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March 2016

Ruthie Blum :Incarcerated Former Israeli Prime Minister Olmert Getting in Closer Touch With Judaism …..see note please

Personally, I think he should have been in a jail in Gaza which he gave away to terrorists….rsk

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is getting in closer touch with his Judaism while in jail, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Thursday.

According to an anonymous inmate at the minimum-security Maasiyahu Prison, where Olmert has been incarcerated since early February — and where he is to serve a 19-month term after being convicted of bribery and obstruction of justice — he has begun donning tefillin (phylacteries), participating in afternoon and evening prayers and studying Torah and halacha, Jewish law. This, said the inmate, the former premier, Jerusalem mayor, government minister and Knesset member has been doing with real estate developer Meir Rabin, who is a serving a five-year sentence for his part in the same affair, surrounding the Holyland apartment complex in Jerusalem.

A lawyer by profession, Olmert never made a secret of his secularism, though he – like most Israeli politicians – always professed respect for religious Jews.

Sources close to a number of inmates at Maasiyahu told Walla that Olmert resides in a wing of the prison with 10 other inmates, which makes up a minyan – a quorum required for public worship in Judaism.

One of these sources said, “They still have trouble conducting morning prayers as a minyan, because each has his own activities in the morning, other than on Shabbat. But during afternoon and evening prayers, Olmert takes part with the others.”

According to these sources, Olmert is sharing a cell with former Bank Hapoalim Chairman of the Board Danny Dankner (convicted of bribery and money-laundering) and former Jerusalem city engineer Uri Shitrit. Rabin, who became friendly with Olmert, shares a cell with former Jerusalem deputy mayor Eli Simhayoff. “Each one has a job in the wing,” one source told Walla. “Dankner, for example, is the cook.”

Italy’s banks should scare Fed’s Janet Yellen even more : David Goldman

“Given the risks to the outlook, I consider it appropriate for the [Federal Open Market] Committee to proceed cautiously in adjusting policy,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen told the Economic Club of New York Tuesday, citing slower growth in the US and China and weak commodity prices. Her opposite number at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, knows better: on March 10 he announced that the ECB would buy corporate bonds to continue quantitative easing, the first time a major central bank has put large amounts credit risk on its balance sheet in living memory.

Draghi feared a collapse of confidence in Italian banks, who in turn own 405 billion euros of Italian government debt, or more than a fifth of the total. The trouble is that the Italian banks probably are insolvent by a wide margin. Non-performing loans stood at about 18% of Italian banks’ total loans at the end of 2014 and the total probably has increased since then.

The Fed’s threat to raise US interest rates sent world stock markets into a tailspin during the first six weeks of the year. Markets snapped back after the US, European and Japanese central banks responded with monetary ease and the promise of more. The central banks are right to worry. The European banking crisis of 2012 was never resolved, just swept under the carpet. It threatened to erupt again in February.

Nonperforming assets are larger than shareholders’ equity in all the top four Italian banks. The basket case is Monte dei Paschi, the third-largest private commercial bank, with non-performing assets at more than 500% of equity. Depending on recovery value, Unicredito and Intesa San Paolo, the two largest banks, might be solvent, presuming that they aren’t lying about their non-performing assets. By contrast, Bank of America and Citigroup have non-performing assets valued at 3% to 4% of their equity.

Chinese banks–the subject of endless scrutiny by foreign analysts–reported nonperforming loans of just 1.6%, and the Hong Kong brokerage house Reorient Group estimated NPL’s at 4.2% of bank assetsin a recent report.

JULIA GORIN: MARCH OF CRIMES….

To be updated post verdict….rsk

“Presumed innocent until proven Serb”
–Balkans forum commenter

“The falseness of the entire situation here defies description.”
– Radovan Karadzic, Opening Defense Statement

Well, at least this Hague-held Serb didn’t turn up dead like six or so others.

Very little in or about the Balkans happens by accident. In 2008 Radovan Karadzic was arrested at a time that the U.S. and EU were desperately ramming through statehood for a criminal enclave named Kosovo. Conveniently, the arrest of Karadzic reinforced the image of Serb as war criminal just as they were looking to have fewer questions about officialdom’s obsession with this tiny place.

And it is again no accident that the date of the Karadzic verdict eight years later was “set for March 24th,” the infamous date in 1999 of America’s greatest international crime and shame, when a purportedly anti-war president took us to war against a Christian, European population that had been America’s historical ally. All for doing battle against domestic terror and the ambitions of Greater Islam which, having little experience with it at the time, Washington dubbed “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” As did Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

Payback is a bitch. Particularly when it’s self-orchestrated, as Europe and America are today reaping the karma and consequence of what they’ve sown, making Serbs of us all. As publisher Milo Yelesiyevich, who has translated Karadzic’s Opening Defense Statement, put it in a letter to me:

I hope the Europeans give Dr. K a second look, because they’re in for it now. In a few short decades, they’ve been cast in the role of “Serbs” in their own countries, yet they still refuse to acknowledge their complicity in their own downfall, which stems from having attacked Serbs and Serbia throughout the 1990s [on behalf of what would become the next nexus of jihad — Bosnia and Kosovo].

From the back cover of the hard-copy version of the opening statement, by Kirkus Reviews:

Karadžić’s defense itself is remarkable, by turns eloquent, historically provocative…. Karadžić claimed Serbs had long been champions of peace and compromise, but they met an intransigent Muslim faction that all but insisted on either war or submission. Moreover, he contended that the “forcible removal of Bosnian Muslims and Croats was never our plan.” In many ways, the full account of Karadžić’s defense does add valuable perspective, especially in pointing out that Muslim insurgents were themselves guilty of extraordinary war crimes and that they were often stubbornly unreasonable partners in political dialogue…. This translation remains an important contribution to the understanding of a historically significant war.

No doubt one U.S. presidential candidate in particular will seek to capitalize on the carefully timed verdict to burnish her credentials, for having urged her husband to wage that “successful” 1999 war and for the overall ’90s Balkans legacy that today culminates in this “important” conviction of yet another Serbian official.

A salient point from the book’s web page:

The U.S. and NATO used the Bosnian War as a laboratory to test weapons as well as new methods of perception management, which they deployed in a long series of wars. Americans who no longer believe the U.S. government’s selective presentation of its foreign policy will find much to consider in Dr. Karadžić’s Opening Defense Statement.

With that, a few relevant snippets. First, an October 2013 email from the American who first coined the term “ethnic cleansing” in the context of Bosnia while serving as a foreign service officer, George Kenney. (Kenney subsequently subscribed to a more balanced version of the war than the cartoon that Americans were fed.):

I am still mystified as to why, but last Friday I was invited to a lunch at a fancy restaurant on K Street for Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister. She was in town for a couple days, opening an office here. About a dozen people attended, including several former government types. After the meal, over coffee, about half a dozen of us lingered, swapping stories

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare see note please

This agenda was exposed in Rael Jean Isaac’s book:

Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (New, Revised…

Fraud: While the global warming alarmists have done a good job of spreading fright, they haven’t been so good at hiding their real motivation. Yet another one has slipped up and revealed the catalyst driving the climate scare.

We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming. Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants. But this is simply not true. The narrative is a ruse. They are after something entirely different.

If they were honest, the climate alarmists would admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.

Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit. CONTINUE AT SITEhttp://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/another-climate-alarmist-admits-real-motive-behind-warming-scare/

Sen. Leahy, 10 House Members, Demand Investigation of Israeli ‘Human Rights Violations’- Dishonorable Mention see note please

In parenthesis in red is the rating these legislators got from the Arab American Institute for their pro Arab voting records: rsk

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry dated Feb. 17, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)(Rated +3 by AAI, ) and ten House members, including Jim McDermott (D-WA)(Rated +8 by AAI), , Hank Johnson (D-GA), (Rated +5 by AAI, ) Sam Farr (D-CA)(Rated +3 by AAI), and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)(Rated +3 by AAI),), requested information on the application of the Leahy Law regarding Israel and Egypt, Politico reported Tuesday.

The Leahy Law, or the Leahy amendment, named after its principal sponsor, Senator Leahy, prohibits the State and Defense Departments to provide military assistance to foreign military “units” that violate human rights with impunity.

To implement this law, US embassies, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the appropriate regional bureau of the US Department of State must vet potential recipients of security assistance. If a unit is credibly implicated in a serious abuse of human rights, US assistance must be denied until the government in question takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons within the unit to justice. Press reports have indicated so far that security forces in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan have been denied assistance under the Leahy Law.