cryptogon.com

The report reflects a sharp drop in demand after buyers stopped scrambling to qualify for a tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time homeowners. It had been due to expire on Nov. 30. But Congress extended the deadline until April 30 and expanded it with a new $6,500 credit for existing homeowners who move.

“It’s ‘exit stage left’ for first-time homebuyers,” wrote Guy LeBas, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott.

December’s sales fell 16.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.45 million, from an unchanged pace of 6.54 million in November, the National Association of Realtors said Monday. Sales had been expected to fall by about 10 percent, according to economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Flight ET409, a Boeing 737-800, heading for Addis Ababa, disappeared off the radar some five minutes after taking off at 2:37 a.m. (7:37 p.m. EST on Sunday) during a thunderstorm.

The Lebanese army said the plane had broken up in the air before plummeting into rough seas and hopes of finding any survivors faded 12 hours after the crash. Witnesses described the impact as a “flash that lit up the whole sea” and a “ball of fire.”

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said he did not think the plane had been brought down deliberately, emphasizing “a sabotage attack is unlikely.”

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Girma Wake said he had spoken with Lebanese authorities who had no word of survivors.

Eighty-three passengers and seven crew were on the flight, Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi al-Aridi said at the airport.

Twenty-four bodies have so far been recovered, at least six of Ethiopian origin, officials said. Some of the bodies were so unrecognizable from the impact of the crash that DNA testing would be needed to identify them.

The remains of mangled aircraft seats and luggage washed up on the shore south of Beirut where the airport’s main runway is located. Lebanese army patrol boats, helicopters and divers searched an area off Na’ameh, 10 km (six miles) south of the capital.

Fifty-four of those on board were Lebanese, 22 were Ethiopian, two were British and there were also Canadian, Russian, French, Iraqi and Syrian nationals.

Marla Pietton, wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton, was on the plane, the French embassy said.

Sensing death was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his family for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of sand from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.

Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks later in 2007. He was 43.

A New York City hospital treating him for tongue cancer had failed to detect a computer error that directed a linear accelerator to blast his brain stem and neck with errant beams of radiation. Not once, but on three consecutive days.

Soon after the accident, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, state health officials cautioned hospitals to be extra careful with linear accelerators, machines that generate beams of high-energy radiation.

But on the day of the warning, at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 32-year-old breast cancer patient named Alexandra Jn-Charles absorbed the first of 27 days of radiation overdoses, each three times the prescribed amount. A linear accelerator with a missing filter would burn a hole in her chest, leaving a gaping wound so painful that this mother of two young children considered suicide.

…

Regulators and researchers can only guess how often radiotherapy accidents occur. With no single agency overseeing medical radiation, there is no central clearinghouse of cases. Accidents are chronically underreported, records show, and some states do not require that they be reported at all.

In June, The Times reported that a Philadelphia hospital gave the wrong radiation dose to more than 90 patients with prostate cancer — and then kept quiet about it. In 2005, a Florida hospital disclosed that 77 brain cancer patients had received 50 percent more radiation than prescribed because one of the most powerful — and supposedly precise — linear accelerators had been programmed incorrectly for nearly a year.

Dr. John J. Feldmeier, a radiation oncologist at the University of Toledo and a leading authority on the treatment of radiation injuries, estimates that 1 in 20 patients will suffer injuries.

Most are normal complications from radiation, not mistakes, Dr. Feldmeier said. But in some cases the line between the two is uncertain and a source of continuing debate.

Tishman, which bought the 80-acre property with BlackRock Realty Inc. in 2006 for $5.4 billion, missed a $16.1 million debt payment on Jan. 8. Gramercy Capital Corp., which holds some of the debt, asked to have Tishman removed as manager of the buildings, three people familiar with the matter said last week.

“We make this decision as we feel a battle over the property or a contested bankruptcy proceeding is not in the long-term interest of the property, its residents, our partnership or the city,” Tishman and BlackRock said in an e- mailed statement today.

The New York-based investors bought the developments from insurer MetLife Inc. near the top of the market with plans to remodel and raise the cost of rent-regulated units to market rates. On Oct. 22, the New York Court of Appeals in Albany ruled that increases on about 4,350 apartments were illegal. That month, Fitch Ratings valued the property at $1.8 billion.

The request to keep the details secret were made by the New York Federal Reserve — a regulator that helped orchestrate the bailout — and by the giant insurer itself, according to the emails.

The emails from early last year reveal that officials at the New York Fed were only comfortable with AIG submitting a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after getting assurances from the regulatory agency that “special security procedures” would be used to handle the document.

The SEC, according to an email sent by a New York Fed lawyer on January 13, 2009, agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG’s confidentiality request.

The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored “in a special area where national security related files are kept,” the lawyer wrote.

In another email, a New York Fed official said the SEC suggested in late December 2008, that AIG file the document under seal and then apply to the regulatory agency for so-called confidential treatment, if central bankers wanted to stop the information from becoming public.

The emails were included in the mountain of documents the New York Fed turned over last week to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which will hold a hearing Wednesday into the AIG bailout and the New York Fed’s role in trying keep the specific terms of that Fed-engineered rescue in November 2008, from being made public.

More than a year later, the Fed’s bailout of AIG remains controversial because it funneled nearly $70 billion to 16 big U.S. and European banks that had bought credit default swaps from AIG. Banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank had bought those insurance-like derivatives to guard against defaults on hundreds of securities backed by subprime mortgages.

‘BACKDOOR BAILOUT’

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have labeled the AIG bailout, in which the New York Fed created a special entity to purchase those securities from the banks at essentially their face value, a “backdoor bailout” for the 16 financial institutions.

The new batch of emails, along with others that have become public in recent weeks, reveal that some at the New York Fed had gone to great lengths to keep the terms of the bailout private and the SEC may have played a role in contributing to some of the secrecy surrounding the AIG rescue package.

“The New York Fed was orchestrating what can only be characterized as an extreme effort to ensure that details of the counterparty deal stayed secret,” Rep. Darrell Issa from California, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said through a spokesman. “More and more it looks as if they would’ve kept the details of the deal secret indefinitely, it they could have.”

In March, some of the secrecy surrounding the AIG bailout began to fall away when the insurer, under pressure from Congress and the SEC, agreed to publicly name the 16 banks that got money in the rescue package and how much each received.

But AIG, largely at the prodding of the New York Fed, refused to make public all of the information in the controversial document, officially called “Schedule A — List of Derivative Transactions,” according to the emails turned over by the central bank to Capitol Hill. AIG continued to seek confidential treatment from the SEC for the redacted portions of the five-page filing.

Last May, the SEC did grant AIG’s request for confidential treatment for the remaining redacted portions of the Schedule A filing. The redacted parts include the CUSIP, or trading ID, number for each security on which AIG wrote a CDS contract, as well as the face value of each individual security that AIG had insured against default.

The SEC agreed to let AIG keep that information confidential until November 2018 — or the 10th anniversary of the bailout. Critics contend that without the redacted information, it is difficult to determine which of the 16 banks had held the worst-performing securities, and which banks originated the worst of the troubled securities.

GEITHNER UNDER MICROSCOPE

The New York Fed has argued the information needs to remain confidential to enable BlackRock Inc, which manages the portfolio of securities bought from the banks, to compete with hedge funds on an even playing field.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has drawn fire for his role in the bailout, was set to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Geithner, who led the New York Fed at the time of the AIG bailout, has said he was not privy to the discussions about what information AIG should or should not release to the public and the SEC.

New York Fed spokeswoman Deborah Kilroe said on Friday that the more than 250,000 pages of documents provided by the central bank to Congress “demonstrate that the FBNY’s actions assisted AIG in ensuring the accuracy of its disclosures and protected important U.S. taxpayer interests.”

For its part, SEC has said it pushed AIG to make public the list of banks getting bailout money and only signed off on the request for confidential treatment after the insurer released that information. SEC spokesman John Nestor said: “The SEC required AIG to make public all of the information in Schedule A that was material to an investor in AIG.”

But this latest round of emails reveals that it was an official with the SEC in December 2008 who recommended that AIG and the New York Fed could seek confidential treatment for the Schedule A document as an alternative to making the entire document public.

In November, a New York Fed lawyer, in another email, had said he thought it was “highly unlikely” the SEC would grant confidential treatment for the document.

AIG and the New York Fed took the SEC’s advice and filed a heavily redacted version of the Schedule A on January 14, 2009, and at the same time requested confidential treatment for the redacted portions.

We are working on resolving this issue as fast as possible. Please use our bank accounts for direct transfer in the meantime, or contact wl-donations@sunshinepress.org for any further questions.

“People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the country’s direction,” he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.

“And the same entrenched interests that George Bush could not shake, this current White House is having great difficulty in shaking. One could suggest they might be more entrenched than ever.”

Kucinich staunchly defended liberalism but alleged that Democrats are not behaving like liberals.

“There’s nothing liberal about the bailouts. There’s nothing liberal about standing by and watching banks use public money to get their executive bonuses. There’s nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care… Since when did that become liberal?”

“There’s nothing liberal about letting coal and oil write climate change legislation,” he added. “Are you kidding me?”

The 13-year congressman lamented the lack of change in economic policies, tying it to the major problems Democrats are facing.

“The minute the president appointed Tim Geithner and Larry Summers to key policy positions, and the minute that [Ben] Bernanke was named to head the Fed again, we’re looking at people who participated in the decline of the economy,” he said. “This group has done us a disservice.”

“Every area of the economy is still about taking wealth from the great mass of people and putting it into the hands of a few. If you don’t have a economic democracy, you don’t have a political democracy.”

In a draconian – and highly unusual – order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence.

The move, which will stoke fresh speculation about the true circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death, comes just days before Tony Blair appears before the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War.

It is also bound to revive claims of an establishment cover-up and fresh questions about the verdict that Dr Kelly killed himself.

Tonight, Dr Michael Powers QC, a doctor campaigning to overturn the Hutton findings, said: ‘What is it about David Kelly’s death which is so secret as to justify these reports being kept out of the public domain for 70 years?’

Campaigning Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has also questioned the verdict that Dr Kelly committed suicide, said: ‘It is astonishing this is the first we’ve known about this decision by Lord Hutton and even more astonishing he should have seen fit to hide this material away.’

The body of former United Nations weapons inspector Dr Kelly was found in July 2003 in woods close to his Oxfordshire home, shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC news report questioning the Government’s claims that

Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

Lord Hutton’s 2004 report, commissioned by Mr Blair, concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.

It was dismissed by many experts as a whitewash for clearing the Government of any culpability, despite evidence that it had leaked Dr Kelly’s name in an attempt to smear him.

Only now has it emerged that a year after his inquiry was completed, Lord Hutton took unprecedented action to ensure that the vital evidence remains a state secret for so long.

A letter, leaked to The Mail on Sunday, revealed that a 30-year ban was placed on ‘records provided [which were] not produced in evidence’. This is thought to refer to witness statements given to the inquiry which were not disclosed at the time.

In addition, it has now been established that Lord Hutton ordered all medical reports – including the post-mortem findings by pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt and photographs of Dr Kelly’s body – to remain classified information for 70 years.

The normal rules on post-mortems allow close relatives and ‘properly interested persons’ to apply to see a copy of the report and to ‘inspect’ other documents.

Lord Hutton’s measure has overridden these rules, so the files will not be opened until all such people are likely to be dead.

Last night, the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain the legal basis for Lord Hutton’s order.

The restrictions came to light in a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council to a group of doctors who are challenging the Hutton verdict.

Last year, a group of doctors, including Dr Powers, compiled a medical dossier as part of their legal challenge to the Hutton verdict.

They argue that Hutton’s conclusion that Dr Kelly killed himself by severing the ulnar artery in his left wrist after taking an overdose of prescription painkillers is untenable because the artery is small and difficult to access, and severing it could not have caused death.

In their 12-page opinion, they concluded: ‘The bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death. We advise the instructing solicitors to obtain the autopsy reports so that the concerns of a group of properly interested medical specialists can be answered.’

Tonight, Dr Powers, a former assistant coroner, added: ‘Supposedly all evidence relevant to the cause of death has been heard in public at the time of Lord Hutton’s inquiry. If these secret reports support the suicide finding, what could they contain that could be so sensitive?’

The letter disclosing the 70-year restriction was written by Nick Graham, assistant head of legal and democratic services at Oxfordshire Council.

It states: ‘Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years.’

Nicholas Gardiner, the Chief Coroner for Oxfordshire, confirmed that he had seen the letter.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday today, he said: ‘I know that Lord Hutton made that recommendation. Someone told me at the time. Anybody concerned will be dead by then, and that is quite clearly Lord Hutton’s intention.’

Asked what was in the records that made it necessary for them to be embargoed, Mr Gardiner said: ‘They’re Lord Hutton’s records not mine. You’d have to ask him.’

He added that in his opinion Lord Hutton had embargoed the records to protect Dr Kelly’s children.

The inquest into Dr Kelly’s death was suspended before it could begin by the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer. He used the Coroners Act to designate the Hutton Inquiry as ‘fulfilling the function of an inquest’.

News that the records will be kept secret comes just days before Mr Blair gives evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday.

To date, Dr Kelly’s name has scarcely been mentioned at the inquiry. One source who held a private meeting with Sir John Chilcot before the proceedings began said that Sir John had admitted he ‘did not want to touch the Kelly issue’ .

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: ‘Any decision made by Lord Hutton at the time of his inquiry was entirely a matter for him.’

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said yesterday that it would not be possible to search their records during the weekend.