Watchman Newsletter

Magnitude-5.6 quake strikes near Guantanamo, Cuba

The Washington Post (Link) - Reuters - Esteban Israel (March 20, 2010)

A 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck near Guantanamo city in eastern Cuba on Saturday, sending residents fleeing into the streets but a local government official said there were no casualties.

A spokesman at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay reported no damage there.

“It’s all calm. There’s no damage and no victims either,” said a local government official in Guantanamo city, who asked not to be named.

State-run Radio Reloj reported from Guantanamo that the quake caused cracks in some buildings and some pieces of masonry fell.

The quake, which also was felt strongly in Cuba’s second city of Santiago de Cuba, was centered 27 miles southwest of Guantanamo at a depth of 14 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

Quartet to Israel: Freeze settlements

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - AP (March 19, 2010)

Top international diplomats on Friday called on Israel and the Palestinians to return to peace negotiations with a goal of reaching a final settlement that would create an independent Palestinian state within 24 months.

The statement further condemned “the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem.” Last week, during US Vice President Joe Biden’s tour of the region, an Israeli building an planning committee had announced that 6,000 additional housing units would be built in Ramat Shlomo, a primarily haredi neighborhood near Ramot and adjacent to the Shuafat refugee camp.

The so-called Quartet peacemakers met in the Russian capital and issued a formal statement read by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the statement, but said the real test would be whether Israel would act according to the Quartet’s demands.

Joining Ban at the Moscow meeting were US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, and the Quartet’s special representative, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

EDITORIAL: Obama surrenders gulf oil to Moscow

The Washington Times (Link) (March 18, 2010)

The Obama administration is poised to ban offshore oil drilling on the outer continental shelf until 2012 or beyond. Meanwhile, Russia is making a bold strategic leap to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. While the United States attempts to shift gears to alternative fuels to battle the purported evils of carbon emissions, Russia will erect oil derricks off the Cuban coast.

Offshore oil production makes economic sense. It creates jobs and helps fulfill America’s vast energy needs. It contributes to the gross domestic product and does not increase the trade deficit. Higher oil supply helps keep a lid on rising prices, and greater American production gives the United States more influence over the global market.

Drilling is also wildly popular with the public. A Pew Research Center poll from February showed 63 percent support for offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Americans understand the fundamental points: The oil is there, and we need it. If we don’t drill it out, we have to buy it from other countries. Last year, the U.S. government even helped Brazil underwrite offshore drilling in the Tupi oil field near Rio de Janeiro. The current price of oil makes drilling economically feasible, so why not let the private sector go ahead and get our oil?

New York State Tax Refunds Put On Hold

CBS (Link) - Marcia Kramer (March 18, 2010)

For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the check won’t be in the mail -- at least not on time. New York State has stopped paying tax refunds and won’t start again until next month.

The tax refund delay is part of a bigger cash crunch.

Message to New Yorkers: don’t start spending your tax refund money because it’s going to be delayed.

Half a billion dollars’ worth of refund checks were put on hold last Friday, and state beancounters won’t start sending you your money until at least April 1.

“I apologize that we had to do this. I hope it serves notice on the public of how serious our financial situation is,” Gov. David Paterson said.

House may try to pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it

The Washington Post (Link) - Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane (March 16, 2010)

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic -- known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” -- has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

Republicans quickly condemned the strategy, framing it as an effort to avoid responsibility for passing the legislation, and some suggested that Pelosi’s plan would be unconstitutional.

Deficits making U.S. military nervous

WorldNet Daily (Link) - Jerome R. Corsi (March 16, 2010)

With the Obama administration pressing for a government takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy to grant health-care benefits to all Americans, the U.S. military is worried that the United States is already losing the ability to afford national defense.

The deteriorating international trade position of the U.S. as documented by the CIA is a national security concern by the U.S. military, according to the Joint Operating Environment 2010 report, or JOE 2010, released Monday by the United States Joint Forces Command, or USJFCOM.

The CIA World Factbook lists the U.S., with a negative current account balance of $380 billion, in last place among 183 nations in 2009. China, in contrast, is listed as No. 1, with a positive current account balance of $296 billion.

Nor is the United States position in international trade improving.

The U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis reported in December that the U.S. current account deficit increased to $108 billion in the third quarter of 2009 from $98 billion in the second quarter of 2009.

The current account is the broadest measure of international trade, defined as net exports and imports, plus net income and transfer payments made between nations. The largest measure is a positive or negative balance of international trade as defined by the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis.

IDF official: Neither Israel nor PA wants violence

Haaretz (Link) - Liel Kyzer, Jack Khoury and Fadi Eyadat (March 16, 2010)

A senior Israel Defense Forces officer said Tuesday that despite the violence that erupted across Jerusalem in response to Hamas’ declaration of a “day of rage,” neither the Palestinian Authority nor Israel was interested in seeing a renewal of conflict.

“Everyone understands that we can’t let this region fall into unbridled violence,” he said, adding that Israeli and Palestinian officials were in close coordination.

Palestinians and Israeli security forces clashed across Jerusalem on Tuesday, and hints of the violence seemed also to spread to other parts of the country after Hamas called to protest Israel’s consecration of an ancient synagogue in the city the day before.

Assailants in the central Israeli city of Jaffa hurled rocks at two public buses, cracking the back window of one of them. Rocks were also thrown at a truck near Kibbutz Mishmar Hanegev in the south and at two vehicles in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dor. There were no casualties in any of the incidents.

Palestinians hurled stones at police and burned tires and trash bins in several areas of East Jerusalem, which Israel captured along with the West Bank during the 1967 Six-Day War.

‘Hamas used kids as human shields’

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - Yaakov Katz (March 15, 2010)

Hamas gunmen used Palestinian children as human shields, and established command centers and Kassam launch pads in and near more than 100 mosques and hospitals during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last year, according to a new Israeli report being released on Monday that aims to counter criticism of the IDF.

The detailed 500-page report, obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post, was written by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam), a small research group led by Col. (res.) Reuven Erlich, a former Military Intelligence officer who works closely with the army.

The IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) cooperated with the report’s authors and declassified hundreds of photographs, videos, prisoner interrogations and Hamas-drawn sketches as part of an effort to counter the criticism leveled at Israel in the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report.

Work on the Malam report began immediately after former judge Richard Goldstone issued his damning report of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip in September.

One example of the material revealed in the Malam report is an-until-now classified sketch of the village of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza discovered by IDF troops during the operation, that details the extensive deployment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and snipers inside and adjacent to civilian homes. The sketch was discovered in a home of a Hamas operative together with several IEDs and Kalashnikov rifles.

Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial reform bill to give huge powers to Federal Reserve

NY Daily News (Link) - Reuters (March 15, 2010)

The Federal Reserve would gain new powers over non-bank financial firms and keep much of its authority over banks under a new bill to be unveiled on Monday by the Senate’s architect of financial reform.

In a turnaround for the central bank after months of public criticism, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd was poised to release a bill that leans heavily on the Fed to fix the U.S. financial system, sources said on Sunday.

Not only would a new government watchdog for financial consumers be housed within the Fed, it would also retain much of its present authority over large bank holding companies and gain new authority over selected non-bank financial firms.

Sources said the Fed would also continue supervising smaller, state-chartered banks now in the Fed system -- a change from an earlier proposal that would have transferred those banks to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. supervision.

The plans could yet change, sources said, with weeks to go before Congress completes its long debate on regulatory reform after the worst U.S. financial crisis in generations tipped the economy into recession and shook markets worldwide.

Israeli envoy sees “historic crisis” with U.S.: report

Reuters (Link) - Jeffrey Heller (March 15, 2010)

Israel and the United States are in a “crisis of historic proportions” over a settlement dispute that has brought relations to a 35-year low, Israel’s ambassador to Washington was quoted on Monday as saying.

The comments attributed to envoy Michael Oren clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to play down tensions with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration over a West Bank settlement project threatening to derail the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian talks.

“Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 ... a crisis of historic proportions,” the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Oren as telling other Israeli diplomats in a telephone briefing over the weekend.

The remarks, also carried by other Israeli media, appeared to refer to U.S. pressure in 1975 for an Israeli redeployment in the Egyptian Sinai, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war and the site of renewed fighting in 1973.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

Mexico gunmen kill American consulate staff

Reuters (Link) - Julian Cardona (March 15, 2010)

An American woman working at the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, and her U.S. husband were shot dead by suspected drug gang hitmen in broad daylight on Saturday as they left a consulate social event, U.S. and Mexican officials told Reuters.

A Mexican man married to another consulate employee was killed around the same time in another part of the city after he and his wife left the same event, a U.S. official said.

The official, who asked not to be identified, said it was not clear if the victims had been specifically targeted, and the motive for the attacks was unknown.

Bloodshed has exploded in recent months in Ciudad Juarez as the head of the Juarez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, fights off a bloody offensive by Mexico’s No. 1 fugitive drug lord, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, at the worst hotspot of Mexico’s three-year-old drug war.

“The president is deeply saddened and outraged by the news,” said White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer. He said Obama “shares in the outrage of the Mexican people at the murders of thousands in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico.”

Corporate Debt Coming Due May Squeeze Credit

The New York Times (Link) - Nelson D. Schwartz (March 15, 2010)

When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.

Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.

With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.

The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.

Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch AAA credit ratings.

Magnitude 6.6 Quake Sways Buildings in Tokyo

Fox News (Link) - AP (March 14, 2010)

A strong magnitude 6.6 earthquake hit off the eastern coast of Japan on Sunday, rattling buildings across a broad swath of the country, including the crowded capital.

There were no reports of casualties, with only light damage to structures near the epicenter, according to local officials.

The quake hit at 5:08 p.m. and was felt most strongly in central Fukushima prefecture about 130 miles northeast of Tokyo, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Click for data from the USGS