"The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.”2 At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the United States makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is its military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

Capt. Gregory M. Zeigler, PhD – Former U.S. Army Intelligence officer. In a 2006 statement to this author Capt. Zeigler wrote, “I knew from September 18, 2001, that the official story about 9/11 was false. That was when I realized that the perpetrators had made a colossal blunder in collapsing the South Tower first, rather than the North Tower, which had been hit more directly and earlier. “Other anomalies poured in rapidly: the hijackers' names appearing in none of the published flight passenger lists, BBC reports of stolen identities of the alleged hijackers or the alleged hijackers being found alive, the obvious demolitions of WTC 1 and 2 and WTC 7, the lack of identifiable Boeing 757 wreckage at the Pentagon, the impossibility of ordinary cell phone (as opposed to Airfone) calls being made consistently from passenger aircraft at cruising altitude, etc., etc., etc.”

But what else are we going to do? We're going to print money. Almost limitlessly we'll print money. That's going to be fine, too. And when we're done with that, we're going to raise taxes. What a fabulous package we have in store for us. (Niall Ferguson)

In Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century, an elegantly written and frequently stimulating dictionary of ideas, he denounces religion as a “rudimentary and primitive precursor to science and technology” while praising the virtues of an atheistic outlook. Grayling asks us to compare “the life of the ordinary man and woman in a western country” with the lives of “their fellows in developing countries, especially those where religion remains a dominating influence over people’s lives. The transforming effect of Enlightenment ideas in history is plain to see; and as admirable as it is plain”.

What we know conclusively is that the people who died often had prior respiratory complications of an undisclosed nature. People die every day with respiratory diseases. In the USA alone some 36,000 flu-related deaths are recorded yearly with no undue panic or alarm. Most are elderly or patients with lung diseases. To date in all France, 24 people have been identified by health authorities as even having ‘symptoms’ of H1N1. It is worth noting that the WHO and CDC list the symptoms of H1N1: temperature, coughing, headache, runny nose. Hmmmmm.

Obama is now mulling over the idea of indefinite detention without trial for U.S. citizens. This, from a teacher of the Constitution ! Bills are in congress to criminalize free speech on the Internet via the Cyberbullying Act which will make hurting somebody's feelings a felony. Just like the Patriot Act this will morph in to a criminalization of political free speech and any criticism of the Government.

Yet the diminution of individual liberty has gone much further under New Labour as ideas of pre-emptive or actuarial justice have evolved in tandem with increasingly widespread electronic surveillance and data gathering. Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and Hate Crimes would once have seemed like Orwellian flights of fancy; today they are a reality. And CCTV cameras and computer databases mean that Big Brother is watching you more than you probably like to think.

Reko Diq is the home of the world's largest gold and copper reserves, reportedly worth more than US$65 billion. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn, these reserves are believed to be even bigger than similar ones in Iran and Chile.

The British, too, turned to aerial surveillance as a way out of the double bind of persistent anti-colonial rebellion and popular demands that their troops be brought home. When the British public grew critical in turn of the violence of the new strategy, officials proclaimed that it worked more through the threat of bombardment than actual attack, gamely embracing "terror" as its main tactical principle.

The euro-based share of reserve assets of Russia’s Central Bank increased to the level of 47.5 percent as of January 1, 2009 and exceeded the investments in dollar assets, which made up 41.5 percent, The Vedomosti newspaper wrote. The dollar has thus lost the status of the basic reserve currency for the Russian Central Bank, the annual report, which the bank provided to the State Duma, said.