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Global Financial Collapse & Future Civil Unrest

Global Financial Collapse & Future Civil Unrest…

The Telegraph
The United Nations nuclear watchdog has warned that a military strike on Iran to prevent it developing atomic weapons would turn the region into a “fireball”. Mohamed ElBaradei said unilateral military action, which has not been ruled out by Israel or the US, would push the Islamic republic into a “crash course” of developing nuclear weapons and threatened to resign if an attack took place.

“What I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger,” said Mr ElBaradei. “If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time … it would make me unable to continue my work.” “A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything,” the International Atomic Energy Agency director general said. “It would turn the region into a fireball.”

Sources at the Pentagon and other US government agencies have confirmed that Israel recently carried out a full rehearsal of an air assault on Iran’s nuclear sites. The exercise, was said to have involved as many as 100 warplanes and its target in the eastern Mediterranean was 900 miles from Israel, roughly the same distance as Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz. More

Sanjay Jha
Soaring food prices are going to stay for long time and UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation ( FAO) have warned that bad weather could increase the problem…as demand from developing countries and production costs rise, says the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO). It warned that the current spike in global food prices was higher than previous records, partly because bad weather had ruined crops.

Although high prices will ease off, other factors, such as rising biofuel demand, will keep future costs high. The FAO said speculators were also to blame for volatile commodity markets. The FAO’s annual Outlook report predicted beef and pork prices might be 20% higher by 2017, wheat could be up to 60% more expensive and the cost of vegetable oils might rise by 80%. More

JOHN HEILPRIN
Associated Press
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Myanmar to focus on saving lives, not on politics, after the military government on Wednesday shunned a U.S. proposal for naval ships to deliver aid to cyclone survivors. The U.N. says up to 2.5 million survivors of Cyclone Nargis face hunger, homelessness and potential outbreaks of deadly diseases.

“This is a critical moment for Myanmar,” Ban told reporters after arriving in Bangkok, Thailand. “The government itself acknowledges that there has never been a disaster on this scale in the history of their country … The issues of assistance and aid in Myanmar should not be politicized. Our focus now is on saving lives.” Read more

CNN/UN/AP
The U.N. says the world economy is “teetering on the brink” of a severe downturn and will grow by only 1.8 percent in 2008. That’s down from a global growth rate of 3.8 percent in 2007. The U.N.’s mid-year economic projections released Thursday blamed the downturn on further deterioration in the U.S. housing and financial sectors in the first quarter.

The U.N. said the U.S. problems are expected to continue to be “a major drag for the world economy” into 2009. It forecast global economic growth of 2.1 percent next year. But developing countries won’t suffer as badly. The U.N. said they should reach 5 percent growth this year, compared to a robust 7.3 percent in 2007.

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Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who was among the original experts to question Bush Administration claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, now says he believes an attack on Iran is a “virtual guarantee.” “We take a look at the military buildup, we take a look at the rhetoric, we take a look at the diplomatic posturing, and I would say that it’s a virtual guarantee that there will be a limited aerial strike against Iran in the not-so-near future—or not-so-distant future, that focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command.”
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