Hedge fund hotel yields up secrets
It is Mayfair's house of financial horrors. Owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family, One Curzon Street is among London's flashiest office blocks. But behind the elegant curves, polished white stone, sweeping windows and panoramic atrium lie billions of dollars in losses that have threatened the global financial system.
US military chief backs counter-insurgency for Mexico
The U.S. military is ready to help Mexico in its deadly war against drug cartels with some of the same counter-insurgency tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan, the top U.S. military officer said on Friday.
Taliban Truce and the Coming Storm in South Asia
By Tom Burghardt
With growing instability and political turmoil inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, due in no small measure to American efforts on both sides of the "Afpak" divide to "stabilize" the region for multinational energy companies, this spring will see the rise of combat operations inside both countries.
Flashback - The Russian-Israeli Mafia: Off-limits to FBI, US intelligence
By Wayne Madsen
The same cancer that bankrupted the Soviet Union and the early Russian Federation, namely the Russian-Israeli Mafia -- the global organized crime syndicate that uses Israeli government protection and passports to cover their illegal worldwide activities -- has so thoroughly permeated the American political and business system that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are virtually powerless to bring the major perpetrators to justice.
Russia pushes for new strategic arms pact with U.S.
Russia called on Saturday for a successor agreement with the United States to replace the START-1 strategic nuclear arms reduction pact, saying this was a priority in 'resetting' their relations as Washington has urged.
Fight Brewing Within GOP Over Soul, Future of Party
This week's dustup between GOP chief Michael Steele and influential radio host Rush Limbaugh underscored the struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. The Republican Party might want to try something radically different this time around. If they want to be taken seriously they ought to start supporting candidates that truly believe in the constitution, the rule of law, and a small, limited federal government.
Speaker Pelosi Backs Senate Amendment to Regulate Talk Radio
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told CNSNews.com on Thursday that she supports an amendment to a Senate bill that would force the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to “take actions to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest.”
Top U.S., European Banks Got $50 Billion in AIG Aid
The beneficiaries of the government's bailout of American International Group Inc. include at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions that have been paid roughly $50 billion since the Federal Reserve first extended aid to the insurance giant.
'Run on UK' sees foreign investors pull $1 trillion out of the City
A silent $1 trillion "Run on Britain" by foreign investors was revealed yesterday in the latest statistical releases from the Bank of England. The external liabilities of banks operating in the UK – that is monies held in the UK on behalf of foreign investors – fell by $1 trillion (£700bn) between the spring and the end of 2008, representing a huge loss of funds and of confidence in the City of London.
Chávez Calls on Obama to Join Him in the Socialist Revolution
“Come on, Obama, align yourself with us on the way to socialism!" said the Venezuelan leader who this week also expropriated plants and lands of Venezuela's Polar, US firm Cargill, and Irish firm Smurfit. "Come on, it’s the only way!”
Court Puts Off Decision On Indefinite Detention
The Supreme Court yesterday vacated a lower court's ruling that the president has the right to indefinitely detain a legal U.S. resident as a terrorism suspect, and put off a decision on one of the most expansive legal claims of the Bush administration.
Federal Courts in Va., N.Y. May Take Some Guantanamo Cases
Federal authorities have finished compiling detailed electronic dossiers on 241 detainees who remain in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and interagency review teams have begun studying the individual files. The process could see some suspects transferred to federal courts, possibly in Northern Virginia and New York City, the jurisdictions where the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks occurred, according to Justice Department officials.
Thoughts of Storm Troopers Filling Spy Case
Legal scholars, the blogopshere and the twitterati have been scratching their heads for a week following the Obama administration's assertion that it might "withdraw" classified documents at the center of a closely watched spy case.
George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution
By Scott Horton
The language of the memos suggest that much more was afoot, including the deployment of military units and military police powers on American soil. These memos suggest that John Yoo found a way to treat the Posse Comitatus Act as suspended.
Three more Obama nominees withdraw from running
Three of Barack Obama's nominations for key government positions have withdrawn from the running on a single day in another blow to his faltering attempts to fill his administration.
Lloyds Cedes Control to Government, Insures Assets
Lloyds Banking Group Plc, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, will cede control to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government in return for state guarantees covering 260 billion pounds ($367 billion) of risky assets.
The FBI raided a Las Vegas business Thursday because after hours it was the meeting place of the People's Sovereign Court, a libertarian social organization with what some might call extreme anti-government views.
WSJ Exposes Corruption at the FDA
The Journal on page one today shines a bright light on some shady doings at the FDA, finding that Democratic politicians, doing a corporation’s bidding, put pressure on administrators to approve a medical device, causing corners to be cut, lies to be told, and the product to be approved on a fast track.
Whose in cahoots with a circle of financial analyst and reporters to Manipulate Stocks
The story begins when a very highly respected journalist and business editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Mitchell, decides to look into allegations made by the CEO of Overstock.com, that some top hedge fund managers, in cahoots with a circle of financial analyst and reporters.
Russia says Afghan heroin habit threatens security
Russia has become the world's biggest heroin consumer and the flood of the drug from Afghanistan poses a threat to national security, Russia's drug enforcement chief said on Friday.
Israel annexing East Jerusalem, says EU
A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of "actively pursuing the illegal annexation" of East Jerusalem.
Why Did So Few Americans Give a Damn?
The documents currently being released by the Justice Department that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.
The first seven of these official memorandums issued last week dealt with claimed presidential powers to unilaterally abrogate international treaties; suspend constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press; and order warrant-less searches, wiretaps and seizures of documents and indefinite imprisonment inside the U.S. without trial or criminal charges. The memorandums claimed that Congress has no overriding authority in these matters.
Call to "Resist and Deter" Nuclear Iran Gains Key Support
A new report on how the United States should "resist and deter" Iran's alleged ambitions to acquire a nuclear-weapons capability by a think tank closely tied to the so-called "Israel Lobby" has been endorsed by two key officials who are expected to exercise major influence on Iran policy in the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.
FBI Busts Alleged Anti-Government Group
Four people arrested in a raid involving tax evasion and weapons charges appeared in federal court Friday afternoon. Authoritites say the men are suspected of being leaders of an anti-government movement called Soverign Movement.
Morgan Stanley predicts economic collapse worse than depression
Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker painted a bleak economic picture for the United Kingdom. In his morning forecast, Mr. Secker warned that UK profits could fall by 60% in the current downturn - a worse performance than the great depression of the 1930s.
Its popularity is increasing as Congress searches for alternatives to the federal gasoline tax, which isn't indexed to inflation and hasn't been raised since 1993.
At a time when the newly laid-off are swelling unemployment rolls to record numbers, the painful surprise for many is that jobless benefits are taxed like income. That leaves many on the hook for hundreds or thousands of dollars because the taxes aren't automatically withheld from benefit checks.
Rival beats CME, Citadel in swaps race
CME Group Inc. and Citadel Investment Group appear to have lost the race to launch the first U.S. clearinghouse in the $27-trillion market for credit-default swaps.
Rival IntercontinentalExchange Inc. Friday said it received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission and will start clearing the contracts Monday. The Atlanta-based energy market will clear the swaps though New York-based ICE Trust, which is overseen by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and backed by Wall Street firms including Bank of America Corp., Barclays Capital PLC, Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank A.G., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley & Co. and UBS A.G.
Why gold prices will keep rising
Safety-seeking investors are pouring money into gold despite prices that, though lower recently, remain near historic highs. The more we worry, the higher gold will go.
Obama-linked think tank calls for US “nuclear umbrella” in Middle East
By Bill Van Auken
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratcheted up bellicose US rhetoric against Iran Wednesday, accusing the country of funding "terrorism" and interfering in the internal affairs of states throughout the Middle East. Her statements coincided with the release of a report by a Washington think tank with ties to the Obama administration suggesting that the US should establish a "nuclear umbrella" over the region.
Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians
The collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne on Tuesday buried more than a millenium's worth of documents under tons of rubble. Archivists and historians hope something can be salvaged, but the future of the city's past is grim.
You have the right to refuse consent to a search if there's no warrant
Last year, Washington, D.C. police announced a "Safe Homes Initiative," under which police would knock on doors, asking for permission to search houses for illegal guns. The scheme bypassed Fourth Amendment constitutional concerns by putting the searches and seizures in the context of voluntary consent.
Avigdor Lieberman in line for Israel foreign minister job?
Avigdor Lieberman, the head of a provocative nationalist Israeli party, is on course to become the country's next foreign minister in a move likely to damage hopes of a peace deal for the region.
High-Level Fed Officials Slam Government Response to Crisis
Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn conceded yesterday that the government's actions "will reduce [companies'] incentive to be careful in the future." In other words, he's admitting that the government's actions will encourage financial companies to make even riskier gambles in the future.
Kiss the Banks Goodbye
By Dave Lindorff
The futility and stupidity of the Fed’s and the Obama administration’s policy of pumping ever more money into failing banks and insurance companies in a vain effort to get them lending again was demonstrated if anyone was paying attention by the collapse in auto sales this past month, with all the leading companies, Ford, GM and Toyota, reporting sales down by about 40%.
Pakistan 'can't rule out' foreign hand in attacks
A top Pakistan official has refused to rule out foreign involvement in the Sri Lankan cricket attacks despite international warnings that the nation faced serious internal dangers.
Health Canada finds bisphenol A in soft drinks
A Health Canada study of canned pop has found the vast majority of the drinks contain the chemical bisphenol A, a substance that imitates the female hormone estrogen and is banned in baby bottles.
Darth Wall Street Thwarting Debtors With Credit Swaps
Amusement-park operator Six Flags Inc. and automaker Ford Motor Co. may be pushed toward bankruptcy by bondholders trying to profit from credit-default swaps that protect against losses on their high-yield debt.
By employing a so-called negative-basis trade, investors could buy Six Flags bonds at 20.5 cents on the dollar and credit- default swaps at 71 cents. If the New York-based chain defaults, the creditors would receive the face value of the debt, minus costs. In a Feb. 27 note, Citigroup Inc.’s high-yield strategists put that profit at 6 percentage points, or $600,000 on a $10 million purchase.
Charges Dropped After Video Shows Cops Beating Man
Police accused a man in Ft. Lauderdale of attacking them, but surveillance video proves the story might be the other way around, and now a civilian is considering filing a suit against the department.
Revealed: police databank on thousands of protesters
Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.
Photographs, names and video footage of people attending protests are routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system". The Metropolitan police, which has pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence. It lists campaigners by name, allowing police to search which demonstrations or political meetings individuals have attended.
LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Radio chip coming soon to your driver's license?
Privacy advocates are issuing warnings about a new radio chip plan that ultimately could provide electronic identification for every adult in the U.S. and allow agents to compile attendance lists at anti-government rallies simply by walking through the assembly.
Bank of America Says Bonus Disclosure Will Harm It
Bank of America Corp. will suffer “grave and irreparable harm” if Merrill Lynch & Co. employees paid $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the firm’s acquisition by the bank are publicly identified, its lawyers said.
Clinton: 'Never waste a good crisis'
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today told an audience "never waste a good crisis", as she highlighted the opportunity of rebuilding economies in a greener, less energy intensive model.
Tongue-tied Clinton gets warm EU welcome
Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows on her first visit to Europe as secretary of state when she mispronounced her EU counterparts' names and claimed U.S. democracy was older than Europe's.
Beating Back Obamanomics
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
It's raining, pouring economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil.
Scientists Allege Fraud in 1984 HIV/AIDS Papers
Thirty-seven legal, medical and research professionals have sent a letter to the journal Science, asking it to officially retract the original four papers making the case for HIV as the cause of AIDS. According to the letter's authors, widespread evidence has now emerged that the studies were not only poorly carried out, but that their results were falsified.
Wealthy To Be Invited To Invest in The Bailout
The government is seeking to resuscitate the nation's crippled financial system by forging an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms.
AIG: Billions Dished Out in the Dark
This is crazy! Forget the bleating of Rush Limbaugh; the problem is not with the quite reasonable and, if anything, underfunded stimulus package, which in any case will be debated long and hard in Congress. The problem is with what is not being debated: the far more expensive Wall Street bailout that is being pushed through--as in the case of the latest AIG rescue--in secret, hurried deal-making primarily by the unelected secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Minnesota Bank Asks Why It Pays for Wall Street Greed
TCF Financial Corp., the Wayzata, Minnesota-based bank that never made a subprime loan and hasn’t lost money since 1995, is asking why it should help clean up the mess made by Wall Street.
Bill Seeks to Let FDIC Borrow up to $500 Billion
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is moving to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to temporarily borrow as much as $500 billion from the Treasury Department.
Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic
It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.
U.S. Military Aid to Israel
By Kathleen and Bill Christison
In these days of economic crisis, budget overruns, earmarks, and multi-billion dollar bailouts, when Americans are being forced to tighten their own belts, one of the most automatic earmarks a bailout by any measure goes to a foreign government but is little understood by most Americans.
US Unemployment Rate Jumps to 8.1 Percent
The nation's unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs amid a deepening recession.
Flu Pandemic Would Catch U.S. Unprepared
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that the nation is unprepared for the true effects of a pandemic such as that expected from avian flu.
Food stamp enrollment jumps to record 31.8 million
A record 31.8 million Americans received food stamps at the latest count, an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession, government figures showed on Thursday.
Suspicions grow that attack was 'inside job'
Dramatic footage showing the alleged perpetrators of Tuesday's audacious attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team making their getaway was released by a Pakistani news channel last night.
Is It Now Okay to Talk about Hitler’s Assumption of Dictatorial Power?
By Jacob G. Hornberger
I know that it’s been considered improper to bring up Hitler in the context of what the Bush administration did for the past 7 years, but I wish someone would explain to me how Bush’s powers, as now revealed by those secret legal memos, were different from the dictatorial powers exercised by Hitler after the terrorist attack on the Reichstag in 1933, soon after Hitler became chancellor.
Ron Paul and the conspiracy of history
Not since 1939, when Winston Churchill’s lonely, defiant voice called the Nazi’s for what they really were, has anybody this old, been this right about something so dangerously missed by the rest of the public.
