The dollar dropped to within touching of its record low against the euro and fell across the board on Monday as rumours of an inter-meeting cut in US interest rates swept the market.
Markets moved to fully price in a 50 basis point cut in US interest rates at its meeting on January 30 after a speech last week from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Mr Bernanke said the central bank stood ready to take “substantive additional action” to support growth.
“The dollar remains on the defensive after Mr Bernanke’s pledge that has markets poised for an imminent rate cut,” said Sue Trinh at RBC Capital Markets.
“The rumour mill suggests a Fed cut today ahead of the meeting on January 30.”
The dollar dropped 0.8 per cent to $1.4890 against the euro, its weakest level in seven weeks and less than a cent away from the all-time low of $1.4966 it hit against the single currency last November.
The dollar also fell 1.1 per cent to Y107.77 against the yen, dropped 0.9 per cent to SFr1.0912 against the Swiss franc.
Derek Halpenny at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ said bearish sentiment towards the dollar was reinforced by reports that additional substantial write-offs by large US financial institutions were expected to be announced this week.
He said with capital injections by sovereign wealth funds seemingly already arranged the concern lies not in the potential collapse of one of these financial institutions but on the macro-economic consequences ahead.
“With the size of the write-downs now being reported unprecedented, there is a high risk that the Fed’s far more aggressive in its monetary easing campaign by front-loading a lot of cuts into the first half of the year,” said Mr Halpenny.
“We maintain our view that the euro will break both the record high and $1.50 over the coming weeks.”
Gold surged to a record above $900 an ounce on Monday as expectations of aggressive interest rate cuts pushed the dollar lower.
By mid morning in London, spot gold hit a record $914 a troy ounce, up 1.8 per cent from Friday’s close.
Gold’s latest rise was driven by fresh weakness in the dollar. Metals, which are priced in dollars, become cheaper to buy in other currencies as the US unit slides. The dollar fell 0.6 per cent against the euro and by 1 per cent against the yen in early London trade.
The safe haven appeal of precious metals was boosted by fears of more shocks in financial markets with further large losses related to sub-prime lending expected from a number of major US financial institutions which report fourth quarter results this week.
”Gold continues to receive support from the uncertainty in the financial markets, and is likely to appreciate for as long as these uncertainties dog the market,” said James Steel at HSBC.
A majority of analysts polled by the London Bullion Market Association last week said they believed gold would reach $1,000 this year.
“There is blue sky ahead of us and there is room for gold to go higher,” said Darren Heathcote of Investec Australia: “We are in an unchartered territory really. We have a weaker dollar and that’s encouraged people to buy gold.”
However, high gold prices have had a damaging effect on physical buying by jewellery makers, but the latest data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed that speculators have continued to increase their bets that bullion will rise further.
ABC breaks the ice for us: in the future, and not too far into it, the process of getting and renewing a driver’s license will become more difficult, stressful, and fraught with all manner of unnecessary nonsense supposedly designed to protect us from terrorists, or rather CIA patsies paraded about to frighten us into submission, and as well prevent illegals from taking to the roads, never mind Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and West Virginia allow illegals to hold a license, thus demonstrating the above is little more than a threadbare excuse.
Of course, when the rubber meets the road, we discern the real reason — a national ID, complete with RFID and possibly biometrics, is all about easing us into the control grid.
According to apparatchik Michael Chertoff and the commissariat of Homeland Security, the whole affair is a matter of national security. “We are now over six years from 9/11,” Chertoff impatiently declared, “we live every day with the problems of false identification. Simply kicking this problem down the road year after year after year for further discussion, further debate and analysis is a time-tested Washington way of smothering any proposal with process.”
In other words, never mind that most people oppose Real ID and civil libertarians warn of vexing abuse, Chertoff and the neocons are itching to get us all in lumbering databases, the next step in a plan that will ultimately result in the chipping of the population at large.
“I think the time has come to bite the bullet,” Chertoff continued, “and get the kind of secure identification I am convinced the American public wants to have,” or rather the government tells them they must have, as most people hate the idea and eighteen states have passed legislation rejecting the law and Congress has refused to put any money into implementing it.
But never mind. It is a win-win situation for AOL, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, all who stand to clean up if Chertoff manages to force his card on Americans at large. “The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) sent a letter to Congress this week begging for more federal funding for Real ID,” Privacy Digest noted last October. In addition to the above corporate culprits, we can add Digimarc and Northrop Grumman, “companies that specialize in creating high-tech ID cards, as well as Choicepoint and LexisNexis, data brokers that make their money selling personal information about you to advertisers and the government. These companies stand to make millions in contracts from states who are struggling with a federal mandate to overhaul their licensing systems and share more data by the May 2008 deadline,” a date right around the corner, thus explaining Chertoff’s impatience.
“Real ID is so unpopular because in addition to being a $23 billion unfunded mandate, it will build a vast national database of personal information, expose us to a greater risk of identity theft, and move us ever closer to a total surveillance society.’
It may also be a way to keep “terrorists” off the roadways — not the Muslim cave dwelling brand of terrorist, mind you, but the kind that exercises his or her right to petition the government under that rusty old anachronism, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
As we know, thousands of Americans are on the Federal Aviation Administration’s No-Fly List and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center has compiled a terrorist watch list of over 700,000 people. Moreover, as Dave Lindorff writes, the government is in the business of passing this information out to private companies. “The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI made its list of people with even remote links to terrorism — having associated, perhaps inadvertently, with a terror suspect, for example — available to a wide range of private companies, from banks and rental-car companies to casinos.”
And who exactly are these primary terrorists, the ones you don’t want to associate with, that is if you ever want to fly again? They are “law-abiding Americans” who were detained and questioned — we used to call this harassment — “based on their political viewpoints,” according to Nancy Chang, a senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “I think what they are doing is harassing people who are opposing the war and publicly speaking out against administration policy,” John Dear, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, told Lindorff.
Back in 2003, we learned that the FBI “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and … advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” the New York Times reported. Of course, this is simply a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, initiated in the 1960s to “neutralize” the opposition — i.e., render activists not only politically impotent, but often wreck their lives as well.
In 2006, we discovered that COINTELPRO didn’t go away, as the official history would have it, but lives on to this day at the Pentagon. “An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations,” reported the New York Times. The database, known as Talon, “showed that the military used a variety of sources to collect intelligence leads on antiwar protests, including an agent in the Department of Homeland Security, Google searches on the Internet and e-mail messages forwarded by apparent informants with ties to protest groups.”
In short, the FBI and the Pentagon are still in the business of compiling lists and checking them twice, and many if not most of these people end up grounded, as noted above.
Now we have Chertoff and ABC telling us the same rules may soon apply to driving a car. As Chertoff told ABC, the Real ID is about preventing “terrorists” from driving — with illegal immigration tacked on as a selling point — and, if the behavior of the FBI and the Pentagon are any indicator, the real terrorists are not Muslim guys who were trained on U.S. military bases and had a fondness for cruising topless bars, but are antiwar activists and other troublemakers.
Soon enough, many of us – those who believe the Constitution says what it means — may be reduced to walking to work and the grocery store… that is until a Real ID card will be required to hold job or buy a loaf of bread.
>We know now that the CIA kept from the 9/11 Commission tapes of al Qaeda suspects in violation of law. But why isn't mainstream media (MSM) reporting about other tapes U.S. Intelligence kept from the 9/11 Commission?
>In today's 2-minute news sound bites it's easy to deceive. Anthrax is released in letters and you are to believe that it came from Iraq. Next thing you know, we have a war in Iraq to eliminate their none existent stockpiles of anthrax. An "al Qaeda" suicide tape is released and you are to believe it came from al Qaeda.
Since the most important 9/11 hijackers were ringleader Mohammed Atta and Ziad Zarrah, let's take a close look at the release of their "last will" tape and how it was reported. Clearly, the CIA kept other important 9/11 tapes from the 9/11 Commission and MSM helped with the cover-up. The so-called Laughing Hijackers tape was obtained by London Sunday Times on September 30, 2006 and reported the next day. Read closely this article from MSNBC and you will see this quote about this "Al Qaeda" video. "The images were taken from a videotape the U.S. military supposedly recovered from an al Qaeda compound after the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001." That's right - the U.S Government had these tapes for five years before they were mysteriously delivered to the media.
>But MSNBC didn't break this story - the London Sunday Times did. "The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel." “Previously tested channel” to me means, this isn't the first time. It's worth noting that the person the tapes were delivered to previously worked for Al Jeezra and was the one who broke previous al Qaeda tape releases. His name is Yosri Fouda.
>How did ABC report this leak of these "new" tapes that the U.S. Government had for five years and that no one knew about? This is the first sentence under their headline "The Man Who Received Tape From Al Qaeda Talks to ABC About the Al Qaeda PR Machine.” Now am I wrong, or does that seem to indicate these tapes came from al Qaeda? In this article they pretend these tapes came from al Qaeda. They didn't.
>Here is a little nugget from CNN on their reporting "A U.S. intelligence official told CNN the intelligence community has been aware of the video for some time." No kidding. They had these tapes for five years. I say tapes because when this was released there were two parts of this video according to the breaking story.
>Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93. The high quality, unedited film shows bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. Dating on the tape indicates that the Al Qaeda leader was filmed on January 8, 2000, ten days before Atta and Jarrah recorded their wills.
>The tapes consist of two parts: Atta and Jarrah supposedly reading their wills dated January 18, 2000, and a speech by bin Ladin dated January 8, 2000. You can watch them here.
>I urge you to watch the bin Laden speech and try to convince yourself that this is not a surveillance tape, made in order to capture the images of people there. That seems to be what it is. It pans the crowd and freeze-frames their images before moving on to another. There is not a whole lot of interest in the speech and the speaker. It is odd, don't you think, to focus on people in the audience instead of the speaker at the event? Why would al Qaeda do surveillance on themselves? They wouldn't.
>But to pretend U.S. intelligence didn't want to do surveillance on Al Qaeda is laughable. Of course they did, which brings up the ugly possibility that these tapes were not "found" in some house in Afghanistan in 2001 but were actually made by U.S. Intelligence.
>One thing is not in question though, although MSM wouldn't tell you this: this was used as a surveillance tape. While this tape was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission, it was being used on detainees in Guantanamo to try to get them to confess to being members of Al Qaeda. Here is the proof.
>In March 2006, seven months before the world was told of these tapes a movie was already made and released documenting the experiences of three people who were actually held in Guantanamo. These three people who were finally deemed innocent had their experience acted out in the docudrama Road to Guantanamo.
>At 1:38 into this clip, a person from Washington DC shows a tape of a bin Laden speech dated Jan 8 2000 this interrogation was being done in 2003. So in 2003, the Government was using this tape in Guantanamo as a surveillance tape. Three years later, they released it along with the Atta video to the reporter who received the "al Qaeda" tapes.
>According to the MSNBC article, they had this tape just after 9/11 and before the start of the 9/11 Commission. After the 9/11 Commission was concluded, they anonymously released it to an overseas reporter who received the other "al Qaeda" tapes. It was then reported in MSM as an al Qaeda tape. The media helped the U.S. Government pass this off as an al Qaeda tape, keeping the public in the dark.
>Does the 9/11 Commission even care that this was kept from them? Why don't they bring this up? Why doesn't the media? The only site that seemed to notice this and tried to get attention focused on it was PrisonPlanet.
Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly London Telegraph Monday January 14, 2008
Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.
The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.
But patients' groups said that they were "totally opposed" to Mr Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies.
There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation and more than 1,000 a year die without receiving the organ that could save their lives.
The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more "potential organ donors" from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they "convert" into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death.
Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden's son has applied for a visa to the United Kingdom where he intends to live with his British wife, the Daily Mail reported.
Omar Bin Laden, 26, and his wife Jane Felix-Browne, 52, say they have been interviewed at the British Embassy in Cairo. The embassy has declined to comment on the issue.
The British woman, who changed her name to Zaina Al Sabah Bin Laden after her marriage to Omar, has been married six times and has three sons and five grandchildren, according to the tabloid.
If the couple's application is accepted, they will move to Jane's $1.1 million home in Cheshire, near Manchester.
The Daily mail quoted her as saying: "The embassy staff are all very friendly and they are doing all the checks. It could take a while for the visa to come through but there's no reason in law why Omar and I should not be able to live in the U.K. together."
The son of the world's most wanted terrorist has divorced his first wife, the mother of his two-year-old son, and is currently waiting for confirmation of the divorce to come through from Saudi Arabia, so that he can prove the British woman is his only spouse.
"We have been told there will not be a problem as long as we can provide the original documents from his divorce from his first wife. And that should be done in a week," Mrs Bin Laden said.
A British marriage visa would allow Omar to live in the country for two years, after which he would be able to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain.
The couple say they are "peace activists", and are organizing a horse ride from Cairo to Morocco.
Omar Bin Laden told the Mail on Sunday: "Associates of my father forced the cancellation of the Dakar Rally [across north-west Africa], but they won't stop me from riding. We want people to join us on the trek - Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, it doesn't matter where people are from."
