Puppet MastersS


Dominoes

U.S. Banks Told to Make Plans for Preventing Collapse

Rick Rothacker
Reuters
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:41 UTC
U.S. regulators directed five of the country's biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

Bank of America
© AP Photo/Mark LennihanA branch office of Bank of America is shown in New York.
The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the "living wills" the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.

Officials like Lehman Brothers former Chief Executive Dick Fuld have been criticized for having been too hesitant to take bold steps to solve their banks' problems during the financial crisis.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency first directed five banks - which also include Citigroup Inc,, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co - to come up with these "recovery plans" in May 2010.

They told banks to consider drastic efforts to prevent failure in times of distress, including selling off businesses, finding other funding sources if regular borrowing markets shut them out, and reducing risk. The plans must be feasible to execute within three to six months, and banks were to "make no assumption of extraordinary support from the public sector," according to the documents.
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Heart - Black

Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano Favored Women Pals for Jobs: Lawsuit

Bruce Golding
New York Post
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:29 UTC
Dora Schriro
© Steven HirschDora Schriro
A veteran US law-enforcement official has filed a blockbuster discrimination lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, charging she pushed him aside to make way for a less-qualified woman who's "enjoyed a long-standing relationship" with the anti-terror chief.

The lawsuit, which was first reported yesterday by blogger Debbie Schlussel, identifies the woman as Dora Schriro, who was later appointed by Mayor Bloomberg as commissioner of the city Department of Correction, a post she still holds.

The court papers also allege that Suzanne Barr, Napolitano's chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has engaged in "numerous" acts of "sexually offensive behavior" intended to "humiliate and intimidate male employees.

Barr's alleged acts include calling one man "in his hotel room and screaming at him that she wanted his 'c--k in the back of [her] throat.' "
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Gear

U.S., Israel at Odds Over Iran Nuke Program Intelligence

Olivier Knox
ABC News
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
Jay Carney
© The Associated PressWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney
The White House expressed confidence Friday that American intelligence will know if Iran escalates its nuclear program in a sprint to build an atomic bomb - a day after Israel's defense minister warned that the allies might not know "in time" to prevent it.

"We have eyes, we have visibility into the program," press secretary Jay Carney told reporters at his daily briefing. "We feel confident that we would be able to detect a break-out move by Iran towards the acquisition of a nuclear weapon."

"We believe there continues to be the time and space to pursue this course," Carney said, referring to punishing American and international economic sanctions on the Islamic republic. "It is the best course of action to ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. We take no options off the table, and we consult with our allies all the time about the situation in Iran with regards to this program."

But Carney's professed confidence about the quality of the information regarding Iran's nuclear program, widely seen by American and Israeli officials as an attempt to acquire the ability to build a nuclear weapon, appeared to conflict sharply with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak's just a day earlier.

Barak told Israeli radio that news reports of a new American intelligence assessment that Iran has made surprising progress towards a nuclear weapon makes it "less clear and certain that we will know everything in time about their steady progress toward military nuclear capability."
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Handcuffs

Egypt Arrests Nine Over Sinai Attack

Ashraf Sweliam
The Sydney Morning Herald
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© The Associated PressArmy trucks carry Egyptian military tanks in El Arish, Egypt's northern Sinai Peninsula on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012.
Egyptian troops and security forces have detained nine Islamic militants in northern Sinai believed to be behind a surprise attack last weekend that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers, a security official says.

It was the first reported arrest in connection with the attack, which took place last Sunday and sparked a major Egyptian military operation in the Sinai peninsula aimed at stamping out Islamic militant groups that have become bolder and grown in numbers since the ouster last year of Hosni Mubarak.

So far the effectiveness of the four-day-old operation is not clear. Despite the influx of troops, militants have continued low-level attacks on Egyptian troops and security forces.

One famous checkpoint on the road linking the Rafah border town with the city of el-Arish comes under attack almost daily. Officials say that militants open fire at night, engage in brief firefights then flee.

Comment: For more information, read:
Sott Focus: The British Empire - A Lesson In State Terrorism
Mossad's "Islamic Militants" Exposed In Yemen

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Bad Guys

Romney's Death Squad Ties: Bain Launched With Millions From Oligarchs Behind Salvadoran Atrocities


DemocracyNow!
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 22:17 UTC

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing new scrutiny over revelations he founded the private equity firm Bain Capital with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain's start-up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s. We're joined by Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who connects the dots in his latest story, Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads. "There's no possible way that anybody in 1984 could check out these families - which was the term that [Romney's campaign] used - and come away convinced that this money was clean," Grim says. [Includes rush transcript]
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Bad Guys

Bain Capital's Ties to Salvadoran Death Squads

Jon Wiener
The Nation
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:55 UTC
Some of the first investors in Mitt Romney's firm Bain Capital, according to a report on the Los Angeles Times, were Salvadoran families living in Miami with members accused by the US government of funding death squads in the brutal civil war in El Salvador.

When Bain Capital was founded in 1984, Romney and his partners had trouble raising funds for their initial investments. "$9 million came from rich Latin Americans," the Timesreports, "including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami.... At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings."

The civil war in El Salvador lasted from 1980 to 1992 and killed more than 70,000 Salvadorans. It started after Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while giving a mass shortly after he published an open letter to President Carter asking him to cut off US military aid to the Salvadoran military regime.

The Times reporters found no direct evidence that the accused Salvadorans themselves "invested in Bain or benefited from it" - it was "family members" of Bain investors who were linked to the killings.
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USA

Voter Registration Controversy Grows in Massachusetts

Alison King
NECN
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:19 UTC

The controversy involving welfare recipients and voter registrations continues to grow in Massachusetts as Sen. Scott Brown says he wants his Democratic opponent Elizabeth Warren to reimburse the state using money from her campaign.

"Professor Warren has over $13 million dollars in her account. If she wanted to have her daughter and her group do that, she can pay for it herself," said Brown.

Brown took time out from his lunch at Nick's Roast Beef in Beverly, Mass. to call on Warren to pay back the Bay State for the $276,000 it cost to mail voter registration cards to welfare recipients.

Warren's daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, chairs the board of the New York-based think tank Demos, which was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was filed in May that argued Massachusetts was failing to comply with the federal law requiring that welfare recipients have the opportunity to register to vote.
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Info

Officials Tell Blogger to Stop Giving Advice on Paleo Diet


The Globe and Mail
Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:30 UTC
Image
The Paleo diet has been gaining popularity in recent years, thanks to passionate followers who believe eating and living as our Paleolithic ancestors did can help them avoid modern-day ailments such as obesity and diabetes.

Among the outspoken devotees is Steve Cooksey, who has chronicled his transition from a 235-pound diabetic to a trim Paleo supporter on his website. He also encourages others to embrace the lifestyle - and that's what landed him in trouble with the government.
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Newspaper

Blogger Told 'Get a License' For Giving Nutritional Advice

Adan Liptak
New York Times
Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:14 UTC
Image
© baretnews.com
Steve Cooksey eats what he calls a cave man diet - lots of meat and greens, no bread or pasta. He says it has helped him conquer life-threatening diabetes.

But when he wrote about his experiences and offered advice on his Web site, officials in North Carolina said he was breaking the law by "providing nutrition care services without a license."

Charla M. Burill, the executive director of the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition, called Mr. Cooksey in January to tell him so. The conversation was by all accounts civil, and Ms. Burill had a state law on her side.
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Megaphone

The Latest Howlers From Human Rights Watch on Venezuela

Joe Emersberger
venezuelanalysis.com
Fri, 03 Aug 2012 08:50 UTC
Image
Predictably, election season in Venezuela has come with yet another voluminous report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) that mostly rehashes the debunked claims of its 2008 report. Over a hundred scholars, including Noam Chomsky, signed a letter to HRW protesting the shoddiness of that 2008 report.

More Than 100 Latin America Experts Question Human Rights Watch's Venezuela Report

HRW's response to that letter was underwhelming:

Human Rights Watch's Response to Academics' Criticism

HRW bowed out of the debate after the devastating reply to its response:

Academics Respond to Human Rights Watch Director's Defense of Venezuela Report

One need not even wade through that debate (though everyone should) to know that HRW is ridiculously biased against the Chavez government. Ken Roth, HRW's executive director, very recently used his Twitter account to call Venezuela and a few other ALBA bloc countries (specifically Bolivia and Ecuador) "the most abusive" in Latin America.[1]
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