Things that make you go Hmm....... And a a Break From Greece !

   Well , good morning All ! Just another day , waiting like Godot to see what Plan 12 from Outer Space gets put forth for Greece's neverending PSI debt swap and eternal bailout .  A few hours to kill before US GDP - have to love a good piece of fiction , right ? Anyway , just as a open post , here are a few things that made me go hmm today ! First up , anyone buying the notion that 35 pounds of cocaine ( street value about $ 450,000 )  allegedly sent by a mexican drug cartel went to a dummy address .... did the wrong dummies screw up the intended transaction ? Nice bribe perhaps , hard to understand why send the dope to the UN rather than some other NYC address - last time I checked , there's much more security in place at the UN than a  Brooklyn bodega.

1) Two forged diplomatic pouches containing a total of 35 pounds (16 kilos) of cocaine were delivered last week to the UN headquarters building in New York, according to a UN official speaking on condition of anonymity.

The packages, delivered to the mail room, were singled out Jan. 16 by security staff during a scan, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

No recipient was identified on the shipment, which was sent from Mexico City, and the badly forged UN logo on the parcels was an effort to get the shipment across the border, the official said.

“Two suspicious mail bags were intercepted by the Security and Safety Service at United Nations headquarters in New York,” according to a statement released by the UN spokesman’s office, which declined to describe the contents.

“The United Nations nor anyone located in the United Nations was the intended recipient of this delivery and the bags were not UN bags, diplomatic or other,” according to the statement.

     Well , I guess that's the story and the UN is just going to stick with that one - until someon figures how to get the coke from the NYPD ! Second item that made me go hmmm..... I see the UN Security Council is set to debate a draft resolution supporting the Arab League plan for Assad to relinquish power..... Russia still stands firmly against it for now. Say what you like about Syria , this appears to be the Libya movie all over again. Consider the state of Libya today after the power grab there.

Russia says it cannot support the current version of a joint Arab-Western draft U.N. resolution on Syria because it “does not take into account” Moscow's positions on how to end the 10-month-old political crisis.

  

2)  U.N. Security Council to hold closed talks on Syria situation

By the CNN Wire Staff

updated 11:20 PM EST, Thu January 26, 2012

Pillay: Tracking Syrian deaths diffiicult

(CNN) -- The U.N. Security Council will hold closed-door talks Friday afternoon on the situation in Syria, the British and French delegations reported Thursday night on their respective Twitter feeds.

The discussion -- set to start at 3 p.m. -- comes as members weigh a draft U.N. resolution on Syria, obtained by CNN this week, that calls on "all states" to take steps similar to Arab League sanctions imposed in November.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil el-Araby and Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, will travel to New York for talks with the United Nations on Monday, an Arab League official said Thursday. They will meet with the Security Council during the visit, said the official, who cannot be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

The 22-member Arab League has called on al-Assad's regime to stop violence against civilians, free political detainees, remove tanks and weapons from cities and allow outsiders -- including the international news media -- to travel freely in Syria. On Wednesday, Syria's government agreed to a one-month extension of the league's monitoring mission there.

     The third item was a piece on Iran that struck me as just a tad too pat , smacking of hubris.....

3)  Citing a number of officials and reports, the New York Times said that estimates that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities “would set off a catastrophic series of events” is considered by some to be “partly a bluff,” and that these estimates are accepted at the top levels of the Israeli government.

  Israeli officials and academic experts think that Iran’s threats of retaliation to a possible strike against it are a bluff, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The newspaper said it had spoken with eight current and recent top Israeli officials, and that these conversations suggest that “since Israel has been demanding the new sanctions, including an oil embargo and seizure of Iran’s Central Bank assets, it will give the sanctions some months to work; the sanctions are viewed here as probably insufficient; a military attack remains a very real option; and postattack situations are considered less perilous than one in which Iran has nuclear weapons.”

One retired official told the New York Times that based on past scenarios including threats from Saddam Hussein to “burn half of Israel,” and threats from Hezbollah which resulted in limited harm to Israel, “If you put all those retaliations together and add in the terrorism of recent years, we are probably facing some multiple of that.”