[Quote:]

Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.

[..]

The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one of 25 deals that Goldman created so the bank and select clients could bet against the housing market. Those deals, which were the subject of an article in The New York Times in December, initially protected Goldman from losses when the mortgage market disintegrated and later yielded profits for the bank.

As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars.

Good. Couldn’t happen to a worse bunch of robber barons.

[Quote:]

The bishop of Rotterdam Ad van Luyn has made a formal complaint to the police about a priest working in Leidschendam and Voorburg who may have been involved in sexually abusing children while working in Sri Lanka.

The bishop told the Telegraaf he had suspended the priest and brought in the police after completing a preliminary investigation himself.

Dear Ratz, this is how you do it.

Compare that to this:

[Quote:]

As a tide of previously confidential Catholic Church documents about child sexual abuse by priests has risen over recent weeks, the Vatican has been able to say that none of them was a “smoking gun” proving it had instructed bishops to cover up the scandals. This defense looks thinner than ever with the posting of a 2001 letter by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos congratulating (yes, congratulating!) a bishop for not only hiding a self-confessed serial abuser but earning himself a criminal sentence for doing so. For more on the 2001 case, click here.

This amazing letter, in which Castrillon Hoyos promises Bayeux Bishop Pierre Pican he will be presented as a hero to all Catholic bishops around the world, exudes the arrogant atmosphere of Church superiority that victims say they have had to battle against for years to have their grievances taken seriously. It puts forward the incredible argument that a bishop, because he has a kind of “spiritual paternity” for priests under him, is equivalent to a father who is not obliged to testify against his son. It even cites Saint Paul and the Second Vatican Council as supporting this view.

My news story on the letter translates the main (and quite explicit) quotes from the French original. The Golias story on it (in French) is here – and its PDF copy of the letter is here.

[Quote:]

British comedy legend John Cleese took a $5,400 taxi ride from Oslo to Brussels after becoming stranded in Europe’s volcanic ash travel crisis.

“We checked every option, but there were no boats and no train tickets available,” Cleese told Norwegian TV2 in a telephone interview posted on the network’s website in Norwegian.

“That’s when my fabulous assistant determined the easiest thing would be to take a taxi.”

The bill? A whopping 30,000 kroner ($5,400), said Cleese, who was visiting the Norwegian capital to take part in the popular Scandinavian talk show Skavlan.

[Quote:]

The MPAA and RIAA have sent a response to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator that would call for software to spy on users for potential piracy. Answering a request for comments, the music and movie studios would like antivirus software to include tools for “managing copyright infringement” and block or report copyrighted material it finds.

Don’t worry, your government will protect you….

So my internet provider had a problem on april 6. Fine, that can happen. They had a power failure in their data center, causing their DNS and DHCP servers to fail. They fixed it in a few hours.

It made the national news because of their market share.

Today they sent all their customers an e-mail, telling them:

- they are sorry it happened
- if I still haven’t got my internet connection back, power-cycle my modem.

Look, the apology is appreciated, but the modem advice? Really? If I still haven’t got my net back 10 days later, do you really think sending me an email will help?