North America

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

A Russian Ministry of Defense report claims that EgyptAir Flight 804 crashed over the Mediterranean Sea due to the aircraft being struck by debris from a large meteorite.  The Kremlin say that a 10,000 metric tonne meteorite entered the Earth’s atmosphere on May 17, and Russia were the first country to issue a warning about the potential danger it posed to aircraft.

For Caterpillar, the great recession was bad, for about 19 months. In May 2010, after declining sharply for just under two years, CAT posted it first positive global retail sales comps and never looked back... until December 2012 when comp sales once again turned negative and have been negative ever since. For the past 41 months!

The breakdown showed that contrary to popular opinion, there has been no pick up in demand for heavy industrial machinery anywhere around the globe.

Reader Anna Salyi, a Catholic in Hungary, sends two great e-mails. I publish them with her permission:

Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.