More natural disasters, reports AP:
“GUATEMALA CITY – Explosive eruptions shook two huge volcanos in Central and South America on Friday, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and disrupting air traffic as ash drifted over wide regions.
Guatemala’s Pacaya volcano started erupting lava and rocks on Thursday afternoon, blanketing the country’s capital with ash and forcing the closure of the international airport. President Alvaro Colom declared a “state of calamity.” Continue reading
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the SEC is going to keep a data base (an “audit trail”) of every trade made through the NY exchange.
What an extraordinarily intrusive, expensive, and dangerous piece of folly this is. If we ever needed the final proof that the SEC is a useless, vindictive, and corrupt outfit, here it is. Do you think this is about protecting ordinary investors? What nonsense. The system already has circuit-breakers to interrupt crashes like the one on May 6. They were put in place after 1987. Continue reading
The Nobel Women’s Initiative is calling for the release of Israeli whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu:
Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire is calling for the freedom of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistle-blower. In a letter to fellow peace laureate President Barack Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres, Maguire has asked for the two men to help obtain Vanunu’s release. Continue reading
Update: The alert has since been canceled
More bad news from mother earth:
“An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.2 rattled the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu early Friday, triggering a tsunami watch for the area, officials said. There were no immediate reports of damage.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued a tsunami warning for Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. It said the quake had the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that could strike coastlines in the region within minutes to hours. Continue reading
Update:
It’s so much easier to ban something than actually prosecute the people who commit fraud, for which there doesn’t seem to be the will. Nonetheless, on the whole, I think banning naked short-selling is right. I’m less certain about CDS, for which there is a legitimate use. In other words, I don’t think you need a separate ban of CDS (if someone is trying to sell another slippery instrument in the market, this ban could be a way of getting rid of a competing financial instrument). What you need to do is prosecute fraudulent short-selling under fraud statutes, under which it should already be listed. Continue reading
Update 4 (May 27):
The more I research this, the more it seems there were some pretty vicious racially targeted killings, but they seem to have been directed not only at Indians, but at other groups – Chinese, for example:
“Killer was out “curry bashing” Ended up attacking, killing Dr Zhongjun Cao Judge says attack was “for pleasure”
A MAN who kicked a gentle university researcher to death for fun while out “curry bashing” to get a new mobile phone has been jailed.
Ringleader John Caratozzolo laughed after inflicting a vicious kick to the head of his prone and dying victim, Dr Zhongjun Cao. Continue reading
And you thought it was the job of TSA to keep you from feeling insecure. Turns out it’s your job to make the TSA feel secure. To make sure, they’re issuing their personnel uniforms with “police-style badges.”
I suggest that next time you fly, you consider wearing a uniform with one of those “police-style” badges.
Isn’t there something in the law somewhere about impersonating an officer? Continue reading
Rick Ackerman thinks the fault does indeed lie with the stars:
“We peruse the Wall Street Journal’s stock-market round-up each day not to find out why stocks may have risen or fallen, but to determine what factors are conventionally thought to have caused such price movements to occur. Continue reading
Update:
A poster’s comment suggests that I might have been uncritical in accepting this report at face value. Here’s some background:
“Perhaps the most severe competition in our government today is between the Special Forces in the DOD and the CIA over who runs clandestine operations” – Chalmers Johnson, in Counterpunch, May 6, 2010 Continue reading
“All the major religions held in common at one point or other was opposition to the charging of interest. Judaism called for Clean Slates (Leviticus 25), and Christianity banned interest outright, citing the laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy.”
— Michael Hudson
At all other times, of course, any invocation of religion, references to Jesus, God, and the like, would be treated as prima facie evidence of intellectual puerility by the socialists. But now a medieval ban on interest is dispositive. Continue reading