Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Wall Street Lobbied Hard To Water Down Law On Congressional Insider Trading
President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act earlier this month, which was passed after a 60 Minutes investigation revealed that members of Congress were profiting from information they received in their official capacity. House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL), for instance, made nearly $30,000 trading on information he received during private briefings during the 2008 financial crisis.
The original version of the STOCK Act that passed out of the Senate included a provision that would have required Washington insiders who sell intelligence to corporate America to register as lobbyists. However, that provision was ultimately stripped from the bill by House Republicans. And according to an analysis by The Hill, it was Wall Street lobbying that proved the catalyst
Wall Street Lobbied Hard To Water Down Law On Congressional Insider Trading
Debt Collector uses Tough Tactics in Hospitals
Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.
This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health
Debt Collector is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals
Maine named most peaceful state in America
Maine is the most peaceful state in America and Louisiana the least, according to rankings by an Australian think tank called the Institute for Economics and Peace.
The rankings are based on the prevalence of violent crimes, homicides, police employees, size of the prison population and small arms availability.
Overall, 2011 was the most peaceful year the United States has experienced in 20 years. Homicides and violent crimes both dropped by more than 3 percent last year, while the murder rate has plummeted a staggering 50 percent since 1991, when the survey first started. However, prison violence—which is not counted in the report—has risen dramatically as the number of people behind bars has also grown. (The United States has a higher percentage of its population incarcerated than any other nation.) Almost half of all forcible rapes occur in prison.
Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Utah were the top five most peaceful states. Louisiana was the least peaceful, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.
Florida man mistakes girlfriend for hog, shoots her
That's guns are used for--killing the innocent:
A Florida couple was on a weekend camping trip that ended in an airlift to the emergency room.
Steven Egan, 52, was hunting with his girlfriend, Lisa Simmons, in the northern part of the state when he mistook her for a hog and shot her.
"He saw a hog and thought he shot it and went to look for it," Maj. Steve Clair of the Flagler County Sheriff's Office told ABC News. "He heard her and thought it was a hog and just shot."
Report: Swiss woman starved doing 'sunlight' fast
Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reports that a woman starved to death after embarking on a spiritual diet that required her to stop eating or drinking and live off sunlight alone.
The Zurich newspaper reported Wednesday that the unnamed Swiss woman in her fifties decided to follow the radical fast in 2010 after viewing an Austrian documentary about an Indian guru who claims to have lived this way for 70 years.
Tages-Anzeiger says there have been similar cases of self-starvation in Germany, Britain and Australia.
Russian's purchase of U.S.-backed battery firm sparks anxiety
Batteries made in America for America and backed by America. That's how politicians hailed Ener1.
The company tapped the country's top scientists at Argonne National Lab in Illinois, and U.S. taxpayers pledged up to $118 million in federal stimulus funds and $80 million in state and local incentives to help Ener1 produce cutting-edge battery technology for electric cars and the U.S. military.
"This is about the future. And the question is which nation is going to seize the future. Some nation is going to grab it by the throat. One of the nations of the world is going to lead the world in green energy and technology," Vice President Joe Biden said in January 2011 in a speech praising federal support for Ener1 at its facility in Indiana.
That nation, in this case, is Russia.
A little more than a year after Biden's visit to Ener1's Indiana manufacturing plant, the company is owned outright by Boris Zingarevich, a Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a fact that concerns some technology experts in the U.S.
Rupert Murdoch defends his 50-year media career
It's clear that the British authorities will not take on Rupert Murdoch. He should be prosecuted and thrown in jail for being behind the massive hacking scandal. And Murdoch should lose his TV license in the U.S.
News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch defended his globe-spanning, half-a-century long media career Wednesday, telling an official inquiry into U.K. media ethics that he never gave his editors orders on who to back or used his political sway for financial gain.
Speaking softly, deliberately and with dry humour, Murdoch parried one question after the other about the influence his dominant media operations had in lobbying lawmakers, setting the news agenda, favouring certain politicians and benefiting from allegedly sweetheart business deals.
"I've never asked a prime minister for anything," he said after being questioned whether he had asked then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to support his bid for the Times newspapers in 1981.
Murdoch was being quizzed under oath before an inquiry run by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who is examining the relationship between British politicians and the press, a key question emerging amid the phone hacking scandal that brought down Murdoch's News of the World tabloid.
Revelations of widespread illegal behaviour at the top-selling Sunday publication rocked Britain's establishment with evidence of media misdeeds, police corruption and too-cozy links between the press and politicians.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Ex-spy: Destroying CIA tapes purged 'ugly visuals'
This jerk should be in jail:
The retired top CIA officer who ordered the destruction of videos showing waterboarding says in a new book that he was tired of waiting for Washington's bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.
Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA's once-secret interrogation and detention program, also lashes out at President Barack Obama's administration for calling waterboarding torture and criticizing its use.
"I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled 'torturers' by the president of the United States," Rodriguez writes in his book, "Hard Measures."
The book is due out April 30. The Associated Press purchased a copy Tuesday.
20 Arrested Protesting Wells Fargo Meeting in San Francisco
Hundreds of protestors tried to shut down a Wells Fargo's shareholders meeting in San Francisco's Financial District Tuesday. Even though they weren't successful, parts of California and Sacramento Streets were closed to traffic throughout the day. A coalition of union workers and Occupy organizers led the march up California to the Merchant Bank building. Their stated goal was to disrupt the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting. "Let us in! Let us in! Let us in," they chanted. At the same time, share holders stood outside waving their stock certificates and demanding to be let into the meeting.
Metta World Peace Suspended 7 Games For Elbowing James Harden
The NBA dropped the ball on this one. Instead of doing the right and suspending him permanently they caved to the players' union and the pocket book. This scum should not have the privilege of playing in an NBA uniform. That elbow was a criminal act. How many more incidents do we have Artest before he really hurts someone, not that a concussion is anything to sneeze at. At the very least the league should force "Peace" to take anger management courses:
The NBA responded to Metta World Peace's latest act of aggression with a seven-game suspension that will lighten the Los Angeles Lakers troublemaker's wallet and playoff schedule.
World Peace was suspended Tuesday for throwing a vicious elbow at Oklahoma City's James Harden, keeping the Lakers' starting small forward sidelined for most of the first postseason round.
World Peace was ejected from Sunday's game against the Thunder for striking Harden in the head with the back of his elbow, giving Oklahoma City's top reserve a concussion. The former Ron Artest claimed the blow was an accidental, overzealous celebration of a dunk, yet even Kobe Bryant and his Lakers teammates weren't defending his inexplicable actions.
"It's hard to get into a guy's head and know exactly what happened in that situation," Bryant said. "I haven't really spoken to him about it. You've really got to ask him."
Former TSA chief: Airport security in America is 'broken'
It's broken just like the two-party system:
As head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from 2005 to 2009, Kip Hawley was the public face of an agency despised by millions of Americans. Today, he says that hatred is understandable because the agency’s approach to airport security is “broken,” arguing that it should forgo standardized procedures and a focus on prohibited items in favor of increased flexibility and mitigating risk.
Hawley elaborates on the concept in a new book, out today, called “Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security” (Palgrave Macmillan, $27), co-written with Nathan Means. In it, he reveals the thinking behind the agency’s actions, the problems they’ve caused — in terms of cost, wasted effort and an angry public — and the possibility that someday we may be able to travel with our liquids, lacrosse sticks and large jars of peanut butter.
Shaky economic prospects threaten both parties
This is why both Presidential campaigns spend most of their time attacking each other. They have no answers to the economic quagmire we find ourselves in:
In the short term, the recovery looks shaky. In the long term, the economy looks shaky — so shaky that it may be many years before a president of either party or any ideology can count on winning a second term.
Polls show that President Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney is narrowing, but should Obama lose in November the decisive factor won’t be Romney (who is as inept a presidential candidate as this country has produced in decades). The real culprit will be the economy.
Occupy Evicted From Its 'Headquarters'
A group of Occupy Wall Street protesters were evicted Monday from a Lower Manhattan space that had served as an informal headquarters and a crash pad for the movement's stalwart supporters.
A late-day request to stay the eviction was denied by a judge, leaving the group without a central location to plan several coming events, including what they hoped would be a galvanizing May Day march that is being coordinated with labor unions.
Protesters moved into the space in late October, a few weeks before New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered police to clear out the group's Zuccotti Park encampment. The loft space at 40 Exchange Place is located a few blocks away from the park that served as the heart of the anti-corporate movement until the Nov. 15 raid.
Ghost of Occupy Wall Street to haunt GE meeting
An offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which rose to prominence last year with its anticorporate stance, plans to bring its populist message to General Electric Co's shareholder meeting in Detroit on Wednesday.
Members of the "99 Percent" movement plan to picket the largest U.S. conglomerate's meeting to protest its low tax rate. The loosely organized coalition, whose name is a contrast to the top 1 percent of wealthy Americans, expects to have more than 2,000 protesters in attendance, according to organizers.
"It's the 99 percent and we want to serve notice to the 1 percent that it's time to start paying your fair share in taxes and being a little more responsible," said Christian Gary, an organizer with Good Jobs Now in Detroit.
Home prices remain near post-crisis low; new-home sales fall 7%
Because home owners don't count. Unless they happen to work on Wall St.
Home prices remain near post-crisis low; new-home sales fall 7%
1 in 2 new Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
Metta World Peace deserves lengthy suspension
Within a five-second span, Metta World Peace threw everything away.
His vicious elbow didn't just damage Oklahoma City forward James Harden. It damaged World Peace's reputation. His ensuing ejection didn't just hang the Lakers out to dry as they somehow managed to escape with a 114-106 double-overtime victory Sunday over the Oklahoma City Thunder. It left them wondering if they can win without him, since World Peace probably will draw a lengthy suspension. And his apology afterward that it was an "unintentional elbow" isn't just laughable because the Lakers' public relations staff refused to allow him to take follow-up questions. It's head-scratching because the replays show World Peace's blow was hardly an accident.
There's no reason World Peace would cock his arm and then rear back with such force unless he was planning to hit somebody. And because of the severity of that incident, World Peace deserves a suspension that lasts as long as Harden remains sidelined as he tries to recover from a concussion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
