Putin Could Become Even More Dangerous In 2015
Russians are going into the new year in a dramatically different, and lessened, economic situation than the one they enjoyed at the beginning of the year.
Caveats abound here. The vast majority of Russians don’t travel abroad, much less have vacation properties in Europe, nor do they have hard-currency mortgages (the ruble now having returned to its Soviet-era pariah status).
Moreover, the average Russian has a physical and mental toughness about getting by in tough times — it is an unmistakable point of national pride — that Westerners cannot really fathom.
Nevertheless, the economic undoing of Putinism over the last weeks, brought about by Western sanctions in response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine which began in early 2014, heralds major changes for the Kremlin, and not just in its domestic affairs.
Russia now faces a protracted and serious financial and economic crisis that will get much worse before it gets better. (...) But are they enough to get Putin to cease his aggression and, in the long run, perhaps even leave office? Western politicians, eager to avoid armed confrontation with Russia, have assumed that enough sanctions-related pain will force Putin’s hand and get him to back off in Ukraine and elsewhere. This was always a questionable assumption.
In the first place, sanctions tend to work as intended mostly against countries that strongly dislike being a global pariah (...) There is no evidence that Putin and most average Russians find being despised by the West particularly objectionable; on the contrary, many seem to revel in it.
Might Putin do the same and decide that since Russia is facing defeat at the hands of Western sanctions, which represent a kind of war, why not opt for actual war, in which Moscow at least stands a chance of victory? It’s too early to determine that, but 2015 will be the year such grave decisions are made.

The Saudi government includes al-Rubaish on its list of most wanted terrorists, and the United States is offering a $5 million reward for information that leads to his capture.
A year later the Pentagon released al-Rubaish into a Saudi 'rehabilitation' program designed to reintegrate jihadis into society. He escaped and fled to Yemen, leaving his wife and three children behind.

Britain has overtaken France to become the world's fifth largest economy, new analysis shows.
(...)
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said Britain's acceleration was also boosted by the inclusion of sex and drugs to UK growth. While the addition of prostitution and illegal drugs form part of new pan-European accounting standards, France has refused to comply with EU rules because it does not consider them to be "voluntary commercial activities".
Eric Dubois, a director at INSEE, France's statistics office, has described drug use as a "dependency" that does not involve "free will". He said prostitution was the result of "Mafia networks and trafficking illegal immigrants".
Official estimates show prostitution added about £5.7bn to the UK economy in 2013, while illegal drugs were worth about £6.62bn.
A Inglaterra, ao contrário da França, decidiu incluir no cálculo do PIB a prostituição e as drogas ilegais. Resultado? A Inglaterra ultrapassa a França como 5ª maior economia do mundo.
Telegraph
Ataques aéreos dos EUA na Síria matam 14 jihadistas
Aviação síria bombardeia cidades controladas pelo Estado Islâmico e mata dezenas de civis
Uma série de ataques aéreos realizados durante a noite pela coligação internacional liderada pelos Estados Unidos causou a morte de 14 'jihadistas' do grupo Estado Islâmico (EI) e cinco civis, disse hoje uma organização não-governamental.
Cerca de 40 civis, entre os quais sete crianças, foram mortos em ataques da Força Aérea síria contra duas cidades do norte do país controladas pelo autoproclamado Estado Islâmico, segundo o Observatório Sírio dos Direitos Humanos.
(...)
“Pelo menos 37 civis, entre eles sete crianças, três adolescentes e duas mulheres, foram mortos nesses raides da Força Aérea síria”, segundo a organização não-governamental. Dezenas de feridos encontram-se em estado grave.
Na véspera de Natal, segundo a mesma organização, mais de 50 combatentes do Estado Islâmico terão sido mortos durante combates com as forças curdas no norte da Síria. A morte do maior número de jihadistas (44) ocorreu durante combates em Qassiab, localidade do nordeste da Síria que foi reconquistada pelos curdos às forças do EI.
The Federal Reserve bought $6.046 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities in the week from Dec. 18 to Dec. 24, compared with $5.752 billion purchased the previous week, the New York Federal Reserve Bank said on Friday.
In a move to help the housing market begun in October 2011, the U.S. central bank has been using funds from principal payments on the agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities, or MBS, it holds to reinvest in agency MBS.
The New York Fed said on its website the Fed sold no mortgage securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the Government National Mortgage Association, or Ginnie Mae,
in the latest week. It sold none the prior week.
Agora a sério .....
Sem ler a noticia, parece-me que existe aí algo que está muito mal contado nessa noticia. Em muitos sitios por essa Europa fora a prostituição é legalizada, havendo "casas" para isso em que as mesmas têm que cumprir regras de funcionamento e pagam impostos como qualquer outra atividade.
Ao mesmo tempo existem aquelas chamadas drogas leves ou drogas autorizadas, que é autorizado em alguns países por essa Europa. Obviamente drogas como heroina ou cocaina que apenas são transacionadas no mercado "negro" e sem qualquer conhecimento por partes das autoridades, não podem pertencer ao PIB porque ninguém tem noção do que é transaccionado.
E não me venham falar em moral senão vou falar na hipocrisia da sociedade no que toca ás bebidas "fortes", tabaco e outras actividades que o Estado recebe enormes quantidades de dinheiro, e todas elas fazem imenso mal á saúde.
Para além de ainda matarmos com subsidio do Estado !
E já agora acho que em Portugal a prostituição e as drogas leves (não faço ideia quais são) deviam ser legalizadas conforme se falou há uns anos atrás !
The package, worth 3.5 trillion yen ($29.12 billion) was unveiled two weeks after a massive election victory by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition gave him a fresh mandate to push through his "Abenomics" stimulus policies. The government said it expects the stimulus plan to boost Japan's GDP by 0.7 percent.
(...)
Of the total, 1.8 trillion yen will be spent on measures such as distributing coupons to buy merchandise, providing low-income households with subsidies for fuel purchases, supporting funding at small firms and reviving regional economies.
The remaining 1.7 trillion yen will be used for disaster-prevention and rebuilding disaster-hit areas including those affected by the March 2011 tsunami. Tokyo will also seek to bolster the housing market by lowering the mortgage rates offered by a governmental home-loan agency
The savings rate in the year through March was minus 1.3 percent, the first negative reading in data back to 1955, the Cabinet Office said. Real earnings fell 4.3 percent in November from a year earlier, a 17th straight decline and the steepest tumble since December 2009, the labor ministry said today.
O número de pessoas à procura de emprego em França registou um aumento em novembro de 27.400 para 3.488.300, sendo este o valor mais elevado de sempre no país.
Segundo dados oficiais, o mês de novembro foi o terceiro consecutivo em que o desemprego cresceu no território francês. Só no último ano, o número de pessoas sem trabalho no país aumentou 5,8 por cento.
Eleito em 2012, o Presidente francês, François Hollande, fez da criação de postos de trabalho uma das suas prioridades durante a campanha eleitoral.
Em novembro, Hollande reconheceu que tinha falhado nesse objetivo e revelou que não se recandidataria ao cargo nas eleições de 2017 se não conseguisse atingir a meta do desemprego até ao final do mandato.
Despite conflicts across the globe, President Obama told American troops on Christmas that the world has become safer in recent years.
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“Afghanistan has a chance to rebuild its own country. We are safer. It’s not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again,” (...)
The nation's economy is also helped by the fact that state and local governments have weathered a period of austerity and are again contributing to expansion. State and local expenditures and investment were up 1.1 percent annually in the third quarter, following a 3.4 percent expansion in the second quarter. The federal government, too, after two years of tightening and sequestration, is again giving the economy a lift: Its spending was up 9.9 percent in the third quarter. Such figures can fluctuate heavily from quarter to quarter, but economists say the government is unlikely to be a drag over the next year.
China plans to temporarily waive a requirement for banks to set aside reserves for some deposits, people with knowledge of the matter said, highlighting efforts to boost lending amid a slowdown of the world’s second-largest economy.
Commercial lenders won’t be required to set aside reserves for the savings that they hold for non-deposit-taking financial institutions, the people said. The waiver is part of planned changes to how banks’ loan-to-deposit ratios are calculated, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they weren’t authorized to discuss the plan publicly.
China's trade will grow 3.5 percent in 2014, implying the country will fall short of a current 7.5 percent official growth target, according to a report on the Ministry of Commerce's website that was subsequently revised to remove the numbers.
The initial version of the report published on the website on Saturday, which quoted Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng, was replaced with a new version that had identical wording but with all the numbers and percentages removed.