Two US navy vessels have collided in the Strait of Hormuz near Iran, lightly injuring 15 sailors, the US navy said.
A nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Hartford, and amphibious transporter the USS New Orleans collided early on Friday, the US Navy Fifth Fleet said.
The incident is being investigated and damage to both ships is being evaluated, a navy statement said.
The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.
The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists.
Read more @ TimesOnlineAs the New York Times notes:
A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens....
At AIG Financial Products here, the riskiest of business was conducted in the blandest of settings.
...
When it comes to AIG Financial, people in this affluent town of about 18,000 are angry, protective, embarrassed or even oblivious to the notion that their town figured so prominently in the financial meltdown.
"I can't believe it — I had no idea they were here," says Marilyn Gould, a former member of the Board of Selectmen, a Planning and Zoning Commission member and director of the Wilton Historical Society.
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu was granted an extra two weeks on Friday to form a government he hopes will be as broad as possible, the presidency said.
The hawkish Likud leader wants to avoid giving too much clout to far-right and religious parties and will use the extra time to try to convince the centre-left Labour party of outgoing Defence Minister Ehud Barak to join his coalition.
These issues were not directly mentioned by Mr Obama but this is what he is referring to
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© November 15, 2008
Professor, Department of Economics
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275, USA
Two thousand eight was year extraordinaire. It started off in a rather nonchalant way, but ended with a bang. Its myriad and breathtaking events caught the world off guard, but please allow me to say, arrogant as it sounds, that they did not surprise me, including the epoch-making victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential election. I had anticipated them all in two books more than two years ago. The first, Greenspan’s Fraud, was written in 2005, and the second, The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, was finished before October 2006. In fact, the title of the second work itself reveals that I had anticipated an Obama-like revolution in the United States.
AIG's CEO, Edward Libby, admitted today that credit default swaps brought down the company:
Mistakes were made at AIG, and on a scale that few could have imagined possible. The most egregious of those began in 1987, when the company strayed from its core insurance competencies to launch a credit-default-swaps portfolio, which eventually became subject to massive collateral calls that created a liquidity crisis for AIG.But instead of letting AIG go quietly into the dark night, Liddy is trying to blackmail America and the world by using a threat. As Salon notes:
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) looks like he may be facing a fresh political firestorm.
Dodd just admitted on CNN that he inserted a loophole in the stimulus legislation that allowed million-dollar bonuses to insurance giant AIG to go forward – after previously denying any involvement in writing the controversial provision.
TOKYO, March 19 (Reuters) - USJ Co Ltd (2142.T), the operator of Japan's Universal Studios theme park, said on Thursday it will go private in a 111.2 billion yen ($1.16 billion) buyout led by a Goldman Sachs (GS.N) fund.
USJ is held about 40 percent by Crane Holdings Ltd, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs.
Crane's 100 percent-owned unit will offer 50,000 yen per share to buy the remaining 60 percent between March 23 and May 21 as well as its new share rights. ($1=95.99 Yen) (Reporting by Nathan Layne)
ReutersWeird, huh? How do you think that happened? - Ed.
March 19 (Bloomberg) -- The arrest of Bernard Madoff’s accountant highlights the peril posed by bogus auditors at the heart of Ponzi schemes that have bilked investors out of billions of dollars.
David Friehling’s arrest for securities fraud yesterday followed at least four other cases this year in which money managers accused of defrauding clients created sham auditors or hired accountants not up to the job. Investors may have avoided about $74 billion in losses if they had examined, or just tried to shake hands with, accountants supposedly verifying the books.
“Due Diligence 101 should demand that you check out the auditing firm and find out if it exists,” said Richard Dietrich, an accounting professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. “Then, you have to find out if they are qualified.”
JOURNALIST: Mr. Secretary, can I ask you a question about some of the technology that you’re developing to fight the war on terrorists, specifically directed energy and high-powered microwave technology? Do you—when do you envision that you can weaponize that type of technology?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Goodness, it is in—for the most part, the kinds of things you’re talking about are in varying early stages. Do you want to—do you have anything you would add?
GEN. RICHARD MYERS: I don’t think I would add much. I think they are in early stages and probably not ready for employment at this point.
DONALD RUMSFELD: In the normal order of things, when you invest in research and development and begin a developmental project, you don’t have any intention or expectations that one would use it. On the other hand, the real world intervenes from time to time, and you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it. So the—your question’s not answerable. It is—it depends on what happens in the future and how well things move along the track and whether or not someone feels it’s appropriate to reach into a development stage and see if something might be useful, as was the case with the unmanned aerial vehicles.
JOURNALIST: But you sound like you’re willing to experiment with it.
GEN. RICHARD MYERS: Yeah, I think that’s the point. And I think—and it’s—we have, I think, from the beginning of this conflict—I think General Franks has been very open to looking at new things, if there are new things available, and has been willing to put them into the fight, even before they’ve been fully wrung out. And I think that’s—not referring to these particular cases of directed energy or high-powered microwave, but sure. And we will continue to do that.
I don’t know how you read that, but to me it sounds like these gentlemen had no qualms about using live human beings as guinea pigs for their cool new weapons toys that US taxpayers pony up a half a billion dollars a year to develop.
Think of it this way. If someone parked a Lamborghini in your driveway, left the keys in the ignition, and passed out in a drunken stupor on your couch at 3am, would you take the car out for a spin? Just around the block for shits and giggles?
Oh, and by the way, you’re a cop. Does that help you decide?
AIG hires renta-cops to protect bankers against "mob effect" (hint hint hint hint hint....I think they want us to do the "mob effect" thing soon.... - Ed.)
A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn’t show up at all.
“It’s a mob effect,” one senior executive said. “It’s putting people’s lives in danger.”
Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?
Senator Grassley is a ranking member of the Senate Finance Committe. As such, he presided over a decade of erosion of safeguards and balance in our financial system.
He is also a member of a political party and a government that had the lead in ruining our country, undermining the Constitution, and allowing financial racketeers like AIG to flourish.Abdullah Toukan of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote that Israel's use of Jericho III missiles to strike Iran's nuclear sites "could look much more feasible than using combat aircraft," because of the lower political and operational risks Israel would face in such an attack, since Iran still lacks an adequate missile defense system.
Toukan estimated Israel would need about 40 Jericho IIIs for the initial volley, and cautioned that an Israeli-Iranian ballistic missile exchange would turn Jordan and neighboring countries into "Ground Zero."
And your problem is......?????? - Ed.1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.
2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people
3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.
4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control.”
9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
10.We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
(Read the full declaration here)
Web Bot Hit: The New Electrics Arriving
THE Tech Breakthrough To Watch
You ought to be keeping an extremely sharp eye on Carbon Nanotubes (CNT's) because it turns out that CNT's may replace copper wire in some applications.
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Of course, if you're into electronics, you caught the bit about transmitting 'both AM and FM radio signals" which is akin to saying a straw can carry water or milk, but they key thing is that CNT's are the future. Sorta like the movie Mrs. Robinson where the fellow says "I have one word for you: "Plastics".
Seems, since the linguistic reports of HalfPastHuman (which you may find useful if you're trying to live ahead of the future, instead of under it) say we're right now in the dawning of a period called 'the New Electrics", CNT's are where to place your bets.
But AIG and legal experts agree that, as far as payouts to employees go, it could indeed be worse -- twice as bad, to be exact.
If the crumbling insurance giant didn't make good on its retention packages, employees could sue the firm for at least $330 million -- double the total size of the bonuses.
Statement of SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger on Secretary Geithner's latest TALF proposal
Washington, DC --Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to invite private equity and hedge fund investors to a fire sale of bank assets is a return to the very same policies and practices that triggered the financial crisis in the first place.Excerpt:
Food is the gateway through which clarity on many other issue areas can flow. Once people understand how they’re being shaken down with regard to food, lots of other topics come into view. Energy, alternative health, deep politics, money/debt on and on.
Masses of people deciding to produce even a small amount of their own food has got to be the ultimate pants shitting event for the elite. Small scale food production is a very dangerous path. It can lead to a near wholesale rejection of the programming that makes the status quo horror show possible. It’s inevitable that people who never thought that it would come to “this” are going to start bartering, trading and selling food to each other, despite what the Legion of Doom has in mind. If the government is actually stupid enough to try to stop this under the auspices of food safety… I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.
The cash was used to cover collateral payments, cancel derivative contracts and meet obligations at its securities lending business after the firm had to be bailed out last year.
Most of the major U.S. and European banks were represented on the list, but AIG (AIG) revealed that
Look at this glassy-eyed nutbag. - Ed.A Congressional committee is holding a hearing today on the credit rating agencies and their role in the financial crisis.
Specifically, the big 3 ratings agencies - S&P, Moody's and Fitch - kept companies' credit ratings high for years after they should have been slashed due to inadequate capital, overstated assets, over-exposure to derivatives and other risky investments, and other chronic problems.
Indeed, emails show that the rating service employees knew they were acting fraudulentlyBy: Peter Chamberlin
This is written for you, the survivors. Two or three years ago, I decided to write this message to you. My only intentions were to find the best solutions to the nightmare visions and ease the suffering billions of souls who were scheduled to pay the final price of a world system based on greed. There is no sense in having a nightmare vision of the future that you know is real if it cannot be shared with others today, in real time. Warning of an impending massive fatal mental illness as a timely prescription for avoidance is an act of futility, in a population inured of life and deaf and blind to any signs of greater “Life.”
Read more @ There Are No Sunglasses
