Bank of England Governor: World Facing Worst Financial Crisis in History
October 7th, 2011So, the green shoots are off then?
Via: Telegraph:
The world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s “if not ever”, the Governor of the Bank of England said last night.
Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.
Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.
Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”
Announcing its decision, the Bank said that the eurozone debt crisis was creating “severe strains in bank funding markets and financial markets”.
IMF Advisor: Could See Eurozone ‘Meltdown’ in 2 Or 3 Weeks
October 7th, 2011“The US investment banks and the rating agencies are now attacking these French banks. They know where the bodies are buried, and they are using the weapons they sold them to attack them… This is part of a new era on Wall Street – they go after sovereign debt. Wall Street and rating agencies are working together to destabilize the sovereign debt of these countries.”
BBC: More confetti. More confetti. We need a comprehensive plan for more confetti.
Via: Business Insider:
In an interview on the BBC (via ZeroHedge), IMF advisor Robert Shapiro said some incredibly alarmist things.
He tells broadcasters that if eurozone leaders don’t address the crisis properly we will see a meltdown as soon as later this month.
UBS Systems Detected £1.3bn Rogue Trader; Warnings Were Ignored
October 6th, 2011Via: ComputerWorldUK:
UBS has insisted its IT systems did detect unusual and unauthorised trading activity, before rogue trader Kweku Adoboli ran up a $2 billion (£1.3 billion) loss on the bank’s derivatives desk.
Interim chief executive Sergio Ermotti, who is running the company following Oswald Grubel’s resignation last month, sent a memo to employees saying the bank is aware that its systems did detect the rogue activity.
In the memo, seen by the Wall Street Journal, Ermotti wrote: “Our internal investigation indicates that risk and operational systems did detect unauthorised or unexplained activity but this was not sufficiently investigated nor was appropriate action taken to ensure existing controls were enforced.”
Feds Target Pot Dispensaries for Closure
October 6th, 2011The government and the pharmaceutical industry don’t like the competition.
Via: AP:
Federal prosecutors have launched a crackdown on pot dispensaries in California, warning the stores that they must shut down in 45 days or face criminal charges and confiscation of their property even if they are operating legally under the state’s 15-year-old medical marijuana law.
In an escalation of the ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and the nation’s burgeoning medical marijuana industry, at least 16 pot shops or their landlords received letters this week stating they are violating federal drug laws, even though medical marijuana is legal in California.
Mario Cal: The Mysterious Suicide That Has Rocked The Vatican
October 6th, 2011Via: Independent:
On a Monday morning in July, a gunshot rang out in the administration section of Milan’s San Raffaele hospital. Seconds later, a frightened secretary entered the office of the institution’s vice-president, Mario Cal, and found him lying in a pool of blood. Mr Cal clung briefly to life, but the Smith and Wesson revolver had done its job. Before long he died on one of his hospital’s own operating tables.
The suicide of the hospital administrator went largely unnoticed outside Italy. But for the powers that be at the Vatican, it was more dreadful news. The global scandal over clerical paedophilia may be the story that dominates the headlines, but as the Vatican attempts to repair its stained reputation and mend diplomatic fences after spats with Beijing and Dublin, the death of Mario Cal was an ugly reminder of problems much nearer home.
Three hundred miles north of the capital, in Italy’s second city, the battle is on to prevent a third body blow to the Vatican. This time cardinals are having to deal not with a moral abyss but a financial chasm – a shortfall of €1.5bn on the balance sheet of Milan’s San Raffaele teaching hospital, an institute with links to the Vatican whose founder, Don Luigi Verzè, is a priest and a good friend of the city’s most famous son, Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The San Raffaele is highly regarded for the quality of its medical care and its research. But as Mr Cal’s death made clear, it is in a crisis.
Thanks to bad investments and profligate expenses unrelated to medical care that would make a tycoon blush – including personal aircraft, hotels in Sardinia, and mango plantations in South America – the hospital is on the verge of collapse, something that was said to have been distressing Mr Cal greatly, and would have proved a huge embarrassment to the Vatican.
Bush Regime Also Carrried Out Gun-Walking Program: Wide Receiver, Possibly Others
October 6th, 2011Via: AP:
The federal government under the Bush administration ran an operation that allowed hundreds of guns to be transferred to suspected arms traffickers — the same tactic that congressional Republicans have criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for using, two federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other Republicans have been hammering the Obama Justice Department over the practice known as “letting guns walk.” The congressional target has been Operation Fast and Furious, which was designed to track small-time gun buyers at several Phoenix-area gun shops up the chain to make cases against major weapons traffickers. In the process, federal agents lost track of many of the more than 2,000 guns linked to the operation.
When Bush, a Republican, was president, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Tucson, Ariz., used a similar enforcement tactic in a program it called Operation Wide Receiver. The fact that there were two such ATF investigations years apart in separate administrations raises the possibility that agents in still other cases may have allowed guns to “walk.”
Secret U.S. Panel Puts Americans on ‘Kill List’
October 6th, 2011Hopey Changey.
Via: Reuters:
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior U.S. government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to U.S. officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Related: The Secret Memo That Explains Why Obama Can Kill Americans
California Appeals Court Approves Cell Phone Searches During Traffic Stops; No Warrant Necessary
October 6th, 2011Via: The Blaze:
…after initially striking down cell phone snooping, California has now joined the list of states that allow cops to go through your phone without a warrant.
Related: Police Device Used To Steal Your Cell Phone Data During Traffic Stop
U.S. Drone Helicopters to Begin Troop Re-Supply Operations in Afghanistan
October 6th, 2011Via: Wired:
Next month, the Afghanistan war gets a boost. Specifically, a boost from a robotic helicopter that ferries gear to U.S. troops.
Check out the video above. That’s the K-MAX helicopter, a collaboration between defense giant Lockheed Martin and Connecticut aerospace company Kaman, lifting off from an Arizona test site in August, after its human pilot walked out of the cockpit. The copter ascends, toting nets bearing what look like hundreds of pounds’ worth of palletized cargo, flies the gear off to another part of the Yuma Proving Ground, drops it safely, and lands.
This isn’t the first unmanned helicopter used in the Afghanistan war. Earlier this year, the Navy — which also owns the K-MAX — sent its Fire Scout surveillance helos into the war zone, where they flew as much as 400 hours per month. But K-MAX is the first robo-copter used for cargo operations, and the Department of the Navy’s been looking for months at using drone helos not only to drop troops their re-supply, but to get wounded warriors to a field hospital before it’s too late.
DARPA Symposium Speakers Consider Implications of Contact with Aliens on Religion
October 6th, 2011[???]
Via: Space:
The discovery of intelligent aliens would be mind-blowing in many respects, but it could present a special dilemma for the world’s religions, theologians pondering interstellar travel concepts said Saturday (Oct. 1).
Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.
In other words, “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” as philosophy professor Christian Weidemannof Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum titled his talk at a panel on the philosophical and religious considerations of visiting other worlds.
“According to Christianity, an historic event some 2,000 years ago was supposed to save the whole of creation,” Weidemann said. “You can grasp the conflict.” [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]
Here’s how the debate goes: If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God’s creatures?
