Welcome to Sott.net
Sat, 23 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Puppet Masters
Map

Attention

Strauss-Kahn Drama Ends With Short Final Scene

John Eligon
The New York Times
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00 UTC
Strauss-Kahn
© Michael Appleton for The New York Times
After the hearing on Tuesday, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, center, said in a statement that the criminal inquiry had been “a nightmare for me and my family.”
The coda to one of New York's most gripping and erratic criminal dramas lasted all of 12 minutes.

A prosecutor spoke first, quickly summarizing what had been obvious for weeks: the Manhattan district attorney's office had little confidence in its case, and even less trust in the accuser it had initially championed. A defense lawyer was next, saying simply, "We do not oppose the motion."

Then the judge spoke.

And just like that, the sexual-assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn was dismissed Tuesday, bringing an abrupt end to what had been a three-month episodic criminal investigation, each chapter offering a sensational twist on the underlying storyline: Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a man of international power and prestige, was accused of sexually assaulting an immigrant hotel housekeeper after she entered his suite to clean it.

The dismissal order issued by Justice Michael J. Obus of State Supreme Court in Manhattan brought some semblance of legal vindication to Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, after his stunning and embarrassing arrest more than three months ago. He was taken into custody on May 14 aboard an Air France jet at Kennedy International Airport, and then appeared disheveled and in handcuffs before news cameras.
      Read More...
Wall Street

Guess How Much Wall Street Borrowed From Fed During Crisis While Americans Went Bust?

Zeke Miller
Politico
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:19 UTC
ben bernanke
© http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4e3c36996bb3f7a45e00001f-400-/bernanke-drops-money-from-helicopters.jpg
After months of litigation and an act of Congress, Bloomberg has an exclusive on the massive lending by the Federal Reserve to Wall Street banks during the height of the financial crisis in 2008.

On top of the $160 billion in loans from the Treasury Department, banks - including those based overseas - borrowed $669 billion from the Fed, with the Fed's peak balance at one point reaching a staggering $1.2 trillion.

According to Bloomberg, the $1.2 trillion is about the same amount as homeowners owe on 6.5 million delinquent mortgages, three-times the size of the federal deficit in 2008, and more than the total earnings of federally insured banks in the last decade.

The Fed had refused to disclose the specific sums it lent to the banks in 2008 - but was compelled to by the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law.
      Read More...
War Whore

Israeli Video Games in Gaza

Alison Weir
Veterans Today
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:20 UTC
"Minimal Collateral Damage" Islam was the second two-year-old to be killed by Israeli drone strikes in two days.

Image
© n/a
Islam Quraiqe in Gaza
He looks at the camera with bright eyes and the beginning of a smile, wearing a miniature dark blue zipper sweatshirt, the cuffs folded up a bit to make it fit.

I can imagine his mother dressing him that morning, making sure he would be warm enough. I wonder if she's the one who took the picture. Someone has written on the photo "kisses."

It's not a formal picture. He's outside on a sunny day. It looks like he was probably moving when the picture was snapped; his arms seem to be swinging a little. As with most almost two-year-olds, I suspect it was hard to get him to stay still long enough for a photo.

It's a happy picture, the kind that makes you smile; perhaps it reminds you of funny, energetic little children you know or remember.
      Read More...
Coffee

Study Shows Powerful Corporations Really Do Control the World's Finances

Bob Yirka
PhysOrg.com
Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:46 UTC
Financial Network topology
© Image from arXiv:1107.5728v1 [q-fin.GN].
Network topology with a zoom on some major transnational corporations in the financial sector.
For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we've suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv.

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).
      Read More...
Bad Guys

Libya Revolt Helped Stop Italy Bank Collapse

Ed Conway
Sky News
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:33 UTC
UniCredit bank
Trade in shares of Italy's largest bank has been suspended - as it emerges that events in Libya have helped prevent a collapse of the Italian banking system.

UniCredit's share price has plunged in the past month because of market fears over eurozone debt - and now share dealing has been halted due to volatility.

Although it may sound far-fetched, the Libyan revolution of the past six months may have saved it and other Italian banks amid the crisis.
      Read More...
Eye 1

US: FOIA shows Bush administration spied on Antiwar.com

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:06 UTC
During the Bush-era, a great many Americans were swept up in the spying dragnet laid after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 by federal officials hoping to prevent another major terrorist attack -- people like pacifist Christians, liberal activists, families with members overseas and even street-level falafel sellers.

Now Americans can add another group to the list of those who were viewed as a potential threat: the staff of Antiwar.com.

Documents produced by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an obscure conspiracy blogger show that in 2004, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assigned an analyst to dig into the website's staff and financial contributors to determine whether they were "engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to National Security on behalf of a foreign power."
      Read More...
Newspaper

Sorry, New York Times: GMOs Still Won't Save the World

Anna Lappe
Grist
Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:27 UTC
Image
© John Malta
With all due respect, Nina Federoff's New York Times op-ed reads like it was written two decades ago, when the jury was still out about the potential of the biotech industry to reduce hunger, increase nutritional quality in foods, and decrease agriculture's reliance on toxic chemicals and other expensive inputs that most of the world's farmers can't afford.

With more than 15 years of commercialized GMOs behind us, we know not to believe these promises any longer.

Around the world, from the Government Office for Science in the U.K. to the National Research Council in the United States to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., there is consensus: In order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed humanity into the future, we must invest in "sustainable intensification" - not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity, has never proven its superiority, even in yields, and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals.
      Read More...
Bad Guys

Study: High Food Prices Driving Unrest

Stephen Pincock
abc.net.au
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:41 UTC
Image
© Barry Malone/Reuters
The researchers point to two main factors driving the increase in food prices
The waves of social unrest and political instability seen recently around the world have coincided with large peaks in global food prices, US researchers have found.

They warn that unless something is done urgently to address rising food prices, it could trigger more widespread trouble in the near future.

Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, and colleagues, correlated the dates of riots around the world with data from the United Nations that plots changes in the price of food.

They found evidence that episodes of social unrest in North Africa and the Middle East coincided closely with peaks in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index.
      Read More...
Dollar

The Scramble for Access to Libya's Oil Wealth Begins

Clifford Krauss
Reuters
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:59 UTC
A truck carrying rebel fighters driving toward the oil refinery in Zawiyah, Libya, last week.
© Bob Strong

A truck carrying rebel fighters driving toward the oil refinery in Zawiyah, Libya, last week.

Houston, Texas - The fighting is not yet over in Tripoli, but the scramble to secure access to Libya's oil wealth has already begun.

Before the rebellion broke out in February, Libya exported 1.3 million barrels of oil a day. While that is less than 2 percent of world supplies, only a few other countries can supply equivalent grades of the sweet crude oil that many refineries around the world depend on. The resumption of Libyan production would help drive down oil prices in Europe, and indirectly, gasoline prices on the East Coast of the United States.

Western nations - especially the NATO countries that provided crucial air support to the rebels - want to make sure their companies are in prime position to pump the Libyan crude.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy said on state television on Monday that the Italian oil company Eni "will have a No. 1 role in the future" in the North African country. Mr. Frattini even reported that Eni technicians were already on their way to eastern Libya to restart production. (Eni quickly denied that it had sent any personnel to the still-unsettled region, which is Italy's largest source of imported oil.)

Libyan production has been largely shut down during the long conflict between rebel forces and troops loyal to Libya's leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
      Read More...
Coffee

US: Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion From Fed

Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz
Bloomberg
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:44 UTC
Rolling Stone Bankers
© Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.

By 2008, the housing market's collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

"These are all whopping numbers," said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. "You're talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money."
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts