9/11 - THE TRUTH IS OUT
The discovery of large amounts of Super-Thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center is solid scientific proof that the government and media version of 9-11 is nothing but a pack of treasonous lies. The evidence indicates that the Twin Towers were exploded using sophisticated nano-composite forms of Thermite and cutter charges. Thanks to the Internet, the truth about 9-11 is out and understood by millions of people across America and around the world.
Although it may come as an unpleasant surprise to some, it is a proven fact that the same network of Zionist Jews is behind the false-flag terrorism of 9-11 and the huge financial crimes of the past few years. Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, for example, the disgraced former CEO of the fraudulent A.I.G., is a member of this criminal network. The first airplane flew directly into the secure computer room of Marsh McClennan (MMC), a Greenberg-owned company (headed by his son Jeffrey) on 9-11. Another Greenberg-owned company, Kroll Security, was responsible for security at the World Trade Center.
Maurice Greenberg is involved in both 9-11 and the A.I.G. bail-out.
I have pointed out these connections in "The Architecture of Terror: Mapping the Network Behind 9-11", a key chapter of my book, Solving 9-11 – The Deception that Changed the World:
Kroll Associates was responsible for "revamping security at the World Trade Center after the 1993 terrorist bombing," Douglas Frantz of the New York Times reported in 1994. This is a crucial point because those who controlled security at the WTC are prime suspects in the demolition of the Twin Towers. It was directly into the computer room of Marsh (Kroll) USA in the North Tower that the first plane struck, or was precision-guided, on 9-11. The light orange flame and whitish smoke that exploded out of burning computer room of Marsh USA are indicative of a Thermite reaction. Burning jet fuel produces darker orange flames and blackish smoke.
John O'Neill, the former chief of counterterrorism with the FBI, who had investigated Al Qaida, was the head of security for the World Trade Center complex, and was reportedly killed on his first day of work - on 9-11. O'Neill had been appointed to this position by the managing director of the Kroll security company, Jerome M. Hauer. Evidently, Kroll continued to manage security for the WTC complex from 1993 until 9-11.
The first plane flew directly into the secure computer room of Greenberg's Marsh McClennan Company. The explosions and white smoke that accompanied the crash are indicative of Thermite having been preplaced in the computer room.
Later, Maurice Greenberg's fraudulent insurance company A.I.G. was the key player in the Bush-Obama bail-out of 2008-2009, receiving more than $180 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds. Much of the taxpayer money paid out to A.I.G. was then distributed to equally criminal private investment banks like Goldman Sachs, whose profits from dodgy financial schemes/instruments had been insured by A.I.G. Fear tactics were employed as the U.S. taxpayer was robbed while being told that the bail-out of the network of financial criminals was for the public good.
We then find the same Zionist criminal network behind the Bernard Madoff scam in which tens of billions of dollars disappeared into thin air. The fact that Madoff's business partner Sy Syms was also a director of a private Israeli bank called Israel Discount Bank (New York), a bank with a documented history of money laundering and a branch in Switzerland, did not seem to interest Lev Dassin, the Zionist prosecutor. Most remarkably, Dassin, the prosecutor of Madoff, failed to even file charges of conspiracy in a financial criminal case in which more than $26 billion is reported to have disappeared.
Behind all of these mega-crimes we find one common denominator: a network of individuals connected to Israeli intelligence, the Mossad. The Israelis are well known to have a penchant for audacity. Seemingly immune from prosecution, the Mossad's crimes have only become more audacious. The evidence of Israeli involvement in these crimes is clear and indisputable. The only reason the Israelis get away with their outrageous crimes is because there is no political will to prosecute them.
PLUNDERING ICELAND
The looting of much of the wealth of Iceland is one such mega-crime in which we find Israelis involved at the highest level. The First Lady of Iceland, Dorrit Moussaieff, is an Israeli Jew, which adds a significant wrinkle to the whole plot.
The Israeli Dorrit Moussaieff is the "fabulously wealthy socialite wife of the President of Iceland." So why did a "fabulously wealthy" Israeli Jew marry the president of a small Nordic nation in the North Atlantic?
Iceland recently arrested several former executives of the former Kaupthing bank, the largest Icelandic bank involved in the collapse of the Icelandic economy in the fall of 2008. Kaupthing and a couple other banks were responsible for the looting of much of the wealth of Iceland (and other nations). Two of the former executives of the bank were recently held in solitary confinement to facilitate the Icelandic investigation.
Iceland's special prosecutor is investigating a number of former Kaupthing executives for alleged market manipulation and forgery. Before its collapse, Kaupthing lent more than $12 billion in shady deals that were "if not illegal, completely unethical," Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said. When Kaupthing, Glitnir Bank, and Landsbanki Islands collapsed in October 2008 they had amassed debts equivalent to 12 times Island’s gross domestic product. After taking control of the three banks, the government was forced to seek a $4.6 billion International Monetary Fund-led loan to stay afloat. If an intelligence agency of a foreign government were involved in bankrupting Iceland, a member of NATO, it should be considered an act of war.
Kaupthing's loan book (leaked on the Internet) shows that around one third of its $20 billion in corporate loans went to a small elite connected to the bank's owners and management. One of Kaupthing's owners and the bank's largest debtor when it collapsed is an Iraqi-Iranian Jew named Robert Tchenguiz (pronounced like Genghis, as in Khan). The bank's leaked loan book shows that Tchenguiz borrowed some $3 billion from the bank to finance his private investments. Tchenguiz and his brother Vincent are London-based business tycoons. Robert was an owner of Kaupthing as one of the largest shareholders in Exista, a company that was the largest shareholder of the bank.
Robert Tchenguiz - "I can't comment on what Hrediar did or didn't do. It is very difficult for me to discuss this. I don't know why he was arrested. I don't know anything about the case."
Tchenguiz siblings Vincent and Lisa
Tchenguiz claims that he lost everything with the bank's collapse. "I lost all my money with the collapse of Kaupthing and I am suing the bank so I have to watch what I say," he said recently. High-profile "losers" like the Tchenguiz brothers, who lose billions of dollars, are typical of Mossad financial scams. Like Bernard Madoff, the Tchenguiz brothers claim to have lost billions of dollars, but where did the money really go?
As I pointed out in the Madoff scam, the missing billions probably went to secret Zionist-controlled bank accounts, for example at the Swiss branch of Israel Discount Bank where Madoff's friend and business partner Sy Syms (a.k.a. Seymour Merinsky) was a long-time director. In the Tchenguiz case, the Israeli partner-in-crime was probably his father, Victor, whose original surname is reported to be Kedourie Molaaem, and who has lived in Israel since at least 2003.
Victor Tchenguiz, an Iraqi Jew from Baghdad, has evidently worked with the Israeli Mossad for decades, and was reported in the British press in 2003 to be "the brains" behind the Tchenguiz business empire: "One reason that Victor Tchenguiz was long supposed to be the brains behind Rotch was that his Ferrari-driving sons didn't seem to spend much time at their desks," Conal Walsh wrote in the Observer of May 25, 2003.
The Tchenguiz kids, Vincent, Lisa, and Robert are well known for living high on other people's money. As the Observer noted in 2003: "The Iranian Jewish community is also legendary when it comes to shopping and partying. One reason that Victor Tchenguiz was long supposed to be the brains behind Rotch was that his Ferrari-driving sons didn't seem to spend much time at their desks."
About the Israeli connection with the Tchenguiz family, Walsh wrote:
Victor Tchenguiz, 80 and now living in Israel, is a larger-than-life figure who apparently traded in his original surname of Kedorie for Tchenguiz, Persian for 'Genghis', in honour of the great Mongol warlord.
An Iraqi-born Jew, he reportedly fled Baghdad to avoid persecution in 1948, landing in Iran and swiftly becoming a favourite of the Shah. How Victor did this is unclear - Robert has hinted that he married well - but by the Seventies he was jeweller to Iran's royal family and, it has been reported, in charge of the royal mint. When the Shah was deposed in 1979, Victor fled to London, with his fortune seemingly intact.
The British press seems to be quite clueless about Victor Tchenguiz's high-level connections to the Shah of Iran and how he got there, as Chris Blackhurst wrote in his MT interview with Robert Tchenguiz:
Somehow, despite being a foreigner, Victor became a member of the Shah's inner circle, becoming the royal jeweller and also head of the country's mint. The family were in the elite of Iranian society - the children were pupils at the International School in Tehran and the sons went to university abroad - Robert to Pepperdine in California.
Then the Shah fell. Victor moved the family to London, again displaying enormous dexterity by managing to bring their money over as well.
While the press reports are quite sketchy, the name suggests that the Tchenguiz family may originally be Iranian Jews, perhaps named Molayem (i.e. soft), which would fit the unusual "Molaaem" spelling of the family name. Although Victor and Violet met in Baghdad, they were married in Iran after a very short courtship, apparently in 1955 according to a 2009 interview with their daughter Lisa. There would be no reason for Iraqi Jews to be married in Iran if they did not have family there:
Lisa's own parents, who are both Iraqi Jews by origin, had a semi-arranged marriage. Her father spotted her mother walking beside the canal in Baghdad, and introduced himself to her father at a café. Several coffees later, the deal was done. 'My mother was at home when her mother came in and told her that she was having an engagement party the following week.' The couple 'dated' for five days, heavily chaperoned, then married in Iran.
Fifty-four years later, they are still together and, says Lisa, happily so.
It is well known that the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, played a key role in supporting the Shah of Iran and his secret police, the SAVAK, as the Wikipedia article on the Mossad notes:
Prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information), the Iranian secret police and intelligence service was created under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957 to protect the regime of the shah by arresting, torturing, and executing the dissidents (especially Leftists). After security relations between the United States and Iran grew more distant in the early 1960s which led the CIA training team to leave Iran, Mossad became increasingly active in Iran, "training SAVAK personnel and carrying out a broad variety of joint operations with SAVAK."
As the Jew who headed the Iranian mint and served as court jeweller for the Shah, Victor Tchenguiz would have worked closely with the Mossad. The Mossad connection would explain why Victor lives in Israel while his "billionaire" children and grandchildren all live in Britain. Why would Victor leave his family and home to retire in a country where he has never lived? The evidence suggests that Victor is indeed "the brains" behind the looting of Iceland and probably needed to be in Israel - close to his Israeli partners-in-crime - to pull off the mega-heist.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
"Robert Tchenguiz: I lost everything with Kaupthing", by Jóna Ann Pétursdóttir, Pressan (Island) May 7, 2010
http://www.pressan.is/News/ReadIcelandicNews/robert-tchenguiz-i-lost-everything-with-kaupthing---i-dont-know-what-hreidar-did-wrong
"Persian playboy goes shopping", by Conal Walsh, The Observer, May 25, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/may/25/theobserver.observerbusiness6
"The Tchenguiz sister", by Lydia Slater, London Evening Standard (U.K.), May 15, 2009
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23691957-the-tchenguiz-sister.do
Wikipedia article on Mossad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Germany Acts Alone to Protect the Euro and Big Banks Against Speculators
BERLIN — If Germany’s efforts to rein in speculation in European markets were meant to surprise investors, they succeeded — just not quite in the way officials in Berlin might have intended.
On Wednesday, the government’s partial ban on so-called naked short-selling took effect, as part of Berlin’s effort to protect its biggest financial institutions and the euro currency from investors who have been betting against them.
Coinciding with the new rule, Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose rhetoric has intensified as the euro zone’s debt crisis has spread, delivered a fiery speech to the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, that combined a demand for governments to assert “primacy” over unruly markets with her gloomy predictions of what would happen if they failed.
“I’ll boil it down to its core,” she told lawmakers. “The euro is the foundation for growth and prosperity” in the European Union. “The euro is in danger. If we don’t deal with this danger, then the consequences for us in Europe are incalculable.”
Even as she spoke, markets were falling in response to her finance ministry’s decision late Tuesday to immediately ban aggressive bets against the financial system. Markets closed down around 3 percent across much of Europe.
European officials, caught off guard, criticized Germany’s unilateral action — the kind of move that, just a few days ago, Mrs. Merkel said would be ineffective in a global market.
“Close cooperation in the E.U. on all issues which have a strong market impact is very important and needs to be strengthened,” the president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy, told a news conference in Madrid, Reuters reported. He said he would raise the issue of naked short-selling at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Friday.
In a short sale, an investor sells borrowed assets hoping to buy them later at a lower price and pocket the difference as profit. In a naked short, the investor does so without actually having possession of the assets. Many Europeans have attacked the practice as casino-style speculation that can unfairly disturb the markets.
Several European countries, including France, Austria, Belgium and Spain, have prohibited naked short-selling of shares in their own major financial institutions since 2008. But outside of Austria, there appeared to be little immediate enthusiasm for following Germany’s lead into new areas of prohibition, like government bonds.
“There’s relatively little trading of euro zone government bonds in Paris — it’s more active in Germany,” Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, told reporters on Wednesday. “So we don’t envisage taking measures.”
Germany has long called for reining in what it sees as the worst excesses of Anglo-American financial capitalism. But the ban on some naked short-selling was seen as a political stance directed mainly at a domestic audience.
Mrs. Merkel opened debate in the Bundestag on Germany’s contribution to the nearly $1 trillion safety net being set up by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for the euro zone’s weaker members. Once again, Germany will provide the greatest share of the loan guarantees — nearly a fifth.
Mrs. Merkel has been pummeled in the German news media over the previous bailout, which was specifically for Greece, and her coalition is still reeling after its huge election defeat two weeks ago in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia.
But the government’s new aggressive attack on speculators won her admiring headlines as the debate over the larger bailout opened Wednesday.
The German financial regulator, BaFin, said Tuesday that it had banned naked short-selling of euro zone government bonds and was reinstating a ban on naked short-selling in the shares of 10 German financial institutions — including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and Allianz — until March 31, 2011.
BaFin also enacted a ban on uncovered credit-default swaps on euro zone government bonds, meaning investors would not be allowed to buy default protection against debt unless they actually owned the underlying bonds.
The moves carry uncomfortable associations for investors, as they echo measures taken by the global authorities to calm markets as the financial crisis began building to a peak in 2008.
In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted several temporary bans against the naked short-selling of American banks that year, as did most major developed countries. Last July, American authorities tightened the rules governing naked shorting to curtail abuses.
Only on Sunday, Mrs. Merkel told the German Federation of Trade Unions that she opposed the idea of Germany taking any unilateral measures, since markets are global. Germany would require the support of the European Union as well as the United States, Japan and other countries, she said.
In fact, the majority of trading in sovereign European debt takes place well beyond the reach of German regulators, in London and New York. That left analysts and officials trying to understand how much impact the German measures would have.
A spokeswoman for the British Treasury declined to comment beyond a statement from the Financial Services Authority, the regulator, which said: “We note what Germany has implemented and will assist BaFin wherever appropriate. The scope of these bans relate to German participants or business taking place inside Germany and does not cover branches of German institutions outside Germany.”
Mrs. Merkel is expected to try to win more support for the ban on Thursday when she speaks at an international finance conference that will consider specifically how the markets can be regulated.
Goldman Sachs Hands Clients Losses in ‘Top Trades’ (Update1)
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. racked up trading profits for itself every day last quarter. Clients who followed the firm’s investment advice fared far worse.
Seven of the investment bank’s nine “recommended top trades for 2010” have been money losers for investors who adopted the New York-based firm’s advice, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from a Goldman Sachs research note sent yesterday. Clients who used the tips lost 14 percent buying the Polish zloty versus the Japanese yen, 9.4 percent buying Chinese stocks in Hong Kong and 9.8 percent trading the British pound against the New Zealand dollar.
The struggles for analysts at Goldman Sachs, which is fighting a fraud lawsuit from U.S. regulators who accuse the company of misleading investors in a mortgage-linked security, show the difficulty of predicting market movements as widening budget deficits, a fragile global economic recovery and tighter financial regulations increase volatility. Stock and currency fluctuations rose to the highest in a year this month as Europe pledged about $1 trillion to stop a debt crisis in the region.
“This says that Goldman’s guys are only human,” said Axel Merk, who oversees $500 million as president and chief investment officer of Merk Investments LLC in Palo Alto, California. “No one is always right. There are a lot of cross currents in this market.”
Gia Moron, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.
China’s Bear Market
Goldman Sachs’s trading profits come from capturing bid- offer spreads when its traders act as intermediaries for clients, Gary Cohn, the firm’s president and chief operating officer, said last week in New York. Proprietary trading isn’t a main driver of earnings, he said.
The trade advice for customers is distributed by Goldman Sachs’s global markets economic research group. It tracks the performance of the trades in a daily research note. The time period of the recommendations is 12 months.
The performance this year is a reversal from 2009, when nine of Goldman Sachs’s 11 trading recommendations made money. Investors saw a 22 percent return owning Chinese stocks and a 12 percent gain buying the British pound versus the dollar, according to a Goldman Sachs note on Dec. 1.
Goldman Sachs analysts made eight trade recommendations for this year in December, including telling clients to buy the British pound against the New Zealand dollar. On April 1, Goldman Sachs added a ninth “top” trade, telling clients to buy Chinese stocks listed in Hong Kong and predicting the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index would rise 19 percent to 15,000.
Tough Analysis
Since then, the gauge has slid 9.4 percent to 11,426.18. The Shanghai Composite index has entered a bear market, losing about 21 percent this year. That’s the third biggest decline in the world after Greece and Cyprus. The decline accelerated this month on concern Greece, Spain and Portugal will struggle to finance their budget deficits and dismantle the euro.
The Chinese stock recommendation was made by a group led by Dominic Wilson, a senior Goldman Sachs economist in New York. Wilson cited inexpensive valuations and “robust” economic growth. He also said investors have already factored in the risk of higher interest rates in China.
Wilson wasn’t available to comment because he was out of the office traveling, according to an e-mail.
Exit Calls
“Emerging markets appear superior to the developed world, but the market isn’t trading that relationship,” said Eric Fine, who manages Van Eck Associates Corp.’s G-175 Strategies emerging-market hedge fund. “It may be that some assets are mispriced, but if the market starts to discount the end point of the game, such as the collapse of the euro, it’s not that mispriced.”
Analysts at Goldman Sachs recommended investors exit two trades in February, one involving interest-rate swap rates in the U.K. and another advising clients to buy credit-default swaps in Spain and sell similar contracts in Ireland. The first trade had a potential loss of 24 basis points and the other had a return of 2.9 percent, according to figures issued in the appendix of the research note in February.
Owning currencies that are tied to growth is the only remaining trade that has increased in value this year, according to Goldman Sachs. The Goldman Sachs FX Growth Index has climbed 3.4 percent since the firm made the recommendation in December.
Betting on Markets
Goldman Sachs makes more money from trading than any other Wall Street firm. In the first quarter, the bank’s $7.39 billion in revenue from trading fixed-income, currencies and commodities dwarfed the $5.52 billion made by its closest rival, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. In equities, Goldman Sachs’s $2.35 billion in revenue was about 50 percent higher than its nearest competitor.
Cohn told investors at a May 11 conference in New York that the firm lost money on only 11 days in the last 12 months. He said that uncanny streak of success refutes suspicions that the bank depends on proprietary bets with its own money.
“It is implausible that a proprietary-driven business model could be right 96 percent of the time,” Cohn said. Instead, he said the “simple answer” is that the firm makes money by capturing bid-offer spreads when acting as an intermediary for client trades.
Goldman Sachs executives have grappled before with questions about whether they’re better at making money for the firm than for their clients, according to an internal e-mail dated Sept. 26, 2007, that was released by a U.S. Senate subcommittee last month.
U.S. Lawsuit
The e-mail to Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein from Peter Kraus, who was then co-head of the company’s investment- management division, explains that individual investors, unlike institutional clients, occasionally make “comments like ur good at making money for urself but not us.”
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Goldman on April 16 accusing the company of misleading investors in a mortgage-linked asset. Goldman denies those allegations and said it will fight the charges.
Bloodbath
The correction, soon to be crash, is here: the market had a bigger relative open to close move today than it did on May 6. We closed at the day's lows on massive volume, despite definitive central bank intervention, regardless whether it was the SNB, the ECB, or the Fed. The central planners have lost control of the market, and all thanks to the inevitable collapse of hyper capitalist Keynesianism coming out of the formerly most communist country in the world. A day of ironies. And it's not over. Futures are already down another 4 handles. The correction is coming, and it will be a bloodbath. The Fed can not push rates lower. It will print. It is inevitable. It is our destiny.
Update: Futures now 7 handles lower. 46 point move in ES: that is almost a 5% move in the S&P for now.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Woman’s Home Confiscated Over Small Water Bill
One raw day in early February, Vicki Valentine stood by helplessly as real estate investors snatched her West Baltimore home over what began with an unpaid city water bill of $362.
As snow threatened to fall, she watched a work crew hired by the new owners punch out the lock on her front door. A sheriff’s deputy was on the scene while Valentine and her teenage son piled whatever they could into a borrowed car.
Running out of time, Valentine scrambled to pack up clothing and mementos. The home had been her family’s for nearly three decades, and her father had paid off the mortgage in 1984. “It’s hard to say goodbye to this house,” she said. “It’s like someone forcing you out of something that belongs to you. I don’t get it.”
Valentine lost the two-story brick row home after the city sold her debt to investors through a contentious and byzantine legal process called a “tax sale.” This little-known type of foreclosure can enrich investors as growing numbers of property owners struggle to pay their bills.
These foreclosed homeowners are not the families making headlines for taking on mortgages they could ill afford. Families ensnared in the tax sale sometimes are unable to overcome relatively small debts owed to local tax collectors.
Rather than collect the overdue money they are owed, many local governments are selling tax liens. Buyers range from behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase & Co, and some regional banks and law firms, to small-fry investors lured by late-night television commercials promising quick riches. Investors generally bid in an auction for the right to collect delinquent taxes and other municipal debts on property owners, sometimes by paying only a few hundred dollars. When owners can’t pay, investors can pick up property at bargain prices.
It can be a good deal for everyone except the property owner. Selling the debts to investors can help governments efficiently ease budget woes without having the added expenses of debt collection, foreclosing and being a landlord.
Investors, meanwhile, can rake in hefty profits. That’s because they can tack on fees and steep interest rates, which can amount to 18 percent annually in Baltimore.
In Valentine’s case, legal fees and other charges climbed past $3,600 – nearly 10 times her original bill.
Investors purchased an estimated $30 billion of real estate tax debt held by governments across the country in 2009, double the amount a year earlier, according to the Florida-based National Tax Lien Association. Altogether, 29 states and the District of Columbia can sell tax lien debt to investors.
Lien sales in Baltimore have nearly doubled since the housing bubble of 2006. On Monday, the city sold 12,689 liens – a probable record. Properties ranged from boarded-up shells and vacant lots to row homes in gentrified neighborhoods and some commercial buildings.
Britain's biggest insurer imposes 'ash tax' on travellers
Britain's biggest insurer is to impose an 'ash tax' on travellers who fear their holidays may be cancelled.
Just a week before thousands of families jet off on breaks during the school half-term, Aviva has become the first firm to impose the levy.
Other big insurance companies are set to follow suit.
Passengers queue at Heathrow's Terminal 5 this week as volcanic ash continues to cause disruptions. Aviva has imposed an 'ash levy' on passengers who fear their holidays may be at risk
The new add-on policy could cost a typical family an extra £40.
More than 150,000 Britons were stranded overseas in April after UK and many European airports were closed for six consecutive days following eruptions from a volcano in Iceland and the dense plume of ash cloud that spread as a result.
Many travellers incurred additional accommodation and transport bills totalling thousands of pounds, but they returned home to find that insurers and airlines refused to pay back costs.
Rochelle Turner, head of research for Which? Travel, said: 'Travel insurers have not come out of this situation very well, people feel let down by them. From now on travellers that want an assurance that their holiday will be protected from the disruption are going to have to pay extra for that.'
After the first closure of airports a handful offered to make a goodwill gesture to stranded travellers. Many have since made a u-turn on this policy.
Anyone who has booked a holiday since April 15 has been told they will definitely not be be able to claim for delays or cancellations. This is because insurers now deem the ash cloud a 'known event'.
As a result travellers book holidays at their own risk. And from July 1 Aviva has said it will not make any more goodwill payments to travellers.
Continuing threat: Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull is again threatening to cause havoc for holidaymakers
Earlier this week airports across Britain were closed again as the volcanic ash cloud once again encroached on airspace.
Lee Griffin, business development director at financial website GoCompare.com, said: 'Consumers may consider the extra cost to be a bit of an ash tax on this year’s holiday which is well worth paying for the extra peace of mind it brings.
'Travel insurers have been reviewing their wordings and others may well join Aviva in bringing out similar add on policies to cater for this unusual situation.'
The Aviva policy was revealed just 24 hours after new rules proposed tougher tests on whether flights could be grounded by ash.
The insurance, which is valid from June 1, costs £5 extra per person on a single trip policy, and £10 per person for an annual trip policy.
It will pay out up to £5,000 per person for travel and accommodation if a trip is cancelled because an airport is closed for 24 hours from the time of departure.
Those stranded overseas will be able to claim up to £100 a day for a hotel room and expenses - up to a total of £1,500. Or they can claim £1,000 for additional travel expenses.
Aviva travel manager Jerry Finch said: 'The risk of air space closure due to volcanic ash continues to loom large, and may be a risk faced by travellers for the foreseeable future.
'However, this was an event that most travel insurers did not cover – and therefore was never factored into the travel insurance premium.
'Aviva took the proactive decision to offer cover for both customers going on holiday or travelling home. We worked hard to develop this cover quickly to provide specific cover for what was previously an uninsured event.
'This is in direct response to what our customers and the public said they wanted: reasonably priced cover that would allow them to make travel arrangements full in the knowledge that should they get stuck abroad, or find that they could not leave the UK, there would be a clear and easy route to compensation.'
A spokesman for Aviva added: 'People can buy add on cover for golf equipment, or for other sports, now we are offering them cover for the ash cloud. You might not want it if you are just going on holiday in the UK or somewhere by ferry but definitely if you are flying you might think it was something that is useful if they were flying and were worried their holiday might be disrupted.'
Grotesque Global Financial System: Greece. Economic Theft on an Unprecedented Scale
Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such.
As The crisis that has led to What makes Epic theft The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs, which gambled on the bankruptcy of At 11 per cent, What has happened in In Shock therapy In Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working-class In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches between 13 and 18 million child deaths every year. This, wrote the economist Lester C Thurow, is "neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself". The same imperial forces have used horrific weapons against stricken countries where children are the majority, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which The people on the streets of | |
John Pilger is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by John Pilger | |
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