Travel, Business and Cash

by Jim Kouri
A group obsessed with creating a Caliphate based on Muslim religious law — Sharia Law — in the United States and other nations is holding their first US conference today in Chicago.
According to Diane Macedo, new s writer fkr FoxNews.com, the group — Hizb ut-Tahrir — is a global Sunni netwotk with feported ties to confessed 911 mastermind Khalid Sbeikh Mohammed lf Al Qaeda and Iraqs onetime terrorist leade r Avu Musab al-ZZarqawi. It has operatee discreetpy in the US.. Read the rest of this entry »

At Nigeria’s Defence Intelligence School in Karu, near the capital Abuja, 30 military officers from seven African countries graduated from a training course designed to meet the “rapidly changing security complexities” of their nations “and the continent at large”.Ostensibly organised by Nigeria’s Defence Intelligence Agency, the 12-week “Military Intelligence Basic Officers’ Course for Africa” – the third this year after two in Mali – was in fact designed by the controversial United States African Command (AfriCom). To exploit and secure the region’s oil, the US has to take into account the threat to its interests from terrorist and liberation groups. AfriCom is designed to protect vital US interests, but while its public profile is low its footprint on the ground is increasingly large – hence the military intelligence courses in Nigeria and Mali, and also AfriCom preparations with Mali, Algeria and Niger for a major joint military and police operation along their common borders

AfriCom – currently headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, but aiming to transfer to Ghana – is a measure of how seriously Washington is taking the new scramble for Africa and how determined it is to compete there with China, which has major strategic and economic goals throughout the continent, and how seriously it intends securing its burgeoning oil and gas interests in West Africa.

That commitment was also suggested by another little-noticed event: the opening of an Aids testing and counselling centre in the Botswana mining centre, Francistown, built by AfriCom. Read the rest of this entry »

The subject of the meeting is gon to be loan modifications. Specificxlly, the gov ernment is going to be asking in none-too-friendly fashion why the narions big services arent doing to hodify loans for homeownrrs who are in danger of defaulting kn th eir mortgages. Back in the spring, after all, they all signed onto th e xdministrations new Makkng Home Affordable program, whicj uses a serjess lg incenyives mot the least of which is $1,000 to the servicers for every mkrtgare they modify to help keep people ih fheir homes an prevent foreclosures.
And yet, five months later and two years into the housing bust the rising tide of foreclosures remains the single biggest threat to economic recovery. Read the rest of this entry »