Fintan Dunne:

by Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com - 26th Sept, 2013 @ 10:00pmET The political theater may take years, but mere months will see the US begin a phased removal of sanctions on Iran, according to signals from John Kerry and Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif . Amid an upbeat tone from the two parties, AP reports: Iran’s foreign minister is urging step-by-step compromises between his country and world powers to advance negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Mohammad Javad Zarif’s remarks on Iran’s state TV referred to “ phased actions ” after reviving stalled talks with a six-nation group.... [ source ] Meanwhile, in the US, John Kerry was also on TV, as AFP reported: Speaking to CBS News 60 Minutes, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that if Iran takes rapid measures to cooperate with international monitoring of its nuclear program, Washington could begin lifting sanctions within months . [ source ] A similar template of phased verifiable countermoves als

by Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com - 25th Sept, 2013 @ 7:00pmET Sometimes, it takes a Pirate to catch a Shark . The founder of Sweden's first Pirate Party,  Rick Falkvinge , has just shown how trading 'sharks' are nosing around the Bitcoin market, repeatedly manipulating it, and picking off unwitting victims. For example, he's found trading patterns where huge streams of bitcoin trading transactions for exactly one bitcoin, are spaced exactly five seconds apart. He's also shown streams of buy orders placed only 0.0001 bitcoin apart in price. There are coordinated transactions, where one of a team of price-manipulators is selling to another, to create the illusion of real market dynamics. It's covert. Even on Wall St. - it's highly illegal. And it's rampant in Bitcoin trading. Falkvinge had even found the same sucker-bait trading cycle repeating five times in sequence over recent weeks. The tactics drove the bitcoin price higher,

Taper Caper Shreds Fed's Cred   by  Fintan Dunne  - 18th Sept 2013 @ 9:30pmET   The US Federal Reserve badly damaged its credibility today.   Having signaled for months a tapering of it's $85 Billion QE program,  the failure to deliver means that all those Fed 'taper' noises were  either pure incompetence or deliberately malign misdirection.  Either way their cred is shred.   Huge global capital flows were triggered by the taper signals. And  those Big Money players expect the Fed's signals to be broadly reliable.  So much for reliability.  So why did the Fed disappoint?   On the face of it, if you strip away the fake 'recovery,' the US is  actually in recession. Thus the Fed is locked in to QEx, because  it can hardly tighten policy heading into recession.  That is the face of conventional media-created 'wisdom'.  In truth, the move has little to do with the economy - and lots to  do with the mortgage and bond markets.  The

There's a sniper on the loose from the scene of the D.C. navy Yard mass killings. A sniper not apprehended and now not even sought by authorities. A sniper whose killing success is itself evidence of his handiwork. Late Monday, D.C. police called off their earlier lookout for a black male suspect between the ages of 40 and 50 in a "drab," olive, military-style uniform; approximately 5-foot-10, 180 pounds, medium complexion with graying sideburns. That individual may have been the sniper - but could be a phantom decoy reported to create space for the real sniper's escape. Either way, the eyewitness accounts and the killed-to-injured ratio confirm his presence. The eyewitness accounts speak of two shooters: Witnesses described a gunman opening fire from a fourth-floor overlook, aiming down on people in the cafeteria on the main floor. Others said a gunman fired at them in a third-floor hallway. It was not clear whether the witnesses on different floors were

by Fintan Dunne - 9 Sept 2013 @ 2:00pmET Updated 3:00pmET Call it a tactical maneuver; call it pragmatic politics; call it what you will. But it seems that John Kerry, on behalf of the Obama administration, has blinked on Syria.  Earlier Monday, alongside the UK foreign secretary, William Hague,  Kerry made what are being presented as merely unscripted remarks : The US secretary of state has said that President Bashar al-Assad has one week to hand over his entire stock of chemical weapons to avoid a military attack. But Kerry added that he had no expectation that the Syrian leader would comply. The US state department explained that Kerry's point was: "that this brutal dictator [...] cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons, otherwise he would have done so long ago" Within hours of Kerry's comments, Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had  responded : "If the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in that count