[Quote]:

The giant US banks have been bailed out again from huge potential writeoffs by loosey-goosey accounting accepted by the accounting profession and the regulators.

They are allowed to accrue interest on non-performing mortgages ” until the actual foreclosure takes place, which on average takes about 16 months.

All the phantom interest that is not actually collected is booked as income until the actual act of foreclosure. As a resullt, many bank financial statements actually look much better than they actually are. At foreclosure all the phantom income comes off gthe books of the banks.

This means that Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, among hundreds of other smaller institutions, can report interest due them, but not paid, on an estimated $1.4 trillion of face value mortgages on the 7 million homes that are in the process of being foreclosed

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It’s not surprising that Assange would take aim at the Chinese government. The Wikileaks founder seemed to have China in mind in a series of essays from 2006 in which he assails authoritarian governments as large-scale conspiracies that depend for their existence on secret communication and control of information. “Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance,” he writes. “Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.”

The aim for those who cherish openness and justice, Assange continues, should be to leverage leaks to reduce “conspiratorial power” to “zero.”

For the Chinese government, which considers “dissemination of state secrets” a grave crime, the feeling of enmity is likely mutual.

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"These banks again have unfettered access to the very top of the political decision making in the United States and, reflects the fact their status is completely undiminished, despite all the mistake they made and all the damage they did to the rest of the economy," he tells Henry in this clip.

[Quote]:

The 1980s song Money for Nothing by the British rock band Dire Straits has been deemed unacceptable for play on Canadian radio.

In a ruling released Wednesday, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council says the song contravenes the human rights clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code.

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Banks were partly to blame for the financial crisis of 2008 — and now they’re being asked to pay for it. The German government wants to extract far higher payments from banks than had been envisaged so far, according to a report in Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

[..]

The German Finance Ministry in Berlin had initially said banks would have to pay up to 15 percent of their annual profit from this year into a restructuring fund with the aim of generating €70 billion ($90.1 billion) with which to pay for future financial crises.

But the 15 percent cap on the levy is about to get lifted, the newspaper reported, citing a leaked government paper.

[Quote]:

Britain’s beekeepers are at war over their association’s endorsement for money of four insecticides, all of them fatal to bees, made by major chemical companies.

The British Beekeepers’ Association has been selling its logo to four European pesticide producers and is believed to have received about £175,000 in return.

[..]

The deal was struck in secret by the beekeepers’ association executive without the knowledge of the overwhelming majority of its members.