[Quote:]

In conclusion Pope Benedict, said today’s younger generations are exposed to a double risk, largely due to the widespread use of new technologies: on one hand, noted Pope Benedict there is a danger that the students capacity for concentration and mental application on a personal level are reduced; on the other hand there is a danger that the students isolate themselves in an increasingly virtual reality.

What he really means, of course, is that new technologies make information so widely available that his church is losing relevance and credibility, and he’s afraid of losing young people from his flock.

[Quote:]

More than 2 million prime mortgages, traditional loans for people with good credit, are now delinquent. That’s 624,000 more than this time last year, according to the mortgage bankers foundation, Tracy reports.

“We didn’t necessarily expect the distress levels that we are seeing at this point,” says economist Mark Fleming.

It used to be if you couldn’t afford your mortgage you could always try to refinance or sell your home and pay off your loan. But these days, for a lot of people, those options no longer exist.

That’s because 12 million households now owe more than their homes are worth, according to Moody’s.

[Quote:]

The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.

The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.

“In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent.”

[Quote:]

Last Friday Vittorio de Filippis, former publisher of the left-wing Libération newspaper, was – according to press reports – seized at his home before dawn, handcuffed in front of two young boys and whisked off for interrogation by an investigating magistrate. Police told him he was “worse than scum” and kept him for five hours in a cell with no access to a lawyer. Oh, and he was strip-searched twice and subjected to “body cavity” examinations.

Damian Green, the UK’s Conservative immigration spokesman who was held for nine hours last Thursday should count himself lucky: his cavities were off limits.

Mr de Filippis had the misfortune to be cited in a complaint lodged two years ago by the disgruntled head of an Internet service provider for libel. Xavier Niel, head of Free Internet, was unhappy about a commentary posted on Liberation’s website in response to an article on his legal problems.

As directeur de la rédaction at the time, de Filippis was in theory legally responsible for the paper’s entire contents, even if he did not write the contentious text – it was a comment by an online reader.

The French press – Libération in particular – is apoplectic about the “interpellation musclé” (literally the muscle-bound arrest) of one of its own.

“Democracy means that if the doorbell rings at 6am, it is likely to be the milkman,” wrote Libération’s editor Laurent Joffrin, paraphrasing Sir Winston Churchill. The police rang at 6.40am, but you get the point.

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Thailand’s Constitutional Court ordered the ruling People Power Party dissolved Tuesday for electoral fraud, banning Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat and more than 30 party officials from politics for five years.

The ruling follows months of opposition protests, including a week-old siege of Bangkok’s international airport and sparked angry counter-protests by Somchai’s supporters outside the court.

The court also banned at least one of the PPP’s ruling coalition partners, effectively dismantling the government over allegations of vote-rigging.

[Quote:]

The new Counter Terrorism Bill, currently in The Lords, contains an amendment to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This amendment will make it an offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, to publish or elicit information about any police constable “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.

Furthermore, Schedule 7 of the Bill applies this amendment to internet service providers and web hosting services. This means they will have a legal duty to remove all sites perceived to fall under this offence, and has provisions for use at home and abroad.

It is unclear what information will be classed as “useful” to terrorists, but due to this ambiguous wording, the Bill has implications for bloggers, journalists, photographers, activists and anyone who values freedom of speech.

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Here’s how it works: a bank will set up a shelf company in Cayman Islands or somewhere with $2 of capital and shareholders other than the bank itself. They are usually charities that could use a little cash, and when some nice banker in a suit shows up and offers them money to sign some documents, they do.

That allows the so-called special purpose vehicle (SPV) to have “deniability”, as in “it’s nothing to do with us” – an idea the banks would have picked up from the Godfather movies.

The bank then creates a CDS between itself and the SPV. Usually credit default swaps reference a single third party, but for the purpose of the synthetic CDOs, they reference at least 100 companies.

The CDS contracts between the SPV can be $US500 million to $US1 billion, or sometimes more. They have a variety of twists and turns, but it usually goes something like this: if seven of the 100 reference entities default, the SPV has to pay the bank a third of the money; if eight default, it’s two-thirds; and if nine default, the whole amount is repayable.

For this, the bank agrees to pay the SPV 1 or 2 per cent per annum of the contracted sum.

Finally the SPV is taken along to Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch’s and the ratings agencies sprinkle AAA magic dust upon it, and transform it from a pumpkin into a splendid coach.

The bank’s sales people then hit the road to sell this SPV to investors. It’s presented as the bank’s product, and the sales staff pretend that the bank is fully behind it, but of course it’s actually a $2 Cayman Islands company with one or two unknowing charities as shareholders.

It offers a highly-rated, investment-grade, fixed-interest product paying a 1 or 2 per cent premium. Those investors who bother to read the fine print will see that they will lose some or all of their money if seven, eight or nine of a long list of apparently strong global corporations go broke. In 2004-2006 it seemed money for jam. The companies listed would never go broke – it was unthinkable.

Here are some of the companies that are on all of the synthetic CDO reference lists: the three Icelandic banks, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, American Insurance Group, Ambac, MBIA, Countrywide Financial, Countrywide Home Loans, PMI, General Motors, Ford and a pretty full retinue of US home builders.

In other words, the bankers who created the synthetic CDOs knew exactly what they were doing. These were not simply investment products created out of thin air and designed to give their sales people something from which to earn fees – although they were that too.

They were specifically designed to protect the banks against default by the most leveraged companies in the world. And of course the banks knew better than anyone else who they were.

[..]

It is now getting very interesting. The three Icelandic banks have defaulted, as has Countrywide, Lehman and Bear Stearns. AIG has been taken over by the US Government, which is counted as a part-default, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are in “conservatorship”, which is also a part default – a ‘part default’ does not count as a ‘full default’ in calculating the nine that would trigger the CDS liabilities.

Ambac, MBIA, PMI, General Motors, Ford and a lot of US home builders are teetering.

If the list of defaults – full and partial – gets to nine, then a mass transfer of money will take place from unsuspecting investors around the world into the banking system. How much? Nobody knows, but it’s many trillions.

It will be the most colossal rights issue in the history of the world, all at once and non-renounceable. Actually, make that mandatory.

The distress among those who lose their money will be immense. It will be a real loss, not a theoretical paper loss. Cash will be transferred from their own bank accounts into the issuing bank, via these Cayman Islands special purpose vehicles.

And here is how a Wisconsin High School and the New York subway became hedge funds…

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Unfortunately, the recently released 2.2 software update, for now, has made the iPhone 3G impossible to unlock–unless you happen to be in Hanoi. Here, I met a man who takes the job quite seriously and gets it done the hard way, literally.

His name is Tuan Anh Do, and he’s a 29-year-old businessman who owns five cell phone repair shops. A big part of his business is servicing the iPhone and iPhone 3G, and that often involves getting those devices unlocked at the hardware level.

One of his shops is on Nguyen Du street, a relatively small, quiet block in Hanoi. It’s located in a typically narrow four-story house, with one floor serving as a reception area, and another holding the accounting department. The top floor is the workshop, where the magic happens.

[..]

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh’s turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

[Quote:]

Monster trucks look even cooler when they are miniaturized via tilt-shift videography.

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These are the 12 “foreign,” or so-called transplant, producers making cars across America’s South and Midwest. Toyota, BMW, Kia and others now make 54% of the cars Americans buy. The internationals also employ some 113,000 Americans, compared with 239,000 at U.S.-owned carmakers, and several times that number indirectly.

The international car makers aren’t cheering for Detroit’s collapse. Their own production would be hit if such large suppliers as the automotive interior maker Lear were to go down with a GM or Chrysler. They fear, as well, a protectionist backlash. But by the same token, a government lifeline for Detroit punishes these other companies and their American employees for making better business decisions.

The root of this other industry’s success is no secret. In fact, Detroit has already adopted some of its efficiency and employment strategies, though not yet enough. To put it concisely, the transplants operate under conditions imposed by the free market. Detroit lives on Fantasy Island.