World News Roundup

A lot has been going on around the world over the weekend, so here's your roundup.

The conflict in Honduras is ramping up in a hurry:

Honduras' interim President Roberto Micheletti said on Sunday Nicaraguan troops were moving to the mutual frontier and urged Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to respect Honduran sovereignty.

He gave no further details about troop movements in Nicaragua which shares a border with Honduras to the southeast of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.

His comments came as ousted President Manuel Zelaya attempted to fly home a week after he was ousted in a coup. Zelaya is a left-wing ally of Ortega and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.

The interim government said it had contacted the Organization of American States to express its willingness to enter dialogue. The OAS earlier on Sunday suspended Honduras for refusing to reinstate Zelaya.

Unfortunately, President Obama is on the side of the ousted thug, Zelaya. If it comes to an invasion by other Marxist thugs like Ortega or Chavez, there's no guarantee that Obama will oppose them.

In other interesting news, Saudi Arabia appears to have given Israel a green light to attack Iran:

The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Earlier this year Meir Dagan, Mossad’s director since 2002, held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.

The Israeli press has already carried unconfirmed reports that high-ranking officials, including Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, held meetings with Saudi colleagues. The reports were denied by Saudi officials.

“The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia,” a diplomatic source said last week.

Although the countries have no formal diplomatic relations, an Israeli defence source confirmed that Mossad maintained “working relations” with the Saudis.

Why would Saudi Arabia do this? Are they on Israel's side? Not really. I've read repeatedly that Iran's neighbors have the same fear of Iranian nuclear weapons as Israel does (though not the existential threat, of course), so it would be to their advantage to have the threat neutralized. It wouldn't hurt the Saudis at all to have the global retaliation come down on Israel, either. VP Joe Biden made a similar comment over the weekend, too, but he's a buffoon in a politician's suite, so there's no telling what he's talking about, or even if Obama has given him permission to speak.

Speaking of Iran, it now appears there are some clerics who are also calling foul play on the election:

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country's supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country's clerical establishment.

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult - if not impossible.

Is this an internal power play by a group of clerics who aren't thrilled with Khamenei's radical armageddon-seeking philosophy? Is this a genuine call for help from the free nations of the world? I don't know, but it's certainly something worth watching.

And on a continuing-economic-trouble front, the calls for removing the dollar as the world's primary currency are increasing:

Suresh Tendulkar, an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said he is urging the government to diversify its $264.6 billion foreign-exchange reserves and hold fewer dollars.

“The major part of Indian reserves is in dollars -- that is something that’s a problem for us,” Tendulkar, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said in an interview yesterday in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he was attending an economic conference.

...China and Russia have stepped up calls for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations that spawned the financial crisis.

For India, China, and Russia to be calling for this shift is not a good sign. I can't imagine it would have anything to do with Obama's historically reckless spending and debt increases, would it?

There's my two cents.