Gold flows from Britain to Switzerland surge in H1-Macquarie

Britain's gold exports to Switzerland surged in the first half of this year, Australian bank Macquarie said on Monday, suggesting bullion being sold out of exchange-traded funds may be heading for Swiss refineries before being sold on in Asia.

The UK exported 240 tonnes of gold to Switzerland in May alone, while its exports over the first half of this year totalled 797 tonnes, Macquarie said in a note.

In contrast, Britain exported just 92 tonnes of bullion to Switzerland in the whole of last year, it said.

"The UK does not have gold mines, so where has it all come from? The obvious source is the gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), most of which hold their gold holdings in London vaults, and which saw huge outflows in 1H 2013," Macquarie said.

"And why is it going to Switzerland? Two explanations make sense. One would be that investors have decided to switch their gold investments from ETFs to allocated deposit accounts, which are often held in Switzerland." Read more >>

Eurozone Unemployment hits record high of 12.2%

Unemployment in the troubled eurozone region hit a record high of 12.2% last month.
The latest official data from Eurostat shows nearly 100,000 additional people were out looking for work in April compared with the previous month, when unemployment was pegged at 12.1%.

The usual suspects -- Spain and Greece -- are facing the highest levels of unemployment. The latest data show unemployment levels of roughly 27% in both countries, with youth unemployment well above 50%.

Meanwhile, Austria and Germany have the lowest jobless levels out of the 17 countries that use the euro currency. Austria's unemployment was just below 5% in April and Germany's unemployment was 5.4%.

In total, 19.4 million people in the eurozone were unemployed in April.
To put that in context, Australia's population was just over 22 million at last count, a stark reminder of just how many people are struggling in Europe.

High youth unemployment has been particularly worrisome for politicians and European officials. Eurostat data show eurozone unemployment among those under the age of 25 topped 24.4% in April. Read more >>

U.S. Mint Sales of Gold Coins Jump to Highest in Three Years

Sales of gold coins by the U.S. Mint rose to the highest since December 2009 after the price of the metal in April fell the most in 16 months.

Last month, sales totaled 209,500 ounces, up from 62,000 ounces in March, data on the mint’s website show. The amount for December 2009 was 231,500 ounces. Silver-coin sales rose to 4.2 million ounces from 3.36 million in March.

Demand surged at mints from Australia to the U.K. and the U.S. after futures slumped 13 percent in two days through April 15. Gold futures tumbled 7.8 percent last month and dropped into a bear market as some investors lost faith in the metal as a store of value.

Perth Mint, which refines almost all of the nation’s bullion, said that demand jumped to the highest in five years after prices plunged, with the factory kept open through the weekend to meet orders.

“People are flocking to buy physical gold,” Todd Dutkevitch, a senior account executive at Los Angeles-based American Bullion Inc., said in a phone interview. “The price drop has made it possible for many retail buyers to add gold.” Read more >>

GM Wheat May Damage Human Genetics Permanently

The Australian government, in the form of its science research arm, is joining Agribusiness profiteering by designing a GM wheat that could kill people who eat it & be inherited by their children.

Heidi Stevenson

We have not yet seen the worst damage that genetic engineering may do. Australia's governmental agency, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), is developing a wheat species that is engineered to turn off genes permanently.

Professor Jack Heinemann at the University of Canterbury's Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety  has studied the wheat's potential. Digital Journal reports that he says1:

What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat, intended to silence wheat genes, can match human genes, and through ingestion, these molecules can enter human beings and potentially silence our genes. The findings are absolutely assured. There is no doubt that these matches exist.

The implications are clarified by Professor Judy Carman of Flinders University:

If this silences the same gene in us that it silences in the wheat—well, children who are born with this enzyme not working tend to die by the age of about five.

Silencing the equivalent gene in humans that is silenced in this genetically modified wheat holds the potential of killing people. But it gets worse. Silenced genes are permanently silenced and can be passed down the generations.

Silenced Genes

The wheat genes involved are called SEI. The specific sequences of those genes are being termed classified confidential information. CSIRO, which is part of the Australian government, is developing a commercial application, but refuses to divulge the information that's most significant to the people of Australia! The government is apparently more interested in profits than in the people's safety.

Dr. Heinemann was asked to provide his opinion of CSIRO's genetic engineering on wheat plants and produced the report "Evaluation of risks from creation of novel RNA molecules in genetically engineered wheat plants and recommendations for risk assessment". He discusses the nature of the genetic entities that are being played with and explains how they can affect human health. Read more >>

Half of Great Barrier Reef Lost in Past 3 Decades

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is a glittering gem — the world's largest coral reef ecosystem — chock-full of diverse marine life. But new research shows it is also in steep decline, with half of the reef vanishing in the past 27 years.

Katharina Fabricius, a coral reef ecologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and study co-author, told LiveScience that she has been diving and working on the reef since 1988 — and has watched the decline. "I hear of the changes anecdotally, but this is the first long-term look at the overall status of the reef. There are still a lot of fish, and you can see giant clams, but not the same color and diversity as in the past."

To get their data, Fabricius and her colleagues surveyed 214 different reefs around the Great Barrier Reef, compiling information from 2,258 surveys to determine the rate of decline between 1985 and 2012. They estimated the coral cover, or the amount of the seafloor covered with living coral. Read more >>

World’s richest woman to jealous poor: "Drink less, work more"

The world’s richest woman, Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, urged those “jealous” of the wealthy to “spend less time drinking” in a piece the government described as “insulting” on Thursday. Rinehart, whose family iron ore prospecting fortune of Aus$29.2 billion (US$30.1 billion) also makes her Australia’s wealthiest person, hit out at those who she said were envious of the rich.

“There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire,” she wrote in an industry magazine column. “If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working.

“Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others.” Rinehart blamed what she described as “socialist”, anti-business policies for the plight of Australia’s poor, urging the government to lower the minimum wage, as well as taxes, unless it wanted to end up like Greece. Read more >>

Jim Rogers: The Agriculture Industry Is Doomed

Legendary investor Jim Rogers has long been a fan of agricultural assets and companies along with a number of other hard assets. His hard-nose investing theory has payed off quite handsomely, as his name has become renown around the world and investors hang on his every word. Unfortunately, his words as of late paint a relatively gloomy picture for the overall agriculture industry, as he feels that it will soon fall on hard times [for more agriculture news and analysis subscribe to our free newsletter].

The first thing that Rogers points out, and has been pointing out for quite some time, is that the world is short-handed when it comes to farmers. “The average age of farmers in America is 58 years old. In Japan, the average age is 66. In Australia, it’s 58. Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers commit suicide every year. It’s a disastrous business. In the U.K., the highest rate of suicide is in agriculture. It’s been a horrible business for 30 years. Prices have to go up – have go to up a lot – or we’re not going to have any food at any price” Rogers stated earlier in 2012. Read more >>

1000 American military bases on every continent except Antarctica

A few online outposts have started to comment on Americas enormous collection of international military bases. The United States maintains the largest collection of foreign military bases in world history. Officially, at the beginning of 2011, there were 1,429,367 American troops stationed in 150 countries worldwide. This number does not include contractors who outnumber troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or the operations of the CIA or other secretive units.

Anthropologist David Vine spent three years researching the changing structure of America’s military bases worldwide. His research found a network of more than 1000 American bases, located on every continent except Antarctica.

“While the collection of Cold War–era giant bases such as those in Germany are shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope” David Vine posted online at TomDispatch.com.

He describes “a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and pre-positioned weaponry and supplies… Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can.

Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more… not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces — essentially floating bases — and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion (A$241 billion) annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.” David Vine posted. Read more >>

Global food chain stretched to the limit

Image by magharebia via FlickrStrained by rising demand and battered by bad weather, the global food supply chain is stretched to the limit, sending prices soaring and sparking concerns about a repeat of food riots last seen three years ago.

Signs of the strain can be found from Australia to Argentina, Canada to Russia. On Friday, Tunisia's president fled the country after trying to quell deadly riots in the North African country by slashing prices on food staples.

The U.N.'s fear is that the latest run-up in food prices could spark a repeat of the deadly food riots that broke out in 2008 in Haiti, Kenya and Somalia. That price spike was relatively short-lived. But Abbassian said the latest surge in food stuffs may be more sustained. Read More...

Australia Inflation - Tomatoes soared 20%, bananas, grapes & sweet potatoes up 10%

Tomato prices soared 20 percent in the past week and bananas, grapes and sweet potatoes are up 10 percent, said Maurice Sorace, owner of Sylvania Best Fresh, who gets about a third of his fruit and vegetables from flood-ravaged Queensland state. “Prices will be higher in the next week” as the deluge drowns more crops and clogs roads, he said.

The crisis may force the RBA to accept higher inflation in coming months as the floods spur food and commodity costs and slow growth in a disaster zone the size of Egypt. A gauge of inflation in the bond market showed the expected rate surpassing the RBA’s target as the damage, along with future rebuilding in a country already near full employment, risked stoking prices. More...

20% British youth unemployed

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBritain is heading for another decade of youth unemployment with the related rate rising to over 20% to be unemployed, according to the ONS. Details given out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggested the number of young people who are long-term unemployed is likely to increase by 50% in 2011.

A prospectus issued by the Department for Work and Pensions predicted that between 140,000 and 200,000 young people aged from 18 to 24 will be registered as having been unemployed for at least nine months or more between 2011-12.

The statistics would simply mean that one out of five young people in Britain will have no job prospects next year. Figures also reveal that in some areas, every third young person will be without a job or the chance of a skill. More...

How we can take stolen profits back from banksters

Image via WikipediaAll of our money comes from debt to private banks -- banks that try to make it look like governments are at fault for their countries falling so heavily into debt. The truth is that banks take the profits that could have been used to better maintain the society if only the people's money was issued by governments through state-owned banks, as was the case, for a time, in both Australia and the US.

What private banks have set up is actually the world's largest pyramid scheme, in which new people must always be going into debt in order that others obtain the currency they need to function within the economy. Within such a system, total indebtedness must continue to increase in order to provide the money that people need in an ever more productive society. More...

SECRET Pentagon video to be released by fugitive founder of WikiLeaks

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

theage.com

A SECRET Pentagon video showing an air strike in Afghanistan that killed dozens of children is set to be released by the fugitive founder of WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange, the Australian-born man behind the secretive web group, has been in hiding since last week following claims US authorities were ''hunting him''.

US media reported that Pentagon investigators were trying to find him and discourage him from publishing confidential diplomatic cables allegedly leaked to him by a disillusioned intelligence analyst

While Mr Assange's location is unknown - he may still be in Australia - he has continued to send email and Twitter messages to supporters.

In an email sent on Tuesday, he suggested he would soon release a secret Pentagon video of a US air strike on Granai in western Afghanistan in May last year.

US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both apologised for the bombing, which left as many as 100 people, mostly children and teenagers, dead.

In Tuesday's email, Mr Assange confirmed the website was ''still working on'' the ''Garani [sic] massacre''. More...

Gold is breaking out in all currencies

Neil Charnock
We have been looking at global trends and the debt markets very carefully this year so as to remain prudent about our views on the direction of gold and the Australian gold sector. This may seem like a long bow to draw however the thigh bone is connected to the knee bone when it comes to global markets and capital flows.

We specialize on coverage of gold and the Aussie gold stocks that make up the Australian gold sector which is one of the important gold share markets due to our high level of gold production and another key reason I will get to shortly. Another important part of our work is on the currencies due to the importance of the AUD to our gold sector and also for our international clients. We have even taken on a leading Fx broker as an advertiser due to the importance of Fx for international capital flows at this point in history.

Our thesis for this year has been one that includes continued trends on global markets on the back of stimulus capital along with increasing sovereign debt trouble and contagion which will (and has) produce fear. We have seen this as a positive environment for gold along with extreme volatility and distortions in the currencies and see no reason to change that view at this stage.

Gold is breaking out in all currencies and I forecasted a rise to the US$1180 area a week or so back. It has not quite made that target and may not, perhaps it will overshoot. After hitting record highs in Euro terms the gold price consolidation of the past 4.5 months in USD terms appears to be drawing to an end with only a few weeks left before we see lift off. I am expecting one last dip in the USD POG (price of gold) which will be short lived and reasonably shallow. The US$1100 level is not out of the question on this hypothesised pull back. More...

Rupert Murdoch Declares War on Free Internet

Image via CrunchBase

Michael Wolff
It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the Daily News, the Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.

And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.

After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.

I should say I am not a neutral party here. Two years ago, I helped found Newser, a news aggregator that summarizes the stories of other news providers, which, along with the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Google News, has become a focus of the print world’s antipathy. (When I tried to explain Newser to Murdoch, he said, “So you steal from me.”)
Read More...

John Pilger's The two sides of Barrack Obama

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.

He regards eye-witness as the essence of good journalism. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, beginning with the Vietnam war in 1967. He is an impassioned critic of foreign military and economic adventures by Western governments.

"It is too easy," he says, "for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to 'our' interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present 'our' policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It's the journalist's job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society."

He believes a journalist also ought to be a guardian of the public memory and often quotes Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Noam Chomsky wrote: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration."

Harold Pinter wrote: "John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is."

For more biographical details, go to the introduction in Articles

CEO of Virtual EBank Embezzles 200 billion

A 27-year-old Australian tech worker and CEO of EBank, EVE Online's largest player-run financial institution which has thousands of depositors, embezzled about 200 billion of EVE Online's interstellar kredits, the game's virtual currency. EVE Online -- a massive multiplayer online roleplaying space game -- has more than 300,000 subscribers who pay $15 a month to play. The players earn money killing rivals (among other things) in a distant future where humans have colonized the stars in a game similar to World of Warcraft and Second Life. The CEO of EBank, who used the online name Ricdic, exchanged the embezzled virtual funds for $5,100 on the black market, according to Yahoo Tech's JaShong King.

"It was a very on the spot decision," said Ricdic, who's married and has two children. "I saw that as an avenue that could be taken, and I decided to skim off the top, you could say, to overcome real life (difficulties)."

"Basically this character was one of the people that had been running EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money," said Ned Coker, of the Icelandic company CCP, which developed the game.

People are doing anything they can think of to survive. In the U.S. the average workweek hit 33.0 hours, a record low since the data were first collected 45 years ago. "At no time in the 1990 or 2001 recessions did we ever come close to seeing such a detonating jobs figure," said David Rosenberg from Glukin Sheff. "We have lost a record nine million full-time jobs this cycle." Ambrose Evans-Pritchard claims Sheriffs in Michigan & Illinois are quietly refusing to toss families on to the streets.