Posted: 16 May 2014 03:22 PM PDT

Hunter Biden, son of US VP Joe Biden, is joining the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer. The group has prospects in eastern Ukraine where civil war is threatened following the coup in Kiev.
Biden will advise on “transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities” to “contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”
Joe Biden’s senior campaign adviser in 2004, financier Devon Archer, a business partner of Hunter Biden’s, also joined the Bursima board claiming it was like ‘Exxon in the old days’.
Biden Jr.’s resume is unsurprisingly sprinkled with Ivy-league dust – a graduate of Yale Law School he serves on the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute, is a director for the Center for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition which comprises 400 American businesses, NGOs, senior national security and foreign policy experts.
Former US President Bill Clinton appointed him as Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy and he was honorary co-chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee.
Burisma Holdings was set up in 2002. Its licenses cover Ukraine’s three key hydrocarbon basins, including Dnieper-Donets (in eastern Ukraine), Carpathian (western) and Azov-Kuban (southern Ukraine).
The Biden board news came as Gazprom moved Ukraine to a prepaid gas delivery regime and sent Naftogaz, Ukraine’s gas champion, a $1.66 billion bill that is due June 2, or Moscow will halt supplies.
Ukraine currently has about 9 billion cubic meters of gas in storage, but by the winter needs 18.5bcm. Kiev bought 27.7 billion cubic meters from Gazprom for which it still owes some $3.5 bn in 2013.
Gazprom is demanding Kiev pays $485 per 1,000 cubic meters, raised from $268.50 after Moscow was forced to cancel several discounts agreed upon under Yanukovich’s tenure as president. Kiev rejects the new price as “politically motivated” and says it will only pay its debt if Gazprom lowers the price back to $268.50, or else open an arbitration case against the company in Stockholm.
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Posted: 16 May 2014 03:05 PM PDT

The Jewish ADL (Anti-Defamation League) revealed this week that more than ‘one in four adults’ are ‘anti-Semitic.’
Of some 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories around the world surveyed for the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism, 26% were found to be ‘deeply infected’ with ‘anti-Semitic attitudes’.
Personally, I find both the ADL and its polls quite amusing. Can you think of another people on this planet who would spend so much time and energy measuring how much they are loved or hated? Do the Brits measure how despised they are in Moldova? Do the Palestinians question people all over the world to see how much they love those indigenous people of Palestine? Well, the Jews do and it’s for a reason. Abe Foxman, ADL’s National Director, must by now have grasped the immense destructive global power of Jewish politics, so naturally he wants to measure the reaction. But rather than reflecting on the results and then turning to his own people in the hope of re-educating them, Foxman always blames the rest of humanity. And why? Because in the Judeo-centric cosmos, the Jew is always innocent and the Goy is always to blame.
ADL discovered that the least anti-Semitic country at 0.2% of the adult population ‘hating Jews’ is ……..Laos! But what does that mean? Should the ADL start to schlep Jews to Laos? Maybe, rather than Palestine, it is Laos that is the promised land. Trouble is, once the Jews start to immigrate to Laos, anti Semitic attitudes will sharply rise. ADL is yet to resolve this Jewish dilemma.
Apparently, according to the ADL, the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had the highest ‘anti-Semitic’ attitudes at 93%. But is it really ‘anti Semitic’ to oppose those who plundered your home and murdered your family? No Abe, this is not anti-Semitism, this is resistance.
The questions of the survey were also very interesting. Respondents were asked a series of 11 questions about Jews, Jewish power, Jewish tribalism, Jews and money and Jewish behavior. Those who responded affirmatively to six or more negative statements about Jews were considered to hold ‘anti-Semitic’ attitudes. But I beg to differ. I’d think that those who answered affirmatively were simply authentic, honest folk who were better informed about the state of the world. Now, if I am correct here, it means that about a quarter of world’s population is authentic, honest and informed – a most positive and encouraging bit of information.
But back to the results of the survey. It seems that 74% of respondents indicated that they had never met a Jew and yet, of those, 25% still harbored anti-Semitic attitudes. Also, of the 26% people who did harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, some 70% of them had never met a Jew. But you know, most people have never met a Nazi either and yet Nazis are also pretty unpopular these days. It’s all a matter of reputation.
All in all, it seems that AIPAC, the Jewish State, CFI, CRIF, ADL and Bernard Henri Levy have been investing an awful lot of energy giving Jews bad name.
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Posted: 16 May 2014 08:20 AM PDT

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As the price of meat continues to skyrocket, will it soon be considered a “luxury item” for most American families? This week we learned that the price of meat in the United States rose at the fastest pace in more than 10 years last month.
Leading the way is the price of shrimp. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of shrimp has jumped an astounding 61 percent compared to a year ago. The price of pork is also moving upward aggressively thanks to a disease which has already killed about 10 percent of all of the pigs in the entire country. And the endless drought in the western half of the country has caused the size of the U.S. cattle herd to shrink to a 63 year low and has pushed the price of beef to an all-time high. This is really bad news if you like to eat meat. The truth is that the coming “meat crisis” is already here, and it looks like it is going to get a lot worse in the months ahead.
A devastating bacterial disease called “early mortality syndrome” is crippling the shrimping industry all over Asia right now. According to Bloomberg, this has pushed the price of shrimp up 61 percent over the past 12 months…
In March, shrimp prices jumped 61 percent from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The climb is mainly due to a bacterial disease known as early mortality syndrome. While the ailment has no effect on humans, it’s wreaking havoc on young shrimp farmed in Southeast Asia, shrinking supplies.
This disease has an extremely high mortality rate. In fact, according to the article that I just quoted, it kills approximately nine out of every ten shrimp that it infects…
Cases of early mortality syndrome, which destroys the digestive systems of young shrimp, were first reported in China in 2009, said Donald Lightner, a professor of animal and comparative biomedical sciences at University of Arizona in Tucson.
The disease, which kills about 90 percent of the shrimp it infects, traveled from China to Vietnam to Malaysia and then to Thailand, he said. Cases also were reported in Mexico last year, Lightner said.
A different disease is driving up the price of pork in the United States. It is known as the porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, and in less than a year it has spread to 30 states and has killed approximately 7 million pigs.
The price of bacon is already up 13.1 percent over the past year, but this is just the beginning.
It is being projected that U.S. pork production could be down by as much as 10 percent this year, and Americans could end up paying up to 20 percent more for pork by the end of 2014.
The price of beef has also moved to unprecedented heights. Thanks to the crippling drought that never seems to end in the western half of the nation, the size of the U.S. cattle herd has been declining for seven years in a row, and it is now the smallest that is has been since 1951.
Over the past year, the price of ground chuck beef is up 5.9 percent. It would have been worse, but ranchers have been slaughtering lots of cattle in order to thin their herds in a desperate attempt to get through this drought. If this drought does not end soon, the price of beef is going to go much, much higher.
As prices for shrimp, pork and beef have risen, many consumers have been eating more chicken. But the price of chicken is rising rapidly as well.
In fact, the price of chicken breast is up 12.4 percent over the past 12 months.
Unfortunately, this could just be the very beginning of this meat crisis. As I wrote about recently, some scientists are warning that we could potentially be facing “a century-long megadrought“.
And right now, there are no signs that the drought out west is letting up. Just check out the map posted below. It comes from the U.S. Drought Monitor, and it shows how the drought in California has significantly intensified since the beginning of the year…
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And considering how much the rest of the nation relies on the agricultural production coming out of California, it is very alarming to see that the drought is getting even worse.
Right now, things are so bone dry in most of the state that it is easy for wildfires to get out of control. In fact, Governor Jerry Brown has just declared a state of emergency in San Diego County because of the vicious wildfires that are raging there…
Officials ordered another round of evacuations early Thursday north of San Diego as gusty winds and near 100-degree temperatures offer little relief from at least nine fires that have consumed a 14-square mile area of Southern California.
Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Diego County, which frees up special resources and funding for the firefight.
The fires, coming earlier than normal in the wildfire season, are being fed by brush and trees left brittle by prolonged drought. They are also being whipped by a Santa Ana wind system that reverses the normal flow of wind from the Pacific Ocean and creates tinderbox fire conditions.
For the first time in its 14-year-history, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website that tracks drought, designated the entire state of California as in a severe (or worse) drought.
If you do not live out west, you may have no idea how very serious this all really is.
For years, I have been warning about the potential for dust bowl conditions to return to the western half of the country.
Now it is actually starting to happen.
And we already have tens of millions of people in this country that are struggling to feed themselves. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “Epidemic Of Hunger: New Report Says 49 Million Americans Are Dealing With Food Insecurity“.
So what happens if drought, diseases and plagues continue to cause food production in this country to plummet?
Those that have studied these things tell us that there is a clear correlation between food prices and civil unrest. For example, the following is a short excerpt from a recentScientific American article…
Since the beginning of 2014, riots have occurred in countries including Thailand and Venezuela. Although they’re different cultures on different continents, these mass protests movements may all have one commonality; increasing food prices may have contributed to their occurrence. The cost of food has been steadily increasing in both Thailand and Venezuela; last month demonstrators in Caracas took to the streets marching with empty pots to protest food shortages. According to Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam and fellow researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), events such as these may be anticipated by a mathematical model that examines rising food costs.
The events of 2014 aren’t without precedent; the price of food has provoked (and placated) throughout history, beginning in Imperial Rome when Augustus introduced grain subsidies. In recent years, the Middle East has been particularly affected by the cost of grain. Centuries after Egypt developed bread as we recognize it, the nation experienced a bread intifada – the country rioted for two days in January 1977 following Anwar Sadat’s decision to drastically decrease food subsidies. More recently, under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the price of grain rose 30 percent between 2010 and 2011. Then, on January 25, 2011 a new revolution began in Egypt.
Could rapidly rising food prices cause civil unrest in the United States eventually?
It won’t happen today, and it won’t happen tomorrow, but some day it might.
Meanwhile, you might want to start carving out a significantly larger portion of the family budget for food for the foreseeable future.
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Posted: 16 May 2014 07:45 AM PDT

Thousands of civil servants in France have held a one-day strike over pay and work conditions.
The demonstrators marched in several cities on Thursday to protest against the government’s planned spending cuts.
The strike came after the government last month announced a series of spending cuts, including a freeze on public sector pay, for the next three years.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls came under criticism after unveiling details of the plan.
Valls, who was appointed prime minister on March 31, said the government is prepared to target politically sensitive areas of France’s welfare state to achieve the savings, including freezing benefit and pension payments at current levels for the next year.
He added that a freeze in the basic pay of civil servants would remain in place. The pay freeze for France’s five million public sector workers has been in place since 2010.
France saw no economic growth in the first quarter of 2014 and prospect of its economy is still grim, while other eurozone countries have had a better performance over the same period.
Eurozone’s second-largest economy has been struggling to cope with an increasing debt problem in recent years.
France suffered two recessions in past years and is currently coping with an unemployment rate of over ten percent. Growth was also calculated at 0.2 percent in 2013.
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Posted: 16 May 2014 07:39 AM PDT

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A draft law submitted to the Russian parliament seeks to impose punishment up to criminal prosecution to producers of genetically-modified organisms harmful to health or the environment.
The draft legislation submitted on Wednesday amends Russia’s law regulating GMOs and some other laws and provides for disciplinary action against individuals and firms, which produce or distribute harmful biotech products and government officials who fail to properly control them.
At worst, a criminal case may be launched against a company involved in introducing unsafe GMOs into Russia. Sponsors of the bill say that the punishment for such deeds should be comparable to the punishment allotted to terrorists, if the perpetrators act knowingly and hurt many people.
“When a terrorist act is committed, only several people are usually hurt. But GMOs may hurt dozens and hundreds. The consequences are much worse. And punishment should be proportionate to the crime,” co-author Kirill Cherkasov, member of the State Duma Agriculture Committee told RT.
Russian criminal code allows for a punishment starting with 15 years in jail and up to a life sentence for terrorism.
Less severe misdeeds related to GMOs would be punishable by fines. For instance the administrative code would provide for up to 20,000 rubles (US$560) in fines for failure to report an incident of environmental pollution, which would also cover harmful GMO contamination, if sponsors of the bill have their way.
Russia gave the green light to import of GMOs and planting of bioengineered seeds as part of its accession to the WTO, but the Russian government remains skeptical of GMOs. In April, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced that his cabinet will postpone the beginning of certification of GMO plants for growth in Russia due to lack of proper infrastructure needed to test their safety.
The government also opposes imports of GMO food, saying the country has enough farmlands to provide enough regular food to feed itself.
But the new draft legislation, even if adopted, would be difficult to enforce in practice. Proving a direct link between certain GMOs and health or environmental problems could be difficult, considering that harmful effects, if they manifest, may take years to become apparent.
Critics of the draft bill also point out that it fails to suggest amendments to laws regulating textile production and pharmaceutical industry, both of which have been using genetically-altered products for years.
“The global pharmaceutical industry uses GMOs much wider than food industry does. And there is the question, who should be punished in this case – producers of medicines which are used to treat people, or those who want to ban them,” commented Aleksandr Korbut, vice-president of the Russian grain union, to Izvestia newspaper.
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