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Bernanke Inserts Gun In Mouth I'm not at all sure I believed what I read today.  (my comments in italics, indented) Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in January indicates that the economy continues to contract.  Job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending.  Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment.  U.S. exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession.  Although the near-term economic outlook is weak, the...

Every Messiah needs his disciples. Barack Obama can count on one in Ann Curry. Reporting from a camp in Chad for refugees from Darfur in a segment on Today this morning, Curry proclaimed that “Obama’s message of hope has reached even here.” Her evidence? The fact that a sign had been tacked up on the door to a mud-brick structure renaming it “the Obama schoolhouse.” The video clip shows a sign in Arabic. Someone had helpfully translated it, scrawling “Obama” in chalk on the entranceway. View video,

There's no way that these times, in spite of the massive and heartbreaking job losses, can compare to the sufferings of the Great Depression. I expect that America will be going back to the seventies, though, when the economy was stagnant and contracting: there were gasoline lines and sky-high interest rates. In the 70s, the unemployment rate was higher than it is now and there were thousands upon thousands of unemployed Vietnam war veterans looking for jobs.

The new financial rescue plan may not work and could even make things worse because it plunges the US further into debt and it is designed by the same people who failed to forecast the crisis and take measures, legendary investor Jim Rogers told CNBC Tuesday. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will unveil a long-awaited package of measures to help the financial sector at 11 am New York time. But Rogers said Geithner, who was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, "has been dead wrong about everything for 15 years in a row," and so was President Barack Obama's...

reports coming in of major damage from 1-2 inches of ice over the area..its still raining with temps below freezing in many areas. information is sketchy but major damage to infrastructure are trickling in. Damage to houses from falling trees, multiple power poles down, and widespread power outages Travel is impossible in many area because of 100's of downed trees blocking the roads. Fires are reported in some area widespread state of emergencies issued Northern AR, SE MO and western KY seems to the the hardest hit so far..but things are icing up fast now in the Louisville/Lexington areas too

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Here is a gallery of aerial phtographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen. The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their...

Why China's next earthquake might be political The “c” in China has always stood for catastrophe. Whether it has been those of nature, man-made political disasters, or a combination of both, no other civilized society has suffered more down through the centuries than the ancient Chinese polity. That was true in the old, dynastic, traditional China, captured in the melodrama of Pearl S. Buck’s novels which despite their lack of sophistication were a representation of what “the real China” was like. In our own time, the chaos, destruction and loss of life during the two-decade long Japanese invasion and Occupation...

At this point it’s reasonable to wonder how Jimmy Carter got elected governor of Georgia, let alone president of the United States. To witness him laying a wreath at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, then schmoozing with Hamas in Damascus, is enough to make the sane among us recoil in disgust. On the very day that the peanut-farmer-who-became-president claimed to have scored a commitment of peace from Hamas, the terrorist thugs launched a rocket salvo at Israel, thus leading the former president to claim that at least he gallantly tried to bring about peace and stability to the Middle East....

So the sky did not fall in. While the Chicken Littles of the world economy, led by Gordon Brown, George Soros and Warren Buffett, may still repeat mechanically the IMF’s surprising judgment that the world - especially America - faces its worst financial crisis since the 1930s, their hearts are no longer in it. Mr Brown, after last week’s election woe, can no longer blame the world economy for his political failure. Mr Buffett, having speculated against the dollar for years and declared that credit derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, has finally begun to find attractive opportunities to...

Reindeer catastrophe overshadows Sami national day Published: 5 Feb 08 15:22 CET Online: http://www.thelocal.se/9886/ The Sami people of northern Sweden celebrate their national day on February 6th and Lappland is a hive of activity getting ready for the party of the year. Reindeer shoes are being made, handicrafts sculpted and party frocks designed and sewn up. Jokkmokk's yearly market sets the pulses racing among Sami youth and high schools and colleges get their traditional goods ready to sell to the hordes of brethren and tourists that will descend on the town from near and far. "For some it is a...

Tajikistan 'facing catastrophe' by Natalia Antelava BBC News, Dushanbe Tens of thousands in Tajikistan are already malnourished Tajikistan is in the grip of emergency food shortages, the UN's World Food Programme is warning. The deteriorating food situation is part of the energy crisis which hit the mountainous nation in the middle of its coldest winter for five decades. The cost of food has tripled in recent months, partially because of rising world prices. Some humanitarian agencies claim Central Asia's poorest nation is heading towards catastrophe. It's well below zero in Tajikistan, but most people have no electricity, no heating and...

Deadly landslide raises more concerns about China's Three Gorges Dam Aileen McCabe , CanWest Asia Correspondent Published: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 SHANGHAI - A deadly landslide near China's controversial Three Gorges Dam has killed one construction worker and left two missing in central Hubei Province, near the dam's massive reservoir. The official news agency Xinhua said the tragedy occurred on Tuesday, the same day Chinese government officials pledged to step up measures to deal with environmental problems caused by the dam. Xinhua did not say what caused the fatal landslide, but in a story about the new environmental plan, Xinhua...

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization,...

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists. The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

AMES - Rudy Giuliani would be a “total catastrophe.’’ Mitt Romney would be “OK.” That’s the assessment of the 2008 Republican presidential field by Steve Scheffler, the president of the Iowa Christian Alliance. Scheffler said his association’s members have not begun to coalesce around any of the candidates seeking the Republican nomination. However, the fact the Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain aren’t in Ames today “is a testimony to the constituency – the largest constituency to participate in the caucuses” – the social conservatives that make up the ICA. “If they thought they could win the straw poll, they...

The defence of the families of victims who died in A-310 air catastrophe in Irkutsk (Russia) in 2006 is considering a possibility of filing a civil suite against the European aircraft manufacturer – Airbus.

One of the criticisms of Al Gore’s message on climate change is that he exaggerates the imminence of the threat—implying, for instance, that sea levels may rise more quickly than scientists feel comfortable saying. But a few people think Gore is actually sugarcoating the catastrophe predictions. Most prominently, the renowned British scientist James Lovelock thinks that the world is already approaching a tipping point, beyond which temperature rise will run out of control and major ecosystems will collapse. The dying Amazon rainforest would begin releasing carbon, making things even hotter. The permafrost would melt, releasing carbon and causing sea levels...

WHILE the international community readies itself for gradual global warming over the next century, a growing number of scientists are beginning to worry that climate change might come much sooner - and be much more catastrophic - than previously thought. They point out that, in the past, climate change has not been gradual. Europe's climate has switched from arctic to tropical in three to five years and, they warn, it can happen again. Fred Pearce, of the New Scientist, has spent the past two years speaking to climate experts who are studying the possibility of "type 2" climate change -...

PARIS (AFP) - The World Wildlife Fund on Friday warned consumers against buying Spanish strawberries, whose cultivation is having a "catastrophic" impact on wetlands in the south of the country. "By buying Spanish strawberries -- on sale in supermarkets from January to April -- you are supporting the destruction of the Iberian natural milieu because the impact of this cultivation on the environment is catastrophic," WWF's Paris office said. Some 95 percent of Spanish strawberries are grown on an area of 5,000 hectares (12,300 acres) around the Coto Donana national park, which is on the UNESCO world heritage list, WWF...

The seas have been rising for 18,000 years, but the pace has quickened. At the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean crept seven inches higher during the past century, as global warming melted glaciers and expanded ocean waters. Californians are taking notice. In one of the first efforts of its kind in the state, officials are starting to address the threats rising seas pose to the Bay Area. One of the first steps was to compile maps that show what would happen if the sea level rose three feet -- the upper limit for what might occur by 2100, according...