total Hong Kong property transactions in January were on track to register the worst month since 1991, when it started compiling monthly figures. In other words, the biggest drop in recorded history.

One of the world’s leading think tanks claims that in the future people will be healthier and wealthier and living with dinosaurs. In the future teenagers will be living like millionaires in futuristic homes built for leisure-time and comfort with robots as servants. They would travel in driver-less cars and supersonic planes. Dinosaurs could also make a comeback around 2050 to join the euphoria, through DNA back-breeding.

Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,Last week US stock markets tumbled yet again, leaving the Dow Jones index down almost 1500 points for the year. In fact, most major world markets are in negative territory this year. There are many Wall Street cheerleaders who are trying to say that this is just a technical correction, that the bottom is near, and that everything will be getting better soon.They are ignoring the real message the markets are trying to send: you cannot print your way to prosperity.

For the past two weeks recurring flashing red headlines of an agreement, or at least a meeting, between Russia and Saudi Arabia - the world's two largest oil producers - have led to aggressive short-covering rallies in oil on just as recurring hopes that the Saudi strategy of flooding the market with excess supply (by its own calculations as much as 3 million barrels daily) adopted during the 2014 Thanksgiving Day OPEC meeting, will come to an end.