December 4, 2013 – 11:18 AMT
Erhan Tuncel, who was previously acquitted of all charges related to the 2007 killing of Hrant Dink, the late editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, was brought to an Istanbul courthouse to testify, Radikal said.
At the court hearing, Tuncel denied any involvement in the murder, instead calling himself a witness in the case. “I informed authorities about the murder being orchestrated, yet no one acted to prevent the crime,” he said.
“The murder was perpetrated by an organization on a higher level than Ergenekon. The organization is sponsored by the state. The court conclusion suggesting “involvement of a criminal organization” in incomplete, the latter including not only Ogun Samast and Yasin Hayal,” the suspect said, noting that he was used as a shill in the case.
Libya assembly votes to follow Islamic Sharia law
December 4, 2013 – 17:31 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – Libya’s General National Council assembly (GNC) voted on Wednesday, December 4 to make Islamic Sharia law the base for all legislation and for all state institutions, a decision that may impact banking, criminal and financial law, according to Reuters.
“Islamic law is the source of legislation in Libya,” the GNC said in a statement after the vote. “All state institutions need to comply with this.”
The immediate scope of the decision was not clear, but a special committee would review all existing laws to guarantee they comply with Sharia.
Armenia and US launch talks to relax visa requirements
December 04, 2013 | 18:13
YEREVAN. – Armenia and the U.S. have launched talks on relaxation of visa requirements, Finance Minister Davit Sargsyan said on Wednesday.
“It is supposed that Armenian citizens applying to the embassy will be provided ten-year multiple entry visas without additional charges, while the Armenian side will lift visa regime for the American travelers,” he said.
The Minister noted that it is the start of very important negotiation process, since many Armenians live in U.S.
nytimes report: E.U. Fines 8 Banks a Combined 1.7 Billion Euros for Fixing Benchmark Rates
The European Union has fined eight banks a combined 1.7 billion euros in a historic accord over alleged collusion to fix two benchmark interest rates.
The settlement, worth about $2.3 billion and announced by European Union antitrust officials on Wednesday, relates to alleged actions by traders at some of the world’s largest banks, including Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank. The banks were accused of fixing rates for the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, as it relates to the Japanese yen and the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/business/international/european-union-fines-banks-for-fixing-benchmark-interest-rates.html?emc=edit_na_20131204
Will Erdogan visit genocide memorial in 2015?
By: Orhan Kemal Cengiz
“It is very likely for the prime minister to go to Armenia, lay a wreath at the so-called Armenian genocide memorial and apologize to Armenians.” This earth-shattering prediction is not based on information or reports. It’s the accusation of a Turkish nationalist against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has done so many things to upset us, this nationalist is saying, don’t be surprised if he apologizes to the Armenians.
True. Erdogan’s trip to Diyarbakir, his use of the word “Kurdistan” and admitting openly that his government is negotiating with Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, are all breaking important taboos for Turkey. Can Erdogan break a similar taboo on the issue of the Armenian genocide?
What the non-Muslims have suffered in Turkey has rarely been on the prime minister’s agenda. He hasn’t repeated his 2009 remarks that surprised everyone: “Those with different ethnic identities were expelled from our country. This, in fact, was the consequence of a fascist approach.” No doubt that remark was alluding to the 1915 tragedy and other unfortunate events in Turkey’s history.
Erdogan now frequently describes Turkey as a mosaic made up of diverse ethnic identities. We often hear him mention Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Circassians and the Laz, but when describing this mosaic Erdogan never mentions Turkey’s long-standing non-Muslims such as Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Syriacs.
In my various articles for Al-Monitor, I have written that the Armenian genocide is no longer a taboo subject in Turkey, that new books on the subject are coming out daily and that there is a free, tolerant media environment for the subject. Civil society now remembers the victims of the Armenian genocide in observances on April 24. As the 100-year anniversary of the genocide approaches, civil society is debating what to do in 2015 and is preparing action plans to explain the genocide.
All these observances and publications indicate that the approach of the Turkish government to the issue has somewhat changed. Otherwise, the police would not have protected activists on April 24 from protesting extremist, nationalist groups.
But the freedom the government allows to civil society and intellectuals to debate and observe the genocide doesn’t mean a change to Turkey’s official position on 1915. Reports leaked to the media about the preparations for 2015 by the government indicate that former official policies are going to prevail.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in a visit to Switzerland at the end of October, conveyed to Swiss authorities Turkey’s sensitivity about a statue Armenians want to erect in Geneva. From these “sensitivities,” we can conclude that there hasn’t been an iota of change in Turkey’s official position.
From the leaked reports, we also understand that Davutoglu asked Switzerland to mediate between Turkey and Armenia. According to Foreign Ministry sources, if Armenia promises to withdraw from five of seven Azeri plots it is holding in the Karabakh region, Turkey would be ready to open the Armenian border.
The recent dialogue between the foreign minister and members of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee suggests that there are actually preparations to open the border. When a member of parliament from Igdir at the Armenian border said he was aware of some work at the closed border crossing, Davutoglu said, “We have such work going on. If we can persuade Azerbaijan, we can make a surprise. We are working on the border crossing.”
Other aspects of Turkey’s preparations for 2015 can be detected from remarks by government spokesman Bulent Arinc: “2015 is the 100th year of both the Dardanelles and the claims of the Armenian genocide. We are working seriously. There is work on symposiums, conferences, panels, publications and documentaries. But we are also engaged in very special public diplomacy activities that could affect the entire world.”
We also know that leading members of the government and opposition have met in the parliament to discuss Turkey’s 2015 strategy. Sadly, all these strategies don’t appear to be anything else but mere repetition of Turkey’s routine approaches.
The Turkish Historical Society is also preparing for 2015. Mehmet Metin Hulagu, president of the society, said it is working on a complete works of Turkey-Armenian relations in preparation for 2015.
When we put all these preparations and views of government officials together, we can predict that Turkey’s defensive attitude based on denials is not going to change in 2015. Though the Foreign Ministry is striving to improve Turkey’s image related to the Armenian issue with gestures such as opening the border, it also seems determined to combat the Armenians’ campaign for 2015.
In short, if Erdogan doesn’t turn the world upside down with a last-minute surprise, we are likely to see in 2015 a more refined and sophisticated version of Turkey’s denial policy of the past century.
Orhan Kemal Cengiz is a human rights lawyer, columnist and former president of the Human Rights Agenda Association, a Turkish NGO that works on human rights issues ranging from the prevention of torture to the rights of the mentally disabled. Since 2002, Cengiz has been the lawyer for the Alliance of Turkish Protestant Churches.
Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs (Video)
Editor tells parliamentary committee that stories revealing mass surveillance by UK and US have prompted global debate
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 December 2013 17.34 GMT
The Guardian has come under concerted pressure and intimidation designed to stop it from publishing stories of huge public interest that have revealed the “staggering” scale of Britain’s and America’s secret surveillance programmes, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper has said.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee about stories based on the National Security Agency leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger said the Guardian “would not be put off by intimidation, but nor are we going to behave recklessly”.
He told MPs that disclosures from the files had generated a global debate about the powers of state agencies, and the weaknesses of the laws and oversight regimes they worked within.
“In terms of the broader debate, I can’t think of a story in recent times that has ricocheted around the world like this has and which has been more broadly debated in parliaments, in courts and amongst NGOs,” he said.
“The roll call of people who have said there needs to be a debate about this includes three presidents of the United States, two vice-presidents, generals, the security chiefs in the US [who] are all saying this is a debate that in retrospect we had to have.”
During an hour-long session in front of the home affairs select committee, Rusbridger also:
• Said the Guardian had consulted government officials and intelligence agencies – including the FBI, GCHQ, the White House and the Cabinet Office – on more than 100 occasions before the publication of stories.
Read More: Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs
Syria: Government Forces Seize Israeli-made Arms
The Syrian army says it has confiscated Israeli-made weapons in its latest operations against foreign-backed militants.
A military source told the Syrian news agency SANA on Sunday that Israeli weaponry — including missiles — were seized in an operation in the central city of Tadmur in Homs province.
A headquarters of militants was also destroyed in the suburbs of the capital Damascus.
Elsewhere, government forces killed several Saudi militants in the strategic region of Qalamun.
In recent days, the army has gained the upper hand in the weeks-long battle in the area, which had been used as a base for militant operations around Damascus.
On Saturday, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad said Israel and Saudi Arabia had set up a new joint command in Jordan to oversee the operations of militants.
A recent British defense study showed that about 100,000 militants, fragmented into 1,000 groups, are fighting in Syria against the government and people.
Source: Global Research
Van PEOPLE STILL COLD AND MONASTERY Varagavank
BY: ZEYNEP TOZDUMAN (Translated from Turkish and is not perfect)
The Money Changers Serenade: A New Plot Hatches
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protégé of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus and is on his way to his fortune.
A Warburg in-law financed Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign. Part of the reward was Wilson’s appointment of Paul Warburg to the first Federal Reserve Board. The symbiotic relationship between presidents and bankers has continued ever since. The same small clique continues to wield financial power.
Geithner’s career is illustrative. In the 1980s, Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates. In the mid to late 1990s, Geithner served as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary. Under Rubin and Summers he moved up to undersecretary of the Treasury.
From the Treasury he went to the Council on Foreign Relations and from there to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). From there he was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked to make banks more profitable by allowing higher ratios of debt to capital, thus contributing to the financial crisis.
Geithner arranged the sale of the failed Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns, helped with the taxpayer bailout of AIG, and rejected saving Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in order to create the crisis atmosphere needed to more fully subordinate US economic policy to the needs of the few large banks.
Rubin, a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, was rewarded by Citibank for his service to the banks while Treasury Secretary with a $50 million compensation package in 2008 and $126,000,000 between 1999 and 2009.
When a person becomes a Treasury official it is made clear that the choice is between serving the banks and becoming rich or trying to serve the public and becoming poor. Few make the latter choice.
As Michael Hudson has informed us, the goal of the financial sector has always been to convert all income, from corporate profits to government tax revenues, to the service of debt. From the bankers standpoint, the more debt the richer the bankers. Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Geithner, and now banker Treasury Secretary Jack Lew faithfully serve this goal.
The Federal Reserve describes its policy of Quantitative Easing — the creation of new money with which the Fed purchases Treasury debt and mortgage backed securities — as a low interest rate policy in order to stimulate employment and economic growth. Economists and the financial media have parroted this cover story.
In contrast, I have exposed QE as a scheme for pumping profits into the banks and boosting their balance sheets. The real purpose of QE is to drive up the prices of the debt-related derivatives on the banks’ books, thus keeping the banks with solvent balance sheets.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” November 11, 2013), Andrew Huszar confirms my explanation to be the correct one. Huszar is the Federal Reserve official who implemented the policy of QE. He resigned when he realized that the real purposes of QE was to drive up the prices of the banks’ holdings of debt instruments, to provide the banks with trillions of dollars at zero cost with which to lend and speculate, and to provide the banks with “fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.” (See: www.paulcraigroberts.org )
This vast con game remains unrecognized by Congress and the public. At the IMF Research Conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers presented a plan to expand the con game.
Summers says that it is not enough merely to give the banks interest free money. More should be done for the banks. Instead of being paid interest on their bank deposits, people should be penalized for keeping their money in banks instead of spending it.
To sell this new rip-off scheme, Summers has conjured up an explanation based on the crude and discredited Keynesianism of the 1940s that explained the Great Depression as a problem caused by too much savings. Instead of spending their money, people hoarded it, thus causing aggregate demand and employment to fall.
Summers says that today the problem of too much saving has reappeared. The centerpiece of his argument is “the natural interest rate,” defined as the interest rate at which full employment is established by the equality of saving with investment. If people save more than investors invest, the saved money will not find its way back into the economy, and output and employment will fall.
Summers notes that despite a zero real rate of interest, there is still substantial unemployment. In other words, not even a zero rate of interest can reduce saving to the level of investment, thus frustrating a full employment recovery. Summers concludes that the natural rate of interest has become negative and is stuck below zero.
How to fix this? The way to fix it, Summers says, is to charge people for saving money. To avoid the charges, people would spend the money, thus reducing savings to the level of investment and restoring full employment.
Summers acknowledges that the problem with his solution is that people would take their money out of banks and hoard it in cash holdings. In other words, the cash form of money provides consumers with a freedom to save that holds down consumption and prevents full employment.
Summers has a fix for this: eliminate the freedom by imposing a cashless society where the only money is electronic. As electronic money cannot be hoarded except in bank deposits, penalties can be imposed that force unproductive savings into consumption.
Summers’ scheme, of course, is a harebrained one. With governments running huge deficits, who would purchase bonds at negative interest rates? How would pension and retirement funds operate? Would they also be subject to an annual percentage confiscation?
We know that the response of consumers to the long term decline in real median family income, to the loss of jobs from labor arbitrage across national borders (jobs offshoring), to rising homelessness, to cuts in the social safety net, to the transformation of their full time jobs to part time jobs (employers’ response to Obamacare), has been to reduce their savings rate. Indeed, few have any savings at all. The US personal saving rate is currently 2 percentage points, about 30%, below the long term average. Retired people, unable to earn any interest on their savings from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, are being forced to draw down their savings in order to pay their bills.
Moreover, it is unclear whether the savings rate is an accurate measure or merely a residual of other calculations. With so many people having to draw down their savings, I wouldn’t be surprised if an accurate measure showed the personal savings rate to be negative.
But for Summers the plight of the consumer is not the problem. The problem is the profits of the banks. Summers has the solution, and the establishment, including Paul Krugman, is applauding it. Once the economy officially turns down again, watch out.
Paul Craig Roberts, is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has been reporting on executive branch and cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. He has written or co-written eight books, contributed chapters to numerous books, and has published many articles in journals of scholarship. Mr. Roberts has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy, and has been a critic of both Democratic and Republican administrations. You can visit his website here.
© PaulCraigRoberts.org
PressTV Report: Australia arrests ‘ringleader’ over Syria
Police said on Tuesday that some 100 Australian residents and citizens have been sent into Syria, some of whom fight along with the militants against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Peter Drennan said the ringleader was the first suspect arrested following a four-month investigation into Australian citizens trying to enter Syria.
A recruit has also been arrested in connection with the issue, the police official added. “We will allege that one of the men is responsible for organizing travel, arranging overseas contacts and facilitating travel into Syria for Australian citizens to fight on the front line,” Drennan stated.
The 39-year-old ringleader and the recruit, 23, will appear in a Sydney court later in the day. They are charged under the Crimes Act, which stipulates that Australian residents or citizens are banned from traveling to other countries to fight or recruit others to fight. The law carries a maximum 10-year jail sentence.
New South Wales State Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn said that six Australians had already entered Syria to fight in the conflict.
“We have identified who we believe is the principle person involved in the facilitation network of sending people over to Syria to engage in conflict,” she said.
The Syrian army has several times identified foreign nationals among the militants.