by Jack Lee
NEW YORK – Oil prices rose to above $64 a barrel Monday as strong second-quarter company earnings boosted investor optimism and pushed stocks in Asia and Europe higher. A weaker U.S. dollar also supported crude markets. (Hold on to your pocket books, puymp prices on the rise again. Did you know there is a way to lock in your pump price for future purchases? Check this out…http://www.fuelbank.com/)
WORLD NEWS – (Aging population spells big trouble for Social Security in the US and general socialistic programs elsewhere.)
The world is about to cross a demographic landmark of huge social and economic importance, with the proportion of the global population 65 and over set to outnumber children under five for the first time.
A new report by the US census bureau highlights a huge shift towards not just an ageing but an old population, with formidable consequences for rich and poor nations alike. The transformation carries with it challenges for families and policymakers, ranging from how to care for older people living alone to how to pay for unprecedented numbers of pensioners – more than 1 billion of them by 2040.
The report, An Aging World: 2008, shows that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65s is expected to almost double, from 506 million in 2008 to 1.3 billion – a leap from 7% of the world’s population to 14%. Already, the number of people in the world 65 and over is increasing at an average of 870,000 each month. (I can’t ad much to this, we’ve got more takers than givers and this means all those European safety nets will be going broke in the next 10-15 years, some even sooner. It is simply unstainable and they are already being taxed to death, so not much room to increase taxes in Europe…USA is about to learn a big lesson when it comes to freebees and mandates)
AFGHANISTAN – The Defense Department identified the U.S. soldier missing since June 30 in Afghanistan as an Army private from Ketchum, Idaho, and said he has been captured.
The soldier is Bowe Bergdahl, 23, a private first class with the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team stationed in Fort Richardson, Alaska, the military said in a statement. The team is a unit of the 25th Infantry Division, stationed in Hawaii.
Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Marsano of the Idaho National Guard, who is acting as a spokesman for Bergdahl’s family, said the government released the statement changing the soldier’s status to captured because of yesterday’s release of a video by the Taliban.
Captain Jon Stock, a U.S. military spokesman, called the use of the video as propaganda “against international law,” Reuters reported. Some of the video is available on Google Inc.’s YouTube Web site. (What the Army and the media are slow to let everyone know is, this guy walked off the base in uniform, unarmed and into enemy territory thus deliberately giving the enemy an opportunity to exploit his capture and undermine the efforts of his country and his fellow soldiers. He is now making anti-war propaganda films for them. The best thing that we could do now is dennounce him as a traitor, this devalues his worth as a POW for the Taliban. On the flip side the most stupid and least productive thing we could do now is to assign some sort of value to this soldier as if he were some sort of hero captured on the field of battle. This is not the case.
It appears this was not a capture, but the actions of a traitor who made himself available to the enemy. FYI – Bergdahl joined the ballet before he joined the Army and he worked as barista in a coffee house where liberals now hold candle light vigil’s for his release. That outta help. He was known as a free-spirit who liked to do his own thing. It was unknown why he joined the Army. It was not diclosed what kind of attitude he had while in the army, however his low rank in comparison to his time in service strongly suggests he was not a good soldier. Normally soldiers with his time in service would be at least a Specialist or E-4 by now, but Bergdahl had the low rank of PFC.)
During an interview with his captors Bergdahl said he has a desire to learn more about Islam and he said the morale of American soldiers was very low. He was prompted by his interrogators to give a message to the American people. “Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country,” he said.
On July 2, two U.S. officials told the AP the soldier had “just walked off” his base with three Afghans after his shift. Bergdahl left his weapon behind, which is unheard of and he left without permission and violated well known safety rules. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
On July 6, the Taliban claimed on their Web site that five days earlier a “drunken American soldier had come out of his garrison” and was captured by mujahedeen and has now become a valuable trophy for their cause.