The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...

The day Dr David Kelly took a short walk to his death in the Oxfordshire countryside, an unopened letter lay on the desk of his book-lined study.

Sent from the heart of the British Government, the pages were marked 'personal' and threatened the world-renowned microbiologist with the sack if he ever publicly opened his mouth again.

The letter remained unopened for the seven days during the drama that would pitch Dr Kelly into the spotlight and end in his death at just 59.

Lagos, Nigeria (UPI) Jul 9, 2009 China's oil companies, buoyed by the country's foreign exchange reserves that now top $2 trillion for the first time, are on another buying spree in Africa
, further challenging the century-long domination of the continent's mineral wealth by Europe's great powers.

So intense is Beijing's drive for wider access to energy resources to fuel China's economic growth that its main state-run oil companies are now competing among themselves.

Independence Day weekend in the US started with fireworks. Political fireworks. Former Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was not content to see Michael Jackson's death nor the infidelities of fellow conservative hypocri..er...politicians get all the media attention. On Friday she had to go drop a bombshell about her resignation. Both naysayers and rabid Palin supporters were surprised to hear that she was stepping down as governor of Alaska.

The conservative supporters seem to have been caught unaware, so much so, that they did not have an immediate talking point at hand, to explain it all away. Initial reactions to her announcement ranged from puzzlement to dismay to applause. The Sarah Palin blog lists a few. However, in the space of a few hours, the usual conservative pundits managed to come up with those handy talking points.

The US has denied a report that it has reached a compromise that would allow Israel to continue the construction of settlements that has already begun.

"That report in that Israeli media outlet is inaccurate," State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly said after the Maariv newspaper reported that the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and US envoy George Mitchell had struck such a deal.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and nine top leaders from the ruling Communist Party say they will 'severely punish' those involved in the Xinjiang unrest.

"The planners of the incident, the organizers, key members, and the serious violent criminals must be severely punished according to law," Xinhua news agency quoted the top leaders as saying at a meeting on Thursday.

The summit commenced -- upon Hu's order -- in the wake of the unrest in Muslim majority Xinjiang, which was identified as "the most important and pressing task."

Hundreds of Chinese from rival ethnic groups fought each other with machetes, metal pipes and bricks in Urumqi, overcoming police attempts to prevent the deadliest communal clashes in decades from escalating.

A mob of Han Chinese was seen breaking into a three-story apartment inhabited by ethnic Uighurs in the northwestern city. Earlier, police fired tear gas to prevent the mob avenging rioting by Uighurs that left at least 156 dead. The fighting came after thousands of Chinese armed with knives and steel bars clashed in central Urumqi with police.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Weapons inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets before his ­mysterious death.

He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the ­British and American invasion.

He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets.

Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material.

Dr Kelly was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In his first-ever media interview, Nigerian immigrant David Nwankwo stands by his claim that he was tortured by police. An outrageous smear? Perhaps. But it's part of wider allegations of corruption, theft and brutality that dog the Met.

A nondescript terrace house in North London and a police drugs raid is in full swing.

On a bedroom floor, David Nwankwo is sitting, semi-naked, with his hands handcuffed behind his back as a plain- clothes officer yells: 'Tell the truth.'

The 24-year-old Nigerian-born immigrant is repeatedly kicked and slapped, on one occasion even being struck around the head with a Bible.