WASHINGTON — In a seeming rejection of liberal orthodoxy, President Obama has spoken disparagingly about liberal victories before the Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s — suggesting that justices made the “error” of overstepping their bounds and trampling on the role of elected officials.Read the rest here.
Mr. Obama made his remarks Wednesday night against a backdrop of recent Supreme Court rulings in which conservative justices have struck down laws favored by liberals, most notably a January ruling that nullified restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections.
“It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically,” Mr. Obama said.
“And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was — is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”
He added, “The concept of judicial restraint cuts both ways.”
...So naturally Navy Secretary Ray Mabus waited only a few weeks after the death of Democrat pork barrel king Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania to announce that a new San Antonio class ship (see photo above) would be named for the Pennsylvania grump.Read the rest here.
Longevity is king where seniority rules. And the 77-year-old Murtha lasted almost 18 terms, which is a long time worthy of keen admiration by the elected likes of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (only 11 terms so far), who called Murtha "our dear Jack..."
...But there's a problem. And it's growing. Back in 2005 as part of Murtha's late-breaking opposition to the Iraq war he was for before he was opposed, when a few fellow Marines were accused of killing some Iraqi civilians in Haditha, ex-Marine Murtha announced the soldiers had done it "in cold blood."
Never mind that there hadn't been a full investigation yet, let alone trials.
Despite Murtha's preemptive verdict, eventual charges against six Marines were dropped, one was acquitted and another awaits trial on reduced charges. Other than that, Murtha was bang-on.
Immediately after Mabus' announcement, a raging online controversy broke out even on the Navy's own website, where Murtha was accused of betrayal.
The honor was called inappropriate, "a slap in the face," an "absolute disgrace" and akin to naming a U.S. ship for Benedict Arnold.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has privately warned that whichever leader wins the election next week will be kicked out of power for decades because of the severity of budget cuts they will have to instigate, it was claimed today.Read the rest here.
To anyone who has been following First Amendment jurisprudence in the past 40 or 50 years, the recent Supreme Court decision (United States v. Stevens, April 20) striking down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of videos depicting animal cruelty in a manner intended to satisfy a particular “sexual fetish” will come as no surprise.Read the rest here.
The proverbial ordinary citizen, however, may be surprised to learn that, according to Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, the First Amendment must be read to allow the production and dissemination of so called “crush videos,” videos (and I quote from Roberts’ opinion) that “feature the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals” often by women wearing high-heeled “spike” shoes who slowly “crush animals to death” while talking to them in “a kind of dominatrix patter” as they scream and squeal “in great pain.” How has it come to this?
SAN CRISTOBAL, VENEZUELA -- Every day for the past three months, government-programmed blackouts have meant the lights flicker and go dark in a city that once bustled with commerce. And Fifth Street, with its auto parts stores and car repair shops, has ground to a halt.Read the rest here.
"We just stop," said Jesus Yanis, who paints cars. "We don't work."
Neither does the rest of Venezuela, where a punishing, months-old energy crisis and years of state interventions in the economy are taking a brutal toll on private business. The result is that the economy is flickering and going dark, too, challenging Venezuela's mercurial leader, Hugo Chávez, and his socialist experiment like never before.
No matter that Venezuela is one of the world's great oil powers -- among the top five providers of crude to the United States. Economists say Venezuela is gripped by an economic crisis that has no easy or fast solution, even if sluggish oil production were ramped up and profligate state spending were cut.
...The internal problem stems from the fact that the euro, widely hailed as Europe’s greatest initiative, is starting to look like a strategic mistake. Europe’s countries and cultures may be too different to live under the same set of economic policies. While none of the European countries wants American-style capitalism, some are much better than others at managing their economic affairs in an orderly fashion. Germany and the Scandinavian countries plus the Netherlands in particular seem to have a gift for good economic management. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece don’t manage things as well, by and large. (France stands uneasily in the middle; more competent than its southern neighbors, but less effective than the Germans.)Read the rest here.
Historically, the Latin countries and Greece have used currency depreciation to ease the strain when poor economic decision making has caused debt to rise too quickly. As has often been the case in Latin America, inflating bad debts away has been a traditional resort of political elites.
In Germany, inflation is associated with the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century. The runaway Weimar inflation brought the consequences of Germany’s devastating World War One defeat to every home in the country; after World War Two the German currency similarly became worthless. Whole generations lost their savings and inflation for Germans even today remains associated with the worst kind of irresponsibility and disaster.
The euro was a glorious fudge. The Latin countries plus Greece could enjoy the benefits of German discipline and virtue while carrying on with traditionally unsustainable public and private sector policies. In the old, pre-euro days, the southern economies had to pay high interest rates on their debt; wary investors knew that inflation and devaluation were likely and so demanded interest rates that would compensate them for the risk. The lira, the drachma: everyone knew they would lose value over time against the Deutsche mark and even the dollar, and interest rates reflected this understanding. But as the southern countries moved into the euro, calculations changed. For the last twenty years, countries like Greece and Italy were able to borrow money at essentially the same rate that Germany could.
Typically, they decided to spend rather than save this windfall. Greece in particular decided that since the costs of servicing its debt were so low, it made sense to run up more debt. Lousy leaders gave greedy civil servants fat raises; promises were cheap and the government scattered them far and wide. In Italy as well, once the national debt was less painful to carry, there was less pressure to reduce the national debt.
Greece’s fortunes were dealt yet another blow as Standard & Poor’s slashed its credit rating to junk status - BB+ - the first time that has happened to a euro member since the single currency was created, pushing yields on 10-year Greek bonds up to a record 9.73pc.Read the rest here.
The credit-rating agency also cut Portugal’s sovereign debt ratings by two notches to A-, as the swirling storm hit the country with full-force.
“We have gone past the point of no return,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief Europe economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland.“There is a complete loss of confidence. The bond markets are in disintegration and it is getting worse every day.
“The ECB has been side-lined in the Greek crisis so far but do you allow a bond crash in your region if you are the lender-of-last resort? They may have to act as contagion spreads to larger countries such as Italy. We started to see the first glimpse of that today.”
Mr Cailloux said the ECB should resort to its “nuclear option” of intervening directly in the markets to purchase government bonds.
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans are prepared to end their stalling tactics on new banking regulations and will attempt to change the bill on the Senate floor, Republican officials said.Read the rest here.
Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked an effort to by Democrats to begin floor debate of legislation overhauling the nation’s financial regulatory system – the third such vote in three days as Democrats sought to paint the Republicans as obstructing tighter rules for Wall Street.Read the rest here.
Both sides say they expect the legislation to be approved. If so, it would be the most far-reaching restructuring of the nation’s financial regulatory framework since the aftermath of the Great Depression.
The vote was 56 to 42, with Democrats once again falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome the Republican filibuster and advance the measure. Democrats said they might keep the Senate in session through the night to dramatize the Republican opposition.
The ratings agency Standard & Poor’s lowered the debt rating of Spain on Wednesday, its third downgrade of a European country in two days.Read the rest here.
The downgrade came one day after the S.& P. cut the ratings of Greek and Portuguese debt, moves that set off a flight by investors away from global equities and into fixed income securities, particularly those in United States dollars.
The news Wednesday set off no such reaction, although an index of Spanish stocks fell about 3 percent. The S.&P. downgraded Spain’s debt one step, to AA, with a negative outlook.
With Greece inching closer to the brink of financial collapse, fear that the debt crisis will spread rattled global markets for a second day on Wednesday as investors awaited a signal from financial leaders gathering in Berlin.
Shares slumped 1 to 2 percent across much of Europe and Asia, and the euro briefly fell to its lowest level in about a year against the dollar, as investors worried that Portugal, Spain and even Ireland might not be able to borrow the billions of dollars they need to finance their government spending.
The Supreme Court gave its approval Wednesday to displaying a cross on public land to honor fallen soldiers, saying the Constitution "does not require the eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm."Read the rest here.
Speaking for a divided court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the 1st Amendment called for a middle-ground "policy of accommodation" toward religious displays on public land, not a strict separation of church and state.
Kennedy disagreed with judges in California who said U.S. National Park Service officials must remove a small Latin cross from the Mojave National Preserve that had stood since 1934 to honor soldiers who died in World War I. The judges said the display of the cross on public land amounted to a government endorsement of religion.
"A Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs," he wrote. "Here, a Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten."
The gallows at Wala Wala Prison in Washington State.
Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon: He spent more than 17 years on Florida's death row before 2002 when he become the 98th condemned man in the United States to be exonerated and released from prison. The State of Florida payed him $100 in restitution for his wrongful imprisonment.
Read the rest hereEnding the Slavery Blame Game
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
As I was driving one day I encountered a bumper sticker admonishing me:Read the rest here.
“WARNING! In the event of Rapture, this car will be driverless.”
The strange belief in the Rapture teaches that some day (sooner rather than later), without warning, born-again Christians will begin to float up from the freeway, abandoned vehicles careening wildly. There will be airliners in the sky suddenly with no one at the controls! Presumably, God is removing these favored ones from earth to spare them the tribulation of the Anti-Christ which the rest of us will have to endure.
Unfortunately the Rapture has been promoted widely by the Left Behind series of books that have sold over 70 million copies.
The Rapture represents a radical misinterpretation of Scripture. I remember watching “Sixty Minutes”a year ago and was appalled to hear the announcer say that “the Rapture is an unmistakenly Christian doctrine”. It is not!
It is a serious distortion of Scripture.
LONDON -- The Greek debt crisis escalated again Thursday as new data showed the government's gaping budget deficit was worse than previously thought and investors expressed fears that officials in Athens may not agree to stringent demands for an international bailout.Read the rest here.
The developments put new pressure on the euro and other heavily indebted European nations including Spain, Portugal even Belgium.
Moody's rating agency, meanwhile, downgraded Greek debt for the second time in five months, saying it feared the financially troubled nation may be forced to continue paying high interest rates that could compound its economic woes.
Officials from the European Union and International Monetary Fund were in emergency bailout talks with the government in Athens, although it remained unclear if Greek officials would accede to demands for more austerity measures beyond the tax hikes and salary cuts for state workers imposed earlier this year.
The attack on the 1,220-ton Cheonan, which sank on March 26 with the loss of 46 of its 104 crew, was carried out in retaliation for a skirmish between warships of the two nations' navies in November of last year, South Korea claims.Read the rest here.
The South Korean government has refused to comment officially on the reports but Defence Minister Kim Tae Young told a parliamentary session that the military believed that the sinking was a deliberate act by North Korea.
Officials in military intelligence say they warned the government earlier this year that North Korea was preparing a suicide-squad submarine attack on a South Korean ship.
"Military intelligence made the report to the Blue House [the presidential office] and to the Defence Ministry immediately after the sinking of the Cheonan that it was clearly the work of North Korea's military," a military source said.
Despite the criticism of the Supreme Court’s eminent domain ruling in Kelo, the city of Auburn, New York appears undeterred and is threatening to invoke eminent domain to seize private property for a private company. The Kelo opinion was wrongly decided in allowing a Connecticut town to seize homes to give the land to a private company. Putting that flawed legal logic aside, I am astonished that elected officials continue to abuse eminent domain powers in this way and shows the need for state laws barring the practice. Mayor Mike Quill insists that the interests of the majority (and one powerful developer) must trump the property rights of a few citizens.Read the rest here.
Ironically, after selling out their fellow citizens, the people of New London, Connecticut never did reap the rewards that they sought. The city is threatening citizens that if they do not reach an agreement with a developer, the city will come in and take the land and give it to the developer.
Dr. Küng:Read the rest here.
A decade and a half ago, a former colleague of yours among the younger progressive theologians at Vatican II told me of a friendly warning he had given you at the beginning of the Council’s second session. As this distinguished biblical scholar and proponent of Christian-Jewish reconciliation remembered those heady days, you had taken to driving around Rome in a fire-engine red Mercedes convertible, which your friend presumed had been one fruit of the commercial success of your book, The Council: Reform and Reunion.
This automotive display struck your colleague as imprudent and unnecessarily self-advertising, given that some of your more adventurous opinions, and your talent for what would later be called the sound-bite, were already raising eyebrows and hackles in the Roman Curia. So, as the story was told me, your friend called you aside one day and said, using a French term you both understood, “Hans, you are becoming too evident.”
As the man who single-handedly invented a new global personality-type—the dissident theologian as international media star—you were not, I take it, overly distressed by your friend’s warning. In 1963, you were already determined to cut a singular path for yourself, and you were media-savvy enough to know that a world press obsessed with the man-bites-dog story of the dissenting priest-theologian would give you a megaphone for your views. You were, I take it, unhappy with the late John Paul II for trying to dismantle that story-line by removing your ecclesiastical mandate to teach as a professor of Catholic theology; your subsequent, snarling put-down of Karol Wojtyla’s alleged intellectual inferiority in one volume of your memoirs ranked, until recently, as the low-point of a polemical career in which you have become most evident as a man who can concede little intelligence, decency, or good will in his opponents.
BALIMBING, Indonesia — The two wild Sumatran tigers, held in large, adjoining cages here, had killed at least eight people between them.Read the rest here
They growled ferociously, lunged at a man outside, ran in circles inside the cages and slammed against the walls, their eyes radiating a fierceness absent in zoo tigers. But if all goes well, one of them eventually will be reintroduced into the wild.
In the only one of two such experiments in the world, tiger experts here have begun rehabilitating and releasing tigers that have attacked humans and livestock elsewhere on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra. As a growing human population and economic development keep squeezing tigers out of their remaining habitats, clashes are increasing with deadly frequency. Last year, tigers killed at least nine people in Sumatra, mostly illegal loggers pushing ever deeper into previously untouched forest.
Chicago native Ben loves his country and is proud to be an American. Yet the longtime resident of Melbourne has just relinquished his U.S. citizenship. "This is not something I did lightly or happily, but I saw no other choice," says Ben, a businessman who became an Australian citizen two years ago.Read the rest here.
His words resonate with another American expatriate, John, a business owner based near Lausanne, Switzerland, who like Ben asked that his last name be withheld for fear of alienating his family in the U.S. "Giving up my U.S. citizenship is a genuine option," says the Ohio native, who recently received his Swiss passport and is considering relinquishing his American one. "I am at a breaking point — being American costs me time [and] money, but mostly aggravation."
For U.S. citizens, cutting ties with their native land is a drastic and irrevocable step. But as Overseas American Week, a lobbying effort by expatriate-advocacy groups, convenes in Washington this week, it's one that an increasing number of American expats are willing to take. According to government records, 502 expatriates renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009 — more than double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. And these figures don't include the hundreds — some experts say thousands — of applications languishing in various U.S. consulates and embassies around the world, waiting to be processed. While a small number of Americans hand in their passports each year for political reasons, the new surge in permanent expatriations is mainly because of taxes.
Considering that an estimated 3 million to 6 million Americans reside abroad, the number of renouncements is small. But expatriate organizations say the recent increase reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. government treats its expats and their money: the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence.
This summer all Puerto Ricans will have the chance to be born again -- at least on paper.Read the rest here.
The government of Puerto Rico is invalidating every birth certificate issued on the island before July 1, 2010, in an attempt to curb rampant fraud and identity theft that officials say has ruined lives, strained social service programs and compromised national security.
Each of Puerto Rico's 4 million residents and the estimated 1.2 million Puerto Rico-born Americans living in the 50 states will have to apply for new vital documents to legally prove that they exist and remain eligible for government benefits.
It's a radical solution to what many say has been a serious and growing crisis involving Puerto Rican birth certificates, which are used to apply for everything from U.S. passports to Medicaid.
When Arizona's bitter Republican primary election arrives in August, it is likely to be 102 degrees in the shade, of which there is little. It is the kind of weather in which only the hearty and highly motivated venture outdoors -- Gila monsters and Tea Party activists. Which may not be good news for Sen. John McCain, who is generally disliked by the latter.Read the rest here.
A recent poll puts McCain just five points ahead of J.D. Hayworth, a former congressman and radio talk show host who aspires to be Arizona's Samuel Adams. McCain operatives dispute that the race is this close, but they cannot dispute that McCain is running in a political environment in which absolutely anything could happen to an incumbent.
AFTER waiting nearly a week as an Icelandic volcano spewed turbine-mangling ash into the atmosphere — thwarting flights into, out of or through Europe — the airlines are supposed to begin flying passengers again on Tuesday.Read the rest here
Governments, businesses and most travelers, irritated by disrupted itineraries and worried about lost productivity, are delighted to see planes back in the sky. But I, for one, wish this blessedly jet-free interlude could have continued a little longer. In the eccentric, ground-level adventures of some stranded passengers — 700-mile taxi rides through Scandinavia, for instance, perhaps a horse-drawn stagecoach over the Alps if things got really desperate — I’m reminded of the romance we trade away each time we shuffle aboard an airplane.
In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.
Historic levels of government debt in the developed world could throw the global financial system back into crisis and clear plans are needed to bring it under control, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.Read the rest here.
In one of its first broad surveys since the recent recession gave way to renewed growth, the agency said that "sovereign risk" -- the chance that sovereign nations have racked up so much debt they won't be able to borrow enough money to pay their bills -- is now perhaps the central threat to the global financial system.
Governments in the United States and across Europe have accumulated levels of debt not seen since World War II as the recession crimped tax receipts, spending rose on entitlement programs, and emergency measures were put in place to support the economy.
"The crisis has lead to a deteriorating trajectory for debt" among developed countries, which could cause higher interest rates and slower growth and weaken the broader financial system, the IMF said. Government debt could "take the credit crisis into a new phase, as nations begin to reach the limits of public sector support for the financial system and the real economy."
...In this context, we have learned with great sadness of the message from the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, issued on February 11, 2010, entitled “A Call to Unity and Romanian Dignity.” In this message—which makes no reference to God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit—the Holy Synod of the Romanian Church claims to be following the Russian and Serbian examples and calls all Romanian Orthodox clergy and faithful outside Romania, those who find themselves “without a blessing” in other sister Orthodox Churches, to reestablish “direct communion” with the Romanian Patriarchate.Read the rest here.
We understand Bucharest's pastoral concern for isolated Romanian faithful in foreign lands. All the same, is it not shocking to see such concern expressed as a prerogative imposed by the Holy Synod on Romanian Christians in whatever foreign country they may be living and in opposition to Orthodox ecclesiology? On this point, the reference to the Council of Nicaea is not acceptable because the Fathers of that Council rejected the notion of dioceses defined by ethnic considerations; instead, they held, like the Apostles, only to the territorial principle...
Having stolen the show from the leaders of Britain’s two largest parties during a televised debate last Thursday, Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has seen his party surge in the polls to such an extent that he is suddenly at the center of what one British reporter is calling “the hysterical condition known as Cleggmania.”Read the rest here.
Just days after he was the third man of the British election campaign, Mr. Clegg now finds himself compared to Winston Churchill, Barack Obama, Princess Diana and even Jesus. The fact that some of those comparisons were made in jest by supporters of other candidates, in an attempt to pierce what the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, claims is “the biggest load of media-driven nonsense since the funeral of Diana,” is perhaps the most telling sign that support for the third party is now seen as a genuine threat, less than three weeks from election day.
Immediately after last week’s debate, supporters of the other parties suggested that Mr. Clegg’s performance was irrelevant, since his party was lagging in the polls and the vagaries of the British electoral map meant that he stood little chance of becoming prime minister. By Monday though, one poll put his approval rating at 72 percent, more than 50 percent ahead of his nearest rival, another showed his party picking up ten points and a third suggested that the electorate was now split roughly in three, with the Liberal Democrats slightly ahead of both the ruling Labor party and the Conservatives.
Daniel Almond, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, is ready to "muster outside D.C." on Monday with several dozen other self-proclaimed patriots, all of them armed. They intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.Read the rest here.
Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate controlorganized , bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a "totalitarian socialism" that tramples individual rights.
A member of several heretofore little-known groups, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Oath Keepers -- former and active military and law enforcement officials who have vowed to resist laws they deem unconstitutional -- Almond, 31, considers packing heat on the doorstep of the federal government within the mainstream of political speech.
Others consider it an alarming escalation of paranoia and anger in the age of Obama.
When her small executive search firm in New York City canceled its health insurance policy last year because of the recession and rising premiums, April Welles was able to buy her own plan and still be covered for her cancer and multiple sclerosis.Read the rest here.
She was lucky to live in New York, one of the first states to require insurance companies to offer comprehensive coverage to all people regardless of pre-existing conditions. But Ms. Welles, 58, also pays dearly: Her premium is $17,876 a year.
“That’s a lot of groceries,” she said.
New York’s insurance system has been a working laboratory for the core provision of the new federal health care law — insurance even for those who are already sick and facing huge medical bills — and an expensive lesson in unplanned consequences. Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net for people like Ms. Welles is falling apart.
The problem stems in part from the state’s high medical costs and in part from its stringent requirements for insurance companies in the individual and small group market. In 1993, motivated by stories of suffering AIDS patients, the state became one of the first to require insurers to extend individual or small group coverage to anyone with pre-existing illnesses.
Russian TU 160 Heavy BomberLONDON, April 16 (UPI) -- Russia is increasingly flexing its military muscles by penetrating Western airspace.Read the rest here.
European defense officials have been worried about an increasing number of Russian bombers entering Western airspace.
A pair of Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack bombers -- the largest jet-powered combat aircraft ever built, capable of carrying nuclear missiles -- last month entered British airspace over Northern Scotland, Deutsche Welle reports.
Two Tornado fighter jets from the British air force intercepted the supersonic bombers, accompanying them for four hours until they left British airspace.
Three and half years ago, a New York hedge fund manager with a bearish view on the housing market was pounding the pavement on Wall Street.Read the rest here.
Eager to increase his bets against subprime mortgages, the investor, John A. Paulson, canvassed firm after firm, looking for new ways to profit from home loans that he was sure would go sour.
Only a few investment banks agreed to help him. One was Deutsche Bank. The other was the mighty Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Paulson struck gold. His prescience made him billions and transformed him from a relative nobody into something of a celebrity on Wall Street and in Washington.
But now his brassy bets have thrust Mr. Paulson into an uncomfortable spotlight. On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Goldman for neglecting to tell its customers that mortgage investments they were buying consisted of pools of dubious loans that Mr. Paulson had selected because they were highly likely to fail.
By betting against the pool of questionable mortgage bonds, Mr. Paulson made $1 billion when they collapsed just a few months later, the S.E.C. said. Investors, who bought what regulators are essentially calling a pig in a poke, lost the same amount.
Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse, was accused of securities fraud in a civil lawsuit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly intended to fail.Read the rest here.
The move was the first time that regulators had taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market.
The suit also named Fabrice Tourre, a vice president at Goldman who helped create and sell the investment.
In a statement, Goldman called the commission’s accusations “completely unfounded in law and fact” and said it would “vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation.”
A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.Read the rest here.
A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.
LONDON — Next target: Portugal.Read the rest here.
Speculators have begun to zero in on another small member of Europe’s troubled monetary zone, highlighting the same economic flaw that brought Greece to the verge of insolvency: a chronically low savings rate that forces a reliance on the now-diminishing appetite of foreign investors to finance persistent deficits.
Just as investors are turning their attention to the next vulnerable country, Greece moved a step closer on Thursday to activating a $61 billion rescue package, as Prime Minister George A. Papandreou asked the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to meet in Athens next week.
The aid package agreed on last weekend — aimed at calming fears of a Greek default — has not yet had its desired effect. The yield on Greek 10-year bonds briefly topped 7.3 percent Thursday, not far from the 7.5 percent it was at before the rescue package was announced. Interest rates on 10-year government bonds for Portugal have also been rising, hitting a high of 4.5 percent on Thursday.
Though Greece’s finance ministry said its request for talks did not necessarily mean it would draw from the funds, it contributed to anxiety that helped push down the value of the euro by 0.008, to 1.3576 against the dollar.
It all raises the prospect that the loan package for Greece, the result of months of political haggling, may be nothing more than a bandage on a wound that shows little sign of healing.
Some analysts think the Greek bailout may have an opposite, more harmful long-term effect. Instead of ushering in a period of lower rates and market calm, it could prompt investors to test Europe’s — and in particular Germany’s — stomach for a rescue of other troubled European economies, beginning with Portugal.
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MOSCOW — Russia formally announced on Thursday that it would suspend all adoptions of Russian children by Americans, responding to the case of a 7-year-old boy who was sent back to Moscow alone last week by his adoptive mother in Tennessee. The case of the boy, who was named Artyom in Russia before he was adopted last year, has caused widespread anger here, and Russian officials said new regulations had to be put in place before adoptions by Americans could proceed.Read the rest here.
Early Saturday morning, when the town of Migdal Ha’emek is still sound asleep, the tiny church of St. Nicolay is crammed with people. There is a strong aroma of incense and thin, yellow candles glow softly, their light reflected on the golden icons. The murmur of Russian words grows into loud singing and the 100-strong parish repeats the prayers after the black-bearded priest and a small choir behind him.Read the rest here.
They are singing in Old Slavonic – the language that could be easily understood by the contemporaries of Ivan the Terrible, and nowadays is used only in prayer texts and church documents. Physically, the church of St. Nicolay is situated in the heart of this quiet and sleepy Jewish town in the North; spiritually it is a part of quite different world, the world of Russian Orthodoxy.
One has to strain his eyes to spot the cross on top of the church – a rare sight in a town with predominantly Jewish population. The simple structure is walled by a two-meter fence erected under the direct order of the municipality for the protection of the worshipers.
The church of St Nicolay was founded in 1894 and was partly funded by the Grand Duke Sergey, who also built the famous Russian Compound in Jerusalem. It has seen the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and the birth of the Jewish state. The church functioned until 1948, and in 1953 Migdal Ha’emek was founded. Long abandoned and in ruins, in 2004 the church was reconstructed by Sophia – the association of Russian Orthodox Christians in Israel. The funds mostly came from private donations of the parish.
Moscow, April 14, Interfax – Orthodox parishes dedicated to St. Patrick - patron saint of Ireland who is worshipped both in the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, may open in Russia.Read the rest here.
I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.Read the rest here.
Shows you how much I know. President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American — Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber.
Students of the law might raise a couple of questions: 1) Doesn’t it violate international law to fire missiles into Pakistan (especially on a roughly weekly basis) when the Pakistani government has given no formal authorization? 2) Wouldn’t firing a missile at al-Awlaki in Yemen compound the international-law question with a constitutional question — namely whether giving the death penalty to an American without judicially establishing his guilt deprives him of due process?
SAN FRANCISCO -- Two women were arrested at San Francisco State University early today after a group of protesters broke into a campus building, angered by sanctions handed down to demonstrators at a December building takeover, authorities said.Read the rest here.The two women, who are not San Francisco State students, were among 19 people who broke into the Cesar Chavez Student Center at about 4 a.m., said university spokeswoman Ellen Griffin.
University police responded, pepper-sprayed the two protesters when they resisted and arrested them, Griffin said. Their names were not immediately released. The other protesters dispersed but remained on campus, Griffin said.
The protest was in response to fines that were leveled as part of misconduct charges against 11 students involved in a two-day protest in December in which activists barricaded themselves inside the business school to protest fee hikes.
Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a decorated military man who has become a part of the fringe "birther" movement - which believes President Obama was not born in the United States - could face a dishonorable discharge for failing to obey orders, MSNBC reported on Tuesday.Read the rest here.
The 18-year veteran came out in support of the largely discredited conspiracy theorists at the end of March, proclaiming he would "disobey" his "illegal" orders to deploy.
"I believe all servicemen and women, and the American people, deserve the truth about President Obama's constitutional eligibility to the office of the presidency and the commander in chief," he said in a video statement posted on YouTube on March 30.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve chairman said Wednesday that the government must begin to make “difficult choices” to address its gaping deficits and warned that “postponing them will only make them more difficult.”Read the rest here.
Tax increases aloneRead the rest here.
If lawmakers opted to reduce the deficit strictly through tax increases, they would need raise more than $500 billion in new revenue, according to a Tax Policy Center study.
And they'd have to hike tax rates by a third to pull it off -- the bottom rate would go from 10% to 13.7%, and the top rate would rise from 35% today to 48%.
If they just wanted to raise the top three rates, they'd have to jack them up by 88%. So, for example, the top rate would rise from 35% to 66%.
To hit the deficit target by only raising rates on the highest-income households would require a far more drastic jump. Rates for individuals making more than $200,000 (or $250,000 for couples) would more than double, with the top rate approaching 77%.
All of these estimates don't account for how those taxpayers would behave when faced with higher taxes. If they did, the rate jumps would need to be even higher, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
Spending cuts alone
Trying to achieve the same deficit reduction without increasing taxes could be done by slashing spending.
But the cuts would be harsh. For instance, discretionary spending would need to be cut by 40%, according to an analysis by Sullivan. Discretionary spending pays for everything except Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt. In other words, it funds most federal government services and support, including defense, education and infrastructure.
Alternatively, lawmakers could just cut mandatory spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security by 25%.
Or they could just cut total spending -- both discretionary and mandatory -- by 13%.
From The Business Insider, April 12, 2010:Source
Nine months ago, Bill Gross's Total Return Fund was 50% in US Treasuries. Now it's only 30%, the lowest percentage in the 23 year history of the fund, says Nelson Schwartz of the NYT.
Why is Gross dumping Treasuries?
Two primary concerns:
* Inflation
* The massive tidal wave of money the US needs to raise in the coming years, which will increase the supply of Treasuries (driving prices down and rates up).
More broadly, Gross believes that, while interest rates have now generally been declining for more than 25 years, we're now moving to an era in which rates will rise, not fall.
PIMCO has shifted money into corporate bonds and foreign bonds, including Germany.
In January, Los Angeles Police Det. Nate Kouri was ordered to stop working.Read the rest here.
One of the LAPD's most productive homicide investigators sat idle for six weeks, unable to follow any leads on old cases or pick up new ones. Kouri was not being punished for misconduct or for botching an investigation. He was benched for working too hard -- and he is not the only one.
With the city reeling from its worst financial crisis in decades, the LAPD has stopped paying officers overtime wages, except in rare situations. In lieu of cash, officials have implemented a strict policy of forcing cops to take time off when they accrue large amounts of overtime hours. Because of demanding work schedules that routinely require them to investigate a case into the night or through the weekend, homicide detectives have been among the first officers to be sent home in significant numbers.
...But there’s another story to be told about John Paul II and his besieged successor. The last pope was a great man, but he was also a weak administrator, a poor delegator, and sometimes a dreadful judge of character.Read the rest here.
The church’s dilatory response to the sex abuse scandals was a testament to these weaknesses. So was John Paul’s friendship with the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. The last pope loved him and defended him. But we know now that Father Maciel was a sexually voracious sociopath. And thanks to a recent exposé by The National Catholic Reporter’s Jason Berry, we know the secret of Maciel’s Vatican success: He was an extraordinary fund-raiser, and those funds often flowed to members of John Paul’s inner circle.
Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down.
This isn’t an isolated case. In the 1990s, it was Ratzinger who pushed for a full investigation of Hans Hermann Groer, the Vienna cardinal accused of pedophilia, only to have his efforts blocked in the Vatican. It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.
So the high-flying John Paul let scandals spread beneath his feet, and the uncharismatic Ratzinger was left to clean them up. This pattern extends to other fraught issues that the last pope tended to avoid — the debasement of the Catholic liturgy, or the rise of Islam in once-Christian Europe. And it extends to the caliber of the church’s bishops, where Benedict’s appointments are widely viewed as an improvement over the choices John Paul made. It isn’t a coincidence that some of the most forthright ecclesiastical responses to the abuse scandal have come from friends and protégés of the current pope.
