Ellen Brown writes: Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses,
and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the
foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and
massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect
the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot
up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the
dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened?

It
hardly took psychic powers to see that the Plunge Protection Team had
come to the rescue. Formally known as the President’s Working Group on
Financial Markets, the PPT was once concealed and its very existence
denied as if it were a matter of strict national security. But the PPT
has now come out of the closet. What was once a legally questionable
“manipulator” of markets has become a sanctioned stabilizer and
protector of markets. The new tone was set in January 2008, when global
markets took their worst tumble since September 11, 2001. Senator
Hillary Clinton said in a statement reported by the State News Service:

The mystery over what was going on with the dollar the first week in August was solved by James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, who wrote on August 7:

Just
as central banks manipulate currencies in concert, so gold can be
manipulated by massive selling of central bank reserves. Oil and any
other market can be manipulated as well. But markets can be manipulated
by only so much and for only so long without fixing the underlying
problem. There is more bad news coming down the pike, news of such
magnitude that no amount of ordinary manipulation is liable to conceal
it. (08/20/08)
more…

BBC Nature – French birds are moving northwards in response to climate change, but not fast enough, scientists have found. Their data came from a large survey in which volunteer ornithologists counted more than 105 species of bird.

In the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, researchers say that the birds are lagging some 182km behind the increases in temperature. This lag may be of particular concern to rare birds or species that have very specific food requirements.

“The flora and fauna around us are shifting over time due to climate change,” said Vincent Devictor, who led the research project from the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris. “The result is desynchronisation. If birds and the insects on which they depend do not react in the same way, we are headed for an upheaval in the interaction between species,” he told the AFP news agency. “At its worst, this desynchronisation could result in species extinctions.” …

This study did not examine whether the failure to “keep up” with rising temperatures was affecting the birds. Evidence from other studies suggests it depends on the species involved, their habitat, how their prey are responding to climate change, and what other threats and constraints they face.

A recent study of great tits in England found they were coping well with rising temperatures, changing their egg-laying times in order to adapt to the earlier emergence of insect prey. But in the Netherlands, the same species is suffering.

“Some species have changed their range hugely over the past two decades,” observed Professor Sheldon. “For example, the buzzard - one of our biggest birds of prey - 20 years ago was restricted to the west of Britain, but has now spread as far east as London.”

Another recent study found a number of species in the UK, including the chaffinch, were laying eggs earlier than 40 years ago. (08/20/08)
more…