Oil prices rose Nov. 19 after suggestions from the Riyadh OPEC summit that member nations are considering ditching the dollar. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the dollar a "worthless piece of paper." Venezuela's Hugo Chavez added: "The dollar is in free fall, everyone should be worried about it. The fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar — it’s the fall of the American empire." That led to a reaction from Saudi Arabia. "OPEC shouldn’t be used as a political organization," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the event's closing press conference. "Oil should be a tool for development and not a tool for conflicts." (London Times, NYT, Nov. 19)

From the all too appropriately named political blog Morons.org, Nov. 12:

We apparently have a new Attorney General....
Last Thursday, Judge Michael Mukasey was confirmed as Attorney General by the Senate in a vote of 53-40 in the dead of night, at 11:04PM. This happened just two days after Mukasey was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, making it an unusually quick confirmation. So quick, in fact, that none of the Senators running for President were able to return to Washington in time to vote on it. So quick that no one had any time to arrange a filibuster, should they have desired to block the nomination.

With the price of oil creeping ominously and seemingly inexorably towards an unprecedented $100 per barrel, the long and equally unprecedented mega-profit-fest for Exxon and the other industry majors is nonetheless starting to level off. It seems that consumption is starting to slow down, the high prices (and perhaps—dare we hope?—concern over the Iraq war, global warming, etc.) finally taking their toll—even with motorists basically captive consumers, dependent on filling their tanks every day to get to work due to urban infrastructure decisions not of their own making. Unable to pass on the costs at the pump sufficiently, Exxon and their ilk are increasingly having to eat the high costs themselves. Resurgent oil nationalism in Venezuela and elsewhere is also taking its toll. It's still a very small victory—but, hey, we'll take what we can get these days. From Business Week, Nov. 1:

Already facing war crimes charges in Germany, Donald Rumsfeld—like Henry Kissinger before him—now runs into a spot of legal bother in France. From RINF Alternative News Media, Oct. 28:

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military’s detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

Forgive our cynicism but it smells to us like a quick cash-in (albeit a year late, so as not to seem unseemly) on the Da Vinci Code hype. The official website of the Holy See has a link right on the front page, for God and everyone to see, to something luridly if paradoxically entitled the "Vatican Secret Archives." Reading the history page on the archives, it turns out (surprise!) they aren't really all that secret, but were thusly named because when they were established by Paul V c. 1610 they were housed in halls adjacent to (not in) the so-called "Secret Library" or Sale Paoline. Some of the documents, however, really are only being released to the public now. These conveniently concern the oh-so-sexy Knights Templar—and are bound in an exorbitantly priced edition. From Reuters , Oct. 11 (link added):

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking to the Association of the United States Army in Washington DC Oct. 10, said the US Army of the future will need to concentrate more on training foreign militaries, mastering other languages and customs, and honing its ability to fight small insurgent forces. (AP, Oct. 10). Calling the post-9-11 War on Terrorism "our first protracted conflict with an all-volunteer force since the American Revolution," Gates outlined the challenges facing US forces as this pattern extends indefinitely into the future. Some excerpts from the text, which is online at Defenselink.mil:

From Amnesty International, Sept. 25:

The authorities in Germany have decided not to seek the extradition of 13 US citizens suspected of being involved in the abduction and rendition of German citizen Khaled el-Masri. The 13 includes at least 10 operatives of the CIA.

Well, it seems that James B. Comey, the man who threatened to subpoena WW4 Report, was actually the progressive within the context of the Bush Justice Department. From the front page of the New York Times, Oct. 4 (links added):

Secret US Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
WASHINGTON — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.