Watchman Newsletter

Deficit reduction critical says IMF's Lipsky

Reuters (Link) - Mark Felsenthal (January 8, 2011)

A top IMF official warned on Saturday that the United States must start down a budget deficit-cutting path relatively soon or face crushing debt service costs as interest rates rise.

“Time’s a-wasting,” John Lipsky, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said in an address at the annual American Economics Association conference here. “It is critical to lay out the basis for credible medium-term fiscal adjustment,” he said.

Lipsky praised recent steps by U.S. central bankers and politicians to support a weak economic recovery with expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. However, he said those steps make it less likely the United States can meet goals of cutting its deficit in half by 2013.

Both the monetary and fiscal stimulus measures have been controversial. The Federal Reserve in November provoked outrage with a $600 billion bond-buying plan that both domestic and international critics protested would weaken the dollar and lay the groundwork for a burst of inflation.

President Barack Obama and Congress agreed in December to a $858 billion tax package designed to support economic growth, but bond markets quailed over the its deepening of the $1.3 trillion budget deficit.

39 Percent Of NYC Pregnancies Result In Abortion

CBS New York (Link) (January 7, 2011)

Archbishop Timothy Dolan is calling for efforts to make abortions in New York City “rare.”

Dolan gathered with other religious leaders on Thursday to draw attention to the city’s high abortion rate. The city health department last month released statistics that showed 39 percent of pregnancies ended with induced termination in 2009.

READ THE REPORT HERE.

“I re-affirm Cardinal John O’Connor’s promise of a quarter-century ago that every woman facing a difficult pregnancy will be provided with free, confidential help of the highest quality from the Archdiocese of New York,” said Archbishop Dolan.

While the numbers have declined in the last decade, the religious leaders said they are still too high.

In 2009, there were 225,667 pregnancies in the City with 126,774 resulting in live births and 87,273 resulting in abortions. In addition to those abortion numbers, there were 11,620 spontaneous terminations.

Obama to hand Commerce Dept. authority over cybersecurity ID

CNet News (Link) - Declan McCullagh (January 7, 2011)

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

Agents of influence

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - Caroline B. Glick (January 7, 2011)

The time has come to determine just how “Israeli” these organizations that form such a big part of the int'l political war against Israel are.

On Sunday, December 19, the self-proclaimed “Israeli human rights” group B’Tselem disseminated a shocking story to the local and international media. B’Tselem claimed that the previous day, Palestinian shepherd Samir Bani Fadel was peacefully herding his sheep when he was set upon by a mob of Israeli settlers.

He alleged that these kippa-clad Israelis drove up in a car and chased him away. Then they torched the pasture and burned 12 pregnant ewes alive and badly burned five others. B’Tselem furnished reporters with graphic photos of the dead sheep.

While the media published the account without a shred of skepticism, the police found Fadel’s account hard to believe. Observant Jews neither drive nor light fires on Saturdays.

And indeed, when questioned by police investigators, Fadel admitted he made the whole attack up. He accidentally killed his herd himself when he set fire to a pile of bramble. Too embarrassed to admit his mistake, he decided to blame the Jews and become a local hero. B’Tselem was only too happy to spread his lies.

China’s Ballistic-Missile, Stealth-Fighter Advances Draw Attention of U.S.

Bloomberg (Link) - Tony Capaccio (January 6, 2011)

Advances in Chinese military technology, including a new anti-ship ballistic missile and possibly a radar-evading fighter plane, are drawing scrutiny from Pentagon officials days before Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to meet with his counterpart in Beijing.

Vice Admiral Jack Dorsett, the head of Navy intelligence, said yesterday that the Pentagon had underestimated the speed at which China has developed and fielded a ballistic missile that may be capable of hitting a maneuvering U.S. aircraft carrier. Dorsett said it was too early to tell whether the U.S. also has misjudged China’s capability to build a stealth fighter jet.

“We’ve been on the mark on an awful lot of our assessments but there has been a handful of things we have underestimated,” Dorsett told defense reporters. The DF-21D missile now has so-called initial combat capability, he said, according to his analysts and U.S. Pacific Command head Admiral Robert Willard.

China’s advances in military technology are drawing close scrutiny and concern from the Pentagon and new Republican-controlled House, particularly when they may jeopardize the dominance of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific region. News of the Chinese advances comes as Congress prepares to consider cuts in the Defense Department budget.

World Food Prices Jump to Record on Sugar, Oilseeds

Bloomberg (Link) - Rudy Ruitenberg (January 5, 2011)

World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs, the United Nations said, exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.

An index of 55 food commodities tracked by the Food and Agriculture Organization gained for a sixth month to 214.7 points, above the previous all-time high of 213.5 in June 2008, the Rome-based UN agency said in a monthly report. The gauges for sugar and meat prices advanced to records.

Sugar climbed for a third year in a row in 2010, and corn jumped the most in four years in Chicago. Food prices may rise more unless the world grain crop increases “significantly” in 2011, the FAO said Nov. 17. At least 13 people died last year in Mozambique in protests against plans to lift bread prices.

“There is still, unfortunately, the potential for grain prices to strengthen on the back of a lot of uncertainty,” Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the FAO, said by phone from Rome today. “If anything goes wrong with the South American crop, there is plenty of room for them to increase.”

Researchers find “alarming” decline in bumblebees

Reuters (Link) - Maggie Fox (January 5, 2011)

Four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United States, researchers reported on Monday in a study confirming that the agriculturally important bees are being affected worldwide.

They documented a 96 percent decline in the numbers of the four species, and said their range had shrunk by as much as 87 percent. As with honeybees, a pathogen is partly involved, but the researchers also found evidence the bees are vulnerable to inbreeding caused by habitat loss.

“We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national level,” the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calling the findings “alarming.”

“These are one of the most important pollinators of native plants,” Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois, Urbana, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

U.S. court says Christian cross is unconstitutional

WorldNet Daily (Link) - Brian Fitzpatrick (January 4, 2011)

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided a memorial cross on federal land on Mt. Soledad, Calif., violates the U.S. Constitution.

In a 3-0 ruling in the Jewish War Veterans v. City of San Diego case, the panel decided that the 29-foot concrete cross, which has stood for 57 years, constitutes a government endorsement of religion and therefore violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

“The question, then, is whether the entirety of the Mount Soledad Memorial, when understood against the background of its particular history and setting, projects a government endorsement of Christianity. We conclude it does,” wrote Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown, a Clinton appointee.

“The decision represents a judicial slap in the face to the countless military veterans honored by this memorial,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of 25 members of Congress. “This flawed decision not only strikes at the heart of honoring our military veterans, it reaches a faulty conclusion that this iconic memorial – part of the historic landscape of San Diego – is unconstitutional. We believe the appeals court got this decision wrong and we look forward to the case going to the Supreme Court where we’re confident this decision will be overturned.”

Egypt and the Destruction of Churches: Strategic Implications

Stratfor Global Intelligence (Link) - George Friedman (January 4, 2011)

Over the past few days, Christian churches have been attacked in at least two countries — Nigeria and Egypt — while small packages containing improvised explosive devices were placed on the doorsteps of Christian families in Iraq. Attacks against Christians are not uncommon in the Islamic world, driven by local issues and groups, and it is unclear whether these latest attacks were simply coincidental and do not raise the threat to a new level or whether they indicate the existence of a new, coordinated, international initiative. There is a strong case to be made for the idea that there is nothing new in all of this.

Yet I am struck by the close timing of events in three distant and dispersed countries. Certainly, Egyptian intelligence services are looking for any regional connections (e.g., whether Iraqi operatives recruited the Egyptian bomber). While there have been previous bombings in Egypt, they have focused on tourists, not churches. What is important is this: If the recent attacks are not coincidental, then a coordinated campaign is being conducted against Christian churches that spans at least these countries. And it is a network that has evaded detection by intelligence services.

Obviously, this is speculative. What is clear, however, is that the attack on a church in one country — Egypt — is far from common and was particularly destructive. Egypt has been relatively quiet in terms of terrorism, and there have been few recent attacks on the large Coptic Christian population. The Egyptian government has been effective in ruthlessly suppressing Islamist extremists and has been active in sharing intelligence on terrorism with American, Israeli and other Muslim governments. Its intelligence apparatus has been one of the mainstays of global efforts to limit terrorism as well as keep Egypt’s domestic opposition in check.

New Laws Govern Guns, Web, Banks

The Wall Street Journal (Link) - Melanie Trottman & Nathan Koppel (January 3, 2011)

A raft of new federal and local laws ring in the new year, governing a span of topics from health care and finance to texting, guns and smoking.

Among the most far-reaching pieces of legislation is the new federal health-care law which this year includes new taxes on drug makers, as well as lower prescription-drug costs for many seniors and restrictions on tax-free medical spending. The provisions come amid heated debate, with many lawmakers saying they hope to overturn the health-care law.

Another new federal law gives borrowers more specific information on the interest rates they pay on credit cards and other loans. Beginning this year, consumers have the right to find out why they didn’t get the best possible terms on a credit-card or non-business loan. Credit-card companies and other lenders must provide a risk-based pricing notice or a credit score to explain the reasoning behind interest rates.

Federal regulations will begin requiring new and upgraded power plants, oil refiners and other large facilities to hold permits to release greenhouse gases.