(Reuters) - Mass protests spread to the capital ofSyria for the first time on Friday and looked closer than ever to driving out the leader of Yemen, nearly four months since unrest erupted across the Arab world.
Al-Shabab fighters have killed at least six politicians in Somalia's strategic southern town of Kismayo, after accusing the victims of espionage activities.
The fighters said the six were spying for the Somali government, a Press TV correspondent reported on Friday.
Al-Shabab is fighting with the UN-backed administration for control of the country
The government of Bahrain is putting intense pressure on the families of students in Britain who were photographed attending a peaceful protestin Manchester in solidarity with the country's pro-democracy movement.
The gulf kingdom has stripped government-funded scholarships from those who attended the event outside the BBC building last month, the students say, and told parents to order their children home.
Students involved have told the Guardian they have "strong and well-founded" fears that they and their families could suffer beatings and torture as a result of the Bahrain government's crackdown on the protest 3,000 miles away and that they are likely to be arrested on their return.
It is now mainstream news that none of the big financial criminals have been prosecuted.
The New York Times is running an article today entitled “In financial crisis, no prosecutions of top figures”, which has been picked up as the leading front-page story by MSNBC. The story even quotes Bill Black:
But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.
And the chair of the Financial Crisis Commission, Phil Angelides, said today:
I think there’s a great concern in this country on two fronts. One is there’s a question here, do we have a dual justice system? One for ordinary people and then one for people with money and enormous wealth and power. Secondly, we need deterrents. To the extent laws were broken, we need deterrents. If someone robs a 7-11, they took $500 and they were able to settle the next day for $50 and no admission of wrongdoing, they’d knock over that 7-11 again. And we’ve seen time after time where people and firms have made tens, one hundreds, billions of dollars. They’ve settled charges for pennies on the dollar. At Citigroup for example they represented that they had $13 billion of subprime mortgage exposure when they really had $55 billion. The penalty to the chief financial officer who made $19 million that year, 2007, was $100,000. Goldman was fined $500 million but the date they settled their stock moved up $2 billion. There’s been no real consequence.
Well I think there’s two things here. Number one is it’s up to the prosecutors to do thorough investigations. That’s what we should expect. We don’t want hangmen justice. We don’t want vengeance, but we want thorough investigations. And if people crossed a line they ought to be prosecuted. But there were a lot of people who bellied up to the line and conducted themselves in a way without the highest standards of ethics or moral conduct that hurt the economy badly.
And I think one of the things that’s most troubling to people is there seems to be very little relationship between who drove this crisis, the big financial institutions, the CEOs, regulators who didn’t do their job, and the people who are paying the price, which are millions of people who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their life savings.
Bank of America [BAC12.92-0.21(-1.6%)]shares were lower this morning on disappointing earnings. But a bad quarter may be the least of the bank’s worries.
The largest bank by deposits just lost its chief financial officer and just hired one of the most connected regulatory lawyers in the U.S.
Both events are alarming.
The bank says that Charles Noski requested to step aside due to family illness. There’s no doubt some truth in this: a family member is ill, and Noski probably volunteered his resignation. But it comes on the back of some very troubling developments:
Earlier this month we learned that Bank of America’s announcement that the government had denied its insane request to raise its dividend had not been reviewed by Noski before it was made public. No one has offered a credible explanation for this lapse in internal controls.
Encasing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in concrete would present much more of a challenge than Chernobyl, according to an executive of the firm whose pumps are helping cooling efforts there.
“In Chernobyl, where a single reactor was encased, 11 trucks were in action for a number of months. In Fukushima we’re talking about four reactors,” Gerald Karch, chief executive of the technical business of unlisted machinery maker Putzmeister, said in an interview with Reuters.
Published: Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. Last Modified: Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:30 a.m.
NEW YORK — The average price of gasoline is now above $4 per gallon in five states, and it could rise to that level in New York and Washington, D.C., this weekend.
The $4 mark is a tough reminder for American drivers. The last time they saw prices that high was in the summer of 2008, just before the economy went into a tailspin. Retail surveys show that motorists are already starting to buy less fuel, yet the government still expects pump prices to keep climbing this summer.
The national average has increased for 24 straight days, hitting $3.82 per gallon on Friday. It's above $4 in Connecticut, Illinois, California, Hawaii and Alaska.
Meanwhile, benchmark crude lost 44 cents to $107.67 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
BERLIN – NATO failed for a second day to find new ground-attack aircraft for the fight against Moammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya but Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told The Associated Press on Friday he expects the additional planes soon.
NATO's top military commander, U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis, has said there is a growing need for precision attack aircraft to avoid civilian casualties as Gadhafi's forces camouflage themselves and hide in populated areas to avoid Western airstrikes.
American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details, said the commander is looking for about eight to 10 additional planes.
In an interview with the AP following a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Fogh Rasmussen refused to confirm that number but said he was confident that military commanders would get the additional resources soon.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic's most recent Consumer Price Index report, consumers saw a price increase of 2.8% during the the last yearly period for food bought at grocery stores. This "food at home" component includes grocery staples such as milk, bread, vegetables and meat. World economic growth, rising crude oil prices, shrinking stockpiles, strong commodity demand and severe crop-destroying weather have created a perfect storm of sorts, resulting in rising food costs worldwide. In fact, the global food price index, compiled from price data for sugar, cereals, oils, meat and dairy products, recently reached a new, all-time high. While the effects of increased food costs are felt everywhere, from the school cafeteria to our favorite restaurants, here are five staples that cost more at the grocery store. (Inflation is often a consequence of economic recovery. Here's how you can protect your financial portfolio.
In case you haven't noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen. Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil the whole game changes. Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively. So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves?
Most Americans are so accustomed to supermarkets that are absolutely packed to the gills with massive amounts of really inexpensive food that they cannot even imagine that life could be any other way. Unfortunately, that era is ending.
There are all kinds of indications that we are now entering a time when there will not be nearly enough food for everyone in the world. As competition for food supplies increases, food prices are going to go up. In fact, at some point they are going to go way up.
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.
Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.
This article appears in the April 28, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive April 15.
Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loanseach to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."
But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
LONDON — BP was facing angry protesters and disgruntled shareholders on Thursday at its first annual general meeting since a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The meeting in London is taking place almost a year since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and caused millions of barrels of oil to spew into the sea.
Bob Dudley, the American who took over as chief executive in October, faces accusations that he engineered a deal to create a venture to explore for oil in the Arctic with Russian giants Rosneft in a bid to camouflage the worst disaster in BP's history.
The Rosneft issue has been put off until next month after BP said Thursday that it and the Russian company had agreed to extend a deadline to complete a $16 billion share swap that is key to the deal.
Fishermen who claim their livelihoods have been damaged by the Gulf oil spill are set to protest at the AGM, alongside environmental campaigners.
The world's largest bond fund began betting against U.S. government debt last month on the expectation that shaky finances will jolt interest rates higher.
PIMCO, through its outspoken co-chief investment officer, Bill Gross, have been raising alarms about a lack of buyers for Treasuries once the Federal Reserve ends its own bond purchase program, also known as QE2, in June.
In February Gross revealed his ultra-bearish view on the United States by dumping all of his fund's U.S. government-related debt holdings.
When presidents are writing editorials in newspapers a hard-sell is just around the corner. Judging by the recent tripartite op-ed in the New York Times by Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron regarding Libya, the hard-sell is most likely a protracted air campaign above Libya with an ever increasing ground presence below possibly leading to an all out invasion. Clearly the operation in Libya will exceed the “days or weeks, but not months” we were told it would take.
Predictably the UNSC r.1973 mandate of “protecting civilians” has “mission crept” into providing air cover for armed militants as they fight towards Tripoli – militants now openly proclaiming their allegiance to Al Qaeda. The CIA and MI6 are also admittedly on the groundassisting the rebels and attempting to bring down Qaddafi’s regime – violating entirely the contrived UNSC r.1973 that defined the intervention in the first place. Further violations come in the form of US calls to arm the rebels and allowing arms to flow into eastern Libya from Egypt. Hillary Clinton said she believed arming rebel groups was legal under UNSC r.1973. Of course, as Adolf Hitler has reminded us, everything is legal when you are the one writing the laws.
Now we are being told via this tripartite op-ed that it is unacceptable for Qadaffi to remain in power and that the operation cannot end until he is removed. Considering the verified lies surrounding UNSC r.1973′s premise and the fact that the resolution has turned out to be protecting and aiding known terrorists, we should be hesitant to accept any expansion upon this disingenuous foundation. We must remember that when asked about reports of Qaddafi brutalizing his people with air strikes, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen both responded “We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever.”
Likewise, the International Institute of Strategic Studies conceded during a questioning session regarding military options in Libya that stories of mercenaries and the intentional targeting of civilian populations were not only unverified, but highly unlikely given that Qaddafi was well aware such actions would only further invite foreign intervention.
(Updates with bond yields in fourth paragraph, Papandreou comments in fifth and in ninth.)
April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Greece plans to carry out 76 billion euros ($110 billion) in austerity measures and state- asset sales to meet budget-deficit goals as Prime Minister George Papandreou vowed the country won’t restructure its debt.
Greece will enact 26 billion euros in deficit cuts and 50 billion euros in asset sales through 2015, the Finance Ministry said today in an e-mailed statement from Athens. The measures will cut the deficit to near 1 percent of gross domestic product by 2015, from a targeted 7.4 percent this year, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said.
LONDON — BP was facing angry protesters and disgruntled shareholders on Thursday at its first annual general meeting since a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The meeting in London is taking place almost a year since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and caused millions of barrels of oil to spew into the sea.
Bob Dudley, the American who took over as chief executive in October, faces accusations that he engineered a deal to create a venture to explore for oil in the Arctic with Russian giants Rosneft in a bid to camouflage the worst disaster in BP's history.
The Rosneft issue has been put off until next month after BP said Thursday that it and the Russian company had agreed to extend a deadline to complete a $16 billion share swap that is key to the deal.
Fishermen who claim their livelihoods have been damaged by the Gulf oil spill are set to protest at the AGM, alongside environmental campaigners.
