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The Crow Dispatch
It's the end of days. Everybody feels something has to change but meanwhile we must survive. We must. And there's no time left to save the world.
The Great Italian Earthquake
Fishing trawler sunk in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay
Large fuel spill near a marine park
Authorities are planning a salvage operation for the Lady Cheryl, the 27m vessel that ran aground near Point Nepean on Saturday. The trawler had 30,000 litres of diesel fuel on board when it sank, as well as 300 litres of hydraulic fluid and 500 litres of commercial lubricant.
Police have questioned the 42-year-old captain, who allegedly recorded a blood alcohol reading over the legal limit of 0.05. He was released without charge, pending further investigations.
“There was a maximum of six-metre swells, so weather and conditions obviously played a part and alcohol played a part,” Sgt Lilly told. “We can’t establish which was the major part at this stage, but between alcohol and weather conditions the vessel has run aground.”
Let’s wear the Maya feathers…
“2011: A Year in Review” - http://online.wsj.com/video/2011-a-year-in-review/51470919-29ED-4A1E-A4C3-7999CAB73393.html (by The Wall Street Journal)
“2011’s 10 stories that mattered most” - http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-top10-20111230,0,3826118.story?track=rss (Los Angeles Times)
“London’s New Year Celebrations” - http://www.lbc.co.uk/londons-new-year-celebrations-49213 (London’s Biggest Conversation)
“New Year’s Eve 2012: Celebrations start in Pacific” - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-16372774 (BBC)
In Rom, agents provocateurs have transformed the pacific demonstration into a war, setting alight several cars and vandalising private properties
Online organizers have set Saturday as the date to spread the Occupy Wall Street protests to over 900 cities around the world. In South Europe (Spain and Italy mainly) they are known as The Indignant, or Angry People.
Today was the great international day of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But the protests in Italy last since days, or better to say weeks.
They call themselfes “indignados” (a Spanish word for “angry people”). Yesterday, Friday, some protesters marched through the streets of Milan, hurling food at bank branches and storming into the local office of Goldman Sachs. They were quickly dispersed by the police and building security, but not before they had a chance to leave some graffiti critical of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi along with scrawls of a more direct sort: “Give us money.”
Afterward, according to video posted by the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, the group tried to move on the offices of Fininvest, a holding company controlled by Mr. Berlusconi’s family, but were blocked by the police. They hurled rotten fruit and vegetables and shouted against the prime minister, who earlier in the morning narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
“We will never have confidence in you, you robbing mafioso,” some in the crowd chanted.
Today in Rom police was in force as ca. 100,000 protesters were awaited… more than 500,000 came instead and filled the streets and the places of Italy’s capital with red flags and slogans like “People of Europe: Rise Up!”.
In Frankfurt, continental Europe’s financial capital, some 5,000 people protested in front of the European Central Bank. Other protests in German have been in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and some other cities. In London, around 500 people marched from St. Paul’s cathedral to the nearby stock exchange.
Supporters in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday waved signs such as “you can’t eat money.” About 200 people in Tokyo joined the global protests, and Philippine supporters in Manila marched on the U.S. Embassy to express support for Occupy Wall Street and to denounce “U.S. imperialism” and U.S.-led wars and aggression.
The Friday showdown in New York came as tensions rose, with several arrests in many U.S. cities and scattered clashes between demonstrators and police. Zuccotti Park owners planned to temporarily evict the protesters at 7 a.m. so the grounds could be power-washed.
Still the police all over the world are defending politicians and money institutions, but many people are sure that they will open their eyes and revolt against their unthankfull bosses… one day or another.
The United States urged 55 million people on its East Coast on Friday to prepare for the onslaught of massive Hurricane Irene, which President Barack Obama warned could be “extremely dangerous”.
Irene’s wide swirling bands are lashing the seabord with winds and rain from the Carolinas to New England.
A quarter of a million New Yorkers may have to leave their vulnerable homes if, as predicted, Irene triggers dangerous storm surge and flooding in the city and farther east on Long Island.
Anders Behring Breivik (32), a Norwegian citizen of Norwegian descent, was arrested after the two attacks. It appears he is lined with with right-wing political activists. Late Friday on night police searched Breiviks apartment in Oslo. The 32-year-old man has beeen questioned by the police today (Saturday).
Youth camp
The first reports of the massacre on Utøya, an island about south-east of Oslo, came around 18.25 Friday. According to a witness the gunman claimed to be a police officer offering help, before he opened fire and started killing people.
Nearly 700 young members of the Labour Party were on the island for an annual youth camp.
It took a while for the police to realise the full extent of the massacre. At a press conference Saturday morning, police confirms that at least 84 people are killed in the shootings on the island.
Some of the youth tried to swim to safety to escape the gunman. The death toll may rise even more as rescue workers search the water around the island.
Yesterday police said they also found explosives in a car on the island.
Explosion
The shootings on Utøya came only hours after a bomb exploded outside a government building in central Oslo at 3.26 PM Friday.
The explosion killed at least seven people and further ten people are seriously injured in the blast, confirms police. So far only four people have been identified.
A man dressed as a police officer was also seen at this scene.
Surrounding buildings were affected by the massive explosion close to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s office. He was not at his office at the time, and was not injured.
Several blocks around the bomb are still evacuated and people are asked to stay away from the city centre.
Premier: “You will not destroy us”
“We will find those responsible and hold them accountable”, said the Norwegian Prime Minster Jens Stoltenberg (Socialdemocratic Party) at a press conference late Friday.
He also had a message to the people behind the attacks: “You will not destroy us. You will not destroy our democracy or our ideals for a better world.”
Anders Behring Breivik is believed to have links to right-wing extremist and anti-immigrant (read: anti-Muslim) organizations. (source: Sky News). Already, he has a Wikipedia page. The Daily Mail has photos.
In the picture above: the only message he wrote on his Twitter account. Both Facebook account (now closed) and Twitter account have just activated within the past week, which is all very suspicious.
Aftenposten notes that he is said to be a conservative Christian and a Mason, and into hunting and bodybuilding. He owned a farming company that had access to chemicals believed to have been used for bomb-making.
According to comments attributed to him on various Norwegian right-wing/anti-immigrant forums, he was a fan of an array of white supremacist and anti-Muslim pundits — including some from the US. Assuming it’s legit, all of this makes early reports that Muslims were responsible for the attacks all the more regrettable.
A heat wave is gripping the south and the midwest of the country this weekend.
From Texas to Louisiana, people prepare to roast. Overall there is some type of heat alert, watch, warning and advisory. In Chicago, temperatures are expected to hit the 90s. Forecaster Ben Deubelbeiss of The National Weather Service (NWS) said things are expected to get even hotter next week in Illinois. “Sunday we’re expecting heat indexes right around a 100 degrees and probably a couple degrees warmer on Monday. A little bit of cool down on Tuesday as we get a weak cold front that pushes through the area but Wednesday and Thursday look to be the hottest days,” Deubelbeiss said.
In the coming days, although the Northeast will get some relief from the heat wave, states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas will continue to cook.
The ash cloud from a volcano in Chile’s Puyehue-Cordon Caulle chain that has been erupting for nearly two weeks has circled the globe and come home again.
The returning cloud — which has disrupted flights in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand on its around-the-world trip — on Friday forced Chilean officials to cancel domestic flights for the first time since the Cordon Caulle volcano began erupting June 4.
LAN airlines suspended flights to the cities of Puerto Montt, Coyhaique and Punta Arenas in the far south of the South American country. While ash from Cordon Caulle has wreaked havoc with air travel abroad, it had left Chile’s internal flights largely untouched until Friday.
“The tip of the cloud that has traveled around the world is more or less in front of Coyhaique,” said Civil Aviation Office chief Pablo Ortega. Coyhaique is 800 kilometers (500 miles) south of the volcano.
Chilean authorities evacuated 3,500 people living near the volcano after it began erupting but some have since returned.
The governor of Ranco province, Eduardo Holck, said the volcano is emitting a fine ash that is scattering over the Nilahue river valley.
The government, however, maintained a red alert for communities near Cordon Caulle. Chile’s National Geology and Mines Service warned that volcanic activity could begin again “with episodes similar or greater in intensity that was has occurred.”
On Thursday, the government of the Argentine province of Neuquen declared an economic emergency to aid towns where falling ash from Chile’s volcano is endangering livestock and keeping tourists away during the lucrative winter season.
Remembering: air travel in northern Europe and Britain was hit last month after Iceland’s most active volcano at Grimsvotn sent a thick plume of ash and smoke 15.5 miles (25 km) into the sky.
In April last year, the eruption of another Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, led to 100,000 canceled flights, affecting 10 million people at a cost of $1.7 billion.
Chilean volcanoes tend to spew more ash than European volcanoes like Iceland’s, because the magma is thicker and rises more slowly. As a result more ash is expelled.
It was the latest in a series of volcanic eruptions in Chile in recent years. Chile’s Chaiten volcano erupted spectacularly in 2008 for the first time in thousands of years, spewing molten rock and a vast cloud of ash that reached the stratosphere.
The Llaima volcano, one of South America’s most active, erupted in 2008 and 2009.
As The Telegraph reports, the Minsk government applies for an emergency IMF-loan over 8 billion dollars. But there have been other loans in the past years and there always will be…
Video about the actual situation: http://youtu.be/Cn1mNSg__Kg
Why is this happening?
Belarus has been hit by a dire cash shortage that was sparked by a jump in the price Russia charges for energy, as well as massive state spending ahead of presidential elections last year.
Today, the government around President Lukaschenko has been forced to freeze the price of key foodstuffs. The move follows May 24’s currency devaluation, which saw the Belarusian ruble lose 36% of its value against the dollar.
This move sparked hoarding among residents, who “feel” that the country will not survive this financial crisis.
Are people protests a response only to expensive food?
Absolutely no! There were unprecedentedly brutal court sentences against democratic activists who claimed frauds during the elections in December. These hard sentences have two goals: using the inprisoned activists as hostages for future trade with the West, and decapitating the whole infrastructure of the Belarusian opposition. Through incarcerating key figures and injecting fear, the government is taking the nation to a pre-1989 level of obedience and timidity.
Fascism=poverty, which is floating through whole Europe
While Belarus is a small economy, its financial problems could cause concern among larger countries. As the country’s economic situation continues to deteriorate, the fears of yet another sovereign debt crisis on the European continent are growing.
Greece and Ireland are the most “famous” cases, but big problems are also in Ukraine, Hungary and the Baltic states (plus the very Belarus): large world’s regions where all the important European and U.S. banks do big business.
How does the future of the Eurozone (and of Europe) look like?
Currency unions can only survive if there is central economic management of the constituent members and if the stronger members are prepared to endlessly make capital transfers to the weaker members. But first of all, currency unions should be born by people’s free will. Instead, in the Old Continent we see the doctrinaire Eurocrats fighting hard for their fantasy of a United Europe (under whose command?) into which all the people are being dragged irrespective of their wishes.
Only winners - in this stupid and cruel game - are the multinational corporations.
Also if Belarus, and Ukraine, and some other European countries aren’t still in the Eurozone, they are under Eurozone’s influence. Their crisis is due to a pseudo-democratic dictatorship but also to the sheer shamelessness of the… Usual Suspects. And not all of these greedies owe an East-European passport.
