cryptogon.com

This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and “other public bodies”.

The White House announced Monday that Cheney will head abroad on Sept. 2 for stops in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy.

The vice president’s office described Cheney’s trip only in the broadest terms, saying Bush wants his No. 2 to consult with key partners on matters of mutual interest.

The dominant attention will likely fall on Georgia, where conflict with Russia has reignited Cold War tensions. Cheney will hold talks in Georgia with President Mikhail Saakashvili, as he will meet with presidents and senior officials in the other countries.

The news comes as Russia’s parliament voted unanimously Monday to urge the country’s president to recognize the independence of Georgia’s two breakaway regions, a move likely to stoke further tensions between Moscow and the small Caucasus nation’s Western allies.

The vote follows fighting earlier this month between Russia and Georgia over the separatist territory of South Ossetia.

With participants throughout the financial system saying that the credit crisis cannot end until the US housing market stabilises, the monthly data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) failed to show any unequivocal improvement.

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Mr. Cherniawski coolly says that I don’t know the literal half of it, as “The alarming part of this report is the acceleration of inflation in the past 3 months. While the unadjusted rate for the past 12 months was 6.2%, the 3-month annualized rate of increase was 11.9%.” Yikes! We’re freaking doomed!

The report itself noted, without any hint of alarm, that “On a seasonally adjusted basis, the CPI-U advanced 0.8 percent in July, following a 1.1 percent increase in June.” Yow!

Some of the terrifying specifics were that the energy index rose 4%, which accounted for “about half of the overall increase in the all items index.”

A study by HSBC’s currency team in Asia has concluded that China’s central bank is in effect forcing commercial banks to build up large dollar reserves, using them as arms-length proxies in a renewed campaign of exchange rate intervention.

Beijing has raised the reserve requirement for banks five times since March, quickening the pace with two half-point rises in late June.

This is having major spill-over effects into the currency markets because banks in China have been required over the last year to hold extra reserves in dollars rather than yuan. The latest moves have lifted the mandatory deposit from 15pc to 17.5pc of total lending since March.

“China has used the pretext of reserve requirement hikes to help slow yuan appreciation. We estimate that the PBOC [central bank] intervened by about $49.6bn in June,” said Daniel Hui, the bank’s Asia strategist.

Beijing has also slashed the amount of foreign debt banks operating in China can hold. The effect is to oblige the banks to become net buyers of dollars, halting the flow of foreign “hot money”.

Given the sheer scale of China’s foreign reserves – now $1,800bn (£970bn) – any shift in its exchange policy now ripples around the globe. The covert buying may help to explain at least part of the explosive dollar rebound over recent weeks.

There is little doubt that the key driver behind the wild currency ructions this summer has been the blizzard of dire data from Britain, Europe, Japan and Australasia. The mounting danger of a full-fledged recession across the club of rich OECD nations appears to have caught the markets off guard.

The closely watched Dollar Index reached an all-time low in March. It crept up gradually in the early summer before smashing through resistance in July.

Police said that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative”.

The shooting was planned for Thursday, when Mr Obama is set to accept the nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate for the November election at the 75,000-seat Invesco stadium.

Tharin Gartrell, 28, who was wanted on numerous warrants, was arrested on Sunday after police found two high-powered rifles, boxes of ammunition, a rifle scope, a bullet-proof vest, walkie-talkies and methamphetamine in a rented truck he was driving.

Gartrell then led police to a hotel, where a second man, Shawn Robert Adolph, 33, tried to jump out of a sixth-storey window. After landing on an awning and trying to escape with a broken ankle, Adolph, who had a handcuff ring and was wearing a swastika, according to reports, was eventually arrested.

An associate of Gartrell and Adolph, Nathan Johnson, 32, and his girlfriend, Natasha Gromek, were also arrested. Johnson is understood to have told authorities that the two men “planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech.”

It is thought the men may have ties to Sons of Silence, an outlaw biker group, with suspected connections with white supremacists. However, federal sources have said that the incident may have had more to do with drugs than with a plot to assassinate Mr Obama, despite local police claims.

The federal officials said that the verbal threats against Mr Obama were made during one of the arrests, but were not considered credible. “It could turn out that these were nothing but a bunch of knuckleheads, meth heads,” a US government source has claimed.

The US Attorney’s Office in Denver has scheduled a press conference to discuss the incident, but Attorney Troy Eid said he did not believe there was a real threat to Mr Obama.

The alleged plot was being investigated by the Secret Service, which is co-ordinating security for the Democratic Party convention, as well as the FBI and the joint terrorism task force.

DEA agents found a hydroponics lab with more than 200 marijuana plants, standing 3 to 6 feet tall in the air and worth millions of dollars, in a storage area on the second floor of the mall.

Authorities said the electricity that powered the lab was diverted from the mall’s main power supply.

Is the agency, whose combined insurance funds were technically pushed into insolvency during the savings and loan debacle two decades ago, ready for another banking crisis? And how bad could it get?

Despite the frequent gloom on both Wall Street and Main Street, industry players seem confident in the overall resiliency of the banking industry and the FDIC’s ability to shelter customers from bank failures.

The FDIC, which had shrunk to 4,600 employees from 23,000 at the height of the savings and loan meltdown, has been gearing up for another wave of bank failures.

It’s hiring 70 new employees and bringing back 70 retirees to beef up its teams that swoop in, usually over a weekend, to take over and reopen banks under new management.

Russia sent peacekeepers to Moldova in the early 1990s to end a conflict between Chisinau and its breakaway Transdniestria region and is trying to mediate a deal between the two sides.

Transdniestria, one of a number of “frozen conflicts” on the territory of the former Soviet Union, mirrored the standoff between Georgia and its rebel regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia until they erupted in war earlier this month.

Russia sent troops to Georgia to crush Tbilisi’s military push into South Ossetia and Moscow says Georgia has now lost the chance of ever re-integrating the breakaway provinces.

“After the Georgian leadership lost their marbles, as they say, all the problems got worse and a military conflict erupted,” Medvedev told Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin.

“This is a serious warning, a warning to all,” he added. “And I believe we should handle other existing conflicts in this context.”

As the two leaders spoke in Medvedev’s Black Sea residence in Sochi, Russian lawmakers were voting non-binding resolutions urging the Kremlin to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.