At the beginning of 2014, Detroit may be bankrupt, but they're cheering the five-year-old U.S. auto bailout in Italy. That's because after being the beneficiary of billions in U.S. taxpayer largesse, Fiat, the leading Italian auto company, is going to buy its final stake in Chrysler from that other big bailout recipient, the United Auto Workers (UAW).

"Chrysler's Now Fully an Italian Auto Company," reads the Time magazine online headline. But wait a minute! Wasn't the bailout supposed to be about saving the American auto industry?

As Mark Beatty and wrote in The Daily Caller in November 2012, after presidential candidate Mitt Romney made the controversial claim that Fiat would be expanding production of Chrysler's Jeep in China (a claim that turned out to be correct),

The real outrage arising from the 2009 Chrysler bailout is not that its parent company, Fiat, is planning to build plants in China. It's that the politicized bankruptcy process limited Chrysler's growth potential by tying it to an Italian dinosaur in the midst of the European fiscal crisis. The Obama administration literally gave away ownership of one of the Big Three American auto manufacturers to an Italian car maker struggling with labor and productivity issues worse than those that drove Chrysler to near-liquidation.

As we noted in the piece, much of Chrysler's profits from its overhauled line are going to prop up Fiat's failing, money-losing Italian business, rather than to expanding production and jobs in the U.S. Moody's had downgraded Fiat's credit rating to "junk" even before the Obama administration arranged for it to acquire a Chrysler stake, and in Autumn 2012, Moody's gave Fiat another downgrade that the Financial Times described as even "further into 'junk' territory."

New York City has sued FedEx Corp, accusing the package delivery company of illegally delivering millions of contraband cigarettes to people's homes, violating a 2006 settlement.

Monday's lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan and seeks $52 million of civil fines and unpaid taxes from FedEx, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee.

It marks one of the last acts by the administration of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose more than decade-old campaign to ban smoking in various public and private places has been credited with saving thousands of lives and become a blueprint for other cities.

According to the city, FedEx created a "public nuisance" through its partnership with Shinnecock Smoke Shop, located on the Shinnecock Indian Nation reservation in Southampton, New York, to ship untaxed cigarettes to residential homes.

FedEx allegedly did so despite, and even while negotiating, a February 2006 agreement with then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to stop such deliveries in New York, an agreement later expanded to cover deliveries throughout the country.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to continue to fight against terrorists and destroy them following two recent bombings in the southern city of Volgograd.

Putin said on Tuesday that the explosions represented inhumane attacks and warned that Moscow would "fiercely and consistently continue the fight against terrorists until their complete annihilation," the Interfax news agency reported.

The statement followed the deployment of some 5,200 police forces to Volgograd to check traffic and inspect public transport following two bomb blasts on Sunday and Monday.

Police have started sweeps throughout the city, detaining 87 people.

Approximately 34 people were killed and 72 injured in the twin blasts.

ObamaCare has delivered another sucker punch to the middle class. This time it's sticker shock.

Now that most people can get past the tech problems of HealthCare.gov and actually see the real cost of insurance plans available, they are finding that Affordable Care is a big hit to the family budget. And when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy?

In California, policies for about 900,000 Californians are being canceled because of ObamaCare's mandates, and about two-thirds of these do not qualify for subsidies, according to The Chicago Tribune. The result: These folks will be paying higher premiums.

In Alabama, premiums have doubled for some middle-class families, like that of Courtney Long, a stay-at-home mother of four. She told WHNT News, "It's devastating. I started crying."

"I mean, we have worked so hard to get out of credit card debt, get ahead on the car loan, transfer our mortgage to a 15- from a 30-year mortgage... and for what?"

Solicitation Number: 14-284-SOL-0015A

Notice Type: Combined Synopsis/Solicitation Synopsis:
Added: Dec 06, 2013 3:35 pm (i)

This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for a commercial item prepared in accordance with FAR Subpart 12.6, as supplemented with additional information in this notice.

This announcement constitutes the only solicitation; proposals are being requested and a written solicitation will not be issued.

(ii) The solicitation number is 14-284-SOL-0015A. This solicitation is issued as an Request for Quote (RFQ).

(iii) The corresponding NAICS code is 325412 and the small business standard size is 750 employees.

(iv) The contract line item number, item, quantity and unit of measure is:

Line No. 001; potassium iodide tablet, 65mg, unit dose package of 20s; 700,000 packages (of 20s)

(v) Delivery is required on or before February 1, 2014.
Delivery will be made to:
DHHS, SSC
Bldg #5 Receiving Dock
Perry Point,MD 21902

How President Barack Obama spent Day 12 of his holiday vacation in Hawaii on Wednesday:

- HEALTH CARE TWEET: Obama sent a tweet from the administration's (at)WhiteHouse Twitter account to mark the major benefits of his signature federal health care law taking effect.

In the personally written tweet, signed off with his initials, the president referenced a Seattle boy who stood next to him and other lawmakers when he signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

"I signed the ACA for kids like Marcelas Owens. He lost his mom bc she couldn't afford coverage. Today millions of Americans finally can," the tweet said.

Michelle Obama sent a tweet from her (at)FLOTUS account signed "mo" that asked people to serve military members and their families in 2014 "as well as they've served us."

The richest people on the planet got even richer in 2013, adding $524 billion to their collective net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world's 300 wealthiest individuals.

The aggregate net worth of the world's top billionaires stood at $3.7 trillion at the market close on Dec. 31, according to the ranking. The biggest gains came in the technology industry, which soared 28 percent during the year. Of the 300 people who appeared on the final ranking of 2013, only 70 registered a net loss for the 12-month period.

"The rich will keep getting richer in 2014," John Catsimatidis, the billionaire founder of real estate and energy conglomerate Red Apple Group Inc., said in a telephone interview from his New York office. "Interest rates will remain low, equity markets will keep rising, and the economy will grow at less than 2 percent."

Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp., was the year's biggest gainer. The 58-year-old tycoon's fortune increased by $15.8 billion to $78.5 billion, according to the index, as shares of Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, rose 40 percent.

Gates recaptured the title of world's richest person on May 16 from Mexican investor Carlos Slim. Gates's fortune has also benefited from a rally in stock holdings that include the Canadian National Railway Co. and sanitizing-products maker Ecolab Inc., which rose 34 percent and 45 percent respectively.

Top 100 CEOs made average $7.96M; average Canadian worker made $46,600

By the time you finish lunch on Thursday, Canada's top paid CEOs will have already earned the equivalent of your annual salary.
It may be hard to swallow, but according to an annual review by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, by 1:11 p.m. on Jan. 2, the average top paid Canadian CEO will have been earned as much as the average full-time worker's yearly income.

The review found the average compensation among Canada's top 100 CEOs was $7.96 million in 2012. This compared with the average annual Canadian worker's salary of $46,634.

85-year-old former prime minister and defense minister, comatose since 2006, suffers renal failure in hospital

Comatose former prime minister Ariel Sharon's condition has gravely deteriorated and he is near death, doctors said on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer said Sharon's condition began taking a turn for the worse in recent days.

Doctors said Sharon, 85, who has been in a vegetative state since 2006, was suffering from renal failure that could lead to multiple organ system failure and death.

Hebrew media reports late Wednesday said doctors had told the family that Sharon had, at most, no more than four days to live.

"The situation now depends mainly on the family and the decisions they make," a senior doctor at the Sheba Hospital told Walla News.

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope.

Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a "bubble," of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured?

If it was the former - if the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution - then the criminal law has no role to play in the aftermath. For in all but a few circumstances (not here relevant), the fierce and fiery weapon called criminal prosecution is directed at intentional misconduct, and nothing less. If the Great Recession was in no part the handiwork of intentionally fraudulent practices by high-level executives, then to prosecute such executives criminally would be "scapegoating" of the most shallow and despicable kind.

But if, by contrast, the Great Recession was in material part the product of intentional fraud, the failure to prosecute those responsible must be judged one of the more egregious failures of the criminal justice system in many years. Indeed, it would stand in striking contrast to the increased success that federal prosecutors have had over the past fifty years or so in bringing to justice even the highest-level figures who orchestrated mammoth frauds. Thus, in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the "junk bond" bubble that, in many ways, was a precursor of the more recent bubble in mortgage-backed securities, the progenitors of the fraud were all successfully prosecuted, right up to Michael Milken.