United States

It's well known that the US government is broke, and if it used accrual accounting instead of cash accounting it would be staggeringly worse, as all of its future liabilities would be shown. Knowing this, government officials are working tirelessly (and even on some weekends, much to the dismay of Jack Lew) to find ways to reduce spending. 

Thanks to all of those long nights scrubbing the budget line by line, a way to save costs has finally been found. As MarketWatch reports,

In his book ‘Relentless Strike’ author Sean Naylor claims that in the aftermath of 9/11, the US Government (specifically the Pentagon) was seriously considering staging the hijacking of an airline to trick the American public into feeling safer. Seriously. Some morons in the Pentagon thought staging an airplane hijacking would make us feel better. Who are these lunatics in power?

A recurring oil market theme in the past few months has been the speculation that despite its jawboning that it is ready and willing to boost crude production, Iran has had a hard time getting both the funding and the required infrastructure to substantially boost its production to recapture its supply levels last seen before the recent US sanctions. That however appears to be changing fast.

Recall all those tankers we have profiled before on anchor next to the Iran shore?

They have finally started to move.

Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,

Paralleling the increasingly draconian policies marking a worldwide descent into fascism, are massive protests — born in the Arab Spring, but arguably an angrier, more potent extension of the Occupy movement — indicative of an unprecedented tipping point.

We, the people of this planet, now stand together, gazing over the precipice whose murky depths of State repression demand we ask one imperative question: have we finally had enough?

China has condemned the United States’ Human Rights record at home and abroad in an annual report released on Thursday. U.S. politics is corrupted by money and nepotism, with numerous wars in the Middle East providing a glimpse of how the U.S. government views “lives in other countries as worthless,” according to the scathing Chinese Human Rights report.