Remember the story about the Wall Street guy who rented out all 94 rooms of an Aspen hotel for three days for his daughter's Bat Mitzvah?

The main character in that tale was an individual named Jeffrey Verschleiser, a former Bear Stearns executive who was instrumental in helping blow up that venerable firm. Verschleiser among other things was reportedly involved with an elaborate Wall Street version of a merchandise return scam, only instead of taking the proceeds from returned TVs and stereos, his unit was pocketing the cash from crap mortgages sold back to banks on behalf of investors.

Verschleiser also made a bundle burning Bear's bond insurers, whom he bet against after inducing them to insure his crappy mortgage bonds, nicknamed "Sack of Shit" bonds by one of the funny dudes in his department. Verschleiser reportedly bragged that he made $55 million shorting his own bond insurers in the space of three weeks. Those interested in the whole sorry story should check out reporter Teri Buhl's excellent Atlantic magazine piece entitled, "E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out of Billions."

After Verschleiser decided to monopolize the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen for his daughter's Bat Mitzvah, news reports about his identity leaked out, and the event spurred some local controversy in Aspen and plenty of inflamed commentary around the interwebs. But it seems that the negative press has not hurt Verschleiser's career.

Fort Collins -- Some northern Colorado cities are earning thousands of dollars selling water for use in hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The Fort Collins Coloradoan reports the town of Windsor sold more than 8.4 million gallons for nearly $17,000 between Nov. 1 and March 1.

In all of 2011, Greeley sold more than 491 million gallons, mostly to the oil and gas industry, for $1.6 million.

In the wake of the NGO funding scandal the Egyptian parliament is to consider cutting more than $1 billion in US aid along with putting the military-appointed interim government to a vote of confidence.

The move by the lower chamber of the parliament comes after the March 1 departure of six American defendants in the case, leading to accusations that US pressure had led to interference in the judicial process.

The People's Assembly urged that the person who allowed the Americans to leave Egypt be put on trial and declared its desire to refuse massive annual aid from the United States, Al-Ahram daily reports.

"We hope that members of the American Congress listen carefully to the decisions of the Egyptian parliament - the parliament of the revolution -and know quite well that the Egyptian people will never accept tinkering with the sovereignty of Egypt or American assistance to be used to humiliate it," parliament speaker Saad El-Katatni said as quoted by the paper.

The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum. It is about pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign, whether by Santorum himself, by Gingrich or Ron Paul, by an intimidated Romney, or by the Republican House majority. The Republican presidential campaign is about a lot more than the campaign for the presidency. It is about guaranteeing a radical conservative future for America.

I am old enough to remember how liberals (me included) made fun of Ronald Reagan as a not-too-bright mediocre actor who could not possibly be elected president. I remember liberals making fun of George W.Bush as so ignorant and ill-spoken that Americans couldn't possibly take him seriously. Both turned out to be clever politicians who changed America much for the worse. And among the things they and their fellow conservatives managed to do was change public discourse, and with it, change how a great many Americans thought.

The Republican presidential campaign has to be seen in this light.

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

This point is being missed by Democrats and by the media, and yet it is the most vital issue for our future in what is now being discussed. No matter who gets the Republican nomination for president, the Santorum Strategy will have succeeded unless Democrats dramatically change their communication strategy as soon as possible. Even if President Obama is re-elected, he will have very little power if the Republicans keep the House, and a great deal less if they take the Senate. And if they keep and take more state houses and local offices around the country, there will be less and less possibility of a liberal future.

"Click this Button or African children will die": How the "Kony 2012" video drafted a Facebook army to support the militarization of Africa

In 1877 the British Empire was at the height of its glory, the Spanish Empire would soon collapse, and a young Oxford student named Cecil Rhodes was gripped by a sudden religious vision. Rhodes scrawled out a manifesto. In it, he called for an "Anglo-American Empire" that would begin in the heart of Africa and spread out to conquer the known world.

"Africa is still lying ready for us," he wrote. "It is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes-that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race; more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses."

Rhodes went on to found the DeBeers diamond cartel and devote his company's vast wealth to the colonial project in Africa. He couldn't have known that, just over a century later, a new invention called the Internet would be tweaking his message, smoothing out his more inflammatory language, and sending his ideas around the globe through YouTube and Facebook. Nor would he ever had imagined that the first black president of the United States would be the one to carry his vision to its ultimate conclusion, under the guise of "humanitarian intervention."

The whole thing is regrettable, really. Shocking, truth to tell. And so sad, I'm sure, for those people, those blanket-wearing, beard-growing, false-god-worshiping, probably-related-to-terrorists, citizens of Afghanistan whose wives and children and babies were gunned down in their beds, shot, murdered, slaughtered, and then burned by one of America's finest Sunday morning. But hey, what are ya gonna do? These things happen.

It seems the soldier in question was not, in fact, representative of our brave fighting men and women. He was just another in the continuing series of lone gunmen who have been shooting up the world here and overseas for as long as any of us have been reading the newspapers. David Cortright, the director of policy studies at Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, tells us "This may have been the act of a lone, deranged soldier." I saw a headline that said he was a rogue. OK; rogues do as often as not, "go rogue" as no less an authority than Sarah Palin would have us know. So given time to reflect a bit, I guess I'm sorry I impugned our noble troops.

President Barack Obama summed it up as succinctly and as eloquently as only a man of his unflappably cool reserve could, I suppose: "This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan." Well there. And yer goddamn right, Mr. President. Our boys kick butt! We take it to 'em! We light up the friggin sky! They don't mess with the U.S.A. and get away with it. You don't kill three thousand brave American heroes on September the eleventh, ten years ago, and expect your four year old girl to sleep in her own bed unmolested. Unkilled. Unburned. We do what needs to be done to keep America free, and sometimes along the way an enlisted man goes a little nuts. Just one. Just every little once in a while.

Mr. Obama got right on the telephone and called up our "partner" in this whole great reworking of Afghanistan, Mr. Hamid Karzai, and told him we were sorry. Or something like that. He expressed condolences. So did Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I'm sure those were awkward conversations, but you know, the buck does stop there, and that's why we pay those boys the long dollar. Speaking of which, compensation will be paid. You betcha. We have a formula. I don't know, fifteen hunnerd bucks or so. Each.

And we're even-handed and generous in spraying our condolences and compensations. When we kill civilians as a part of our regularly scheduled, officially sanctioned, presidentially authorized drone strikes, it makes Mr. Obama sad, too. It is regrettable, of course, that so many children will insist on living in the same hovels as the alleged terrorists we need to kill, or with somebody who kind of looks like one of them or who might once have been associated with them in some way. We were attacked, you know, and candidate Obama said his predecessor wasn't prosecuting the Afghanistan adventure vigorously enough, but he would, and he for sure, by God has, hasn't he?

Does it feel different to be dead by drone than dead by M-1? Does Obama have nightmares? Did Bush? Do they wash their hands, trying to scrub off the blood? We do not doubt this particular atrocity was perpetrated by a young man gone leave of his senses, but we are not encouraged that he will be tried in a military court, found crazy, demoted, dismissed, given cursory mental health treatment and some time in an institution. We wonder if our Congress and our President should be pronounced crazy, too. Or maybe just criminal. And what about us, neighbor, in our complicity? We who elected them and will re-elect them or others just as cold and cruel and as able to calculate that the life of an Afghan child is not worth much compared to our unending and unyielding compulsion to exercise extreme power in pursuit of God only knows what.

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said in an interview Sunday that the United States should assume that Iran is actively preparing to build nuclear weapons.

Kissinger, 88, was asked on the CNN show GPS if the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon was so dire that Israel would need to launch a military strike in the near future.

"I am very uneasy with the so-called intelligence report that say we don't know whether they are actually working on nuclear weapons," Kissinger told CNN.

"I think we should start from the premise that they are undergoing all this in order to achieve a military capability. I don't think that is a disputable point."

A huge child pornography ring has been smashed, the police are jubilant and the guilty snared. Or so it seems, and in Italy nothing is ever as it seems.

Breezing through chat shows, offices and homes is the suspicion of a cover-up. Almost 1,500 people have been charged but not those in high places who are believed to form a "paedophile lobby".

My neigbours, echoing last night's chat shows, are certain a conspiracy is afoot. Whispers and denunciations will continue awhile but probably come to nothing. Italy will have another mystery.

The facts are these. Two years ago police, prodded by a campaigning Sicilian priest, set up a fake website to trap sellers and buyers of child porn.

A Belgian television station has broadcast a clandestine interview with the paedophile murder suspect, Marc Dutroux, who is awaiting trial on charges of abducting, raping and killing four girls.

Dutroux was arrested in 1996 in a case which rocked the nation. Two of the children who he abducted starved to death in makeshift dungeons under his house.

In the interview with the Flemish-language station VTM Dutroux admitted locking up the girls but did not acknowledge responsibility for their deaths.

He also said he had been part of a wider paedophile network but said the justice system did not want to pursue it.

"There is a well-grounded [paedophile] ring," he said. "I maintained regular contact with people in this ring. However, the law does not want to investigate this lead."

Dutroux has already served time for a paedophile conviction. He was set free in 1992 after serving three years of a 13-year sentence for raping five girls.

Punch-drunk Belgium is reeling from a new shock after a senior police officer confirmed last week what has long been rumoured: that some of the country's leaders indulge in sex parties, known ironically as "ballets roses".

Amusing and appalling in turn, the testimony of Georges Marnette, a senior Brussels policemen, might appear to make a welcome change from the horrors of recent months. But this is not mere entertainment: the stories may provide an important insight into the mores of a ruling class that has outraged ordinary people.

At times, Belgium has been in the throes of a near-revolution, with hundreds of thousands on the streets demanding an end to the political patronage that, they believed, had helped - by omission if not commission - a paedophile ring to murder children and escape arrest. It has not been a time of many laughs for anyone.

All the same, it was with a mixture of knowing winks and barely suppressed laughter that a parliamentary commission investigating another of the country's most mysterious scandals heard the evidence of M Marnette. Belgian newspapers usually refer to the portly M Marnette as "un superflic", and mean it. In fact, his evidence was more reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau.

"Yes, we used to go the bars, the gay and lesbian clubs and the sex parties," he said, his bushy moustaches bristling at the memory of his past achievements. Infiltrating such establishments was no easy matter; it was not a job to be done wearing "jeans and a leather jacket".