- Sir Winston Churchill when once asked why he had booked on an Italian liner when the RMS Queen Elizabeth was available.
'There are three things I like about Italian ships. First, their cuisine, which is unsurpassed. Second, their service, which is quite superb. And then - in time of emergency - there is none of this nonsense about women and children first.'
A Massachusetts appeals court has verbally skewered a judge who ordered that a mentally ill woman have an abortion against her will even if it meant she had to be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed” into a hospital.Read the rest here.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court this week overturned the ruling by Norfolk Probate Judge Christina L. Harms, who had also ordered that the 32-year-old woman, known as “Mary Moe,” be sterilized.
The appellate decision noted that Moe “has consistently expressed her opposition to abortion” and likely would “continue to do so if she were competent.”
As for the sterilization order, state Appellate Court Associate Justice Andrew R. Grainger wrote: “No party requested this measure, none of the attendant procedural requirements has been met, and the judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air.”
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Republican presidential contest took a series of unexpected twists Thursday as Texas Gov. Rick Perry quit the race and endorsed Newt Gingrich, while officials in Iowa declared that former senator Rick Santorum had in fact won more votes than front-runner Mitt Romney in the caucuses there two weeks earlier.Read the rest here.
The developments struck a blow to Romney, who just days ago appeared poised to lock up the Republican nomination by the end of the month. But on the morning of a potentially decisive debate in Charleston, the race was suddenly in flux. Gingrich seemed to be enjoying a sudden burst of momentum — drawing huge crowds, getting new endorsements and ticking upward in multiple polls — while Santorum laid claim to the Iowa caucuses as a victory.
But Gingrich faced his own setback Thursday after his former wife, Marianne, gave an interview to The Washington Post describing her husband’s infidelity. He is also expected to release his tax returns later Thursday, a move designed to pressure Romney to release his own, which Romney has said he will not do until April.
Sunt autem, Oxonienses, et alii pro quibus Omnipotentem deprecari possimus. Mensis enim Ianuarii dies iam quintus decimus lucescit; qui dies quamquam non omnibus candidus laetitiam tamen nonnullis haud minimam adferre debet. Nam annus unus elapsus est ab illo die quo Benedictus papa eius nominis sextus decimus, advocatis beata Maria et beato Iohanne Henrico, huius ecclesiae quondam Vicario, Ordinariatum ut vocant erexit. Quem vero pontificem, in Anglia peregrinantem, hos apices somniantes non visitasse, virum doctissimum a doctis non esse receptum, virum erga Dei Genetricem tam pium in hac eiusdem ecclesia locum orandi non invenisse, virum scriptis beati Iohannis Henrici inter primos eruditum, eius altare, eius ambonem, non vidisse – dico aperte – admodum doleo. Fingite, Academici, pontificem porticum illam appropinquare per quam beatus Iohannes Henricus hanc aedem precaturus contionaturus litaturus saepe ingressus est; porticum dico iuxta mentem archiepiscopi illius aedificatam qui nomine suo martyrii sui LAUDes designavit, cuius porticus locum summum rite coronata Deipara Virgo tenet. Columnas idem papa agnovisset quales salomoniacas nuncupatas Iohannes Laurentius circa altare clavigeri discipuli in colle Vaticano eisdem fere annis ponebat quibus hunc imaginem hanc porticum has columnas, pignora duco populi Christiani in unitatem coniuncti, alma Academia Oxonii erigendas curavit. Quae vero facta sunt in aevo cum oecumenico tum Mariano quo tempore Roma et Cantuaria paene inter se osculatae sunt; quo aevo Catholicae Ecclesiae gubernacula summus ille pontifex et Urbanus et doctus tenebat cuius auspiciis vates quidem Polonicus, vir ipso Flacco minime indignus, Virginis “teretes pedum suras non humilem lambere Cynthiam” canere non dedignatus est.Legetque illud omnibus.
Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.Read the rest here.
A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based.
As the race for the Republican nomination heats up, Mitt Romney is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a shroud of secrecy around the details about his vast personal wealth, including, as ABC News has discovered, his investment in funds located offshore and his ability to pay a lower tax rate.
"His personal finances are a poster child of what's wrong with the American tax system," said Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who is an authority on tax enforcement and offshore banking.
On Tuesday, Romney disclosed that he has been paying a far lower percentage in taxes than most Americans, around 15 percent of his annual earnings. It has been Romney's Republican rivals who have driven the tax issue onto center stage. For weeks, Romney has cited a desire for privacy as his reason for not sharing his tax returns -- a gesture of transparency that is now expected from presidential contenders.
"I can tell you we follow the tax laws," he said recently while on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. "And if there's an opportunity to save taxes, we like anybody else in this country will follow that opportunity."
The war in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of two sons of an Arkansas couple who also have a third son in the military.Read the rest here.
Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin Wise, 34, of Little Rock, was on his fourth deployment overseas when he was injured during an insurgent attack on his unit last week. He died from his wounds Sunday at hospital in Germany, the Department of Defense said in a statement Tuesday.
His brother, 35-year-old Jeremy Wise, was killed in a terrorist attack on a CIA outpost in Afghanistan in December 2009. He was a former Navy Seal working as a security contractor.
Their brother, Marine Corps Cpl. Matthew Wise, is based Hawaii but was in Germany to be with his brother, his wife Amber said. She said she was at Benjamin's home in Washington state watching his children, but she declined further comment.
The Army Ranger is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.
The men's parents, Dr. Jean and Mary Wise of Hope, Ark., and their sister did not return telephone messages seeking comment from The Associated Press. But the family released a statement thanking friends and Benjamin's fellow soldiers "for their sincere expressions of sympathy during this very difficult time."
His family described him as a loving husband, devoted father, caring son and selfless soldier.
The boss, who’s something of a gold standard enthusiast, is excited: Newt Gingrich called this morning for a Gold Commission, like the one Ronald Reagan set up in 1981, to consider how to get back to hard money (and perhaps to gold). Here’s video of Gingrich speaking in Columbia, S.C., at a foreign policy forum sponsored by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. (The text is below.)Read the rest here.
“We need to get our house in order. And we need to vaccinate ourselves against foreign contagion. The correct answer to the Euro is not to spend more American money propping up the Germans who prop up Southern Europe. The correct answer is to figure how we seal our banks off; how we make sure we protect ourselves and then say to the Europeans: you have a problem and you need to solve it.
“Part of our approach ought to be to reestablish something Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and that is to have a Commission on Gold to look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.
“We need to repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. We need to say to the Federal Reserve: your only job is to maintain the stability of the dollar because we want a dollar to be worth thirty years from now what it is worth now because that optimizes saving and investment because people know what they are going to back.
MOSCOW, January 18 (Itar-Tass) – Construction of forty Russian Orthodox churches will be underway in Moscow City’s densely populated bedroom communities in 2012, Vladimir Ressin, an advisor to the Mayor of Moscow told reporters Wednesday.Source.
All in all, the authorities plan building some 200 new Russian Orthodox churches in the city’s dormitory districts that have an apparent shortage of church facilities.
“Foundations of twenty church buildings have already been laid and we’re supposed to make arrangements on another twenty land plots this year,” Ressin said after a conference on the Program 200 that envisions the construction of 200 fast-to-build churches.
He is the supervisor of the project.
“I mean considering the situation with utility lines, geology surveys, architectural design projects, and the dates of public hearings,” he said.
The scope of participants in the conference that was held in the downtown Cathedral of the Savior included clergymen, officials from all the prefectures of the city, experts from construction companies and design bureaus, and executives of investor companies.
Conferences on the program will be held in the Cathedral of the Savior weekly.
The Obama administration will announce this afternoon that it is rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.Read the rest here.
However, the administration will allow TransCanada to reapply after it develops an alternate route around the sensitive habitat of Nebraska’s Sandhills. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will make the announcement, which comes in response to a congressionally mandated Feb. 21 deadline for action.
The cruise liner captain accused of abandoning ship after he grounded it off the coast of Italy Friday now says he only left because he slipped and tripped into a lifeboat while helping passengers evacuate the ship.Read the rest here.
The Supreme Court Wednesday ordered a new hearing for an Alabama death-row inmate who missed a critical appeals deadline because his lawyers at a prestigious New York law firm ceased to represent him without telling him or court officials.Read the rest here.
The circumstances surrounding the appeals of Cory R. Maples--which included a mailroom mix-up at the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell that returned unopened an adverse ruling against Maples--created a “veritable perfect storm of misfortune,” according to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Such extraordinary events, the court ruled 7 to 2, meant Maples deserved another hearing.
“No just system would lay the default at Maples’ death-cell door,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.
The court went to some length to explain that it was not adjusting its previous decisions that in most post-conviction appeals, the mistakes of lawyers must be attributed to their clients and cannot be grounds for a new hearing.
“A markedly different situation is presented, however, when an attorney abandons his client without notice, and thereby occasions the default,” Ginsburg wrote.
Maples was convicted of shooting two acquaintances in the head in 1995. He stole money and a car, and he confessed when captured two weeks later. He is not contesting his guilt.
Doing some research recently I’ve found that almost 9 out of 10 of the trades on any given day on Wall Street are between professionals, not individuals. Think about that for a second. When you go to make a trade, 9 out of 10 times you are doing it against someone that does it for a living. And not just a living, but paid really big bucks to do it and has a tremendous amount of resources behind them. This includes mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, professional speculators, investment banks, etc.Read the rest here.
But it gets even better. If 9 out of 10 trades are between professionals that means that most of the trades pros do are between each other. Now that’s interesting to consider. That means the average you see in the investing products on Wall Street represents the best that the pros on Wall Street can do in any single year.
Often I read about an investing strategy or trading method that claims to beat the broad market indices. That’s a pretty bold claim. I have to wonder if the sellers of these ideas are aware of the reality of trading on Wall Street. To think that you’re going to teach an individual investor to go up against a highly skilled pro and win. It’s kind of like telling an amateur golfer they are going to turn into Tiger Woods if they just buy the right golf club. It’s a fun thing to think about, but just not very realistic.
Even much vaunted hedge funds, the supposed masters of secret Wall Street strategies, often bomb. If they can’t do it, what chance does an individual have?
OTTAWA — A Canadian naval officer who worked in some of the country’s key military intelligence centers has been charged with breach of trust and passing along government secrets to a “foreign entity.” The officer, Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, 40, remained in jail on Tuesday after his lawyer asked a court in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to delay a bail hearing to give him more time to study the government’s case.Read the rest here.
Neither the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the military nor the government offered much detail publicly about the charges, including the identity of the foreign power. But the Canadian television network CTV said it was Russia, without giving the source for that information.
The European Commission has launched legal action against Hungary's Fidesz government for violations of European Union treaty law and erosion of democracy, marking a dramatic escalation in the war of words with the EU's enfant terrible.Read the rest here.
Hungary's defiant premier Viktor Orbán has no hope of securing vital funding from the EU and the International Monetary Fund until the dispute is resolved, leaving him a stark choice of either bowing to EU demands or letting his country slide into bankruptcy.
Yields on Hungary's two-year debt jumped to 9.17pc on Tuesday, an unsustainable level for an economy in recession with public debt of near 80pc of GDP. Hungary's debt was cut to junk status by rating agencies last week.
Capital Economics said Hungary must repay €5.9bn (£4.9bn) in EU-IMF loans and raise external funds equal to 18pc of GDP this year, the highest in Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of household debt is in Swiss francs, leading to a lethal currency mismatch as capital flight weakens the forint.
"Hungary is playing with fire," said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank. "The EU is not bluffing. It will let Hungary go over the edge to make the point that EU countries must play by the rules. Our worry is that Hungary's government has not yet got the message."
FLORENCE, S.C. — Bowing to pressure from his Republican rivals as well as the Democrats, Mitt Romney told reporters here Tuesday that he plans to release his federal income tax returns this spring and estimated his rate at about 15 percent.Read the rest here.
“What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Romney, a GOP presidential candidate, said. “My last 10 years, I’ve — my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual income. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”
