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In the whodunit of the financial crisis, Wall Street executives have pointed the blame at all kinds of parties — consumers who lied on their mortgage applications, investors who demanded access to risky mortgage bonds, and policy makers who kept interest rates low and failed to predict a housing market collapse.

But a new defense has been mounted by a bank executive: my regulator told me to do it.

[Quote (@BorowitzReport)]:

Gingrich on his NH endorsement: “The voters want an adult, and no one has a stronger record of adultery than I do.”

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Pope Benedict XVI insisted on Saturday that all of society’s institutions and not just the Catholic church must be held to "exacting" standards in their response to sex abuse of children, and defended the church’s efforts to confront the problem.

Benedict acknowledged in remarks to visiting U.S. bishops during an audience at the Vatican that pedophilia was a "scourge" for society, and that decades of scandals over clergy abusing children had left Catholics in the United States bewildered.

"It is my hope that the Church’s conscientious efforts to confront this reality will help the broader community to recognize the causes, true extent and devastating consequences of sexual abuse, and to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society," he said.

"By the same token, just as the church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards," the pope said.

[..]

“No public figure talks more about child safety but does little to actually make children safer than Pope Benedict,” David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.

“The pope would have us believe that this crisis is about sex abuse. It isn’t. It is about covering up sex abuse,” Clohessy said. “And while child sex crimes happen in every institution, in no institution are they ignored or concealed as consistently as in the Catholic church.”

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A former Council Bluffs youth pastor accused of sexually exploiting teens as he tried to help them gain "sexual purity in the eyes of God" pleaded guilty Tuesday to three charges.

Brent Girouex, 32, was initially charged with 61 counts of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist and 28 counts of third-degree sexual abuse related to acts he is alleged to have performed while a youth pastor with the Victory Fellowship Church.

[..]

Court documents indicated Girouex told investigators that as a youth pastor he felt it was his duty “to help (the teen) with homosexual urges by praying while he had sexual contact with him.”

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In Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most populous states, half of the women and a quarter of the men are illiterate, and about 90% of its 104 million inhabitants live in rural areas. Life here is particularly difficult for girls, and one of the greatest hindrances to their development is the simple journey to school. For many, the trip is long, expensive and dangerous.

But here, in rural Bihar, we recently saw that a two-wheeled solution to the problem has been found.

Three years ago the state’s new chief minister Nitish Kumar adopted a "gender agenda" and set about redressing his state’s endemic gender imbalances in an attempt to boost development in one of India’s most backward states. His vision was to bring a sense of independence and purpose to his state’s young women, and the flagship initiative of this agenda is the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, a project that gives schoolgirls 2,000 rupees (about £25) to purchase a bicycle.

The project’s results so far have been extremely promising: in those three years in Bihar alone, 871,000 schoolgirls have taken to the saddle as a result of the scheme. The number of girls dropping out of school has fallen and the number of girls enrolling has risen from 160,000 in 2006-2007 to 490,000 now.

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He knew he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phones—which he called his IMF BlackBerry. This was the phone he used to send and receive texts and e-mails—including for both personal and IMF business. According to several sources who are close to DSK, he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy’s center-right political party. She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.1 It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.

To have a hurried sexual encounter with your maid under those circumstances seems, well, stupid.

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A massive blast at a missile base operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps nearly two weeks ago was the latest in a series of mysterious incidents involving explosions at natural gas transport facilities, oil refineries and military bases — blasts that have caused dozens of deaths and damage to key infrastructure in the past two years.

Iranian officials said the Nov. 12 blast at the missile base was an “accident,” and they ruled out any sabotage organized by the United States and its regional allies. The explosion on the Shahid Modarres base near the city of Malard was so powerful that it shook the capital, Tehran, about 30 miles to the east.

[..]

Suspicions that covert action might already be underway were raised when four key gas pipelines exploded simultaneously in different locations in Qom Province in April. Lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency that the blasts were the work of “terrorists” and were “organized by the enemies of the Islamic Republic.”

You cannot expect to stay covert if you set off five explosions at the exact same time. That more or less rules out the USA or Israel.

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Only nine of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park – the world’s most expensive residential block – have been registered for council tax.

The ownership of the Knightsbridge apartments, which range in price from £3.6m for a one-bedroom flat to £136m for a penthouse, is now under investigation by Westminster city council, which is determined to pursue the monies owed by the secretive owners of the apartments.

Council records show that only four owners are paying the full council tax of £755.60 a year plus £619.64 to the Greater London Authority, while five are paying the 50% discounted council tax owed on a second home.

Westminster has received no response from the developer of One Hyde Park, Project Grande (Guernsey), managed by billionaire brothers Nick and Christian Candy, to a written request sent two weeks ago asking for the names of the remaining apartment owners. Officials are now researching Land Registry records for the exclusive block, sandwiched between Harvey Nichols and the Serpentine. However, the myriad offshore companies protecting the identities of residents are, according to sources at the council, likely to defeat them.

An analysis of the records by the Observer shows that 25 of the flats’ registered owners are companies in the British Virgin Islands. Other offshore tax havens used to purchase the properties include Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein and Liberia.