[Quote]:

A federal judge in New York on Monday threw out a settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Citigroup over a 2007 mortgage derivatives deal, saying that the S.E.C.’s policy of settling cases by allowing a company to neither admit nor deny the agency’s allegations did not satisfy the law.

The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the S.E.C.’s $285 million settlement, announced last month, is “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest” because it does not provide the court with evidence on which to judge the settlement.

The ruling could throw the S.E.C.’s enforcement efforts into chaos, because a majority of the fraud cases and other actions that the agency brings against Wall Street firms are settled out of court, most often with a condition that the defendant does not admit that it violated the law while also promising not to deny it.

That condition gives a company or individual an advantage in subsequent civil litigation for damages, because cases in which no facts are established cannot be used in evidence in other cases, like shareholder lawsuits seeking recovery of losses or damages.

[..]

“An application of judicial power that does not rest on facts is worse than mindless, it is inherently dangerous,” Judge Rakoff wrote in the case, S.E.C. v. Citigroup Global Markets. “In any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth.”

[Quote]:

What we have here is a century of deceit, and a century revealing the internal culture inherent in the copyright industry. Every time something new appears, the copyright industry has learned to cry like a little baby that needs more food, and succeeds practically every time to get legislators to channel taxpayer money their way or restrict competing industries. And every time the copyright industry succeeds in doing so, this behavior is further reinforced.

It is far past due that the copyright industry is stripped of its nobility benefits, every part of its governmental weekly allowance, and gets kicked out of its comfy chair to get a damn job and learn to compete on a free and honest market.

[Quote]:

A Kansas teenager who wrote a disparaging tweet about Gov. Sam Brownback said Sunday that she is rejecting her high school principal’s demand for a written apology.

And to show how well the Streisand effect works:

“Krawitz, her principal, told The Kansas City Star previously that the situation is a “private issue, not a public matter” but didn’t return a phone message from The Associated Press at his home Sunday. ”

“Brownback’s office didn’t return calls or emails Sunday from the AP. ”

They both know they fucked up.

[UPDATE]:

Brownback issued a statement Monday after the Shawnee Mission School District said 18-year-old Emma Sullivan wouldn’t be punished for refusing to write an apology letter to the governor.

[..]

In his statement, the governor thanked educators "who remind us daily of our liberties, as well as the values of civility and decorum."

[Quote]:

Less than a third of the $16 million gathered in 2010 by hip-hop star Wyclef Jean for earthquake relief in Haiti actually made it to emergency efforts in the country, the New York Post reported on Sunday.

According to the exclusive report, Jean’s charity, Yele Haiti, doled out millions in questionable contracts — in fact, $1 million was paid to a Florida firm that doesn’t seem to exist.

The Post also reported that a company called P&A Construction — which is run by Warnel Pierre, Jean’s brother-in-law — received $353,983 from the group.

[Quote]:

Islands make up only about 3% of the earth’s land area but host about 20% of all species and 50 to 60% of endangered species. The biggest threat to islands are invasive species, mainly rats, but also pigs and cats, who feed on nesting birds and native plants. New Zealand has been the innovator in clearing islands of rats because of its endangered populations of flightless birds which are vulnerable. One species of flightless parrot, known as the kakapo, has only 131 individuals left in the “wild” – they are closely guarded 24×7 on Codfish Island, their nests surrounded by rat traps and cameras vigilantly on the lookout for invaders.
The idea of clearing islands of rats was until very recently thought impossible. Rats quickly learned not to touch cyanide-laced food when they saw comrades writhing in death. A new poison called 1080 was developed that caused a slow death with no seeming connection to the food eaten. The rats would take the bait. Starting in 1988 a few intrepid individuals in New Zealand tried to clear a single small island of rats (Breaksea), much to the dismay of officials who thought it a waste of time and money. But it worked. Increasingly larger islands were attempted and new techniques developed using GPS pin-point helicopter drops of the bait. Entire species could be brought back from the brink of extinction by a few people in a few weeks of time. The largest islands cleared to date include Campbell Island (map) in New Zealand, the Galapagos Islands (map) and Rat Island (map) in the Bering Sea. Nearby Kiska Island (sight of a Japanese base during WWII which is still clearly visible on the map) is the next and biggest target, as is South Georgia Island. Over 800 islands have been cleared around the world, but it’s still a small amount compared to what could be done. This is a new and evolving technique, Island Conservation is one of the biggest island-exterminators going.

[Quote]:

The world’s most prestigious consultancy prides itself on its intellectual prowess and ethical standards. But this year, an insider trading scandal surrounding former McKinsey luminaries has left staff and alumni reeling

I don’t get this “oh, we’re so ethical” thing they’ve got going in. They full well know that if they were really honest, they would recommend the wholesale dismissal of the entire management team that was stupid enough to bring them in. Instead, they overcharge a ridiculous amount to figure out what management wants to hear and telling them that. A great racket if you can get it.

[Quote]:

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.”

[Quote]:

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.”

[Quote]:

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.”

[Quote]:

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.

[Quote]:

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.

[Quote]:

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.

[Quote]:

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.

[Quote]:

In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth. He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas.

None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. Lots of people rent trucks or have relations in Syria, and no doubt there are harmless eccentrics out there fascinated by amusement park infrastructure. Taken together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something. And yet, until about four years ago, his pre-attack prep work would have gone unnoticed. A CIA analyst might have flagged the plane ticket purchase; an FBI agent might have seen the bank transfers. But there was nothing to connect the two. Lucky for counterterror agents, not to mention tourists in Orlando, the government now has software made by Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that’s become the darling of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA’s Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri’s name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government’s disposal. There’s fingerprint and DNA evidence for Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck’s license plate at a tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across the globe. All this information is then displayed on a clearly designed graphical interface that looks like something Tom Cruise would use in a Mission: Impossible movie.

As the CIA analyst starts poking around on Fikri’s file inside of Palantir, a story emerges. A mouse click shows that Fikri has wired money to the people he had been calling in Syria. Another click brings up CIA field reports on the Syrians and reveals they have been under investigation for suspicious behavior and meeting together every day over the past two weeks. Click: The Syrians bought plane tickets to Miami one day after receiving the money from Fikri. To aid even the dullest analyst, the software brings up a map that has a pulsing red light tracing the flow of money from Cairo and Syria to Fikri’s Miami condo. That provides local cops with the last piece of information they need to move in on their prey before he strikes.

Scenario: a friend needs to fertilize his lawn, and I want to help him. I borrow his car, and on the way to the store I fill it up (with diesel, it’s a small truck). I pay with my debit card, of course, and I do the same at the store. Before I get back to his place, I am arrested for making a bomb. After all, the apartment I live in has no garden, and I drive a petrol car myself – so why would I buy diesel and fertilizer if I wasn’t planning to create a bomb, right?

Feel safer yet?

[Quote]:

What’s remarkable isn’t just that the US covers are different, less intense or less smart (as the FPP suggests), but that some of them are explicitly about making you feel okay that the world is falling apart. Revolution freaking you out? Anxiety is good for you! About to go over a waterfall? Crises keep America great!

The Onion had it right:

[Quote]:

"Sometimes, only the courts of law stand to protect the taxpayer. Somewhere, someone has to stand up," Blackmon wrote in a five-page Nov. 2 order in Carroll County Superior Court. "Well, sometimes is now, and the place is the Great State of Georgia. The defendant’s motion to dismiss is hereby denied."

Blackmon’s order shot down U.S. Bank’s request to throw out a complaint from Georgia homeowner Otis Wayne Phillips, who had tried to get a mortgage modification from the bank. Phillips could not be reached for this story.

The order lays the case out like this: Phillips is in danger of foreclosure. U.S. Bank is among the "poorly run organizations" that recently received massive bailouts from the federal government and agreed to participate in the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program. When Phillips applied for a modification, the bank denied his request "without numbers, figures, or explanation, reasoning, comparison to guidelines, or anything."

HAMP guidelines require banks to consider homeowners for modifications if they are at risk of falling behind on their payments because of a financial hardship and if their monthly mortgage expenses take up more than 31 percent of their income.

"This court cannot imagine why U.S. Bank will not make known to Mr. Phillips, a taxpayer, how his numbers put him outside the federal guidelines to receive a loan modification," Blackmon continued. "Taking $20 billion of taxpayer money was no problem for U.S. Bank. A cynical judge might believe that this entire motion to dismiss is a desperate attempt to avoid a discovery period, where U.S. Bank would have to tell Mr. Phillips how his financial situation did not qualify him for a modification."

If Phillips didn’t qualify, Blackmon wrote — with apologies to folksinger Arlo Guthrie — why didn’t the bank say so with "mathematic equations, pie charts, and bar graphs, all on 8 by 10 glossy photo paper, with circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back explaining each winning number"?

"Maybe U.S. Bank no longer has any of the $20 billion left, and so their lack of written explanation might be attributed to some kind of ink reduction program to save money," Blackmon continued. "Clearly, U.S. Bank cannot take the money, contract with our government to provide a service to the taxpayer, violate that agreement, and then say no one on earth can sue them for it. That is not the law in Georgia."

[Quote]:

A Spanish savings bank has fired two directors and is investigating two former executives for allegedly syphoning off €20 million ($26.5 million) into secret pension funds, the bank said Saturday.

The board of directors of Caixa Penedes bank had "required the departure" of its president, Ricard Pages, and director general Manuel Troyano. It said both men had agreed to leave, the bank said in a statement.

[Quote]:

Newman was shopping at a Wal-Mart store in Buckeye, Arizona late Thursday night along with thousands of other Americans who congregate to celebrate consumerism in a post-holiday bargain hunting binge called Black Friday. Newman says he became overwhelmed by the crowds at the Wal-Mart he was shopping at, so he attempted to lift his grandkid into the air to avoid a mob of violent shoppers. To free his hands, Newman says he placed a video game into his waistband and tried to launch the youngster out of the crowd. Police suspected the man of shoplifting, however, and took him down. Hard.

[Quote]:

The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of a minority group, according to interviews.

[Quote]:

A British resident with a British wife and four British children, Shaker Aamer has never been charged or tried, and yet, as Clive Stafford Smith reports, in an article, a press release and a letter to the British foreign secretary William Hague, all cross-posted below, he remains held, exactly ten years since he was first seized, even though he was notified that he had been cleared for release in 2007, and even though successive British governments have requested his return to the UK.

Those closest to his case have been obliged to conclude, for many years, that he is still held because, as an eloquent, charismatic man, and the foremost advocate of the prisoners’ rights, he knows too much, and these fears are further confirmed with the knowledge that he stated that, on the night of June 9, 2006, when three other prisoners died in Guantánamo in disputed circumstances (the authorities claimed that it was suicide, while soldiers who were present have suggested that the men may have been killed), he was tortured to within an inch of his life.

[Quote]:

A London court has released Russian businessman and Portsmouth Football Club owner Vladimir Antonov on bail following his arrest in connection with a massive money-laundering probe in Lithuania.

Antonov, 36, was detained Thursday on a European arrest warrant issued by investigators probing alleged fraud and money laundering at his banks in two Baltic states. He was arrested along with his Lithuanian partner Raimondas Baranauskas, 53.

[..]

The Bank of Lithuania said late Thursday that his bank there, Snoras Bank, will be liquidated, calling it the best solution for country’s financial system and economy, which were jolted after the bank was nationalized and its operations halted.

Lithuanian regulators claim that hundreds of millions of euros were siphoned from Snoras, the country’s fifth-largest financial institution, while Latvian authorities have said that similar asset-stripping took place on a massive scale at Latvija Krajbanka, a subsidiary bank controlled by Snoras.

Lithuanian bank chief Vitas Vasiliauskas said the government was liquidating the bank rather than waste taxpayers’ money trying to help “a plane that won’t fly.”

[Quote]:

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with the NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover rolled out to Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station around 8 a.m. EST Friday. Launch is set for 10:02 a.m. Saturday.

The launch team continues working towards liftoff of the Atlas V on Saturday, Nov. 26. No significant launch vehicle or spacecraft issues are being worked on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket or the MSL spacecraft, which includes the rover Curiosity.

Launch day weather remains favorable, with only a 30 percent chance of conditions prohibiting liftoff.