Germany’s ruling SPD party is ready talk reparations with Poland. The Polish government is demanding 6.6 trillion zlotys, or 1.6 trillion US dollars, in reparations from Germany for material and humanitarian losses during the World War II. The Polish government states that a 1953 Stalinist era agreement of relinquishing all reparations claims were made under duress from pressures of the Soviet Union and are therefore are null and void. Polish side claims it never received fair compensation for the 1939-1945 war that left the country in ruins. If the compensation is paid, it would amount to $41,000 per Polish citizen, or 230% of the country’s GDP. That amount surpasses the restitution paid out to Holocaust victims and their heirs that Germany paid out in the amount of $87 billion.

Gangs in Honduran Prisons

On June 20, 46 female inmates were massacred at a Tamara women’s prison outside of Tegucigalpa. The Barrio 16 street members smuggled in guns, grenades, machetes, and flammable liquid before subduing prison guards. The female gang members then attacked a cellblock where a rival gang was housed; victims were shot, hacked with machetes, and set on fire. Honduras, with a network of 21 prisons, is making efforts at replicating neighboring El Salvador’s crackdown against gangs and gang members. El Salvador recently moved 4,000 of its 70,000 jailed gang members to Terrorism Confinement Center, a specially built maximum security prison that can hold 40,000 prisoners.

Nicaragua Distances US for Iran

In mid June, Iranian president Ebrahim Rainsis visited Latin America’s Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. “During all these (years?), you resisted against the conspiracies of imperialism and triumphed,” said president Rainsi to the Nicaraguan parliament. “The United States wanted to paralyze our people with threats and sanctions, but it hasn’t been able to do it,” he told Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Nicaragua in 2007 and this visit is yet another sign of multi polarization of the region and Central America. While the Iranian president visited the most established leftist regimes in the Western Hemisphere, he was not yet invited by the new left governments that took power in Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.

From Volcanoes to Bitcoins

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has presented a plan of constructing several volcano powered energy plants devoted primarily to bitcoin mining. This is a fast track project. The state owned geothermic company La Geo estimates that the country generates around 200MW, or 22%, of its energy through geothermal power. The estimates also show the capacity of increasing that to 644MW, where around 70% of El Salvador’s energy would come from volcano power. That would make the country one of the biggest bitcoin miners in the Americas. Volcano generated and geothermal energy bitcoin mining operations have been in operation since October 2021. That was just weeks after El Salvador declared bitcoin, alongside the US dollar, to be its legal tender. El Salvador abandoned its Colones for the US dollar in 2001.

War is good for Business

The Ukraine-Russia war is providing a great boom to international military manufacturing complex Black Rock and other global players. Many new types of armaments are being manufactured, and development in munitions manufacturing should maintain the war for the next decade or two as the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. The British government is supplying depleted Uranium ammunition to Ukraine. The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine cluster bombs that are banned by the UK, France and Germany for being too dangerous to civilians. Ukraine is deploying scatter mines that the country itself has banned. Russia has developed intercontinental nuclear “vanguard” missiles that can travel at 27 times the speed of sound, and has stationed them near the Finnish border and other locations. Iran is finishing construction of low cost Shahed kamikaze drones outside of Moscow. Iran’s drone technology comes in significant part from a captured US stealth drone, RQ-170 Sentinel.

The primary targets for German navy were oil and petroleum routes from Trinidad, Venezuela and the Dutch islands. Almost as important were the cargo vessels hauling bauxite from Jamaica and the Guyanas to be used in the manufacture of aluminum. Thus the battle of the Caribbean began. After the fall of France in 1940, Germany and Italy based most of their submarine fleet on the island of Martinique. Not wishing to provoke the United States into entering the war, the Axis left the American banana boats alone.

Using the Honduran ports of Puerto Castilla and La Ceiba as supply dumps, Nazi agents began bribing workers from United Fruit and Standard Fruit, into providing the Germans with bootleg diesel siphoned from tractors, field generators, and other equipment. Germans were keen on supplying their mariners with fruit, liquor, beer, water, and other contraband merchandise. These would be surreptitiously loaded onto barges which would rendezvous with the U-boats in between the mainland and the Bay Islands.

Germany and Italy based most
of their submarine fleet

on the island of Martinique.

This illicit commerce ended when US entered the war in December 1941, declaring war on Japan on December 11 Germany and Italy declared war on the US in response. Honduras followed suit and declared war on Germany and Italy on December 12. A blacklist of the 510 documented Germans living in Honduras had been compiled by US intelligence.

These “undesirable aliens” were arrested, and their businesses and properties confiscated. These Germans were taken from their Honduran families and deported to internment camps in Texas. The men were sent to a 22-acre compound called Camp Kennedy and the women and children relocated to another camp called Crystal City.

A total of around 4,500 Germans from all over South and Central America would pass through these camps during the war.
Though many would be repatriated to Germany in exchange for seriously wounded American military personnel, many Honduran Germans would remain until late 1946, after the war’s end, returning to find their homes and businesses in ruins and unable to claim any reparations. To say that the German population of Honduras was inconvenienced during World War II would be a major understatement.

America’s baby boomers are filing for bankruptcy at alarmingly increasing rates. Three times more people over 65 were forced into bankruptcy in 2016 than in 1991. In 2016 3.6 people per 1,000 filed for bankruptcy in the 65 to 74 age bracket. Their average debt was only $17,000, but they had few options to get out of their financial situation. These baby boomers are in distress with declining income, rising healthcare costs, and mounting debt.

Slovenia

After the first solar powered aircraft circumnavigated the globe in 2016, several electric airplane manufacturers began production. One of the biggest in this small but growing and disruptive industry is Pipistrel, a Slovenian airplane manufacturer that in 2011 launched Taurus G4, the first electric four-seat aircraft. These electric aircraft are cheaper to construct, cheaper to operate, and the chassis is subjected to less vibrations and noise. With battery energy density rising by as much as 8 percent per year, the batteries hold increasing amount of energy per kilo. Pipistrel’s Alpha Electro two-seater costs $130,000 and can fly for about an hour.

Bhutan

In 1971 Bhutan dropped Gross National Product as the principal way to measure the county’s progress and embraced GNH – Gross National Happiness, an index that measures the spiritual, social, physical and environmental comfort of its citizens. The UN got in the game of defining happiness and is issuing its own list of happy countries based on GDP, life expectancy and social support. This year’s top rank went to Finland and Bhutan came in at 97th place. Bhutan, a homogenous Himalayan kingdom with strong culture has been quite content loosing the GDP race since it was adopted as a standard in 1944. While 70% of Bhutanese live without electricity and quarter of the population makes it on $1.25 a day, people seem quite content with life there and haven’t pleaded for asylum in Europe.

Germany

To recuperate from the stress and tedium of living in Germany, the government is paying for refugees to take paid vacations back home: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Bangladesh, wherever. While the refugees supposedly “felt unsafe in their own counties” they feel safe to go back there on a jet airline courtesy of German taxpayers for a three week vacations. There have been close to 2 million asylum seekers in Germany since 2012. And the country has a foreign population of 10 million.

Israel

Israel received its fifth nuclear cruise missile armed Dolphin-class submarine, ‘Rahav’, courtesy of Germany. Israeli nuclear armed subs have operated in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean and in 2013 launched cruise ship missiles again the Syrian port of Latakia. West Germany and France have funded the Israeli nuclear defense program since the 1960s. Israel has 300-400 nuclear warheads and, like India, Pakistan, and South Sudan never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The US has given $234 billion to Israel despite a 1961 US ban of aid to countries engaged in clandestine nuclear programs.