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Mysterious Cocaine Bonanza Draws ‘Treasure Hunters’ And Cops To French Beaches

Mysterious Cocaine Bonanza Draws ‘Treasure Hunters’ And Cops To French Beaches

Kanye West’s Sunday Service at Joel Osteen’s Church Requires Tickets

Kanye West’s Sunday Service at Joel Osteen’s Church Requires Tickets

George Lopez Says Let Impeachment Hearings Play Out, Then Unite

George Lopez Says Let Impeachment Hearings Play Out, Then Unite

Disney Actor Chris Tavarez Busted for Domestic Violence

Disney Actor Chris Tavarez Busted for Domestic Violence

Joe Johnson Teases NBA Return, ‘It’s Possible, We’ll See’

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The Inevitable Finale Of The Nord Stream 2 Saga

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Guess Who This Happy Baby Turned Into!

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Emmy-winning former medical correspondent allegedly asked girl, 9, for sexual photos

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Christmas tree used to fill pothole in Atlanta neighborhood: ‘Why not have fun with it?’

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Imax China Hires Edwin Tan as CEO

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Former Michigan lawmaker captures photo of ‘one-in-a-million’ 3-antler deer

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How Surveillance And Propaganda Work In “The Free World”

How Surveillance And Propaganda Work In “The Free World”

Man convicted of fatally shooting store clerk in plot to steal beer put to death in Georgia

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Dolly Parton’s faith-based CMAs performance praised by fans: ‘Everyone should be made to listen to this’

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Kelsey Grammer slams ex-wife Camille as ‘pathetic,’ claims she asked for divorce day of his mom’s funeral

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Alicia Keys Will Return as 2020 Grammy Awards Host

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Along the shores of southwestern France, not far from the resort town of Biarritz where leaders of the world’s most powerful economies congregated for a meeting…

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Mysterious Cocaine Bonanza Draws 'Treasure Hunters' And Cops To French Beaches

14 November 2019

Mysterious Cocaine Bonanza Draws 'Treasure Hunters' And Cops To French Beaches

Along the shores of southwestern France, not far from the resort town of Biarritz where leaders of the world's most powerful economies congregated for a meeting of the G-7 a few months back, police are struggling with a unique problem that is frustrating local and federal authorities: Kilos of extremely pure cocaine keep washing up on local beaches.

Al Jazeera and French newswire AFP report that police are having difficulty warding off adventurous 'beach combers', some of whom reportedly traveled for miles to try and snatch a kilo or two of raw blow right off the beach. Police have seized 900 kg of cocaine so far this year, but they believe there's plenty more that they missed, much of which may have fallen into the hands of criminals.

On Monday, police caught a 17-year-old carrying five kilos of washed-up cocaine a Lacanau, a surfing beach near the city of Bordeaux that police had ordered closed because of the cocaine.

The fact that freelancers - whom police have called cocaine treasure hunters - are trying to snatch the cocaine across the police barricade is hardly surprising: Officials claim that the kilos are 83% pure, meaning a single gram could sell for $70 or more.

Police have closed half a dozen other beaches in the area, and have been stopping people found wandering in the closed area or nearby. Federal agencies have also set up "intense" surveillance including patrols by police helicopters from Nantes all the way to the resort town of Biarritz.

French investigators are working with European counterparts, as well as the DEA, to try and figure out the source of the drugs. They noted that similarly packaged kilos of cocaine - bearing the stamps like "Diamante" or "Brillante" just like some of the kilos that have washed up in France - have also appeared on beaches in Florida, though in a much lower volume.

The leading theory is that the cargo was abandoned during a storm.

"There are several hypotheses, but for the moment we think it's likely they were jettisoned because of a mechanical problem or during a storm," one official said.

Police seized a record 140 tonnes of coke across Europe in 2017. According to preliminary data from the last two years, that number is likely to rise.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/14/2019 - 04:15

The Inevitable Finale Of The Nord Stream 2 Saga

14 November 2019

The Inevitable Finale Of The Nord Stream 2 Saga

Authored by Venand Meliksetian via OilPrice.com,

Europe is quickly becoming one of the most important export destinations for gas exporters. Production is decreasing quickly due to political and technical developments. The next few decades are promising for exporters. Nord Stream 2 is arguably one of the most contentious projects currently under development. Denmark recently granted the last necessary permit to start construction activities in its EEZ and analysts now agree that the project’s completion is only a matter of time. In reality, the pipeline’s future was decided long before construction even started due to external factors such as Poland’s decision to diversify away from Russian gas and Western Europe’s determination to turn away from nuclear and fossil fuel production.

Safe but expensive, risky but cheap

The availability and transportation of natural gas are determined by the relative distance between consumers and the production area. A general rule of thumb is that for a distance smaller than 4,000 km or 2,500 miles pipelines are more economic while LNG is more economic for distances larger than that. Political factors, however, trump financial and technical logic. The safety of supply is valued more by countries such as Poland who opt for more expensive alternatives such as the Baltic pipeline.

Historically, the European energy market is dominated by Russia due to its proximity and massive energy reserves. Siberian gas is the most obvious choice from an economic point of view. Politics, however, are what currently dominates the natural gas industry. With that in mind, the persistent support for Nord Stream 2, NS2, by Western European countries and companies, most notably Germany, may appear strange. But a more in-depth look at energy politics in the region and domestic developments, in general, provide somewhat of an answer.

European production is decreasing dramatically, primarily due to the depletion of old gas fields. Also, political motives hamper production such as in the Netherlands where tremors, allegedly due to gas extraction, have reduced political support for the industry. Europe’s biggest single gas deposit, the Groningen field in the Netherlands, will cease operations in 2022. The closure of this gas giant was another reason to support the construction of NS2.

Poland’s push for diversification

Poland is one of the staunchest opponents of NS2. The Eastern European country argues that Moscow is trying to divide Europe by circumventing traditional transit countries in the east and increasing dependency of the wealthier west, primarily Germany. Warsaw though has financial motives to oppose the project because Gazprom is aiming to export its gas directly to Germany instead of through what it considers more “unreliable” countries such as Ukraine and Poland. This measure will cost Eastern Europe billions in lost transit fees every year.

Poland is diversifying suppliers by constructing a subsea pipeline from Norway through the Baltic sea. Denmark recently granted a permit to construct the infrastructure in its EEZ. The pipeline is planned to come online before 2022 when Poland’s import contract with Gazprom ends.

The import of Norwegian gas will have unintended consequences for other countries’ energy security. The Baltic pipeline is designed to export 10 bcm of natural gas annually. Norway produced 121.7 bcm in 2018, down from 124.2 bcm in 2017. Although production is expected to increase slightly, the pipeline will reduce the availability of natural gas to traditional customers in Western Europe.

Especially Germany, which intends to shut down its nuclear and coal power plants by 2022 and 2038 respectively, requires a steady supply of cheap natural gas to fill the gap and supplement intermittent renewables. Although there is sufficient LNG import capacity available across Europe, cheap piped gas remains the most sensible economic choice for businesses.

Not so gloomy after all

The discussion concerning NS2 is unavoidably connected to Ukraine because the pipeline's necessity was born due to Moscow and Kyiv's conflict over pricing and supply. Ukraine earns approximately €3 billion each year from the transit of Russian gas. Also, Kyiv argues that its bargaining position with Gazprom for the extension of long-term gas contracts will be weakened if it loses its strategic transit function.

Despite Moscow’s policy to circumvent Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, the country will retain its importance for European energy security. Kyiv will remain important after NS2 begins transporting crude however, with the country having the same export capacity as NS2 and Turstream combined. The country exported 86.8 bcm of gas in 2017 while NS2 and Turkstream have capacities of 55 bcm and 31.5 bcm of respectively.

Almost 150 bcm of natural gas is required to fill Europe’s demand gap until 2025 (see figure 1) and Russia is the only producer with the necessary capacity to become a swing producer. Ukraine’s infrastructure remains vital for Moscow’s strategy to increase exports to the continent and strengthen its position as a strategic and vital energy supplier. The construction of NS2 may have been a blow for Kyiv, but the European market is poised to change significantly over the next couple of years and Ukraine still holds plenty of power in this game.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/14/2019 - 03:30 Tags Business Finance Environment

Global Supply Chains Imploding As Quarter Of German Firms Plan To Leave China

14 November 2019

Global Supply Chains Imploding As Quarter Of German Firms Plan To Leave China

The Bussiness Confidence Survey 2019/20 published by the German Chamber of Commerce in China, in cooperation with KPMG in Germany, finds that almost a quarter of German companies operating in China are preparing to relocate production facilities.

The survey was conducted from late July through mid-September and had 526 member companies out of 2300 respond. Out of the 526 member companies, 23% of the respondents said their factories will be transferred out of China or are contemplating the move.

Among the German companies leaving or actively planning to leave China, about 71% blame increasing labor costs; 33% cited unfavorable policy environment; 25% said the US-China trade war, and 22% said market access barriers.

Of the respondents who've resorted to relocation, 52% have chosen Southeast Asia, 25% India, 19% Central/Eastern Europe, and 17% Western Europe. Only 5% of respondents said they were going to move operations to the US, contrary to President Trump's claim that companies exiting China will be rushing to the US.

Respondents said the US-China trade war had created a toxic and "gloomy" business outlook that has contributed to the global synchronized slowdown.

About 83% of German companies said the trade war has directly or indirectly affected their operations. "Business expectations have dropped to their lowest level in years with only 27% of surveyed German companies expecting to reach or exceed their business targets in 2019," the survey warned.

Jens Hildebrandt, Executive Director of the German Chamber of Commerce in China, said: "2020 is likely to be characterized by uncertainty, stemming from an unresolved US-China trade dispute related with a decelerating Chinese and global economy."

German firms also said market access barriers and regulatory hurdles stunted their growth in China, with 66% of firms saying they've encountered either direct or indirect market access restrictions.

The key finding in the report is that the business environment in China remains downbeat into 2020. The disruption of complex supply chains in China means the global economy will likely not bottom in early 2020 as equity markets have already priced in.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/14/2019 - 02:45 Tags Business Finance

How Surveillance And Propaganda Work In "The Free World"

14 November 2019

How Surveillance And Propaganda Work In "The Free World"

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A Bloomberg report of October 22 was concise and uncompromising in declaring Russia to be a surveillance state. Harking back to the good old days of the Cold War, as is increasingly the practice in much of the Western media, Bloomberg recounted that “The fourth of 10 basic rules Western spies followed when trying to infiltrate Russia’s capital during the Cold War — don’t look back because you’re never alone — is more apt than ever. Only these days it’s not just foreigners who are being tracked, but all 12.6 million Muscovites, too. Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel.”

Terrifying, one might think. Straight out of Orwell’s 1984, that dystopian prediction of what the world could become, as noted in one description of how the face of the state’s symbolic leader, Big Brother, “gazes at you silently out of posters and billboards. His imposing presence establishes the sense of an all-seeing eye. The idea that he is always watching from the shadows imposes a kind of social order. You know not to speak out against The Party — because big brother is watching… The face always appears with the phrase Big Brother is watching you. As if you could forget.” Such is the terrifying Bloomberg picture of Moscow where there are supposedly 200,000 video cameras. You can’t blow your nose without it being seen. And wait for the next phase, in which Big Brother will hear you laugh.

In line with the Western approach, there is little mention of surveillance in other cities, but the website ‘Caught on Camera’ has analysed world-wide practices.

It reports that there are some 25 million closed-circuit surveillance cameras world-wide and “the United Kingdom [with 4 million cameras] has more CCTV activity than any other European country, per capita... surprisingly, the Wandsworth borough in London in particular has more CCTV cameras than Boston, Dublin, Johannesburg and San Francisco put together. It is estimated there are 500,000 cameras dotted around London. The average person living in London will be recorded on camera 300 times in one day.”

The statistics obtained by Caught on Camera and comparitech differ markedly from those in the Bloomberg story which was retailed throughout the Western world by many news outlets, who increasingly refer to the West as “the Free World”. Comparitech records that as at August 2019 Moscow, with a population of 12.4 million, had 146,000 (not 200,000) cameras, while London’s 9 million citizens were being watched by 627,707 cameras. The picture (if one may use that word) is slightly slanted. To put it another way, London has 68 cameras for each 1,000 people, and the ratios elsewhere are enlightening: Shanghai 113 (China is in treble figures in three cities); Atlanta (Ga) 15; Chicago 13; Baghdad, Sydney and Dubai 12; Moscow and Berlin 11; and St Petersburg, Canberra and Washington DC tie at 5.

The slanting doesn’t stop there, because there are other ways of attacking Russia, spearheaded by such as the Washington Post, which highlighted the Bloomberg surveillance tale. The Post behaves like Big Brother focusing on Winston Smith, the hapless victim/hero of 1984 whose job it is “to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality.” There is an eerie resonance in this, because the Post’s reportage on Russia verges on the obsessively censorious, while it avoids mention of anything remotely positive.

Understandably, the Post relies heavily on such sources as “Meduza, a Latvia-based online news outlet that covers the Kremlin” which reported that the Russian government “passed a law earlier this year that lets Vladimir Putin take all the country’s Internet traffic off the World Wide Web if he decrees that there’s an ‘emergency’.”

The fact that the intelligence services of the West have worked for a long time to devise strategies and tactics to destroy internet services in Russia and many other countries is neither here nor there, but it is important for Western propaganda purposes to condemn Russia for taking measures to counter the manoeuvres of the West’s cyberwar agencies.

The Post emphasised that arrangements were made by various Russian ministries and agencies, including the Emergencies Ministry and the Federal Security Service which “is the successor to the KGB, where Putin was once an officer.”

The absurdity of that needlessly-injected personal point is amusing in a way, and serves to highlight the unending reiteration of detail intended to set the western public against Russia. Naturally, there is exclusion of information that could lead to audiences approving of Russia in any way.

The news site Axios states it aims to “deliver the cleanest, smartest, most efficient and trust-worthy experience for readers and advertisers alike” but when it comes to Russia it appears that there could be a bit of selectivity in that delivery. For example, in October the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported approvingly that according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), alcohol consumption in Russia “has dropped by 43% since 2003” and commented that the WHO had “put the decrease down to a series of measures brought in under the sport-loving president, Vladimir Putin, including restrictions on alcohol sales and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.” But Axios didn’t report it quite like that.

The Guardian also noted that “The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, led an anti-alcohol campaign with partial prohibition, which brought down consumption from the mid-1980s until 1990. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, alcohol consumption exploded, continuing to rise until the start of the 2000s. Under Putin, Russia has introduced measures including a ban on shops selling any alcohol after 11 pm, increases in the minimum retail price of spirits and an advertising blackout.” The result has been “increased life expectancies in Russia, which reached a historic peak in 2018, at 78 years for women and 68 years for men. In the early 1990s, male life expectancy was just 57 years.”

This is an amazing societal development. In no other country has there been a comparable initiative that resulted in such a massive and positive shift in community habits.

The BBC was more coy than the Guardian about allocating approval for the remarkable success of the programme, and confined itself to reporting that the WHO “attributed the decline to a series of alcohol-control measures implemented by the state, and a push towards healthy lifestyles.” There was no reference to President Putin, and indeed the credit went elsewhere, because “alcohol-control measures introduced under former President Dmitry Medvedev included advertising restrictions, increased taxes on alcohol and a ban on alcohol sales between certain hours.”

Axios followed suit, and ‘Radio Free Europe’ didn’t mention Presidents Putin, Medvedev or Gorbachev, retailing simply that the “decline in consumption was due to “alcohol-control measures introduced at the beginning of the 2000s.” There were no reports of the achievement in US mainstream outlets or the UK’s resolutely right-wing anti-Russia media. (The Guardian doesn’t carry a Russian flag; it merely reports without xenophobic bias.)

The WHO Case Study provides an admirably detailed timeline of legislature and other developments concerning Russia’s successful drive against alcohol abuse, recording, for example, that in 2018 there was a “presidential decree on ‘National Purposes and Strategic Development Challenges of the Russian Federation until 2024’… including in the field of public health. The aim is to increase life expectancy to 78 years by 2024 and to 80 years by 2030, as well as the proportion of citizens leading a healthy lifestyle and systematically engaging in physical activities and sports.”

Don’t expect such an initiative to be praised or even mentioned by the Western media. Big Brother prefers to slant the cameras.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/14/2019 - 02:00

The Blob: Still Chasing After Pax Americana

14 November 2019

The Blob: Still Chasing After Pax Americana

Authored by Andrew Bacevich via TheAmericanConservative.com,

After all the failure, they still look at our wars in the Middle East as some kind of golden age...

I wish to call attention to an instructive essay about U.S. policy in the Middle East—instructive in the sense that it reveals the utterly impoverished nature of establishment thinking on this subject.

The title of the essay is “The US Has One Last Chance to Halt Its Withdrawal from the Middle East.” The author is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, who shall remain nameless since I bear him no ill will. Let us refer to him simply as X, in honor of George Kennan, author of a famous 1947 essay offering counsel on how to deal with the Soviet Union. Kennan published that essay under the pseudonym X. And so shall I refer to the author of “One Last Chance.”

Kennan’s purpose was to sound the alarm regarding the Soviet threat and to propose what came to be called the strategy of Containment. The purpose of our present-day Mr. X is to sound the alarm about the United States lowering its profile in the Middle East.

To avert that prospect, he proposes what can only be termed a strategy of staying-the-course-while-ignoring-the-facts.

X concedes that throughout the region, things have not gone especially well for the United States over the last couple of decades. He rightly notes that Americans are “still reeling from costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continuing chaos in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.” He ever so briefly acknowledges that this is “a region where even pro-American governments are often undemocratic and can be disdainful of fundamental human rights” and “where billions of dollars are spent that would be better used at home.”

Of course, to say that the U.S. has expended billions in the Middle East is the equivalent of saying that my wife and I paid thousands for the home we purchased last year. While nominally correct, the statement is wildly misleading. X has an aversion to actual numbers. He prefers tidy generalizations to specifics.

Yet the essence of X’s argument boils down to this: setting aside these recent errors of judgment by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, U.S. policy in the region has actually been a smashing success. From the end of World War II until ever-so-recently, Washington pursued a course in the Middle East that was reasoned, careful, and eminently wise. “This bipartisan tradition of American leadership worked,” X asserts. While it might have been “imperfect, time-consuming and often unsatisfying,” the nation’s “vital interests in the region remained protected. The U.S. presence was sized to align with those interests, and we were not overextended.” X approvingly calls this a Pax Americana in the Middle East.

When one encounters a claim of an American-constructed Pax, the first rule is to look for what the writer leaves out. In this case, among the incidents and developments that our X totally ignores are these: treating Saudi Arabia as a de facto protectorate; CIA involvement in the 1953 overthrow of the Mossadegh regime; the pro-Israel tilt in U.S. policy dating from the 1960s, to include turning a blind eye to Israel acquiring a nuclear arsenal; the Iranian Revolution; various Arab-Israeli wars; oil “shocks” during the 1970s; the Beirut debacle of 1983; the U.S. role in destabilizing (and then abandoning) Afghanistan; Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War; the rise of al-Qaeda; and the events of 9/11.

Admit these into the conversation and the question you confront is this one: what Pax? In truth, Pax Americana no more describes the postwar Middle East than the phrase “Long Peace” describes the Cold War. The purpose of such formulations is to preclude actual thinking, attaching labels to preempt analysis.

“It took many decades to build a Pax Americana in the Middle East,” X writes.

Not true: it took only a handful of hours—the time he invested in writing his essay. The Pax Americana is a figment of X’s imagination.

Yet once having conjured up his fictive Pax, X easily convinces himself that it can exist again, if only the next president—he writes off Trump as a total loss—will act to “reestablish American leadership in the Middle East, restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies.” But what does “leadership” actually mean in this context? What will it entail? What will it cost? Once again, when it comes to specifics, X is essentially silent, offering only this:

“The next commander in chief will require political fortitude to lead the United States back to its traditional role in the region, demonstrating what in previous generations was deemed a profile in courage.”

That and four bucks will get you a latte.

All of that said, I submit that X has written something worthy of reflection. Here on full display is a model of establishment thinking—heavy on clichés, light on substance, and short of memory.

Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament.

Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a “war on terrorism” meant to settle matters once and for all.

To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X’s illusory Pax is essentially zero.

There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/14/2019 - 00:10 Tags Politics

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Many of the links and stories on this site contain copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making this material available in an effort to advance the understanding of environmental issues, human rights, economic and political democracy, and issues of social justice. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of the copyrighted material. Copyright Law which contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. If you wish to use such copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’…you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. (17 US/Code 10)

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